Stardate 2263.88
2045 hours
The shuttle smoothly departed the bay into the darkness of space. Though it wasn't immediately visible through the glass, the rift was only a few thousand kilometers away. The amount of anxiety coursing through him was steadily rising.
Captain James Kirk looked at Ensign Chekov and raised his eyebrows. "Ready when you are, Ensign Chekov."
"Aye," replied Chekov, engaging the impulse engines.
He'd brought the young Russian because of his natural ability with math, astrophysics, and pretty much everything. Chekov filled so many roles aboard Enterprise, serving as the navigator, weapons officer, and relief science officer. His annual evaluation was due, and if Kirk remembered correctly, Chekov finally met the time in service requirements for advancement to lieutenant.
"Remind me to promote you when we get back," he said, slapping him on the shoulder.
"Aye," he chuckled. "Will do."
"Well, I'm glad he can laugh," Bones grumbled. "In the future, I'd appreciate being left out of your grand time traveling plans. And now that I've agreed to this, next thing you know, it'll be wormholes and-"
"Isn't the medical professional in you concerned about the people sending out these distress signals?" Kirk interrupted.
That was exactly why Kirk had brought him. If Spock's theory was correct, these people were almost certainly going to need medical care.
He couldn't quite wrap his head around it yet. Temporal mechanics was one of those courses at Starfleet Academy that even the instructors who taught it probably couldn't pass if they were grading fairly: the amount of paradoxes and questions that time travel posed was mind-numbingly awful.
He'd spent the last hour in the astrometrics lab with Spock, listening patiently as his science officer did his best to explain his theory. Spock hypothesized that when the red matter had consumed the Narada, it created and destroyed a supermassive black hole in a fraction of a second, one so massive that it created a permanent rift in space time.
To get the point across, Spock had eventually resorted to comparing the Narada to an old-fashioned bullet fired into a box: the point of entry was small enough to be negligible, but the point of egress was enormous and would be located at a weak position in the fabric of space. Maybe it wasn't a perfect analogy, but the main idea was that when Nero's ship disappeared into that black hole, it burst out somewhere else with a serious bang.
Apparently that "somewhere else" was here. Spock had further speculated that based upon the Narada's previous temporal incursion at these coordinates when it attacked the Kelvin, any remains of the ship might also remerge at this location.
At that point in his science officer's briefing, Kirk had made the mistake of asking how long this temporal incursion had existed if the Narada had disappeared five years ago, and had watched Spock explain a number of calculations and equations that nearly made his eyes bleed before he begged him to stop.
All Spock could say was that he was eighty-six percent certain the rift led to the relational past, and based on his estimates, there was an additional seventy-two percent chance that it led to a time period within the last five hundred years. Spock's calculations had been made before Lieutenant Uhura picked up the obsolete Federation distress signal, so that additional information seemingly narrowed it down to sometime within the last seventy or eighty years, based on the frequency that was being used. That only left the problem of what to do.
Though the Narada had been destroyed, there existed a moderate possibility that the crew might have successfully deployed one or more escape pods. Without any firm directive in place, Kirk wanted to investigate the source of the signal, apprehend any Narada survivors, and bring them back to Earth to stand trial.
Spock had been quick to point out that he wasn't certain there even had been survivors: it was possible the signal came from other Romulans. If the rift led to a point sufficiently distant in the past, the Romulan Neutral Zone may not yet exist on the other side, and the Romulans they would encounter would have every right to be there.
Kirk had insisted they at least check it out, if not for the Romulans, then for the Federation distress signal. Despite Spock's formal protest, he had loaded up Bones and Chekov into the Class 17 shuttle and headed for the rift. He ordered Spock to remain on the Enterprise and continue his research into closing the distortion to prevent others from freely travelling through.
The rift was rapidly growing visible through the reinforced aluminum glass window of the forward cabin and he felt his heart beginning to pick up speed.
"So you wanna tell me why we're jetsetting into the past?" Bones growled.
"To perform search and rescue operations," he replied, choosing his words carefully.
"It's bad business messing with time," Bones mumbled. "I understand that I have a duty to treat sick and injured people, but what if one of these people ends up being a psychopath or a megalomaniac in a few decades? You seem to have an uncanny ability to scrape those kind of people out of the bottom of the barrel."
Kirk sneered at him and sighed.
"You do," Bones insisted. "Nero. Khan. Krall. It's like you have a magnet for villains. It wouldn't surprise me if we were going back in time to save some twentieth century Andorian dictator or-"
"You're being kind of dramatic, Bones," Kirk sighed.
"I must agree with Dr. McCoy, Keptin," Chekov nodded. "I mean about altering time. It is bad business."
"I understand your reservations: I have some myself. But this is also personal," Kirk explained.
He hadn't told them the precise purpose of this mission, but as they approached the outer edge of the rift, he felt they deserved to know. They both shot him an expectant look.
"Mr. Spock believes this temporal distortion was created when the Narada was destroyed, and he believes there may be survivors. That's why I brought you, Bones. I'm pretty sure they're going to be a little banged up."
"Wait, what?" Bones roared. "That doesn't make any sense. The Narada was destroyed, what? Five years ago?"
"Time is relative, Dr. McCoy," Chekov interrupted. "What appears to be years to us may only be moments relative to individuals passing through space time, and-"
"Dammit, I'm a doctor, not a temporal physicist," Bones snapped.
"And that's why I brought Chekov," Kirk interrupted with a thin smile.
"We will enter the rift in forty-four seconds, Keptin," Chekov murmured, looking to him for guidance.
"Half impulse ahead, Mr. Chekov," he ordered.
Stardate 2233.02
1045 hours
"What do you think about 'Robert' if it's a boy?" Commander George Kirk said thoughtfully. "No, erase last sentence."
He looked at the PADD in his hands. Composing his final message to Winona was proving more difficult than he'd thought it would be, especially when he considered the child he probably was never going to meet.
They had spent the last nine months sporadically discussing names, but they could never agree on anything. So many names had been put forward and tossed into the garbage heap just as quickly. She had already said 'no' to 'Robert' at least once.
Angela, Jason, Lily, Peter, Sarah, Michael, and Andrea: all considered, all rejected.
It would have narrowed the field down by half if Winona had given in to curiosity and found out the baby's sex, but just as with George, she was determined to be surprised. At least their first son had been easy to name, since they both liked the idea of having a George Jr. running around.
She'd been receptive to the idea of using family names, and he nearly laughed out loud at the prospect of naming this child for his own father. Tiberius Kirk. Little Tibby. With a name like that, they might as well just pick on him at home and save him the trouble of walking to school.
Winona's father was named Jim. Jim. James. James Kirk. Not bad. He clicked the button for the record feature on his PADD and resumed his message.
"What do you think about 'James' for a boy? You know, after your father?"
He paused his recording. Maybe this baby would be a girl. He had no idea what he would do with a daughter, and gulped at the thought of fending off boys when she got older. Then again, he was composing this message to his wife in the event that he didn't survive, a possibility that was becoming more likely with each passing hour. There would be no one there to chase off the boys.
He inhaled deeply into the mask to suppress the urge to cry. Sure, there was no one there to see his tears, but he would know.
He and his wife were both in Starfleet, and they both knew the risks of service. There was no such thing as "safe", and no way to know when any given day would be the last. That was true regardless of one's choice to don a uniform.
His sluggish, frozen fingers trembled over the record button on the PADD, and he resumed his last message, "So I was thinking if the baby ends up being a girl, 'Charlotte' would be nice…"
Stardate 2263.88
2126 hours
Spock worked quietly at the science station on the bridge, training his mind to the task at hand. Even though he was Vulcan, it wasn't easy to focus at present.
In his final message, Ambassador Spock had given him a wealth of information on temporal mechanics, black hole physics, and artificial space engineering. Unfortunately, the information he'd received was a hundred years more advanced than current knowledge and theories, so his learning curve had been steep.
Spock was well versed on red matter. The substance was synthesized by the Vulcan Science Academy in 2377 from a decalithium isotope. This was common knowledge more than a hundred years before red matter was even developed, due to Nero's temporal incursion.
What was not widely known, however, was how the physicists at the Vulcan Science Academy had initially developed and tested the red matter. It had begun with experiments on gravity wells, but the scientists quickly realized the substance had enormous potential for also creating artificial black holes and wormholes.
When the researchers realized the full magnitude of their discovery, they chose to cease further experimentation for ethical reasons. Temporal mechanics was complicated, and being able to freely alter time was among the most dangerous abilities ever contrived by science.
One physicist called Rekan had felt so disturbed by his role in the creation of red matter that he'd devoted the rest of his life to finding methods to safely collapse temporal rifts and wormholes prior to his death five years later in 2382.
Ambassador Spock had used red matter in 2387 to destroy the supernova without permission from the Federation, Vulcan Science Academy, or research team. It was a choice that would weigh heavily on him for the rest of his life, but he'd hoped to eventually atone for his decision. Now his death made that impossible, and he'd asked Spock to take up the cause.
He had passed along what he knew of Rekan's research, and Spock had been working to make sense of it in the past week. He'd made moderate progress, but he needed more time.
Unfortunately, Captain Kirk had undertaken a fool's errand to investigate the possibility that there may have been survivors from Nero's ship. Spock had been skeptical when he read of Ambassador Spock's suspicions regarding the Narada's crew, and he regretted relaying those suspicions to his captain.
The ambassador had been vague about how he came by the information that a permanent rift in space time may have formed as a result of the red matter that destroyed the Narada. He knew that in the years since Vulcan's destruction, Ambassador Spock had made numerous attempts to find a peaceful resolution with the Romulan Star Empire.
Tensions between the Romulans and the Federation had escalated considerably following the loss of Vulcan and both sides had been quick to point fingers, shift blame, and make pointless demands. Nero had acted alone, but there were many in the Federation who still blamed the Romulan Empire for what happened, which had the expected effect of making the already distrustful Romulans understandably even more defensive.
Therefore, it seemed likely that the Romulans knew something the Federation did not in regards to the ultimate fate of the Narada and this permanent temporal rift, which was a worrisome prospect. Altering time had infinite unforeseen consequences, including the possibility of writing oneself out of existence. That kind of power was dangerous in any hands, but particularly dangerous in the hands of a belligerent adversary.
He had tried to relate to Kirk that retrieving the Narada's survivors from the rift, if there were any survivors at all, could have catastrophic consequences. Yet his commanding officer had been convinced that returning them to this side of the anomaly would prevent them from disrupting the past and therefore preserve the present. The field of temporal mechanics was famous for infinitely looping paradoxes, and the reality was that returning the Narada's crew to the present might be the very thing that destroyed the present as they knew it.
That was not a consequence he was eager to embrace, especially not now that he knew he was to be a father. He allowed his eyes to trail from his work station to Nyota. She was sitting stiffly in her seat, deliberately avoiding glancing in his direction.
They would have to leave Enterprise prior to the birth of the child, as the ship lacked the necessary facilities to care for infants and young children. Obtaining a joint assignment in Starfleet could be a tenuous process: the organization had millions of personnel, each with valid reasons and excuses for requiring family-friendly assignments.
They could increase their chances for successful colocation by marrying, yet he'd never broached the subject with her. She'd always been fiercely independent, and he'd often gotten the sense that she viewed the human custom of marriage as a superfluous gesture of affection. He loved her, and she loved him in return. That had always been enough.
"Commander, I'm receiving a transmission from the away team," she announced, casting her eyes at him.
"Report," he said.
Her eyes narrowed and she sat up a little more straightly. She removed her earpiece and tied in the signal to the bridge intercom. The quality of the transmission was poor, and echoed as a result of the rift.
"… no sign of the Romulan distress signal. It's just gone. The Federation signal is stronger on this side, and we're detecting a human lifesign on a nearby planetoid. We're going to investigate."
"Captain, I would be remiss if I did not remind you that interfering with this time period may have significant and indeterminable effects," Spock replied.
"We're only going to take a look, Mr. Sp- raise shields!"
"Captain?" Spock replied.
"We're under att-"
The transmission cut out, and Nyota began scrambling to find the lost signal. All eyes on the bridge focused on him.
"Sir?" Lieutenant Sulu murmured. "What are you orders?"
