I don't own Star Trek, in any part of the franchise. Today, I have already uploaded a time-travel related story to Star Trek if you're interested, but I will say it again. Time travel has changed and reshaped the entire franchise. Technologies are introduced centuries before their time, events which should never have happened take place... it's a mess, and Temporal Investigations have to clean up the mess.
Temporal Investigations is not going to like this.
As she sat at her desk late at night in the Ready Room writing out her report on the whole incident with Captain Braxton and Henry Starling and the timeship, Kathryn Janeway could not help but think.
But then again, while time travel gave her a headache as she tried - and frequently failed - to understand the paradoxes involved with time travel, Janeway was left with a number of questions on her mind. And realisations. It was ironic, really; when she had been promoted to captain and given command of Voyager, one of the biggest promises she had made to herself was she would never, ever be involved with time travel or any kind of temporal anomaly.
She was aware of James T. Kirk's record, how Temporal Investigations had a massive file on him. She had heard in passing from Admiral Owen Paris, especially when they'd served together on the Al Batani whenever they encountered any kind of phenomenon related to time, which would result in the inevitable meeting with Temporal Investigations. Janeway had learnt enough of their reputation over the course of a few years before she took command and she promised herself all temporal phenomena; causality loops, time loops, time portals, timeships, time travellers, attempts to meddle in history, time travel experiments, would be avoided.
Kathryn remembered thinking how it would be easy. Now though, she was looking back on her previous views and promises and she could not help but think how naive she had been. It was one thing making a promise, only to stumble across something to do with time travel.
The Delta Quadrant was littered with temporal anomalies. In some ways, the place was nothing more than a death trap. It didn't help that Voyager was without some kind of safety net. Only a week or two after the Caretaker had stranded them in the Delta Quadrant to look for a mate in a desperate bid to ensure the Ocampa survived, Voyager was accidentally caught in a quantum singularity, and while the time travel involved there was nothing but simple general relativity as the black hole twisted time into a loop so actions Voyager took were repeated later on with a temporal reflection of her ship.
Likewise, the 'Harry Kim wormhole' when they'd stumbled across an ancient wormhole leading into the Alpha Quadrant was nothing more than a simple temporal anomaly created by the wormhole's collapse, but neither the wormhole nor the quantum singularity offered any kind of anomaly which would warrant greater scrutiny from Temporal Investigations, and Janeway was hoping to keep it that way.
But those hopes had been dashed the moment the Aeon attacked her ship and Braxton claimed pieces of Voyager's hull had been found in the future where Earth was destroyed in a temporal explosion which also levelled the solar system. Braxton had travelled back in time to the 24th century to destroy her ship to change history, and Kathryn could understand his views but she wasn't going to let her ship be destroyed, not without Braxton spending a few minutes to answer her questions.
How had Voyager gotten into the situation in the first place? Was there some kind of paradox involved and her ship had tried to flee through one of the time rifts Braxton used to journey through time as easily as someone would pass through the Bajoran wormhole?
They'd fought back. Fell through time, and found themselves in Earth's past. But it soon became apparent somebody had been meddling with history; subspace technology was not meant to be discovered for a century, relatively speaking, so the use of it in the 20th century had sent up red flags. Braxton might have been trigger happy and reckless in his attempt to change history - a bit ironic considering how, it was implied during their brief discussion when he first attacked Voyager, the Starfleet of his time was supposedly dedicated to protecting history, although Janeway could see the temporal trap Braxton had fallen into.
In trying to protect and save Earth, he was the one responsible for the whole mess.
But she had her doubts he had anything to do with the disaster facing the crew of Voyager, at least not directly. And she was right. Finding Braxton, now a vagrant living on the streets of Los Angeles, who'd apparently lived a truly unpleasant time in the 20th century while he tried to warn the populace the end of the world was coming, but without any kind of proof he was seen as insane, Janeway and Chakotay both learnt the timeship had been taken from Braxton who'd beamed out fully expecting his time machine to be destroyed.
But it wasn't.
It was taken, which was worse, by a local of the 20th century. Janeway rubbed her eyes at the thought of Starling. While she had no doubt he was a brilliant and intelligent man, he was far from being a genius. He had taken 29th-century technology, although now she was looking back in hindsight, she found it hard to say Starling had stolen the ship given how Braxton had already left the Aeon cockpit and abandoned the ship to its fate. Whether that was because Braxton was naturally short-sighted, or people's IQ's in the future became shot, she had no idea.
Dealing with Starling posed a problem. He had invented himself as an entrepreneur, but truthfully he was nothing more than a parasite who had strip-mined the Aeon for every piece of technology and science it could provide. A lot of it was scientifically beyond Starling, but Janeway had the feeling he wouldn't have cared either way. It was obvious he had been fixating on only a few points of interest in Aeon's database. Thanks to Starling, human computer technology received advancements long before they were meant to occur. The computer revolution Starling instigated never happened in the timeline Chakotay and she knew about, and Janeway had seen the grim look in Chakotay's eyes.
Both of them were thinking the same thing.
Starling was changing history, and there was nothing they could do. Maybe if Voyager had passed through the rift at the same time as the Aeon, they might have prevented this from happening. But it was too late now. It had occurred to Janeway while she and Chakotay were in Starling's office and hacking into his computer they might have a chance of tracking down his technology, but she had killed that thought pretty quickly. Starling had been doing this for a long time and his computers were all over the world. Worse, some of the Aeons' subspace technology was now too widespread to be simply taken from Earth.
Janeway closed her eyes and sighed while she checked the chronometer. She had been in her Ready Room for the last few hours writing up her reports for Starfleet. They would be transmitted as soon as they were in a position to do so, but she had no doubt in her mind Starfleet was truly not going to like learning just how much of established history had been altered by Braxton and Starling.