E3
AU: E2 Trip and T'Pol had a daughter and a son, T'Liz and Lorian. T'Liz was believed to have died when an experiment went horribly wrong. Unbeknownst to Enterprise, T'Liz was thrown into the future to the year 2154 in the time just after the end of the Xindi conflict. T'Liz is set on making contact with the future Enterprise and finding her parents, but she has one problem – she's just been dumped into the middle of the Borderland in an unarmed and badly damaged shuttle pod.
Chapter 1: There's no going back now
March 26, 2067
Delphic Expanse
Willful, reckless, fool hardy… Those are just a few of the adjectives T'Liz was certain her mother would use in her lecture for this most recent mishap. She couldn't argue that she was undoubtedly willful and her plan was completely reckless and fool hardy and she would gladly open her eyes to face her mother and the Captain just as soon as her head stopped throbbing.
T'Liz didn't know what had gone wrong, but she wasn't surprised the experiment had failed. Nothing seemed to go right for her these days, not since the accident. Lorian had completely immersed himself in his engineering studies and in reading their father's engineering logs to the point that he no longer so much as held idle conversation. He had fallen back on their Vulcan heritage and closed himself to his grief. Likewise, their mother seemed to have been able to simply shut down a piece of herself, the piece where her father's memory lived, and had continued life as though nothing had happened. In fact the only clue that there had ever been another resident in their quaint B-Deck family unit was the empty chair at the dinner table each evening, a sight that only perpetuated the silence.
T'Liz had always taken more after her father. Like Trip, T'Liz was quick witted and good humored and largely wore her heart on her sleeve. T'Pol had made valiant efforts to instill what she could of the Vulcan culture into her two hybrid children, but T'Liz had also inherited Trip's sheer will. As a child, T'Liz had seldom been able to hold the required focus that effective meditation required and had resisted her mother's teachings frequently. As a result, she was never able to fully tap into the Vulcan ability to compartmentalize. It had been a year since her father's death and she was still quite obviously an emotional wreck. The test had been a welcome distraction.
Opening her eyes, the first thing T'Liz noticed was that she was still in the shuttle pod and that she had most likely come within an inch of destroying the damn thing. The smell of burning electrical hung in the air and smoke was clouding the small compartment. She grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprayed the smoking console. Sitting in the pilot's chair, she decided that the only way to get a sedative for her raging headache would be to contact Enterprise and face the wrath of her mother.
As luck would have it, perhaps the only functioning piece of the smoking console was the communications panel.
"T'Liz to Enterprise, a little help would be great right about now."
She waited a beat before opening the channel again "Enterprise, do you read? I understand I disobeyed a direct order but I could really use some help. The pod's thrusters are offline. You're going to have to come to me."
After a full 2 minutes with no response, T'Liz knew something was wrong. Either her comm panel wasn't working or Enterprise wasn't out there. A check of each pod window showed no visible signs of her home ship and her sensors had been knocked out during the test failure. Trying to keep the rising sense of panic out of her mind, she set about fixing the sensor array so she could at least determine where she was and find Enterprise.
Laying under the instrument panel, T'Liz wondered how the test had gone so horribly wrong. They had encountered the wormhole a week ago and had since been running scans and analyzing the data for evidence that this could be another subspace corridor like the one that had erroneously transported them to this timeline 30 years previously. The hope was that they could utilize this potential corridor to quickly travel several thousand light years away from their current region of space, in which they had unintentionally made a name for themselves and developed a few enemies. As much as possible, the generational ship hoped to fly under the radar of other species. They didn't want to spoil any first contacts or contaminate the timeline so the born explorers had been forced to stow their exploration instincts and focus on survival.
Two days ago, they had determined that the level of gravitational distortion in their current set of scans was too high. The only way to get scans with the level of detail needed for further analysis of the wormhole's potential for safe travel would be to get closer. Unfortunately, the mass of Enterprise was such that if they moved any closer to the wormhole the ship would be caught in its gravitational pull and find out the hard way whether the corridor was safe. T'Liz had become fixated on the possibility though. She had always enjoyed a good mystery and recent events had given her cause to divert her mind to puzzles such as this more frequently. She had worked tirelessly on the calculation and had determined the exact distance required for viable scans and the exact weight allowable at the necessary proximity. Almost exactly the weight of a shuttlepod. Almost.
She had proposed her plan to the Captain and explained that they could modify one of the shuttlepod's sensors and relieve the pod of "excess" weight in order to get closer to the wormhole. She had even proposed piloting the shuttle herself, as she was the smallest of the crew familiar with the analysis. He wouldn't hear of it. It was too dangerous, the margin for error was too high, and the payoff was too low.
She had been angry. Unreasonably angry in fact, but she had been working for 48 hours straight and even the Vulcan in her was at the brink of exhaustion. When it was apparent that no effort to persuade the Captain would work, especially with her mother taking his side, she had curtly asked to be dismissed and gone to her quarters to calm herself.
She had thought that after cleaning herself up, having a meal, and getting some sleep she would be able to forget about the corridor, but the mystery lingered. It weighed on her during her meditation that night and got bigger and meaner the more she tried to ignore it. At 0100 hours she finally decided she had to know if the corridor was viable. The mystery was eating at her and the more it ate at her the closer it came to eating away at the thin veil she kept over her grief. She gathered her toolkit and headed to the launch bay.
The sensor enhancements wouldn't take more than a couple hours which left her with plenty of time to remove excess weight from the shuttlepod and review her final test calculations. She would launch her little unauthorized mission at 0800 as that was shift change and the least likely time for her departure to be noticed and stopped.
Once the sensor upgrades were complete, she began removing anything that was non-essential to the mission. She unbolted all passenger chairs, ditched the food packs and first aid gear, removed most of the onboard maintenance tools and left only a skeleton set of tools behind in case she needed to tweak her sensor modifications. At 0630 she sat in the only remaining seat in the pod, the pilot's seat, and began her final calculation review. It would be close, but she was confident she her measurements were precise and she would be coming home with detailed scans in hand. The Captain would definitely be angry, livid in fact, but she had been sure even he wouldn't be able to stay angry for long once they were over a thousand light years away from the scene of the crime.
Hearing the telltale beeping and reboot noises come from the panel above her, T'Liz got back in the pilot's chair to examine her work. The few fixes she had been able to make with the skeleton set of tools had short range sensors back online and assured her that the comm was indeed functioning. All other systems were done for until she could get her hands on some replacement parts and a full toolkit. She ran a scan of her immediate surroundings and came up with nothing. Not a soul in short range other than herself.
Opening a channel again she said "T'Liz to Enterprise, do you read me?" And was greeted once more by silence.
With no way to command her vessel, T'Liz was at a loss for what to do next. She could spend hours analyzing the data, but she knew what she would find. The test scenario allowed for a limited set of outcomes. Had her calculations been correct, she would have approached the wormhole with little trouble, taken about an hour of scans, and returned to the ship. Had her calculations been incorrect and the wormhole not been a viable corridor, the pod would have been pulled in and presumably crushed by the magnitude of the wormhole's gravity. As she was still alive and had no detailed scans or Enterprise to return to, she came to the dreadful conclusion that the corridor was viable, at least for a shuttlepod, and that her distance-weight calculations had been incorrect. She could only assume that she had just traveled thousands of light years away from everyone she knew and the ship she called home and was effectively stranded in an unknown region of space with no food or water and no way back.
As it turns out, some mysteries are best left unsolved.
