Hi, a new one-shot/short story series dealing with the Temporal Cold War, involving my character from my story A Different Timeline Unfolds, Noys Lambent - named after the main protagonist in The End of Eternity; I felt it was appropriate there, and it's appropriate now.
I don't own Star Trek or any of the franchises which will be crossed with Star Trek.
Enjoy!
Temporal Cold War: The Asgard Database.
As she stood in the middle of the holographic 'screen' of the Temporal Observatory so she could examine the timelines she was manipulating from her point in history, Noys smirked as she considered the possibilities open to her although she knew there was only so much she could do without attracting the attention of the Temporal Agents.
But the Temporal Agents had their own issues, dealing with psychopaths like Vosk, and trying to find ways of stopping the Suliban Cabal or other factions within the so-called 'Temporal Cold War.' Noys found the whole concept of a Cold War dealing with time to be foolish; most of the factions the Agents were dealing with saw the creation of so many timelines when the records of the Department of Temporal Investigations revealed that while the so-called 'prime reality' existed, time travellers hadn't been returning to that history for centuries. All those time travellers returned to was an alternate timeline, or a future or past version of the timeline they had visited. Time travel to the past was impossible unless you had a fixed stable and static portal.
The incident with the Orb of Time used by Arne Darvin was an exception; the Orb, guided and manipulated by the aliens dwelling within the Bajoran Wormhole, was able to mitigate the worst changes to the timeline so when Sisko and the rest of the Deep Space Nine crew returned to the 24th century, the alterations to the history of that reality were limited thanks to the Prophet's abilities and skills when it came to the manipulation of the timelines. Some temporal physicists believed the wormhole aliens, having created the wormhole in the first place and being on a totally different dimensional plane than other races, had the means of manipulating time on levels some time travellers could not understand although there were phenomena and beings who had similar abilities, such as the Guardian of Forever or the Devidians.
The 'Temporal Cold War' was being fought by factions who merely wished to stop time travel from being used; they believed if they created enough timelines, or they changed history in such a way that the research missions where legitimate expeditions to explore the past would be banned for good because they were moving further and further away from their reality. Noys held nothing but contempt for them.
Didn't they realise for one moment their precious reality had been altered and shifted so many times over the aeons their efforts were pointless?
Time travel had always existed, be it through technology, natural ability as in the power of the Q or the Bajoran prophets, or temporal phenomenons throughout the cosmos. It was not going to go away no matter what they thought, but Noys had to admire them for their dedication.
That and the idea of simply meddling in history in the hopes of creating too many timelines for the Temporal Agents to cope with.
Noys chuckled to herself as she regarded the image of her homeworld; Earth was the nexus of so many timelines, it was remarkable, but the general history of the planet was identical until a specific point diverged earlier or later in the timelines. She had found a number of timelines diverging from an early point in the galaxy's history, back when the Iconians, surprisingly went to war with a parasitic race of conquerors known as the Goa'uld who called themselves gods.
The Goa'uld, who stole technology, had been no match for the far more powerful Iconians. In fact, it wasn't really a battle to the death, it was more of a slaughter. Thanks to their gateway technology, the Iconians had found it relatively easy to wipe out the Goa'uld; they merely tracked the parasitic arrogant beings, used the gateways and planted bombs of terrible destructive power into the hearts of the stars and exterminated the Goa'uld en-masse. They went to war simply because the Goa'uld had made the mistake of trying to conquer a small Iconian colony, and when they did that and tried to steal Iconians for hosts, the Goa'uld were marked for extermination. It took the Iconians a century to wipe the Goa'uld out, but when they finally used a bioweapon and spread it throughout the galaxy, the parasites were doomed. The only way to learn about the Goa'uld was to go through ancient archives, or when the Goa'uld took over Earth and spread themselves through Earth's mythology as the ancient gods like Isis, Horus, Ra, Cronus, and others. Some of the ancient powers in the galaxy had likewise been at war with the Goa'uld, who had quickly discovered their arrogance would not be tolerated by the older races.
But in another timeline, that…never happened.
In another timeline, the Iconians had simply grown tired of the Milky Way and they'd left before the Goa'uld came to power. When they did that the Goa'uld found a galaxy ripe for the taking and they built an empire in a large section of the Milky Way. Races like the Vulcans, the Klingons, the Trill, and several others were destroyed simply because the Goa'uld felt they were a threat, while others like the Dominion and the Borg never came about. In that timeline, the Iconians had an opposite number in a race of humans who'd evolved in a totally different galaxy, but the Iconians had grown tired of the Milky Way after they'd explored it, and just felt they could reach their potential somewhere else instead of simply remaining.
As she studied that timeline and how it worked out, Noys saw that the Ancient humans who were known as Alterans had originally fled from their homeworld in an alien galaxy due to their race splintering as one side turned their attention towards advancing through science, technology, debate, while the others turned to religion, worship towards themselves, and arrogance. The Alterans fled to the Milky Way, and they created a technology that linked planets together with wormholes. It was more primitive than the Iconian gateway, but it was effective. After returning to the Milky Way from the Pegasus Galaxy - Noys found vague hints about a race of vampire-like aliens who drained the life force out of those whom they captured, a race that matched the Alterans in terms of power, but she would look into that in a moment - the Alterans had tried to rebuild their empire in the Milky Way, but the Goa'uld and the stress of the last war had taken its toll, and even though they made a concerted effort against their new, infinitely more primitive enemy, in spite of their three allies, the Alterans died or ascended to a new level of consciousness.
Noys read two things into that, the first was the Alterans just refused to take responsibility for their actions. They had left their technology, including their Stargate network throughout the galaxy for the Goa'uld to use, and if they could have put their knowledge to better use they could have found a more practical way of wiping out the Goa'uld for good.
The second was the Alterans had a truly nasty habit of running from their problems when the going got tough.
Noys had no intention of meddling in the history of the Alterans, or Ancients as they were later called by other races; not only was their history fixed, she found their final fate of ascension so boring and irritating there was no real point of changing it.
But she was interested in the proceeding events. Unlike the Alterans, some of the races of the alliance had done their level best to help; the Furlings might have been a migratory species who travelled from galaxy to galaxy in the hopes of spreading their race out, but they had problems of their own such as their short life span which only lasted about 150 Earth years and so they had a desperate need to colonise as many worlds as they could while they fought wars which only made them stronger. During their war with the Goa'uld, the Furlings had only fought against the parasites because of the occasional use of superweapons the Goa'uld had made use of (another sign of Ancient stupidity; rule one - when you abandoned a galaxy for a long time, DO NOT LEAVE YOUR WEAPONS LYING ABOUT!) which threatened their own empire in the galaxy, while the Asgard were a galaxy away, but the Asgard were more than happy to help. The Nox, on the other hand, were happier and content just being left alone.
There were dozens of diverging timelines from this particular timeline, of course, especially when the Stargate was unearthed on Earth and used by the Americans. Noys was disgusted by the American's stupidity in keeping it secret, especially when Apophis attacked Earth at the end of SG1's first year, although in other timelines the Goa'uld System Lord became so frustrated his plans were being thwarted time and time again he launched a savage attack against the Earth and enslaved the population of the planet.
Noys had only just found this branching mass of timelines and she hadn't yet meddled in any of them, but she was getting a number of ideas on what she was able to find out so far - the idea of the Aschen conquering Earth with a long game involving bio-genetic viruses which slowly destroyed the reproductive material in a human body was interesting and something Noys would need to look into later, but she didn't have any immediate plans in mind for using that information for her own use yet.
But one of the interesting points in Earth's timeline was when the Asgard, who were dying out because of how they had been cloning themselves for thousands of years, but they had lost their genetic samples and so had to constantly clone their cloned bodies, time and time again until the bodies were soon unusable. The Asgard were gradually dying out, and without fresh generations to replace them, their race was doomed. The Asgard had been trying to stave off the upcoming extinction event of their race, but they had failed; some Asgard, like the ones who had broken away from the race thousands of years before and travelled to the Pegasus galaxy and studied humans while the Alterans and the Wraith were fighting, and Loki who performed similar experiments and one Asgard who had been exiled centuries before they had made first contact with SG1 because he'd accidentally destroyed a solar system - Noys made a mental note to see if she could acquire the Isa device technology and find some use for it - had discovered regenerative properties of Wraith DNA which could potentially save the Asgard, but when they had discovered their efforts were useless, the Asgard had died out, but not before they had given their technology to Earth in the form of a database which contained detailed information about their discoveries.
It was so pathetically simple for Noys to see the possibilities of the database. She left her time period and she opened a Time Portal to a point in time after the Odyssey returned to Earth. It wasn't difficult to get beyond the safety precautions and the detail protecting the Asgard database - the humans of this timeline knew what they were doing, and they knew how vital the Asgard database was for their continued existence and eventual rise as a space-faring power although Noys was still worried about the intelligence which went through the minds of the people who came up with the idea of hiding the existence of the Stargate from the rest of the human race, some of the precautions were a strange mixture between advanced and archaic.
As she got to the Asgard database, however… it didn't take long for Noys to proceed extremely carefully as she started accessing the database. The console and the computer were easily more advanced than anything Noys, who was used to extremely advanced technologies, but downloading the information was incredibly hard. Thor and the other Asgard engineers and specialists who'd been working on the computer for a whole year had known what they were doing, and they added in some very specific riddles.
She had timed the time she could freeze the time period before the time bubble broke down to give her the time she would need to get to the information contained in the core. As she downloaded information relating to hyperspace and hyperdrive technology and navigation, Asgard transporter beaming technology, Stargate wormhole theory, and more advanced power systems, computer scanning systems which included targeting scanners, Noys considered how she was going to be using the information she was downloading from the Asgard database.
There were dozens of timelines where the Asgard's knowledge could be a benefit; she could easily give this knowledge to the crew of the USS Voyager and change the ships' timeline so they got back to the Alpha Quadrant, but perhaps after a specific time period.
No, she wasn't going to waste it - there were likely other moments in history she could manipulate in much the same way, but for now, she would wait for the right opportunity. When the download was finished, Noys accessed more of the Asgard computer core and downloaded more files relating to mathematics, technology, and science.
There was so much here which would cause history to change completely.