Hello. My name's Mengde, and I haven't written a Star Trek/Star Wars crossover fanfic in more than ten years.
No time like the present.
Where No One Has Gone Before
I
Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master, grimaced as the hull of the Millennium Falcon shuddered with the impact of laser blasts.
"What exactly did you do?" he asked, trying to maintain his veneer of calm. The manic tinge to his tone told him he was only partially successful.
Han Solo, former smuggler and husband of the current Chief of State of the New Republic, uttered an extremely foul phrase in Huttese. "I didn't know they had pocket patrol craft with engines lit!" he said, sending the Falcon into a complex series of evasive loops. "It's not my fault!"
"I didn't say it was your fault," Luke said, resisting the urge to clench his teeth. "I asked what exactly you did."
"So I had to do something?" Han asked, his voice all hurt and indignation. "Maybe Alvarro just decided he wanted the bounty on our heads! The Hutts still technically got one up."
Chewie, in the co-pilot's seat, rumbled something contrary-sounding.
"Chewie's right," Luke said. "You wouldn't have dragged me out here if you'd thought there would be some real danger." A bark from the Wookiee. "Sorry, dragged us out here."
"Fine! I may have accused a dealer of having a skifter in his deck," Han said.
The hull rang out again. Luke fought down the impulse to also indulge in some profanity. "You thought it would be a good idea," he said, "to accuse a dealer in Alvarro's Den of cheating?"
"But he was!"
"Alvarro's Den. The single most renowned spaceborne casino in this quadrant. With every reason to want to protect its reputation from the slander of famous guests."
Chewie contributed his two credits to the discussion. "No, I don't think killing us is a preferable outcome to their name being besmirched," Luke said. "It seems kind of short-sighted. But right now they've got their lasers breathing down our necks, thanks to Han."
"Can we make the jump to hyperspace yet, or is there some reason you two feel like your criticism needs to happen in realspace?" Han snapped.
Luke's Shryiiwook wasn't perfect, so when Chewie rattled off an answer about gravitational eddies and fluctuations, he wasn't sure exactly what the problem was. So he asked, "How long?"
He definitely understood the phrase ten minutes.
"There are six of them on our tail!" Han said. "We can't keep juking them for ten minutes!"
"I'll get on the dorsal quad battery," Luke said, beginning to unstrap himself.
"Wait!" Han said. "You can't. I wasn't lying when I said Leia wanted me to come here as a diplomatic envoy. I was supposed to meet with Alvarro and talk about establishing a trade route through his station. Things just kinda got out of hand."
"So you've torpedoed the mission, but the only chance of ever getting him to talk to anyone from the New Republic is not to blow up his hired goons," Luke said.
"Pretty much, yeah."
Luke reflexively glanced at the seat next to him, expecting Threepio to chime in with probabilities of survival or a simple 'we're doomed,' but Han had left the protocol droid on Coruscant.
"Fine. Hold on."
Closing his eyes, Luke extended his senses out beyond the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, out into the cold reaches of space which surrounded them like a vast, black ocean. He felt the Force flowing through him, enveloping him; he felt the ripples caused by the ship, and the patrol craft in pursuit. He reached out and touched the minds of the ships' pilots.
Four humans, two aliens – a Trandoshan and a Rodian, from the feel of them. Those two would be more difficult to sway, but Luke knew he could get through to the four human pilots.
Turn back. This is not where you want to be. It's not safe here.
Three of the craft immediately peeled off, heading back for the station. The fourth stayed doggedly on course, its laser cannons spitting hot bolts of death at the Falcon. Luke grimaced; he had never been comfortable with forceful persuasion rather than simple suggestion. It strayed too close to the Dark Side for his comfort. He increased the pressure. Go away!
That did it. Hesitantly at first, but with increasing certainty, the pilot swung about and headed back for the station.
"I don't know what you just did, kid, but we only got two of 'em on us now," Han said. "Good job."
"I can't persuade the others without danger," Luke replied. "It's a risk I'll take, but only if I have to."
"Well, you might not have to, if a certain somebody can get the damn navicomputer to work," Han told him.
Chewie began a long, bellowing rant at a speed too fast for Luke to really keep up; he heard something about very complex and passive-aggressive before the ship gave a horrible wrench.
"What in the stars was that?" he asked.
"Uh," Han said. "Those gravitational eddies Chewie was talking about? I think I know where they're coming from."
There was a hole, in space.
Looking into the center was like looking into pure, endless void. It hurt. So Luke looked at the jagged edges of the hole, which glowed a hot, electric blue and shimmered wildly, like the fabric of reality was burning away.
He realized the hole was getting bigger.
"Uh, Han?" he asked.
"I'm trying!" Han said frantically. "But the pull's too strong!"
Chewie howled mournfully.
Luke tried to extend his senses into the void, to probe it, but he felt nothing at all. It was like the anomaly wasn't even there. He did feel the patrol craft behind them peeling off, far enough away themselves to be able to escape. It did little to mollify his feelings about their current predicament.
"Out of the frying pan and into the Hutt's mouth," Han muttered, desperately yawing the Falcon back and forth in an attempt to break out of the hole's grip. "Luke, you got any bright ideas?"
Size mattered not, Luke thought, but in this case, the sheer mass of the hole and the vast power of its gravitational field was a bit of a roadblock. "I can't do anything," he said. "Chewie, can you override the hyperdrive's safety interlock to let us jump inside the gravitational field?"
Chewie's answer was a short negative, followed by a sarcastic comment about how it was so useful to suggest that idea now, rather than three minutes ago when he might have had time.
The hole loomed large enough to eclipse their entire field of view.
"I want you to know," Han said, "that you're the best friends a man could ever ask for."
"Well, there is a bright side," Luke murmured.
"What?"
He grinned, trying not to let fear overwhelm him. "This time, Han, this really wasn't your fault."
Ordinarily, Captain Jean-Luc Picard's policy was not to hover at his officer's stations. In this case, he felt fairly justified in making an exception.
"Is there a problem, Captain?" Geordi asked, looking up from the engineering console.
Picard gave him a thin smile. "Not at all, Mister La Forge. I'm simply recalling the last time we performed a deep subspace probe of this nature, and how that led to beings from another dimension kidnapping and vivisecting members of my crew."
He watched his chief engineer's artificial eyes squint in a grimace. "True, Captain, but we're taking extra precautions this time. And unless we perform this scan, we're never going to understand where the hell this thing came from."
Glancing over his shoulder at the viewscreen, Picard looked at the hole in space which had appeared, without explanation or warning, within a light-week of Deep Space Four. The Enterprise-E had been the closest starship – he paused for a moment to reflect on how often that proved to be the case – so they had been sent to investigate.
Three days of scanning had turned up precisely nothing of any use.
After seventy-two hours of throwing themselves at a brick wall, Data had proposed using a deep subspace scan to try to gain more information on the anomaly. There were risks, of course, but as Geordi had just said, they were taking every possible precaution.
So why did he have this looming presentiment of disaster?
"Mister Data," he asked, "would it interfere with the operation of the scan if we were to raise our shields?"
"It would slow the scan's efficiency by three point eight percent," Data replied promptly from his position at con. "Is there a reason you believe the shields to be necessary, sir?"
Picard shook his head. "Just a gut feeling, Data. I've been uncomfortable ever since we arrived."
It was a testament to the android's advancement over the past eight years that he did not immediately start firing off questions about how one should treat irrational instincts. Instead, he simply paused for a moment, gave a slight nod, and returned his attention to the console.
"Any change in the anomaly's rate of growth?" Will asked, twisting around in his chair to make eye contact with Geordi.
"No sir," Geordi replied. "Eight percent every three and a half hours, like clockwork."
"Which means it will begin to threaten Deep Space Four in a matter of weeks," Picard said. Everyone already knew, but he felt a reminder was in order. "They are counting on us to –"
His speech was cut short prematurely as the Enterprise rocked, the deck shifting under his feet from sudden turbulence.
"Status report!" he barked, catching his balance on the back of Geordi's chair.
"The anomaly has begun throwing off high levels of tachyons and excited gamma rays," Data reported, "coinciding with an eighty percent growth rate acceleration. I recommend we immediately move the Enterprise out to eight hundred thousand kilometers."
"Make it so!" Picard said, taking advantage of the momentary lack of turbulence to return to his chair. "Shields up!"
"Sir!" the science officer reported. He was a new transfer; Picard hadn't memorized his name yet. "There's something on the sensors emerging from the anomaly! It looks like a… vessel of some sort."
"Confirmed," Data said. "Unknown configuration and type. Thirty-six by twenty-four meters, one hundred and fifty metric tons."
"Life-signs?" Picard asked, his mind racing. The ship had survived passage through the anomaly, he had to assume, but it might not make it through a second trip.
"Three. Interference from the anomaly is making it difficult to establish a sensor or transporter lock."
"Get a tractor beam on that ship," Picard said. "Pull it into shuttle bay one, and move us out to eight hundred thousand kilometers."
"Aye, sir," Data responded.
"Number One, I want you to take command of the bridge for the moment," Picard said, lowering his voice slightly. "Have a security team meet me in shuttle bay one. This may be the first chance we get to discover something useful about this anomaly, and I confess I'm rather eager to see this mysterious vessel for myself."
Will nodded. "Of course, sir."
A moment later, Picard was in the turbolift, heading – he hoped – toward answers.
The first thing Luke realized, upon regaining consciousness, was that he was still alive. It was a pleasant surprise.
The second thing was that the turbulent trip through the anomaly had laid him out stomach-first across Chewie's lap. The Wookiee was still out cold, as was Han, who was slumped almost comically over the control panel.
He scrambled to his feet to look out of the cockpit. Outside, he could see a pristine hangar bay, done in mild shades of blue and grey. Alongside the Falcon were sleek, streamlined craft he didn't recognize.
There were also yellow-uniformed men surrounding the ship, with what were obviously rifles of some sort.
"I have a bad feeling about this," Luke sighed to himself.
He grabbed his lightsaber and got ready to step outside to meet their latest hosts.
