As Zhem strode into the Tal Shiar warbird's engineering room with Khoal and Merak close behind, he said, "Eviess, how long would it take you to configure a subspace isolation field that would cover this entire ship?"

The Reman cocked her head to one side. "I could do that, sure. It would probably take about half an hour. But wouldn't all the Tal Shiar crew start waking up then?"

Zhem nodded. "That's the idea. We're going to send them through the temporal portal and let them carry out their mission."

"We're letting them go?" Shonna sounded incredulous.

"Looks that way," Khoal said with a shrug.

"What I want," Zhem said, "is to program the ship to go through the portal, and then unlock the controls once it's on the other side. T'res is collecting just enough red matter to collapse the anomaly after they have passed through. We activate the isolation field and trigger the program after we beam back to the Averrek."

"Thus ensuring that we can't come back," the Tal Shiar commander said with something that sounded like approval. "So you don't trust me after all. Good for you. I'm glad to know that your Federation masters haven't completely corrupted you, and that you're still capable of thinking like a Romulan."

"Allies, not masters," Zhem corrected. "I command on my ship."

"So you believe," Merak said smugly. "You may come to find that it's not as true as you would like, though. Watch your back, friend."

"Guess I'd better get to work," Eviess said, shaking her head. "Never thought I'd be helping out the Tal Shiar, but here I am."

"Subcommander, finish up here and get everyone back on board the Averrek as soon as the program is ready," Zhem ordered.

"And there they go," Khoal said, watching the viewscreen on Averrek's bridge.

"Confirmed," N'alae added. "The Tal Shiar vessel is through the anomaly."

"Fire torpedo," Zhem commanded.

Khoal pressed a button on his console, and announced, "Torpedo away."

They all watched on the screen as the torpedo streaked away from the ship toward the anomaly. Once it was inside the temporal portal, the torpedo exploded, igniting the eight milliliters of red matter it contained. There was a bright flash, and then nothing.

"The anomaly has collapsed," N'alae announced. "Chronitron radiation is dropping to normal levels."

"I wish them well," Zhem said softly.

"I'm a little conflicted myself," Shonna said. "Sure, maybe they can save Romulus over there. But won't that mean that the Empire survives?"

"Maybe not, Lieutenant," Khoal said. "The Empire was liberalizing before the Hobus event. My mother and others in her party were hoping that the Empire would reform into a republic over the subsequent few decades. Or at least transition to a less totalitarian form of government. It's possible that the Republic could have formed on Romulus."

"But we'll never know," Zhem added. "We'll never even know if our Tal Shiar friends accomplished their mission."

"They may find history harder to divert than they anticipated," T'res said. "As long as their timeline remains entangled with our own, events there will follow on a roughly parallel track to events in our own. Romulus and Remus were destroyed here, so some sort of planetary catastrophe is highly likely there. Perhaps a different disaster will destroy your worlds. Or other worlds may be destroyed in their place - Earth, or Qo'noS, perhaps. It is impossible to know."

"Cheerful thought," Khoal muttered.

"Still, they have a chance," Zhem said. "But history is likely to go rather differently over there, without James T. Kirk involved."

"Maybe his parents got away," Khoal said. "If they got onto escape shuttles before the Kelvin was destroyed..."

"What I want to know," Shonna said, "is how you know so much about Kirk in the first place."

Zhem chuckled. "I've heard all about Kirk for my entire life. My father is a Unificationist," he explained, "and for whatever reason he has a particular fascination with Ambassador Spock's best friend."

"So much so that he named his son after him," Khoal said with a smirk.

Shonna's eyes widened. "Your name... is Jim?"

"'Zhem' is a perfectly common Romulan name, Lieutenant," Zhem said with a straight face.

"Which just happens to sound very close to 'Jim'," Khoal added, laughing.

"Well, I trust I handled this situation in a way that my namesake would approve of, at least," Zhem said, a smile spreading across his face.

Shonna shook her head. "Jim Kirk? He would have taken the Enterprise straight through that anomaly, blasted the hell out of whoever was attacking the Kelvin, saved his parents and himself, and prevented the timeline from being altered in the first place. And he'd probably have made a huge mess in the process."

"Probably," Zhem said, laughing now. "But I did think about doing something like that."

"Commander, I'm told that part of the lecture every Starfleet captain gets when they first take command is, 'You aren't Jim Kirk. Don't try to be. You'll just get yourself court-martialed.'"

"Speaking of courts-martial," Khoal said, "Fleet Command might not be too happy about what we did here today."

"We prevented a Tal Shiar attempt to alter the timeline," Zhem said. "And put what I hope is the Tal Shiar's entire supply of red matter permanently out of reach. Plus we downloaded a treasure trove of data that should keep Intelligence busy for months. If they aren't satisfied with that, too bad."

"I hope they see it that way, Commander," Khoal said. "Orders?"

"We'll remain here for another ten hours to ensure that the anomaly is completely gone," Zhem said. "Tomorrow we resume our mission. Let's go find ourselves some colony worlds."

In Averrek's officers' mess, Shonna set down a bowl in front of Eviess and said, "See what you think."

Eviess took a cautious bite, and then smiled. "Well, it seems like humans know how to cook food with some flavor to it after all. What did you call this again?"

"Shrimp gra prow," Shonna said. "It's a classic Thai dish. Too spicy for most people, though."

"Well, I like it," Eviess said. She stuck her fork into the bowl took another bite.

Shonna used chopsticks to fish out a bit of pepper and take a bite. Eviess watched with interest; she had given the chopsticks a try herself before reverting to the fork, complaining that she'd starve to death if she had to eat with the sticks.

"Is this what people eat where you're from?" Eviess asked.

"Atlanta?" Shonna laughed. "There are a few good Thai restaurants in the Atlanta area, but the traditional local cuisine is cornbread and butterbeans. Decidedly not spicy."

"Too bad," Eviess said.

Shonna sighed. "Crazy day," she said.

"You think?" Eviess said. "Crazy by our standards, sure. But isn't every day in Starfleet a whole mess of temporal anomalies and super-powerful alien beings and world-shattering crises?"

"We do have days like that, yes," Shonna said. "Usually it's a whole lot more routine, though."

"Well, with you Starfleet folks around, it looks like things are going to get a whole lot weirder for us," Eviess said, grinning hugely.

"Could be," Shonna said. "My senior year at Starfleet Academy, I took a seminar that Admiral Janeway taught. One of the things she said was, 'We're Starfleet. Weird is part of the job.' You learn to deal with it, after a while." She shrugged and added, "Or else you find something else to do with your life."

"Well, however weird it gets, my life is right here," Eviess said. "This ship is named for my father, and he'd be very unhappy if anybody else was taking care of his engines. So looks like I'm stuck working with you Starfleet weirdos." She winked.

"Looking forward to it," Shonna said. "It's going to be fun."

Coming soon: Episode 2, "Aehaellh"

The crew of the RRW Averrek must infiltrate a mysterious Tal Shiar science outpost and put a stop to their demented research.