This time, they had no one to blame but themselves.
Time was again messed up, but no one else was at fault. Still, someone was watching, and taking notes.
And they had their own dilemma to deal with – how do you decide who lives, and who dies? Who's worthy of saving?
Star Trek
Enterprise
Ohio
A Star Trek Fan Fiction By
J. R. Gershen-Siegel
This is a fan written work
The copyrights & trademarks of Star Trek are owned by
Paramount Pictures, CBS Corporation and their licensee, Pocket Books. Any attempt to sell or rent this book should be reported to the copyright owners for their action
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
we're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming.
Four dead in Ohio.
- Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (Ohio)
=/\=
Richard Malcolm Daniels had spent most of a month with his parents. This was not a normal state of affairs. Usually, he'd be working, or off birddogging some woman or another. But for the nonce, instead, he had taken some time off. It was a time to be reflective, and to nurse a heart that wasn't exactly broken, although it was pretty exquisitely bent.
His parents were occupied with the preparations for his father's sixty-fifth birthday party – and with each other. They would call each other from other parts of the house, probably more because they enjoyed saying each other's names so much than for any other purpose. So he would hear Chloe or Steven several times per day whenever they were both at home.
When they went out to work, they called each other several times, and if one of them was home during one of these calls he would hear laughter or murmured endearments. They retired to bed early, and got up late, and could scarcely keep their eyes or hands off one another, even though they'd been married for over four decades.
In short, in a house with three occupants, he was the only one not gettin' any.
A few days after his father's party, on September fifth of 3109, Rick felt up to returning to his work at the Temporal Integrity Commission. He called his boss, Admiral Carmen Calavicci.
"Ah, our prodigal son wants to return," she said.
"I guess that would be me," he said, "I, uh, my time off, was that a big problem?"
"Not at all. There's been very little activity. I'm just about ready to go ahead and hire two more Temporal Agents. There is a third, you remember the ancient computers specialist?"
"Sure," he said, "Sheilagh Bernstein."
"Correct," Carmen said, "She'd like to meet you before she says yes to anything."
"Oh, huh, I'm sorry, I guess she was kept waiting," he said.
"I think it'll be all right. Contact her and set it up, then come in, all right? You'll be working on training her, you know. Calavicci out."
He tapped his left ear once, to engage an implanted communicator and initiate a call.
She answered almost immediately, "I'm on Mars. Can you come here, or should I go there? Er, wherever you are?"
"Titan," he said, "Let's meet on Io. That's more or less halfway. There's a diner, we can get tuna melts or whatever."
"Tuna?"
"Then get something else. They've got a menu longer than your arm."
"Okay," she said, "See you at thirteen hundred hours. Bernstein out."
"Ma? Dad? I'm going out to lunch," he called, but Steven and Chloe did not hear him as they moved together, familiar yet exciting, as they had for over forty years and, hopefully, would for several decades more.
=/\=
The diner was small, done up in a retro 2300s style. There were dabo girls and wheels. Money had long since been abolished, so all gambling was done for fun, or to pit your skills against an opponent or test your luck.
It was a little bit like meeting a blind date. He wasn't nervous – he was generally a rather confident guy. It was more a matter of anticipation than anything else.
He got there later than he expected, and found her, a not unattractive blonde, sitting at a table by herself. She smiled and shook hands with him when he arrived. He noticed, but didn't mention it, but she pleasantly smelled a bit of vanilla. She was wearing a suit and looking a bit uncomfortable.
"Oh, I hope you don't think of this as a job interview," he said, "I dislike them, so stiff and artificial and formal."
"Yes, it's a bit like the court of King Louis XIV," she said, "It's all posturing."
"Like a wolf pack, too, I suppose," he said, "Uh, the posturing, that is," he added quickly.
"Does this mean we're supposed to circle each other and sniff?"
"Uh, well, maybe later," he said. That could be a good thing. He already liked her lack of pretense.
"What's good here?"
"Besides tuna? Huh, pretty much anything."
"Good!" they put their orders in and were left alone, "So, I'd like to ask you a few things."
"Gotcha," he said, "Recognize that we're in a public place and a lot of things are confidential. So I reserve the right to parry some of your questions, or just be vague."
"That works for me. Do you, well, do you like it?"
"It's interesting. I like a lot of pieces of it."
"But not everything?"
"No job is perfect, Sheilagh."
"Of course not, it's just I'm coming from being my own boss. Does, uh, how is Carmen as a boss?"
"Fair – and I don't mean fair to middling, but rather fair as in balanced. She's mostly hands off. You do your assignments, and she doesn't care much how you do them, so long as they're done and you don't create other problems along the way."
"What if you mess up and create other problems?"
"Well, it happens," he allowed, "She's good about letting me clean them up. Of course with a few of us, we might be fixing each other's messes on occasion."
"What about Roger Lloyd and Gillian Harper?"
"Oh, you looked up two of my predecessors."
"I did. Neither of them lasted very long in the job. Why do you suppose that was the case?"
"Lloyd wasn't very competent, when all was said and done. Harper, she, well, she had a breakdown."
"I'm sorry I asked."
"Hey, you didn't know," he said as their food arrived.
"How do you handle irregularities when you're out there?" she asked as soon as their waitress had departed.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Isn't the medical care terrible most of the time? How do you get out of being bled?"
"Huh," he looked around. No one seemed to be watching them, "Are you squeamish?"
"Not particularly."
"You use that steak knife yet?"
"Nope. Here."
"Don't react verbally to what I'm about to do, okay?"
"What?"
He placed the knife against the palm of his hand and pushed in, making a gash about four centimeters long. He cringed in pain, his face betraying more of a reaction than the cut should have evoked in him. The wound bled a bit, so he dipped the corner of his napkin into the blood. The napkin absorbed a tiny amount, "Watch," he said.
The wound closed up nearly immediately. The entire procedure took less than a minute, and the only evidence there had been a cut at all was the small amount of blood that had been absorbed by the napkin.
"How?"
"We'll talk somewhere more private. They'll fix you up this way as well. Other things, too."
"Are you an," she whispered the last word, "Augment?"
"In private. Can you, uh, can you wait until then?"
"Uh, sure. And waitress, can I get another knife? This one, uh, it's been used."
=/\=
Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down,
Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her
and found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?
- Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (Ohio)