Chapter 11

Captain's Log: July 1st, 2159

After answering a distress call from a remote planet, the Enterprise has taken on four more passengers. They claim to be descendants of what was a highly classified space exploration and defense program run by the old United States government called the "Stargate Program". Their leader, Colonel Ronan Shepherd, claims those involved with the program left Earth towards the beginning of the Eugenics Wars in the mid twenty first century through an alien device called a "stargate" which I am told allows nearly instantaneous travel between two points in space through the creation of stable, artificial wormholes. This team claims to be from a colony established in a base called "Atlantis" somewhere in the Pegasus Galaxy. They arrived through one of these stargates which had been established on the planet below. I am told their mission was to attempt contact with Earth to determine what happened with us after their original base and stargate located there was subject to a nuclear attack during the war.

While attempting to assist this team with making contact with their home, the Enterprise came under attack by two Klingon battle cruisers that entered the system. At the same time, our away team also came under attack by a group of five Klingons on the planet. I'm not sure I believe the report my officers gave me as to how they and this ship survived both encounters, but what they tell me is too fantastic to have been made up. Suffice it to say that after heavy combat one Klingon vessel was destroyed and the other one retreated. I'm told the Klingons on the planet took heavy casualties inflicted by my helmsman.

The Enterprise suffered major damage during the fight. I am still waiting on my chief engineer's report on the full extant of the damage, and when we will be able to get under way again.

"Well..." Trip drew in a breath and blew it out, scratching the back of his dark blond head as he prepared to give his captain his assessment. He'd been up all night pouring over the data and reports from his own people for hours, even getting a good extra-vehicular view of the damage to the port nacelle. Now he stood in front of his captain's desk in his ready room, feeling a little like being called to the principal's office without having done anything wrong himself.

"How bad is it, Trip?" Archer asked him point blank.

"Do you want the good news or the bad news first, Captain?" His chief engineer asked.

"Good news is always welcome." The captain responded from where he sat at his desk, himself looking over the sensor data from the recent engagement, still trying to make sense of it.

"The good news is that the port side warp coil is still intact and looks to be structurally sound. I can have the nacelle patched up and serviceable to warp three in about a day or so. I've already got my people on it."

"And the bad news, Trip?" Archer pressed him.

Commander Tucker let out another slow breath again. "We took an awful lot of damage in the wrong places, sir. Those Klingons really gave us a pounding. I haven't seen it this bad since the Xindi mission." He told his captain. "Two of the port side phase cannons are destroyed. There are hull breaches in a dozen bad places around the saucer. All that's fixable either here or in drydock back at Earth. But our real problem is that the antimatter storage units were damaged during the battle. Ensign Davis ejected them into space before they lost magnetic containment altogether. I would have done the same under the circumstances but it still leaves us in a bind. Right now we're keeping the lights on by means of back up generators, but we can't generate plasma for the warp nacelles without antimatter. I can patch up our engine, sir, but we're running on empty and need gas in a bad way, so to speak."

"We can't go anywhere because we're out of gas?" Archer repeated.

"Yes, sir. I can try to jury rig something to convert some of the deuterium we've still got into its mirror image, but that might take a little longer. I'll probably need T'Pol's help on some of it." Trip told him.

Archer thought for a minute, then added, "See if our new friends from Atlantis might have some tricks up their sleeve as well. That Dr. McKay seems pretty sharp, and correct me if I'm wrong but they claim to have experience with technologies that are still light years ahead of ours. If we're not getting back to Earth without antimatter then neither are they."

"Uh… yes, sir." Trip said, a little unsure.

"Problem, Trip?" Archer asked.

"It's just that that McKay gal… she's kind of a piece of work herself." Trip responded.

"Noted. But she still may know a few things we don't that could help us get moving again." His captain answered.

"Yes, sir. I'll get started on it right away." Commander Tucker answered and then made to leave.

"One more thing, Trip." Archer said, holding him up.

Trip stopped in front of the door, his hand reaching for the switch to open it. He then turned around, "Yeah, what's up?"

"What really happened out there last night?" He asked.

"Sir? What do you mean?" Trip responded, confused.

"I mean, Klingon warships don't just fall out of orbit and take a nose dive into atmosphere. Travis told me he suddenly got his memories back and used the Force to drag it down. Besides Travis, you've spent more time around Yoda than anyone else. What did you see? Do you think that's what happened, or did our other guest have anything to do with it?" Archer explained.

"I don't really know, Captain. Truth is, the possibility that anyone could pull a thousand metric tons of starship and drag it anywhere just by thinking about it scares the hell out of me." Trip told him honestly. "I was kind of out of it from the heat to begin with, but from what I saw, the little green guy wasn't doing anything like closing his eyes or concentrating or anything that I've seen him or Travis do when they do that Force stuff when it was going on."

"What about on the planet?" Archer pressed.

"One minute Travis and Yoda were behind Ronan and I, the next, there was Klingons and Klingon blood everywhere on the ground and Travis was shouting at us to keep up and get in the shuttlepod. I'd never seen anything like it." Trip told him.

Archer considered that information. "That's an awful lot of power for any one person to have control over." He finally said. "Wouldn't you say?"

"Yeah it is." Trip agreed in a serious tone of voice. "Y'know, there used to be a whole religious order of these kinds of people that kept each other in check and took out the bad ones." He said. "Yoda was talking like those bad ones might be making a reappearance the other day. I got the gist that's the reason why he wanted Travis to remember and relearn it so badly."

"The lieutenant's a good man." Archer observed. "I can't see him using this kind of ability for anything other than helping people."

"Yeah, I agree, Captain. But..." Trip began.

"But from what we saw of those bad ones," Archer picked it up, "the Sith, from those movies, if they were anywhere near accurate; imagine if just one of them who had the same abilities that Travis just demonstrated was let loose on Earth or in the rest of our little corner of the galaxy today with no one to keep them in check." Archer said, the concern on his face growing, then more so as a new thought struck him. "Imagine if it was someone already in a position of authority or influence."

"Yeah. Klingons would be the least of our worries. I think I understand now why Yoda came back. But then, why doesn't he just deal with the problem himself? Why go to all this trouble to bother Travis with it?" Trip asked.

"More questions to answer." Archer observed, his hands unintentionally clasped together on his desk in what could be considered a gesture of prayer.

"For eight hundred years, did I train Jedi. Progressed much in a short time you have. More open to the Force than most Jedi I have trained you are. Done well you have. One thing more need you, and then complete will be your training." Yoda told Travis solemnly.

They were sitting in the lieutenant's quarters. Travis had asked the Captain for the morning off in order to "figure some stuff out" after he had delivered his report on the events of the night before. Under the circumstances, the captain agreed without hesitation. Travis hated to be away from the ship's helm, which was where he still felt he truly belonged, but he couldn't ignore the choice he had made on the shuttlepod. The choice to accept what he was, and all the responsibility that held.

"What is that, Master Yoda?" Travis asked as he sat calmly, cross legged on the floor. Yoda sat in the same position on Travis's bunk in front of him.

From within the folds of his robe, Yoda withdrew a bag that looked large for him which jingled and clanked. He opened the bag, and through the Force allowed the contents to carefully and gently spill onto the floor in front of Travis.

Among the disparate pieces, there was a cylindrical tube, a small piece of what looked to Travis like crystallized dilithium (but too small to be useful in the warp reactor he knew), some small disks of transparent aluminum, what looked like a rechargeable power source from a phase pistol, and various other pieces of electronics.

Travis studied the pieces, trying to understand what this new test was. His eye was drawn to the cylinder. He picked it up. It was hollow on the inside. It looked like a short piece of fixed conduit; no more than twenty centimeters long and about four in diameter. Just the right size to fit in his hand. What did it remind him of?

Then he knew.

"A lightsaber." He pronounced solemnly. "You want me to build a lightsaber."

"A proper weapon a Jedi needs, yes?" Yoda confirmed for him.

He wanted to ask how the Jedi Master had acquired all of these parts without anyone missing them, especially the dilithium, but then thought better of it. If Grand Master Yoda wanted to filch some supplies, he doubted there was anyone on board who could have seen him do it, and most people might have just seen a bag of junk anyway.

"But Master Eddal never taught me how back in the Temple." Travis protested.

"Hmmph." Yoda retorted. "And know nothing about it do I, hmm?"

"Sorry. You're right." Travis checked himself, forcefully reminded again that this was the Jedi Grand Master. "Where do I begin?"

"You know, this would be a lot simpler if this was a hyperspace generator." Jennifer McKay said for the fifth time in the last hour. "I could just hook the Z.P.M. into it and we'd be at Earth by now."

"Yep." Came Trip's response through clenched teeth. "I believe it."

He and T'Pol had been working with the Atlantis scientist through the last hour of the morning in Enterprise's engine room, and while the woman was indeed brilliant, and did have some amazing insights which even his Vulcan companion hadn't ever thought possible, the woman could be so insufferable, he still felt it would have been more comfortable working with a Klingon on a bad day than the younger, attractive blond scientist in front of him.

"I mean really, why didn't you people just stay with the hyperspace and naquida technology we left behind?" She asked. "You could have avoided having to use antimatter at all."

"Well, we didn't really have a choice seeing as your ancestors weren't exactly open and up front with the rest of the world about its existence now did we?" Trip retorted as pleasantly as he could. "And as for this naquida stuff, I only heard about it the first time today from you. Considering that we're twelve light years out from Earth, I think we did alright without your people's help." Trip's voice began to show his frustration.

T'Pol jumped in. "And yet we do appreciate your continued assistance in this matter, Dr. McKay." She told the woman, putting a hand on the chief engineer's arm trying to ward off his flaring temper.

"Yeah, I can see that." The Atlantis scientist responded dryly, turning her attention back to the matter at hand. "It just seems like such an inefficient design." She said, not quite under her breath. "It's not like there's a huge quantity of antimatter just floating out there in case you run out."

"Well, it was never a problem before." Trip responded. "We don't normally have to carry carry a whole damn charge reversal production facility on board."

"Vulcan ships don't have the capacity to convert normal matter to antimatter either. The technology still requires extensive facilities and power requirements." T'Pol added.

A diagram of one of those facilities was up on the display screen of the computer they were standing in front of, and McKay went back to it looking it over again. "It looks like it still uses the same basic principles as one of the old particle accelerators Earth used to have."

"Yeah, it's a thousand times more efficient, but it's basically the same idea." Trip affirmed. "Problem is that we just don't have the kilometer or so of space they do to set one up here in engineering, not to mention the power requirements to do it. We're doing good right now with the lights and computers running off the back-up generators."

"I'm pretty sure we can handle the power requirements with the Z.P.M." McKay said somewhat patronizingly. "If only there was a way to shrink down the distance needed to accelerate the particles..." She continued to stare at the screen.

The last few minutes of conversation played back through Trip's mind, and something clicked. "Y'know, we field tested a hyperspace engine about a year ago." He said without any warning.

Dr. McKay looked away from the screen in surprise. "You did?"

"Commander, that's classified information." T'Pol reminded him quietly.

But the chief engineer kept going, "Starfleet wouldn't tell us everything there was to know about who came up with it. Not even the Captain. They wouldn't even give me the schematics for it or its power source it was so hush, hush. I'll bet dollars to donuts it came from someone running across the plans from your ancestors."

"Did the test fail?" McKay asked, surprised.

"No, the engine worked just fine right up until we tried running the warp engines through a hyperspace window. That's when everything went sideways." After a minute's pause trying to decide how much to say about the rest of it, he then settled with, "suffice it to say, after that the experiment was deemed a failure and Starfleet pulled the hyperspace generator back out of the Enterprise."

"What do you mean it went 'sideways'?" She pressed, not understanding.

"It's not important at the moment. But my thought was that if someone back at Starfleet command got those plans from your people's research, then there's a good bet they've got more than that. And I'm just wondering, where would they have gotten all that information from? Where would your ancestors have stored all of it?" Trip asked.

"Well, the whole database on Atlantis was too big for any of the computers of that time period to handle. But outside of the city, the next largest cache would have been the base computers and libraries at Stargate Command under Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado in North America. But the last we heard of it, it had been nuked and the Stargate was presumed buried under a mountain of rock." She responded.

"When was the last time your people tried to call home?" Trip asked bluntly.

McKay's face took on a look of comprehension as she followed his train of thought. "My grandparents tried it last. It's been decades at least." She replied.

"Commander, perhaps we should discuss this with Captain Archer." T'Pol attempted to break in again. "Unless our present problem is resolved, the Stargate on the planet below will be our only means of leaving this system."

"Right." Trip agreed. "So, whatcha think?" He asked McKay.

"I think we can come up with something." She said, returning to the computer display, but her tone of voice and demeanor lacked a certainty as to which subject to which she was referring.