I don't own Space 1999 and Star Trek.
In theory, there are many timelines where different possibilities take place, so Space 1999 and Star Trek can and will be linked in some way. It's only the different ideas that differentiate the two. The Space 1999 continuity is set in the Big Finish reality where the Moon was torn out not by nuclear blasts, but a traversable wormhole.
Enjoy.
Temporal Cold War: Breaking Moonbase Alpha.
Noys supposed it was inevitable; every single possibility was there as it played out, occurring all the time whenever somebody made a fresh decision.
For instance, a child could get in the way of a young woman as she was racing for a bus or for a train, and they only arrived just as the doors were closing. However, it was possible for the parent to pull the child back, allowing the woman through.
The result was a totally different timeline.
Granted, some timelines were mundane, but others were quite interesting and as she studied this new timeline to see what she could do with it later, Noys became more and more fascinated, sensing huge potential.
As a time traveller, Noys had encountered her fair share of different timelines which broke away from the primary timelines and became something new, but as she studied the timeline unfolding she became even more intrigued and curious about what was going to happen next. And she was especially fascinated by this timeline where the Apollo missions in the 1960s and the early 1970s resulted in space exploration was very nearly abandoned.
That was nothing new; space exploration, especially for primitive societies which were still having trouble tackling the problem of breaking out of the planet's gravity was extremely difficult and demanded large amounts of resources, and Earth was far from different. She had seen dozens of rocket launches (she had even spied on Gary Seven's sabotage of a rocket) and knew millions of tonnes of rocket fuel were needed to launch a relatively small capsule into space. It was such a waste it was not even funny. But in this timeline, wasted money and resources were frowned upon. But, somehow, enough money was used to fund a new space exploration organisation, the World Space Commission. Through them and their advances in new methods of propulsion and revisions of lifting off in a planet's atmosphere which was based largely on the spaceplane principles, a moon base was constructed with the aid of the military. Over the years the military lost interest in the moonbase, and the base was transformed into a scientific research centre on the moon.
As she paid extra attention to the Moonbase Alpha timeline, Noys' interest grew. In this timeline, space science sent ripples into Earth society as technologies that would have appeared decades later appeared, but their knowledge of space and knowledge of the solar system such as the compositions of the ocean on Europa, and the gravity of Jupiter was known to space scientists on Earth within a decade of Alpha's construction. At the same time, telescopes and scanners sent back large amounts of information about the phenomena in the universe to the Earth, making them more advanced than in other timelines. Thanks to the base on the moon, Earth was willing to work with small and controlled experiments and eventually, they created particle accelerators in space and made them larger and more complicated, which was made even simpler because they were being constructed out of the atmosphere but thanks to the accelerators they discovered many secrets of science and they found a way of stabilising gravity.
Not bad for the 1980s.
At the same time, Noys became even more fascinated and intrigued as she saw the World Space Commission devise a form of interstellar drive known as the Queller drive, but the moment she learnt what it did and how it worked the time traveller made plans to visit this timeline and make new timelines. The Queller drive didn't exceed the light speed limit, all it did was spew neutrons out and used the thrust to travel through space. But it was lethal. You would be safer on the other side of the solar system because a Queller drive that accidentally went wrong would cause unprecedented levels of death and destruction.
But the drive was useful and thanks to it, the humans of this timeline had advanced further out into the solar system and they had even passed into interstellar space, past the Oort Cloud after studying the asteroids located there, so between the invention of the different nuclear fission and later fusion drives after fusion was cracked, and the Queller drive, humans of this timeline had advanced quite a way from other timelines and they hadn't even developed warp drive.
And that was when it began to go wrong.
In the closing years of the 1990s, the World Space Commission received transmissions from a planet 5 light-years beyond Earth, right when their astronomer division discovered the source. The Commission came up with a plan to send an expedition to the planet, which they named Meta, and make contact with the aliens, but that was where things went wrong. The Commission not only limited the knowledge of the transmission to a few outside the inner circle, but only a few on the Commission's council were even aware of it. Perhaps if they had known instead of keeping it all as a surprise for dramatics or because there was a degree of uncertainty about the idea of aliens being on Meta, there would not be so much infighting. And it wasn't just limited to the Commission; unsurprisingly many scientists and people in the population argued with the decision, claiming the 5-year mission was a waste of time and money, which proved how shortsighted some people were.
Didn't they realise the applications of exploring a planet outside of their home system? Not only could there be a potentially new colony, which would alleviate the world population problems, but there were also new elements to discover new vaccines and drugs. And the Meta expedition could have opened up the door to a technology that was magically there, just waiting to be found and studied. It was a historical fact space exploration brought with it more benefits, but these idiots in this timeline who were more interested in costs were more fixated on a small fact.
Quantum Slipstream Drive had been brought, in either knowledge or practical form, by the USS Voyager after the ships' 7 year trip in the Delta Quadrant.
The Guardian of Forever had been located and discovered in the 23rd century. Nobody would have even known about the existence of the Guardian, or Quantum Slipstream Drive had there been no space exploration, but these idiots were short-sighted and didn't realise there were other ways of making money. Hadn't they heard the expression you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs? Clearly not. At the same time the World Space Commission's shortsightedness came out because while they had the means, they hadn't bothered to mine the asteroids in the Oort Cloud; if they had, they would have gotten a near limitless amount of metals and chemicals, especially minerals which were found on Earth but were becoming increasingly rare, like gold, palladium, iron, and platinum. And what about substances like water? If they studied and filtered the water, shortages would be a thing of the past.
None of that would have happened because of space science, but the World Space Commission always fought tooth and nail and laser over its own investments. Just as Noys was considering meddling in the timeline to help advance the humans living in it, she saw something that worried her.
The Meta transmission was aimed straight for the moon, or more precisely the nuclear waste storage dumps. Noys shook her head in disgust as she thought about the accumulated nuclear waste in those silos, thinking about all of the lost time people could have been finding ways of recycling the waste matter and using it for a better reason. But no, they had just taken the waste and taken it all to the moon and left it, believing it to be somebody else's problem. That attitude was prevalent throughout the timelines she had encountered.
But as she studied the timeline on the computer, Noys read with increasing bemusement that the transmission was somehow transforming the nuclear waste into the exotic matter needed to create the wormhole. It was doing this for months, and it was having strange effects on astronauts who were being trained for the Meta mission. The astronauts were perfectly normal before they flew over or near the waste silos, but then some of them would begin going mad, but then they would slip into a coma and die later on. Moonbase Alpha's medical and scientific personnel, led respectively by Dr Helena Russel and Professor Victor Bergman spent a month studying the effects, but they couldn't find a cause or reason for the deaths. It didn't help that World Space Commission's Commissioner Simmonds, a politician if ever Noys had even seen one, had locked out the communications of Moonbase Alpha to prevent a panic. It wasn't until Commander John Koenig replaced the original Moonbase Alpha's Commander, who was out of his depth with the matter that the answers came.
Noys wasn't surprised by that after she had started researching Koenig's file. He was an astronaut, a pilot with years of experience with some scientific training, and was the total opposite from Commander Gorski. Thanks to Koenig, the Alphans discovered the exotic matter. Noys rubbed her eyes, fighting the urge to pinch herself as she learnt the Queller drive of the Meta probe ship interacted with the exotic matter violently, and tore the moon out of Earth's orbit after it created a traversable wormhole.
Noys leaned back from the observatory she was using to study the different timelines, and folded her arms and closed her eyes so she could think in peace for the next few minutes. Exotic matter existed, of course, but because of subspace physics, everyone knew only a minute amount of exotic matter was needed for wormholes or warp drives. The exotic matter was present within subspace domains anyway, so it wasn't seen as rare or as a scientific possibility.
But the idea of aliens on Meta transforming the moon's nuclear waste into exotic matter, from what she could read of the timeline's future as it unfolded because the aliens wanted the humans' bodies, was unspeakable, to say nothing of what the effects meant for the Earth. Everyone in her time knew enough basic physics to know about gravity's effects; without the moon in orbit, the Earth's own orbit would be drastically, even fatally, affected by the sudden disaster. Terrible storms wracked the planet, causing mass flooding in various cities, earthquakes rippling around the planet such as in the San Andreas fault.
As Noys read through the timeline file, she had seen that the whole accident resulted in terrible losses of life and the pollution of Earth. But the population later moved into domed cities, but as she studied the timeline she saw the entire world was so badly damaged and would likely never recover for thousands of millions of years, the human race was now on a knife-edge.
Noys picked up her padd and opened up a new entry for this timeline. She decided to travel back in time to before the disaster, where she would make sure the Oort Cloud was mined while Mars itself became a colony. She believed, with these early changes, the timeline would become better. At the same time, she would likely leave a database like the one Daniels foolishly or deliberately - she wasn't entirely sure which, but if he had left it deliberately he had wanted it to be studied so then history would change drastically - so human science accelerated. That would be a major help if the moon was torn away.
She also made little notes about what to do then.
Should she give them warp drive or something a bit more realistic, like the Vaadwaur underspace corridors? Either one would work, of course - with the corridors, they could write the discovery off as an accident, an accident which would allow Earth to colonise large areas of the galaxy, and ensure the human race's survival.
As for Moonbase Alpha… Noys was fascinated the base had survived the whole mess at all, but it had, only now it was travelling the stars, torn away from home and without a hope of getting back. She could meddle in history there as well. Moonbase Alpha was a barracks and there was a limited population in the base, and the disaster left a fraction of it alive. But John Koenig would announce they could be the last survivors of the human race, something Noys Lambent planned to make sure did not happen.
A cache of embryos waiting in case of a global war or fallout would certainly be the assurance to the Alphans their race would survive, so she made a note there. But she also planned to meddle in their timeline, and give them technology and knowledge later, but she would focus on that later.