I don't own Star Trek Deep Space Nine, and I don't own Stargate SG1; This is a one-shot story.
Please let me know what you think.
Shattered Times and Timelines: Odyssey out of Time.
"Captain Sisko to Ops, there are elevated neutrinos from the wormhole; the level is off the count, something is coming through. Red alert shields up," Jadzia Dax tapped her combadge as she checked her console, where the sensor array was aimed straight at the point in space where the Bajoran wormhole was located. With the Cold War between Starfleet and the Dominion at its current height since Odo's changeling capabilities removed while the Founders implanted lies during the process to make it seem Gowron, the Chancellor of the Klingon High Council, was a Changeling. In fact, it was all a ruse, to ensure the war between the Klingons and the Federation continued until both sides were destroyed, leaving the Alpha Quadrant ripe for the picking.
The dangers the Dominion posed to the Federation had ensured that small squadrons of Starfleet ships went sent into the Gamma Quadrant to patrol and update Starfleet on Dominion activity. The last patrol had gone through and returned to the Alpha Quadrant a week before, so everyone in Ops was tense, and it said something that Dax had told Sisko instead of the others.
Sisko came out of his office, his expression grim. "Report," he snapped without preamble.
"Elevated neutrinos are coming from the entrance point of the wormhole, but these readings are off the scale. That means that either something is coming through, like an enormous fleet, or there's something really wrong with the wormhole," Jadzia looked gravely at him.
"Stand by all weapons," Sisko ordered.
Kira tapped her own combadge. "All runabouts, standby at full alert. Commander Worf to the Defiant."
When the runabouts and the Defiant had been launched from the station, Sisko frowned at the point where the wormhole was located. He was prepared for the worst moment imaginable. The fears of the Dominion war had been keeping everyone worried for the last two years, and if there was one thing the events of the last year had proven to him - the Battle of the Omarion Nebula where the Tal Shiar and the Obsidian Order were both well and truly tricked and manipulated by the Founders into joining forces once they'd learnt of Tain's plans to attack the Dominion capital where they could then wipe them out because the two organisations were ruthless and efficient, and a positive threat to the Founders, the fake Tzenkethi war, the war the Klingon Empire was inflicting on the Cardassians and on the Federation.
Their losses would work well for the Dominion's agenda, although a part of Sisko was nonetheless curious about what would have happened if the Obsidian Order and the Tal Shiar would have survived.
But in the end, it was all a part of a master plan orchestrated by the Founders when they'd decided they wanted to conquer the Alpha Quadrant and put it under their domain. The Founders had decided to kill four birds with one stone; they had known if they had wiped out the Obsidian Order and the Tal Shiar in one swoop, they would cause ripples of unrest within both governments. Sisko didn't know for sure if the coup orchestrated by the Cardassian dissident movement was down to the Founders or only came about because they couldn't believe their luck, either way, it had given the Martok changeling the excuse he had needed to persuade Gowron to attack and conquer Cardassia, under the facade of defending the Alpha Quadrant. But what Sisko really despised was the way the Klingons refused to see the dangers. He only hoped the Klingons who were clamouring for war against the Federation swallowed their words when the Jem'Hadar started.
But he was puzzled when the wormhole appeared, but it seemed to be growing larger and it was rippling through space.
"Dax?" He turned to the Trill science officer hoping she had some ideas, but the look on her face told him she was as baffled as he was.
"Sorry, Benjamin. I don't understand it. The wormhole seemed to be going through a storm, but I don't understand it. All I know is the graviton emissions are off the scale, and the wormhole itself seems to be getting larger," Jadzia apologised. It was clear she didn't have any ideas.
God, I hate it when Jadzia doesn't know something or have any theories as well.
"Captain, something is happening to the wormhole," O'Brien suddenly said.
Sisko and the rest of his officers watched as the wormhole, which had been rippling madly suddenly folded inwards, bursting into a bright light. Sisko was about to order a number of high-resolution scans, kicking himself for not having more ships assigned to DS9 to make sure the wormhole was monitored or satellites to do the job, when suddenly the wormhole reappeared, looking as it normally did. It opened up like a flower made of pure light energy and something emerged.
It was a ship. It was rather blocky and primitive-looking with a long section with some kind of control tower with two blocky nacelles attached to the main body.
"It doesn't look Dominion to me," Kira commented.
"Dax, O'Brien?" Sisko hoped the two had an idea of what was out there.
"It reads like a genuine antique, sir," O'Brien reported as he checked his console and his readings thoughtfully, "it has no impulse engines, but some other more basic gravimetric thrusters linked to some kind of booster rockets. It's a weird mix of archaic technologies blended with more advanced technologies; the hull itself is composed of ceramics, carbon-titanium and some form of superconductor. And there is a weird mix of weapons as well, Captain; there are nuclear missiles I can easily pick up, but there is some kind of weapon on that ship that seems to be plasma-based."
"There is something strange about the more advanced technologies on that ship. There's a power emanation that's at least 3-4 times higher than the output of a Galaxy-class ships' warp drive," Jadzia pointed out.
"A weird mix of technologies. It's like meeting a stone-aged man with a stone axe in one hand and a phaser rifle in the other," O'Brien commented.
Sisko had been listening to this strange report with interest and puzzlement. He knew, well, they all knew this was not the Dominion. The Founders were capable of trickery, but this was not their style. At the same time, he was aware while their fighters were powerful, the Jem'Hadar didn't use power systems 3-4 times higher than that on a Galaxy-class ship, and they didn't make their ships out of a superconducting material.
There was a mystery here. And Sisko knew there was only one answer.
They had to find out what it was.
"Major, contact the Defiant, tell Mr Worf to tractor that ship and bring it to one of the docking pylons," Sisko ordered,
X
"Captain's log - Stardate 4412.49.
We have tractored in the ship which came through the wormhole and we have begun an investigation. So far our preliminary examination of the hull and the technology has told us we aren't dealing with anything manufactured by the Dominion. Much of the technology from the initial scans are archaic, but when the team got inside they discovered the ship is named the Odyssey. And strangely… the ship is from Earth."
X
"Well, Mr O'Brien, Mr Worf, Dax, what did you find out?" Sisko asked the three officers who had been tasked with investigating the Odyssey for the last three hours. Sisko had wanted to board the ship himself, but he had been informing and reporting to Starfleet Command on a secured frequency in case the Klingons got wind of it. And they would.
After exchanging a quick look at one another like they were mentally drawing straws to begin first, Dax was the one who spoke up first. "When we beamed on board we found dead bodies from all of the crew; Julian will need to perform a proper autopsy to be sure, but there were two people on that ship, a man and a woman who possessed slightly different biochemistry from the others."
"In what way?" Odo asked curiously.
Dax shook her head. "I don't know for sure. The problem with conventional tricorders is they're designed primarily to scan and study other phenomena and can only perform basic medical checks. But for the man, there was something strange about his abdomen. There was a cavity with a cross-shaped opening in the skin."
"A cavity?" Julian repeated, his eyes brightening with medical and scientific interest. He hadn't been on the station at the time the Odyssey had come through the wormhole. He had been on Bajor at the time, tending to the wounds sustained by a Bajoran militia crew who'd been ambushed by a Klingon Bird of Prey. The Bajorans had been patrolling a sector of their space while finding areas to fortify against the increasing hostility of the Klingon Empire. While the Bajorans were not formally at war with the Klingons, that did not mean they were friends, and the militia ship had taken serious damage from the attack, but they had used tactics used by the Bajoran Resistance during the Cardassian Occupation to trick the Klingons and they had destroyed the ship.
The patrol ship had then limped back to Bajor. When they had returned, the Bajorans had asked for Starfleet help, knowing enough of Julians's reputation to know he would help.
"Yes. The strange thing was it reminded me a little bit of something a marsupial life form would use, to say nothing of how a symbiont is implanted into a Trill. But I don't know for sure," Dax replied.
Sisko was surprised by the news but he decided to wait and see what else there was. "What did you find out about the Odyssey?"
"You're not going to believe it, Benjamin," Jadzia replied, her expression making it clear she meant it. "The Odyssey was built in 2006, by the United States Air Force, on Earth."
"What?" Sisko said in disbelief, his expression mirrored by the others in the room. They had seen the Odyssey, and while it certainly looked pre-warp, they knew Earth had never used gravimetric engines, and they didn't have power sources of that degree. "But Earth never had that kind of technology." A thought came through his mind when he caught Jadzia's look. "It travelled in time, didn't it?"
"This is the part you're not going to believe, Ben," Jadzia said. "I took a scan of the Odyssey's hull. It not only travelled through time, but it also came from another universe."
"You mean like the parallel universe with the Klingon-Cardassian Alliance and the Terran Empire? You can tell if it came from another universe?" Bashir shared a meaningful look with Kira, both of them remembering their time in the parallel universe and remembering the violence of that world.
"Every universe has a quantum imprint, Julian. With the right technology, it's easy to determine; it wasn't until our experiences with alternate timelines and quantum realities when Worf's shuttle from the Enterprise," Jadzia explained, sharing a look with Worf, "when he fell into a few quantum realities. One where a birthday cake was just a sponge, when he remembered a chocolate one instead, a reality where the Borg invasion went horribly wrong," she sent an apologetic look at Sisko, who remembered the way his wife was killed at Wolf 359 along with so many other lives who should never have been there in the first place, "or a reality where the Bajorans turned militant after overthrowing the occupation."
"Militant, what do you mean?" Kira asked looking at Worf and Jadzia in shock.
"I didn't discover the full story, Major; I was too busy getting used to travelling from one universe to the next and trying to find a world where I could return; we only managed to do it when a Bajoran ship attacked an alternate version of the Enterprise D and it upset a quantum fissure where the realities met and it was torn open by the use of weapons fire, but from what I was told the Bajorans had turned militant and hostile towards other powers following the end of the occupation in that universe, but I don't know if the Resistance got their hands on more advanced ships and weapons to drive the Cardassians away from Bajor," Worf explained.
Kira's expression was full of shock. But everyone in the room remembered the Kohn-Ma and the resistance towards having aliens coming to Bajor following the Cardassian occupation. The Alliance of Global Unity, otherwise known as the Circle led by Jaro Essa had taken things to the extreme; they had threatened the lives of every non-Bajoran in the system, but they were unaware of the Cardassians being the ones who were supplying them with weapons. The Cardassians had planned to drive the Federation away from Bajoran space and then they would return in force to take the wormhole away. The Cardassians were greedy, hungry for new territories and technologies to gain new resources, and they didn't care who they harmed in order to get them.
Kira had no doubt if they had failed to expose the involvement of the Cardassians then the whole planet would be going through the occupation again, only much worse. There was also no question in her head that the Cardassians would punish Bajor for driving them out regardless.
But hearing of a parallel universe where the Bajorans didn't have Federation aid in rebuilding Bajor but were antagonistic…. Kira had to admit it was possible, especially considering how xenophobic many of her people had been after the occupation and the Federation had been asked to help administrate Deep Space Nine; that mess with Kai Winn and the school, the Kohn-Ma, the Circle, the way Odo was attacked by that crowd because he was framed for murder - a lot of the reason there had been so much suspicion was because of Odo's non-Bajoran heritage, but she would remember the way Aamin Marritza had cried in shame inc his cell when she confronted him after discovering he was not Gul Darhe'el, one of Bajor's worst Cardassian overseers. Marritza had been horrified by what his people were doing to the Bajorans, so much so he had taken Darhe'el's appearance so he could be convicted and punished as a war criminal to make his people acknowledge what they had done, but his plans had failed.
Of all the Cardassians she had met - and hated in her life - Kira had felt a degree of admiration for Marritza because of what he had tried to do and achieve, but it was a pity he was stabbed by a racist Bajoran.
So no, she wasn't surprised by the thought of a more antagonistic Bajor who would have been lashing out at everyone for their wounds, but she did wonder if they had discovered the wormhole.
Sisko's question broke her out of her thoughts. "Did you take a look at their computer?"
"We did; we're not sure when the divergence actually took place, but it likely happened many centuries in the past because there are several ancient races and alliances which had a major impact on the future; the details have already been given to the science team who're normally tasked with examining information gleaned from the Gamma Quadrant and the wormhole," O'Brien said.
"But to put it simply, in 1928 on Earth, an archaeological dig in Egypt uncovered a Stargate, an advanced transport device which opens small traversable wormholes between planets with a Stargate on them, linking them in a network across an entire galaxy. In 1945, the gate was activated by the United States who assumed and hoped it was some kind of weapon but the research ended when a scientist vanished and was not seen again for decades. In 1996, an archaeologist called Dr Daniel Jackson discovered that the Stargates worked via a celestial coordinate system. There is an inner ring on the Stargate itself with a series of glyphs symbolising constellations. To make them work, you simply selected six points in space with an origin point to connect the gates. They call them gate addresses," Jadzia took up the explanation.
"Stargates? I wonder if the technology is similar to Iconian gateways," Sisko pondered thoughtfully.
"I thought that as well, sir," Worf said.
"We haven't gotten too far in working out if they are similar or not," Jadzia took up the explanation, "we won't know for sure until we've performed a more in-depth study into the Odyssey's database. But from what we have seen so far, and this is only a brief summary, but Earth was attacked and badly devastated by an alien attack. The United States had been sending teams through the Stargate for a few years and they made a number of alien enemies who had the power to attack them. After the attack, which was repelled with the help of Earth's alien allies while one of the Stargate teams located an ancient alien complex armed with powerful weapons, the United States had no choice but to disclose the truth."
"What?" Bashir's already large and expressive eyes were wide with horror even as he stared at his friend. "You mean the United States kept the Stargate a secret and they endangered the entire world? What made do something so stupid?"
"I think they were greedy," Jadzia's voice was blunt, she clearly didn't like it any more than they did. "One of the desires of the Stargate program was to acquire new technologies, but I think the United States enjoyed playing god."
"What makes you say that?"
"I read through the historical files and found that the United States gained the monopoly on whatever new technologies were reverse-engineered from the trips through the gate," Jadzia shook her head, wondering why it was that so many races could not make do with their own technologies, and they needed alien hardware to make 'progress.' "But after the attack, the Americans didn't have a choice. Needless to say, everyone was outraged. That world has been rebuilding ever since, and the Odyssey was one of the first a large batch of ships launched to protect Earth. From what we gathered, Earth only had one main capital ship and a handful of fighters to defend themselves."
"Oh, this is getting better and more of a joke by the minute," Kira snapped, looking at Jadzia in disbelief with a smile that the people of that universe would know they were being judged for their common sense, "they were making enemies everywhere they went, yet they didn't bother to build up a large fleet. What were they thinking?"
"Search me," Jadzia shrugged, looking like she was having a hard time thinking about it herself.
"They made a few powerful allies, though," Worf turned to Jadzia, "Tell them about the Asgard, Jadzia."
"I was coming to that, Worf. It seems that there was some alliance of powerful races in the milky way galaxy thousands of years - alternate universe speaking - in that reality, one of those races were the Asgard, they came to Earth and assumed the mantle of Norse gods. In fact, it seems to be a running theme in that universe; that powerful races show themselves up as gods and form religions."
Sisko frowned. There were many primitive races out there who believed when they encountered the Federation that they were gods. It went against the Prime Directive to impersonate deities and other religious figures. It was dangerous and anything could happen over the long term; religious wars, dark ages, inquisitions. Clearly, these aliens didn't care about that. "Go on, Dax."
"The Asgard gave humans of that universe different technologies, including hyperdrive technology which allows them to travel faster than light through hyperspace."
"Hyperspace, I've never heard of that?"
"It's an old slang term for faster than light travel, Major," Julian explained. "There are science fiction novels that use some kind of higher plane to allow ships to travel from one part of the galaxy to the other, or even further beyond. So warp drive doesn't exist in that place?"
"I don't know," Jadzia admitted.
"How does this hyperdrive work?" Sisko leaned forward curiously.
"I'm not sure of the finer details, but from what we've found out, the hyperdrive opens a subspace window into a deeper domain of subspace and the ship dives into it. The drive on the Odyssey is an intergalactic hyperdrive, capable of travelling to other galaxies within four days," Jadzia's excitement became palpable as she saw the possibilities of what was on that ship. "But that's not all; Benjamin, the Odyssey was despatched to the Asgard home galaxy with three other ships to collect the sum total of Asgard knowledge and technology. They were dying out and they chose the humans of that reality to be the benefactors of their technology. The Odyssey went with the Daedalus, the Phoenix, the Sun-Zhu, and the Defiance because all of those ships were needed for different expeditions in order to further defend Earth, and the Asgard felt with humanity rebuilding they would need more than one copy. On that ship is the knowledge of an advanced alien civilisation that has the power to travel through galaxies in the blink of an eye!"