I don't own Star Trek.

Please let me know what you think.

X

The Harsh Reality.

Azalea left the caravan she shared with her brother, and she wasn't surprised when she came face to face with both Riker and La Forge. Both Starfleet officers wore grim, uncertain looks, but their mouths were set in determined lines. They knew what they needed to do, and Azalea could see that despite the clear signs of their debate about what she had told them when they had gone to find Zefram, they were not entirely convinced and they were determined to make sure their plan was achieved.

She could admire their zeal. That didn't mean she had to like it. Azalea wondered what they were going to do; they needed her brother to see their precious future come to pass, although she wasn't even sure if that future was possible in this reality and she was concerned about the implications.

"How is he?" Riker demanded without preamble.

Azalea narrowed her eyes, seeing clearly none of these people cared about her brother as a person, but as the man who'd usher their precious future in. That made her thoughts of sending them away even more justified. "Sleeping."

Riker looked grimly down at the ground, Azalea was starting to see he was more concerned that his precious future wouldn't see the light of day if this went on. Azalea wasn't originally planning on saying anything to them, but she decided to do what she needed to do.

"He's in no fit state to do anything. Just let him sleep it off," she said to them, hoping the two Starfleet officers had the common sense to listen and take in what she was saying to them both.

"We can't do that; the alien ship-," La Forge started to say, but Azalea angrily waved her hand for silence. Just what would it take for these people to see this was their own fault? If Riker had enforced his role in their chain of command and told his people not to harass Zefram and if the idiot La Forge hadn't pushed it by talking about that stupid statue of her brother, and allowed one of his crewmen to shake Zefram's hand like that, none of this would have happened.

"I don't give a damn!" Azalea knew no real good ever came from shouting, but this was one of those moments where it was needed. "I couldn't care less about your precious future, and I certainly don't care about your Federation. This is a totally different universe you are in, and it's about time you accepted that. If your Federation is meant to exist, then it will. Maybe it would be better if humanity struggled for a few more decades rather than the picnic you described last night of everything being solved in 50 years' time. Maybe people will start to recover and rebuild Earth and we'd be in a better position to launch the Phoenix, rather than just launching it now."

Riker and La Forge exchanged a glance, wondering how they were going to convince her to launch the Phoenix. Azalea wondered if they had come up with contingency plans like making it out that Zefram had indeed flown the ship and broke the light barrier while instead one of them had performed the flight. She wouldn't have it. Deep down she knew her brother had wanted to fly the ship from the moment he designed the original engine. She was not going to let them take that from him.

"How is your brother?" Riker repeated himself, at last, changing the subject.

Azalea frowned. "He's asleep," she repeated before she added with a disgusted sneer, "Not that you care."

"No, I mean, what is wrong with him?" Riker rephrased his question awkwardly. Clearly, he wasn't sure how to ask how Zefram Cochrane, a hero in his century, was like this.

Azalea wasn't sure if she should divulge her brother's problems and his mental health issues. She was worried if she did that these people would try to do something stupid, or be disgusted with Zefram, even if it wasn't his fault. Somehow she doubted the Federation society had many of the same problems with mental health that were present here at this time.

"He suffers from bipolar condition," she said at last, "it usually manifests itself as a terrible depression. Zefram has suffered from it all of his life, but luckily early diagnosis picked up on it in time, and he was given an implant designed to mitigate the worst of the effects, but it began wearing down and he's become an alcoholic to stop the worst of the effects from bothering him too much because he doesn't have any true way of stopping the depression."

Riker and La Forge exchanged a look before they turned back to her with serious expressions. Not for the first time, Azalea wanted so much to know what they were thinking. If they honestly thought she was going to let them bother her brother, they were in for a surprise.

"Can I ask you something?" Azalea asked, hoping to get in before they came up with another insane plan.

"Sure," Riker nodded honestly.

"Have you ever travelled back in time before?"

Riker, not expecting the question, took a second longer to respond, but he nodded. "Yes. A few years back we met Mark Twain while we were trying to stop a race of aliens from stealing human neural energy in the 19th century."

"Mark Twain? The 19th century?" Azalea repeated in amazement. She had expected them to have some experience with time travel, but this had surprised Azalea so she was struggling to think about the implications of them meeting an author like Twain, but she quickly pulled herself together so she could make her point. "Did you….did you tell him about his future, about the books he wrote or would write?"

"No."

"So why have you been harassing Zefram the way you have? Ever since you arrived, you have let your officers shake his hand, staring at him, and talk about schools that are named after him, and there's a marble statue. The smartest thing to have done would have to leave him alone, but that would have been too easy for you, would it? You must have seen him struggle. Just because you come from a different reality, it must have occurred to you to keep your mouths shut so you would not have foretold him about any crucial details. Okay, I can understand the hype that he's a hero to you, but I'm actually tempted to blow the Phoenix up so your precious future goes up in flames!"

"You can't do that!" La Forge said.

Azalea suddenly snapped.

"DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! MY BROTHER IS CURRENTLY SUFFERING FROM A BREAKDOWN BECAUSE OF YOUR STORIES OF HOW HE'S GOING TO BE SO FAMOUS, YOU LOT WORSHIP HIM TO THE POINT WHERE YOU PRAY TO HIM! MY BROTHER MEANS MORE TO ME THAN SOME FUTURE THAT MIGHT NOT EVEN HAPPEN HERE, SO DON'T TELL ME WHAT I CAN DO!" Azalea screamed at the two Starfleet officers.

"YOU HAVEN'T ANSWERED MY QUESTION; WHY DIDN'T YOU STOP YOURSELVES FROM DROPPING LITTLE HINTS AND TIPS ABOUT WHAT ZEFRAM WAS GOING TO DO, OR WOULD HAVE IN HIS HONOUR LATER? WHY?"

"Dr Cochrane, you're right. What happened with your brother was a careless mistake on our part, but you have to understand, that our future reveres him. It was thanks to him and his team that Earth became a paradise," Riker said earnestly as he was practically begging Azalea to see things from their point of view. "If you are right, then we have travelled into an alternate universe," he exchanged an uneasy look with La Forge, "but I want to know more about the Shunt drive. What is it?"

Azalea wasn't sure she particularly wanted to tell them anything about the technology she had worked on with her brother. Originally she had been planning on working on time travel rather than a form of faster-than-light drive. In the end, it had just stuck. She sighed. "It's essentially a time drive," she said tiredly. "It folds time on itself by opening a portal into another universe, so the distance travelled is crossed in a phased state with the other reality in a similar state. Travel is instantaneous. For instance, if I wanted to travel to the other side of the galaxy, then I would hop into a Shunt Drive ship, set the controls, and away I went."

"You can cross such distances instantaneously?" La Forge whispered in something that was disbelief but more than a little awe, so Azalea could not place it.

"Yes. As far as the universe is concerned, the ship is crossing the distance naturally below the speed of light. In fact, it's out of phase with our universe and is dipping into another. I didn't really plan on constructing it. Zefram was working on the original theories of his warp drive, but I saw a flaw in the plans. Every time you want to go faster, you need to increase the ratio of the intermix. I did some math and realised if we did that, then the warp bubble would become unstable," Azalea explained.

La Forge sighed and a pained expression crossed his face, while his silver eyes looked troubled despite their unnatural appearance. "Yes, that's true. In the 24th century, the warp factor was altered when it was found there were other layers of subspace they could interact with, and the fields we had already were not capable of manipulating them, but when we had the new factor to address the issues we have had problems breaking warp 10. We call it the maximum warp factor."

"Anything in the universe that can travel warp 10 would exist in a state of infinite velocity; it would exist within every moment of the universe at the same time, but it's impossible," Riker added.

"With something like that, you wouldn't need wormholes or anything else, but it's the same with the Shunt drive; it exists out of phase with our universe and remains phased in the other universe, so the normal laws don't apply. We tested it in the labs and found it worked. We also developed small probes that worked in practice, and we improved on the design ever since," Azalea was fascinated by the idea of something that could exist within every point of the universe at the same time and she knew Zef would be, too, but she wanted to keep her momentum going.

"Why didn't you tell us this before?"

Azalea sent them a withering look. "You're forgetting, your ship's warp engine nacelles are just like the Phoenix's. We'd assumed your world was like ours, so at the time I didn't have anything to be suspicious of. It wasn't until I overheard one or two of your engineers comment on the differences that I became suspicious; Zefram was too overwhelmed by what he was hearing to truly pay any attention," Azalea felt her bad mood return to her when she remembered what these people had done to her brother.

Riker thought of something important. "Dr Cochrane, I'm truly sorry about this and what's happened to your brother; you are right, we shouldn't have said anything about the future to him, but we do have to see this through. We need to ensure First Contact happens. But when you conducted the tests, were there any emissions when the ship dropped out of FTL?"

Azalea had a good idea why he was asking her that. He wanted to know if the aliens would detect something unusual and arrive to investigate. "I honestly don't know," she replied.

She was telling the truth. She and her brother hadn't really bothered to build or design some kind of device that could detect a Shunt Drive in operation or whenever it dropped out of FTL. But if these aliens were sophisticated, they would have the means to pick up exotic particles or they might have a futuristic and more sophisticated radar system and get a fix using that.

In all honesty, Azalea didn't really care by this point. Her brother's health was on the line right now and she truly did not care one little bit about their precious future.

"My brother is not going up there in the first place," Azalea said.

"What?"

"Dr Cochrane, he must-!" Riker protested, but Azalea lashed out before he could really get started.

"I've already thought I'd made this clear to the pair of you," Azalea snapped, wondering if IQs dropped to below zero in the future for idiots like this to exist. "My brother is currently asleep because of the stress and the shocks you've dropped on his head. I am not putting his life on the line because of that."

"Lea, it's okay."

Azalea swung around and her eyes widened when she saw her brother standing right there in the doorway of their caravan. "Zef, what the hell are you doing?" She chided him when she rushed over to him. "You should be sleeping."

Zefram irritably waved her protests away, but she caught the crooked and affectionate smile on his face. "Lea, I'm okay, really," he smiled at her. "In any case, I heard you shouting at them, so I couldn't sleep anyway."

"Oops, sorry," Azalea sheepishly replied, cursing herself for not thinking but she had been so angry with Riker and La Forge's stubbornness and inability to listen to what she was telling them. She had told herself to keep it down and not scream, but they had tried her temper.

"It okay," Zefram repeated but he looked at her seriously. "Look, I wanna launch the Phoenix. I think the drugs and the laser beam really helped. I feel just like I did before the attack, and even when we were building the Phoenix."

Azalea remembered the euphoric mood she had seen her brother when they had worked on the Phoenix together, spending months rebuilding and repurposing the nuclear missile they'd found in the silo, building the ship up from the missile and trying to scavenge the technology needed to make the Shunt Drive work in a rocket that wasn't designed for the work. But her brother had taken to the project with gusto. He had worked virtually all hours after deciding the nuclear fuel in the rocket would work.

She had known it wouldn't last, but she had hoped the mood would last long enough for them to make the manned flight with a Shunt Drive engine. Sadly it hadn't happened.

But if his mood had returned then Azalea saw nothing wrong with seeing what happened and where it took them. She nodded at him silently in agreement.

"Okay, we can launch the Phoenix, but there are going to be ground rules," Azalea looked between her brother and the two Starfleet officers and her brother. "First, you don't hound my brother and drop little hints about what happened in your reality. As far as I'm concerned, your reality and ours diverged a long time ago and they don't matter in the long term. I want you to make it clear to the others you brought down from your ship with you about what happened and why. Don't hide it. Second, my brother has brief moments of rest."

Riker and La Forge both glanced at each other. They didn't hide their displeasure at the conditions, but they knew if they wanted the Phoenix to be launched then they would need to cooperate, even though they didn't like it.