September 2, 2161, aboard the Enterprise, in orbit above Vulcan
Malcolm Reed struggled up through the frigid, dark water toward the light and the voice he heard calling his name. He was desperately tired, cold and hungry. The heavy blue wool uniform weighed him down. The bright blue scarf at his throat seemed to be choking him, so he clawed at it with his fingers. His lungs burned and felt as if they were about to explode. He'd never make it! He began to panic. Strong hands grasped his. Were they trying to help him or to drown him? He heard the voice call out, "Doc, get over here! Mal's wakin' up." The voice turned its attention to him. "Mal, you relax now, hear? Doc says you'll be fine. You're safe, Mal. Just relax."
He followed the voice's command now that he recognized it as belonging to his closest friend and first officer, Commander Charles "Trip" Tucker, III. As he ceased struggling, the strong hands released their grip. A gentle hand brushed his dark hair back off his forehead. His blue-gray eyes fluttered open. He recognized the bright light and sterile white of his ship's sickbay. He recognized Trip's blond hair and worried blue eyes. He recognized the doctor and prepared himself for the inevitable questions.
Did he know who he was? The short answer, all that the Geneva Convention required he give, was that he was Malcolm Reed. He held the rank of captain. His identity number was SW1NX01601789.
Did he know where he was? He was in sickbay (again!) on board his ship, Her Majesty's Starship Enterprise.
Did he know what day it was? The last date he remembered was August 31, 2161. If the doctor told him how long he'd been unconscious, he could figure out what day it was. He didn't think his considerable mathematical skills were impaired.
Did he know who sat upon the throne? Her Sovereign Majesty, Diana, by the Grace of God, Queen of England and Empress of Earth.
That was the short version. The long version was much more interesting. He was the Honorable Malcolm Reed, the only son of Stuart, the 20th Earl Reed of Elmwood and current First Lord of the Admiralty, and his wife, the Lady Mary Dominica Keating-Reed, a peer of the realm in her own right, but of the Irish peerage. He had been born at Elmwood, the sprawling estate in the lush farmland to the west of Chicago in the Dominion of America. The estate, a land grant in the old Northwest Territory, had been a gift from His Majesty, King George III, to the First Earl Reed in recognition of his services to the crown in the First War of the American Rebellion.
Malcolm had never spent much time at home. While his father served as commandant of the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, the boot camp for colonial Americans wishing to join the ranks of the Royal Navy, and then as the admiral commanding the 9th Naval District (Great Lakes) of the Dominion of America, Malcolm had been sent off to England for a proper education at a military boarding school, Eton, Oxford and finally the Royal Naval College. He was also taught to speak with a proper English accent, not the flat Midwestern accent of his birthplace that somehow managed to put an "r" in "wash."
At the Naval College, he'd met two fellow cadets who would have a profound impact on his life. The first was HRH William Arthur Edward, the Duke of York. He'd introduced his sister, Madeleine, to William. One thing led to another, and now Maddie was a duchess. He had to call her "Ma'am" and bow to her. She made sure he never forgot that, either.
The second was his roommate, a loud, brash, intrusive, devil-may-care colonial who was the scion of one of the oldest, wealthiest and most staunchly Loyalist families in the Dominion of America. Charles "Trip" Tucker, III, had a brilliant mind when he chose to apply himself which he did just enough to keep from being expelled. He was proud of his heritage and never bothered to cultivate a proper English accent in place of his distinctive colonial drawl. He was also a demerit magnet and ceaselessly tried to involve his roommate in his schemes. Malcolm had had enough and was planning on applying for a different roommate for the next term, but then they'd gone on the training cruise on the old square-rigged ship and the accident had happened. He'd been aloft taking in sail as the weather began to deteriorate. Somehow, part of the rigging had given way and he'd fallen. Fortunately, he ended up in the water - a fall to the deck from that height would surely have killed him outright. Unfortunately, he was still tangled in the ropes and would have drowned if Trip hadn't dove in without a second thought and rescued him.
Malcolm had earnestly and sincerely expressed his gratitude. Trip had been uncharacteristically modest and self-effacing. It was nothing. Malcolm would have done the same for him. It was duty. He mouthed all the clichés, but when they'd gotten back to their room he'd finally told Malcolm the truth. "Ya know, Mal, sometimes ya give me a royal pain right where I sit, but I've sorta gotten use to ya. I wouldn't wanna hafta train up somebody new." He'd actually gotten Malcolm to laugh at that. Next term, they were still rooming together and Trip was "mighty obliged." Malcolm had merely smiled and murmured something about "the devil you know."
A few uncharitable souls ascribed Trip's subsequent successful career in the fleet air arm solely to his connection with the family of the First Sea Lord. Malcolm would never have even considered asking his father to show such favoritism to his friend. Admiral Lord Reed, however, despite being a rather undemonstrative man, loved his son a great deal and was inordinately, if secretly, proud of him. He was also grateful for Trip's heroics and kept an eye on his career. Whenever possible, Trip and Malcolm served together. If anyone had had the temerity to question him about the assignments, Admiral Lord Reed would simply have remarked that there had been a synergy between the Reeds and the Tuckers since the late 1700s.
During the First War of the American Rebellion, Charles Lee Tucker had been the deputy of the British commanding general in North America, General Lord Cornwallis. As such, he had chased the ragtag rebels through the Carolinas and Virginia until he had trapped them on the Yorktown peninsula. The rebel general, George Washington, had hoped to evacuate his army by sea with the help of a French squadron, but Malcolm, Viscount (soon to be the first Earl) Reed, in command of the British North American squadron had routed the French by destroying several ships and taking more as prizes. Washington had been forced to surrender, and in due time he and his officers were executed for treason. Tucker and Reed had celebrated their joint victory at Tucker's home, Arlington House, on the bluff overlooking the Potomac across from what would become the colonial capital of Georgetown.
One hundred years later, during the Second War of the American Rebellion, Robert Lee Tucker (Marse Robert or Bobbie-Lee to Trip, depending on how many pints he'd had) had been given the honor of commanding the Army of the Potomac, the main British force in eastern America. He'd finally brought the upstart rebel Army of Northern Virginia to heel at a small Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg. He'd been an observer at the Battle of Balaclava some ten years before and had no intention of making the same mistake Lord Raglan had when he'd ordered the charge of the Light Brigade. He waited patiently in his strong line atop Cemetery Ridge, the Round Tops and Culp's Hill. He had the measure of his opposite number, General Gardner, and knew that he could be induced to recklessly attack a well-fortified position. He hadn't been wrong. Gardner ordered the division of Major General Henry Archer to stage a frontal assault on Tucker's line. In the disastrous Archer's Charge, the Army of Northern Virginia and the dream of a free America were broken.
As much as Trip loved telling this story, he allowed as how his illustrious ancestor had had just a smidgen of help from the Reeds. Stuart, the 5th Earl Reed, had commanded naval forces in the West. He put down the rebellion in New Orleans and secured the Mississippi River for the Crown. He protected the port of Chicago, not only from the rebel Yankees, but also from the Parti Québécois, French Canadians who felt that the unrest in the Dominion of America offered them the best chance to secede from English-speaking Canada and form their own nation.
Stuart's younger brothers, Archibald and Clement, did their part in putting down the rebellion as well. Archibald commanded the first true ironclad warship, HMS Monitor. When mutineers aboard HMS Virginia turned their vessel into a fireship and tried to set it amongst the rest of the squadron anchored in Hampton Roads, Captain Reed and his crew succeeded in sinking it before it could do much damage. In comparison to the wooden ships in the squadron, the Monitor had much less to fear from a fireship, and the movable turret gave it a much wider field of fire. Monitor did have a vulnerability, though. With a draft of only about 10 feet, the ship, described as a "biscuit tin on a shingle" was basically a semi-submersible. It didn't handle rough seas well. A few months after its heroic action, the Monitor sank in a gale off the North Carolina coast. In the best tradition of the Royal Navy, Captain Reed went down with his ship.
Clement commanded the world's first successful submarine - that is, if one defines success solely on the basis of sinking its prey. HMS Hunley, which was named for its inventor, was a hand-powered ship that had snuck into the Rebel-controlled port of Charleston, South Carolina, and sunk the blockade runner vaingloriously named USS Alabama. Unfortunately, the Hunley had sunk along with its victim and another Captain Reed went down with his ship.
At the turn of the millennium, the Tucker Family Foundation would donate much of the money that made it possible to find and raise both the Monitor and the Hunley. The long dead Captains Reed were finally laid to rest, with all the pageantry of a funeral with full military honors, in the family plot behind the great wrought iron gate at Elmwood.
After the end of the Second War of the American Rebellion in 1863, the Yanks seemed finally to have learned and accepted their place in the Empire. They joined the mother country in the Anglo-German War of 1914 that secured Europe for the Empire, the Anglo-Russian War of 1941 that brought an end to the Bolshevik heresy and made the vast lands of Russia a part of the Empire and the Anglo-Chinese War of 1954 that secured Asia once and for all for the Empire. Oh, there were a series of "dirty little wars" in the Mideast during the reign of Elizabeth II. Misguided Brits and Yanks alike, from "Mad Anthony" Blair to the Bush Brothers, followed in the footsteps of T. E. Lawrence, the so-called "Lawrence of Arabia", in trying to foment rebellion in this oil-rich part of the Empire, but they all failed miserably. By the reign of King William V, a united Earth under the Empire enjoyed a renaissance akin to that of the 1500s and 1600s. The warp drive was developed, and manned deep space exploration finally became possible. Over the years, there had been talk of creating a Royal Air Force separate from the Royal Navy that would be responsible for the Empire's space program, but there was always an Earl Reed about to make sure that the space program remained the exclusive domain of the fleet air arm.
First contact had been made with the Vulcans in 2151. It had taken 10 years, but by 2161, this proud (despite their claim of being emotionless and logical), secretive and powerful people were ready to sign a treaty of friendship with the Empire. Captain Malcolm Reed, commander of the Empire's first warp 9 vessel, a vessel faster and more powerful than anything the Vulcans possessed, had been named ambassador plenipotentiary for her Majesty's government. He was considered to be the perfect man for the job for a number of reasons: He was the only son of one of the oldest and greatest noble military families in the Empire. He was related through his sister's marriage to the Imperial house itself. Finally, his strict English upbringing and carefully crafted mask of command made him seem almost as emotionless as a Vulcan when the situation demanded it.
The treaty of friendship had been signed between Vulcan and the Empire. There had been a banquet in celebration. Reed had been assured that everything offered to eat and drink was safe for humans. He'd eaten a Vulcan fruit that vaguely resembled pineapple. That was the last thing he remembered.
"Charles, how did I end up in sickbay yet again?"
"Doc says ya had an id-io-syn-crat-ic reaction to that fruit ya ate." He pronounced the word very slowly and carefully. "Didn't bother the rest of us none, just you."
"Ah, an allergic reaction then."
"Precisely," the doctor confirmed. "A rather nasty anaphylactic reaction that gave you congestive heart failure with flash pulmonary edema. You would have felt as if you were drowning."
"That sounds vaguely familiar," Reed replied with a rather ironic tone of voice the doctor chose to disregard.
"I believe I can give you shots periodically to control the problem if you find you fancy the fruit."
"Not bloody likely, doctor."
"You'll be fine, Captain, but you do need to rest a bit longer."
Reed sighed. "Charles, I'll leave the ship in your capable hands. Since this is a peaceful mission, do try to refrain from starting a war with our chief engineer whilst I'm otherwise engaged. I need both you and Mr. Archer to be at your best. No teasing him about his antecedents. Am I clear?"
"Aye, sir," Tucker said immediately. After a pause, he added sotto voce, "But it ain't my fault Jon Archer can't take a joke." Reed merely sighed again.
"Come, Commander, the captain needs to sleep."
As the doctor led Tucker out of sickbay, Trip asked quietly, "Is he really gonna be OK by tonight, Doc? Ya know Chef wants to make Mal's favorite double chocolate cake in the shape of the Enterprise for the birthday party the crew's throwin' 'im. That's gonna take awhile. Is it a go or what?"
"Yes, Commander, it's a go. You can pass the word to Chef."
"Thanks, Doc," Trip said as the doors to sickbay whooshed shut.
After checking to ascertain that his patient was comfortable and fast asleep, Doctor Daniels reflected that things had finally worked out in the end. As best as he could ascertain, the timeline had finally been correctly restored.