I don't own Star Trek; in some ways, I like the Temporal Cold War, but if I had been writing it, I wouldn't have had it mentioned, but I would have had time travellers meddling in Enterprise's time more than any other.
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Temporal Cold War.
Jonathan Archer gazed at the Earth. It was Earth, and yet it wasn't his.
He had known that from the moment he had woken up in the hospital tent, tended by Nazis, but when he had discovered they were in America, Jonathan needed only a small amount of proof before he realised they were telling him the truth. And with those clues, Archer had realised that, somehow, he had travelled back into the past, into a new version of World War 2, and he had wondered what new mess Daniels had gotten them into and why the Time Agent simply couldn't leave him and his crew alone. It was bad enough they'd gotten involved in so many little conflicts which weren't even meant to be happening in the first place, but the scale of this mess on top of the Xindi war was the last thing Archer wanted or needed.
He was thankful the American resistance had rescued him from that truck; after encountering that alien and gradually seeing what was new in this timeline, Archer realised someone had changed history and the alien was responsible and recognised Archer for what he was.
In the truck, Archer was thinking about the changes to this version of history; one of the German nurses had been very kind and open and had talked, although she had been guarded by what to tell him, although he had played the delirious act quite well, although it had helped he was badly injured following the destruction of the weapon.
It was in that tent he learnt he was in 1944, and the Germans had conquered a large slice of the globe, including America. Archer could only imagine what kind of knowledge the Germans had been given, but if aliens were on Earth then they would have given the Nazis a great deal. It was only the primitive materials and technologies keeping them back, but they could still achieve a lot. It wasn't until he'd spent time with Alicia that he saw the state of the war, learning America was fighting a war on two fronts; with the Pacific War against the Japanese while half of the country was under Nazi occupation. Archer had been charmed by Alicia, she was a kind woman who didn't deserve the kind of pointless racial abuse the Nazis had spewed at her, and when he had seen for himself the scene of Jews being rounded up to be taken to the concentration camps, he had been frightened for her safety. It would only be a matter of time before the Nazis' barbaric practices were meted out against a people who were just as human as they were, but they were too narrow-minded to see it.
At the same time, Archer had been trying to come up with a plan for keeping himself and Alicia safe while he tried to find some way of ending this diverged version of World War 2 despite the limited resources he had at hand, and he had been trying really hard not to think about what he could do to escape or find a way back home. Although he had experienced it more than once, Archer wasn't entirely sure how the time travel technology Daniels or Future Guy used, he didn't have any clues here.
That meeting with the alien contact had cleared the mystery up for Archer. He had known that his presence in the 1940s meant time travel was being used, and that meeting with the alien Sal and the others had killed was further proof; he was just pleased Daniels had brought back the Enterprise with him. Getting in contact with his ship, he and Alicia had beamed on board, only to discover a dying and deformed version of Daniels stranded here.
Why did Daniels have to use him and his crew as pawns? If he and his people were better trained and equipped to cope with time travel and alternate timelines, then why couldn't they have come here before they were deformed like Daniels?
Still, the good thing was they had a clue, and Archer was positive if he'd been given some time with that alien before the gang had killed him, he would have learnt about the Temporal Conduit and how important it was. If he had had a few more moments before the gang became too spooked, then Archer could have gotten them to listen and that the facility needed to be destroyed to put things right.
It didn't matter really.
Enterprise might be badly damaged, but her sensors were still good; they had come a long way in the last few years since their early launch from Spacedock to take Klaang back to the Klingon Empire, and already they had traced the divergence of this timeline. It was so shocking that even Archer was surprised by how something that was as simple as an assassination could have such profound repercussions on history, but Archer was beginning to realise that every change to history was like a domino effect; knock down one domino, and the rest followed. With Vladimir Lenin assassinated by a temporal assassin, Russia never became communist and they never grew stronger, with Adolf Hitler conquering Russia easily and having the strength needed to invade the West, conquering Britain, Europe, and even a slice of America.
As the Doctor from Doctor Who said in an episode featuring Aztecs, "You can't rewrite history. Not one line."
Well, he was right.
And Vosk and his friends had come back and given the Nazis more advanced weapons and technologies to help them do it.
And the future didn't exist, not as the one Archer and his crew remembered. It was gone, and until Archer and his crew could find the conduit, then they'd never be free. He'd already gotten T'Pol and the others looking for a large energy signature to try to track it down, but it was shielded but Archer knew T'Pol well enough to know she wasn't going to be giving up any time soon. At the same time he also wanted to know what other differences there were in this timeline to see if there had been other divergences that had shaped this reality.
But Archer was becoming tired and frustrated by the image in his head, of him and his crew and even many others in the 22nd century being pawns in a bigger game. Archer wanted this to change.
Now.
