Strange Times Are Upon Us
Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dishThat's the way we do things, lad, we're making sh*t up as we wish
The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us
'Cause if we find we're in a bind we just make some sh*t up
— Voltaire, "The U.S.S. Make Sh*t Up"
Federation Department of Temporal Investigations
Greenwich, England
24 March 2410 Earth Standard
"You have no right to question me, Federation petaQ!" the auburn-haired, leather-clad Klingon snarled at the white-haired human in a black business suit, slamming a fist into the table and knocking over the pitcher of coffee in the middle. "I'm a member of the Klingon High Council and I have full diplomatic immunity!"
"Lady Ba'wov, I've been in touch with the Klingon embassy already and they've waived your immunity," Special Agent in Charge Gariff Lucsly answered, steepling his fingers calmly as the orangey-bronze Lethean sitting next to the enraged noblewoman grabbed his wife's shoulder and pulled her back into her chair. "We could've done this in an interrogation room and by rights I probably should've done. This conference room is a courtesy."
"Honey, you're not helping," Brokosh muttered to his wife in Chel'tok battle cant. "I've dealt with Fed cops before; let me handle this. SAC Lucsly," he said, switching to English, "if we can't use our diplomatic immunity we're using yours. My wife and I are exercising our rights under Article V, Section 3 of the Articles of Federation."
"The embassy has appointed an attorney for you; he's on his way. But I have here a message from Ambassador Vagh commanding you to answer my questions."
"Ambassador Vagh can go f*ck a goose. Lawyer."
"Look, General, give me a break here," Lucsly tried in a conciliatory tone. "I'm just doing my job. You were involved in a potentially severe temporal incursion on Federation soil. Now, I think you're in the clear because of a predestination paradox, but I have to dot all my 'i's and cross all my 't's, you follow me?"
"Lawyer!" Brokosh repeated, more forcefully this time.
The human sighed, shut the cover on his PADD, and walked out of the room. Brokosh heard the lock click shut.
"Why do you demand a lawyer? We have done nothing wrong!"
Brokosh spluttered a mouthful of coffee onto the table and started laughing. "Yeah, that's got nothing to do with it, love. Basic practice with Fed LEOs is always get a lawyer. Guessing you've never been arrested before."
"Obviously not!" she replied with some disdain.
"Well, I have been. Mostly drunk and disorderly but…"
"'But'?"
"Never mind, it was stupid."
"Well, now you've piqued my interest. And it'll take my mind off the potential ramifications of that mess that got us here."
Chel'tok House Fleet Battlecruiser HoSbatlh
Free Haven System, Deferi Sector, Alpha Quadrant
16 March 2410 Earth Standard
"Rezreth-class dreadnought still active!" Norigom announced. "Forward shields holding at 72 percent!"
"Helm! Hard to starboard! Take another pass at them!" the small, heavily armored Orion in the captain's chair commanded. Captain Meromi Riyal instinctively braced a foot on the floor against the acceleration.
"JorwI'Hegh and MajQa'be', watch that crossfire," Brokosh ordered from his seat in the tac dome at the back of the bridge. "Meromi, you got two clutches coming in dead ahead."
"I see them. Emergency power to weapons! Lieutenant, fire!" The bridge roared with the (simulated) sound of rapid-fire disruptor pulses blasting from the Tor'Kaht-class battlecruiser's pylon cannons, and sickly green energy packets crashed into the pair of Plesh Breks. One fell out of formation, engine nacelles in flames, the other detonated in a blinding white flash as the wedge-shaped flagship streaked past.
The Sixth Fleet was two weeks into an offensive against the Dok Thak, a faction of Breen commanded by Thot Hark, to break up a possible alliance with the True Way and put a stop to their raids on trade vessels. Starfleet had provided intelligence from a captured dalsh that the Dok Thak were planning to hit the Bajoran colony Free Haven, so Brokosh had prepared an ambush.
"GuiMon Trag, anytime you feel like joining in—"
"Sorry, General, we got held up! Hitting them astern … now!" A squadron of D'Kora-class ships crash-translated from warp, dumping hundreds of missiles into vacuum in the space of seconds.
"Koren! Time to drop the hammer!" Brokosh ordered.
"Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam!" The Bortasqu', more than double the size of the fleet flagship, shed its cloak and its spinal disruptor cannon smashed into the enemy dreadnought's stern, buckling the shields, but only struck a glancing blow to the hull.
Brokosh couldn't say the same for the Ferengi missile salvo that followed. As the helmsman swerved to miss the expanding debris field that used to be the Rezreth-class, the Lethean commented to nobody in particular, "Actually, looks more like a good day for the other guy to die."
"Sir, remaining Breen ships are fleeing," the giant Gorn manning sensors announced.
"Confirmed, Ila'kshath. All units, form up and move to pursue. HoSbatlh to Rule 25, we'll take it from here. Thanks for the assist."
"Gotta protect our markets, General. Rule 57, eh?"
"Right, 'Good customers are almost as rare as latinum. Treasure them,'" the mercenary quoted. "True enough. See you 'round the galaxy. Lieutenant! Punch it!" The helmsman obediently rammed the lever home and the battlecruiser rocketed past the light barrier. "Time to overhaul?"
"Six minutes. They have a head start but we're gaining," Meromi said. "They're headed for a metreon gas cloud on the edge of the system, but we'll catch them well short."
"That's if that moron Koren gets her act together," Norigom remarked. "Stupid jil'kresh'd be late for her own funeral."
"Forget Koren," Brokosh said. "She who falls behind is left behind, and we've got more than enough firepower between us and three Negh'Vars to make short work of what's left."
"brokoS Sa'," the half-Klingon at communications said timidly, "you are aware you said that on an open channel?"
An explosion of angry tlhIngan Hol invective came through the speakers in the tac dome and Brokosh quickly muted it. "Yes, I was, as a matter of fact," he replied, the tusked corners of his mouth twisting into an unpleasant smile as the hammerhead-bowed dreadnought went to warp and struggled to catch up.
"She really doesn't like having to work for us mercs, does she?" Norigom commented conversationally.
"You have no honor!" Bekk Tengku roared in a passable imitation of Koren's voice. "No sh*t, Sherlock!" The human and a Nausicaan next to her both burst out laughing and Brokosh started snickering, but it ground to a halt under Meromi's glare.
"We may not pay heed to honor as the Klingons define it," the HoSbatlh's emerald-skinned captain said in an authoritative voice, "but we will show superior officers the respect due their rank. Do I make myself clear?"
There was a pause. "Yes sir," Tengku meekly acquiesced.
Brokosh privately messaged Engineering. "How's it feel to be back in the engine room, love?"
"qu'!" Ba'wov sent back in a happy tone. "A fine vacation from the tlhIngan yejquv! So much more pleasant fixing reactor controls than arguing over spending cuts! I should do this more often!"
"At least you out here can just shoot your enemies, right, cha'paroyli'?"
"Or stab them. Stabbing them is good, too."
Brokosh's exploits in the past year had been good for the House of Chel'tok. They still weren't the richest of Houses, but they had expanded their holdings and improved their income, and unaligned warriors and mercs had flocked to join the house fleet, bringing ships, manpower, and money. And with the deaths of Kidu and Chel'tok at the hands of the Undine and the Iconian, Brokosh and Ba'wov were now the seniormost members.
Brokosh still wasn't comfortable having his wife with him on missions, especially now that she sat on the High Council, but like his duties managing house operations, she couldn't do the politicking all the time without losing her mind. Compared to Klingon internecine squabbles, heading up the Sixth Fleet was child's play.
Meromi's deceptively girlish soprano broke him out of his thoughts. "Sir, we will be at extreme firing range in one min—"
"Missile separation!" Ila'kshath called from his console.
"Full shields forward!" Meromi ordered. "Target the weapon and destroy it!" The sound of cannon fire rumbled through the hull once again as the Breen Sarr Theln-class continued firing torpedoes from its chase launcher. Two of the Chel Gretts began to reshape their warp fields and slowly flipped backwards, slowing as they did so, and brought their bows to bear.
Full marks for courage, Brokosh thought as the enemy cruisers rapidly closed. He'd always admired the ethos of Breen soldiers, their willingness to sacrifice for the mission, not glory. Not unlike Starfleet, come to think of it. But Starfleet didn't share the Breens' sheer bloody-minded military pragmatism and cold calculation.
He checked the plot again. Meromi's defensive fire was having some effect but by now the Sarr Theln had thirty torpedoes loose. "Network our ECM and point-defense with the Begh'poQ and the QartaDSa."
The two K'Tanco-class cruisers, the closest ships to the HoSbatlh, opened fire. Seventeen torpedoes vanished well short. ECM diverted eight more. Another four exploded mostly harmlessly against the forward shields, the force blunted by the warp field.
One got through. Transphasic mines erupted into space ahead of the HoSbatlh as Meromi screamed, "All hands, brace for impact!"
The bridge shook violently as the armor plate fought to hold off the force of multiple explosions. Bekk Tengku's console exploded, throwing her from her chair screaming. The main viewscreen cracked and went down, and Brokosh could faintly hear the sound of air rushing through the corridor behind him as the blast doors slammed closed, trapping a Klingon crewman on the other side. "Damage report!" Brokosh thundered.
"Hull breaches on command deck and decks three, five, six, and eleven!" Norigom rattled off. "Disruptor Four out! Forward thruster bank out! Forward shields at 32 percent! Cloaking device out! Casualties reported in all sections!"
"Enemy reinforcements detected."
"Goddess," Brokosh said to himself with some admiration, brushing broken glass off his lap. "They suckered me. Pulled the same trick on me I pulled on them." The odds were now close to even.
"Enemy Sarr Theln still fleeing! They have ceased fire and are dropping to sublight! Escorts are reversing course!"
"Koren to brokoS Sa', get the honorless petaQpu' on that carrier! We can handle the escorts!"
"Godspeed, Captain Koren," Brokosh acknowledged. "Meromi?"
"Yes, sir. Norigom, take the turrets offline; they'll do us no good. Divert their power to the engines. And pull power from life support and put it to the shields."
"You got it, boss!"
"QarchetvI', MajQa'be', and Satlh'QaH, we're going after the flagship. Km'prala and Sshamath, cover fire. 202 Wing and C'Risasse, stay on our wing. Crash translate, now!"
"Confirmed, Flag," the Ferasan commanding the Satlh'QaH hissed. Four birds-of-prey and a Negh'Var-class battlecruiser swung in behind the HoSbatlh, while the rest of the fleet opened fire as their warp fields fell away. Disruptor bolts and torpedoes sleeted into the oncoming Breen cruisers; return fire skittered across the shields.
"Forward shields at twenty-five percent!" Norigom reported. "Sir, we can't keep this up! We've gotta fall out!"
"Divert damage control teams to the cloaking device!" Brokosh ordered.
"What?"
On the screen two pips indicating Breen cruisers went dark. "Get the cloak online! See if we can sneak past."
"Captain," Ila'kshath said suddenly, "there's something wrong. The odds are still against the Breen; they should've kept fleeing."
"They are courageous foes!" the Klingon engineer trying to fix the viewscreen said with glee as the ship jolted again. "Their defeat will bring us much honor!"
"No, there's something else going on, Sergeant. I'm reading a disturbance in subspace on the edge of this micronebula. I think they dropped out of warp because it was more dangerous than—Egg-Bringer!"
Brokosh saw it on his screen. It was like a rip opening in space. "Meromi, get us out of here! Ila'kshath, what the hell is that?"
"I don't know! It resembles Tyken's Rift but these readings are—"
"Engineering to Bridge!" Ba'wov's voice came through the intercom. "Reading a destabilization in the warp core! We're about to lose containment—I'm shutting it down!"
Then there was a sudden flash behind Brokosh's eyes. The light faded but something felt wrong.
Then he realized what was wrong. The star Sanelar at the center of the Free Haven System was far closer than it had been before, a mere 30 million klicks away, and the rest of his fleet was someplace else. "What just happened? Did we just teleport?"
The Gorn answered, "Still working on it—Egg-Bringer! Breen battleship and cruiser, closing and firing!"
"Take evasive action! Head for the sun—maybe we can lose 'em!"
The battlecruiser wheeled and burned hard for the blindingly bright orb of flame, a pair of crescent-shaped Breen warships in hot pursuit, firing as they went. Disruptor fire streamed from the aft turrets but the enemy cannons were far more powerful. "We're losing rear shields," Norigom grimly announced. "Another minute or so and we're dead." There was a shrieking crack. "And there go the main disruptors."
"Shut down the weapons generators and divert all power to engines," Meromi ordered. "Helm, head for that sunspot formation, the one that looks like a yorel root. And charge up the tractor beam."
"Meromi, what are you doing?" Brokosh asked.
"I'm going to trigger a solar flare. We can't shoot them down, so we'll burn them down."
"Ballsy," the Lethean commented. "And if you get us, too?"
"It's a risk, sir. I believe it's an acceptable one."
Brokosh thought for a moment but then the bridge shook and another red damage indicator on his HUD decided for him. "All right, go for it. Damn. I wanted that targ-f*cker alive."
"Norigom," Meromi said. "Reconfigure the forward and ventral shields for thermal protection. Things are about to get hot."
The huge star filled the sky, washing out Brokosh's viewscreen even though the external cameras had automatically dimmed it. "Warning," the ship's computer intoned. "Exterior temperature at unsafe levels. Warning. Exterior temperature at unsafe levels."
"Turn that blasted thing off!" Brokosh yelled.
"Tractor beam available," the gunner stated.
"Target the sunspots and activate tractor beam."
As the battlecruiser careened across the star's surface, hull beginning to glow cherry-red, a blue glow brushed out from its underside and stroked across the blazing clouds of plasma. There was a bright flash hundreds of kilometers below and an enormous volume of unbelievably hot gas began to rise. "Helm, get us the f*ck out of here! NOW!" The helmsman frantically hammered his board and the star began to fall away.
"This one's gonna be close!"
Behind them there was a pair of flashes, barely visible against the light of the star, and the two Breen capital ships vanished from the plot. The HoSbatlh screamed through space as millions of tons of ionized hydrogen exploded off the surface and blasted into space.
As the star receded into the distance behind them, Meromi ordered, "Put us into a stable orbit. Stop engines." The roar of the exhausted impulse drives quieted and then all that was left was the hum of the life support system.
Brokosh pulled off his HUD visor and stalked into the main bridge. "All right. Somebody tell me what the hell happened back there. That is not Sanelar—it's the wrong color. Sanelar was class K, this thing's a G2V. We've gone at least a dozen light-years."
Ila'kshath waved Brokosh over. "This is what happened. Our weapons fire mixed with the Breens' transphasic weapons, plus with the theta-verteron particles in the vicinity of that micronebula, produced a subspace distortion. A class four quantum singularity."
Brokosh stared blankly up at the Gorn. "Okay, Ila'kshath, remember what I said about technobabble?"
"We accidentally made a wormhole, General."
Brokosh stood there trying to process it. Finally he said, "Targ-sh*t."
"Sir, I don't make the news, I just report it."
"All right, then where the hell are we?"
"Nonessential computer memory's scrambled all to hell," Norigom reported. "I'm starting to restore from backup but it'll take several hours or so. Sensors are showing eight major planets, four of them gas giants, plus one Class M in the habitable zone, plus an assortment of dwarf planets and an asteroid belt between planets four and five."
"All right, set course for the Class M," Meromi ordered. "Any sign of any advanced technology?"
The Gorn shook his head. "Not even any artificial EM signals."
"Landing gear? Can we survive a reentry?"
"Probably," Norigom answered. "Send some guys outside to patch the hull breaches on the underside, no problem."
Brokosh nodded, then his mouth tightened grimly. "Have Vornigar make up a casualty list."
Ba'wov was on the bridge taking a breather with her husband as the blue speck in the distance began to enlarge. The noblewoman's face was streaked with sweat and grease, her leathers tattered and blackened in places, and her green eyes were reddened from the smoke of burnt plastic. "qeylIs batlh," she breathed in astonishment as the viewscreen, newly replaced, began to resolve the image of the system's third planet. The shapes of the green-brown continents were unmistakable, known throughout the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, because of the influence of the government that should have been based there.
"Goddess," Brokosh agreed with his wife. "That's Earth. But no Federation. That doesn't make sense."
"Sir," the giant lizard-man interjected as the helmsman brought them into a high orbit, "I think I know what happened. Some wormholes, they don't just travel through space, they travel through time. The Harry Kim Wormhole, for example—the Delta Quadrant terminus is twenty years into the future."
"Are you saying we went back in time?" Brokosh was dumbfounded. "How far?"
"Well, I'm detecting primitive factories and coal-fueled industry, but no sign of electrical activity or radio communications. Sometime in the mid-19th century Earth Standard, perhaps?"
Ba'wov changed the subject. "loDnal, we have another problem. The primary dilithium crystals were damaged by the passage. They're decrystallizing. Without them, we can't generate enough power for the warp drive so we can slingshot back to the present."
"So replace them with the spares." He looked at his wife's face, and noticed a worried, sad look on her face. He took her chin in one leathery hand and tilted her head back. "What's wrong, bang?"
Ba'wov's mouth was tight as she shook him off. "That cargo bay was breached. They went into space at some point."
"F*CK!" Brokosh screamed, putting a fist through the nearest screen and sending a bekk diving for cover. "F*CKING F*CKED UP F*CK!"
"Hey! Don't break my ship!" Meromi shouted angrily.
Brokosh struggled to get control of himself and his breathing slowed. He grimly adjusted the collar of his sweater and turned to face his command crew. "Okay. Options."
"I think we can repair the crystals, sir," Ila'kshath offered. "There's a trick a Federation engineer developed in the 2280s involving radiation collected from a wet-navy warship's fission pile."
"Uh, one problem with that, Lizard-Breath," Norigom pointed out, raising a finger. "If I'm right about roughly when we are, I don't think humans even discover radioactivity until decades from now." Everybody turned and stared at the armored yellow-skinned Nausicaan. "What? I'm allowed to read, ain't I?"
Ila'kshath bared her teeth at the Nausicaan and he shied back. "Not a problem. There's uranium and thorium ores all over Earth and they haven't been tapped yet. We can mine it, refine it, and get home in a week."
"Sooner is better," Meromi said. "The longer we stay down there, the more likely we're detected, even if we get the cloak back up."
Brokosh scratched at his chin with one taloned finger, deep in thought. "All right. Ila'kshath, find us a good deposit of radioactives, close to the surface, few people around. Use your discretion. Ba'wov, see if you and Norigom can't get the history files back up, then get cleaned up and replicate yourself some native clothes once we know where we're going."
"Why me?"
"Because we need people who can pass for human without too much trouble."
"Well, why not Meromi?"
"She's green," Norigom pointed out.
END OF PART ONE
Author's Notes: Cribbing stuff from all over the franchise for this. Tractoring the sun to cause a coronal mass ejection is from DS9: "Shadows and Symbols", while the idea to fix the dilithium crystals with radiation is from Star Trek IV, obviously.
And yes, Ila'kshath is a girl Gorn. Like most reptiles, the females are distinguished by being just plain bigger.
