There were hardly any people in the mess hall when Maggie and Hoshi
arrived. It was a breathtaking room. There were chairs and tables scattered
about, of course, but on one wall were windows. And these windows didn't
look out on mountains, or the ocean, or some waving crop of wheat, these
looked out on the stars and planet and moons of space. Maggie had never
seen something so beautiful in really life. Nor had she ever seen
something so frightening.
That was when it really hit her. She walked in to the mess hall behind Hoshi, looked up and out the windows, and stopped. She couldn't move any further. She was in space. She was terrified of heights and she was in space, how much high can you get, not much.
"Are you ok?" Hoshi moved in front of her line of vision, cutting off the view of the stars. Maggie shook her head to clear it. She was ok, it was just like flying in a plane, she liked flying in planes, and she would like this.
"I'm fine, just caught me a little off guard is all." Hoshi turned to look at the windows herself.
"It did me too at first. Flying through space was never something I aspired to do. You get used to it though. Just like living in a high-rise I think." She turned back to smile at Maggie and motioned her to another wall.
This one had a slight recess in it with a lighted shelf. Maggie assumed this must be where they got food.
"The shifts don't go on break for another half hour, so we have the mess to ourselves. Chief can make you just about anything you want."
"Anything?" She told herself she was really just hunting for clarification is all.
"Anything." Hoshi answered with a slight giggle in her voice.
"Can I have a slice of pizza then?" she was nothing if not a simple girl. If it can be delivered, she could eat it. Pizza, though, had always been her weakness, always.
"Sure." She turned and talked in to the recess. "Chief, one slice of cheese pizza for our guest please, and one for me too." There was a blinking light panel that indicated he had gotten her message. Hoshi grabbed two glasses off of a near by tray and moved past Maggie to a smaller wall recess on the adjacent wall.
"This is were we get something to drink. It can give you just about whatever you want to." She then waited for Maggie to supple the drink she wanted.
"Oh, um milk please." Hoshi gave her a slightly puzzled look but then turned and placed one of the glasses in the recess and requested milk, cold. Almost instantly milk poured from a spicket in to the waiting glass. Hoshi turned and handed it to her.
"I've decided not to follow you on that one, sorry." Hoshi said as she placed her own glass in the recess and asked for coffee, hot. And from the same spicket came her drink.
"That's amazing. Dos it have, like, voice activation and a store of certain drinks?" She needed to know how everything worked. She hated feeling out of place. Even though it was her general state, she still didn't have to like it. Maybe if she could just figure things out here, use them like she always had, she wouldn't feel so lost. These were the little things she could control, she like them.
"It's a gene resequencer. Its really complicated, you'll have to ask Trip about it, I was never good with machines. I just know it takes what we have and makes what we want." She took a sip of her coffee. "And it seems to work just fine."
Maggie laughed a little in the back of her throat. At least she wasn't the only fish out of water. Hoshi motioned for them to take a seat while they waited for the food to get done.
"So what do you do on the ship? You're not an engineer obviously, and you don't like space so I'm guessing being a pilot wouldn't be very practical. So what do you do?"
"I'm the communications officer. See I have this talent for languages and seeing as we're on a mission of exploration, the Captain decided that was defiantly a talent he needed. Plus I have a bit of a weakness for new and unusual dialects. There have been so many even just in the short time we've been out here. Its like a dream job on the good days."
"And on the bad days?" she took a sip of her milk and eyed Ensign Sato with new respect. What she wouldn't give to have an ear for languages. She could barely say 'si' or 'hola' with a straight face. Really she had enough trouble with her own language that another one was simply out of the question. Probably why she chose a field where interaction was only a sporadic nuisance and not a daily routine.
"On the bad days its almost a nightmare. But you take the good with the bad, and in this case the good defiantly wins. What about you, you don't like space, why are you developing an engine to travel faster through it?"
"Sure turn my question around on me, that's not fair." But she smiled and answered anyway. "It was really more a puzzle to solve in the beginning. I saw it and I wanted to know how to make it work. So I studied and tried different combinations. Its like seeing something you just know goes together but someone lost the lid to the box so you just have to wing it."
"The lid to the box?"
"You know like a puzzle lid." Hoshi was shaking her head.
"Never mind. It was just this problem in front of me that I was sure I could solve. And I think I did. I had the model ready and every thing. It was just the numbers that threw me. I've never been any good at numbers. I was on my way to getting someone to help me with them when I ended up hiking with hypothermia."
"That will change your plans I suppose."
"Yea, a little. Then I saw those engines though. They are so beautiful, everything I imagined and more. I don't think I'll ever be able to top that." She was becoming wistful and depressed; she could feel it coming like an approaching thunderstorm or a really mad bull. Either way it was not something she wanted to wait around for.
"But its nice they got made anyway, or else where would you learn new languages. Only some many on earth right?" she put on a mock smile, hoping against hope that Hoshi would catch the hint and let the subject die and silent peaceful death.
It turned out she didn't have to.
The whole ship shook violently on its artificial axis. Glasses and their contents careened across the floor and in to the opposite wall with a crash. Unfortunately the people hand it no better. Maggie hit the wall with a sickening thud and clutched her wrist to her chest. Well that hurt a little more then she would have liked. Life was just continually getting better for her. It seemed some higher being really wanted her in sickbay, like with a vengeance.
She heard Hoshi groan and looked over to see her get thrown in to a table headfirst. Thankfully she had her arms above her head and didn't seem to be unconscious.
Then just as suddenly as it had begun, the shaking stopped.
Maggie had the irrational urge to get in to a doorway before the aftershock hit. Instead she crawled over to Hoshi who was lying on her back trying to catch her breath. Now it was her turn to ask 'are you ok?' and it wasn't nearly as satisfying as she thought it would be.
"I'm alright. Just got the wind knocked out of me." Hoshi answered as Maggie helped her to sit up.
There was a beep that echoed through out the mess hall, followed by the Captains voice.
"Ensign Sato report to the bridge, and bring our guest with you if you would."
"That would be us." She said as she got completely to her feet. She motioned Maggie to follow her and walked gingerly out the door.
The halls were one mass of activity. People ran or walked quickly about, either inquiring after the situation, hurriedly making there injured way to sickbay, or just as quickly scurrying to there posts. Maggie found it all a bit unnerving. Shouldn't these people be more hardened, more military? Didn't they know they were in space and could die from a micrometer in the hull? They all seem shocked and appalled something had dared to shake their world. Yet it seemed to Maggie, what with it being space and all, they should kind of be expecting the unexpected. Now her on the other hand, she was allowed to panic. It was her right as a woman of the twenty-first century.
They reached the bridge through the elevator, which Hoshi referred to as a lift. Maggie seemed to recall an old English film she had once watched had called elevators that. It had seemed so charming.
Yep she was losing it again; she was now to the point of analyzing word structure. Great, just great.
She had expected there to be more people on the bridge then there turned out to be. When they exited the 'lift' Hoshi had gone straight to her post. The Captain was talking with a woman dressed in what appeared to be a brown cat suit, but hey, whatever works right. The rest of the people present consisted of, a young black man seated in front of a consol facing a large window, or view screen, and a short dark haired man seated on the opposite side of the room from her. He too had a consol in front of him. They all seemed to have very important and specific things to do, and were so doing them.
She felt extremely out of place. More so then normal. So she just stood off the side and tried to refrain from literally twittling her thumbs.
Finally the Captain looked up from his discussion and motioned for her to join them. Which of course caused her non-to smoothly to look behind her to see whom he was talking about.
"Me?" she asked, pointing to herself as if just incase one of those present happed to be named Me.
He nodded and so she approached with no small amount of trepidation.
"This is T'pol, my science officer. I would like to you tell her how you came to be here." Maggie nodded to the woman he had indicated and thought she may have seen pointed ears when the woman retuned the gesture, but at this point who cares.
"You want me to explain it now? Aren't you like under attack or something, surely there could be a better time." The last thing she wanted was to die just because the Captain thought it fair to fulfill is obligation to her.
"The shockwave we experienced seems to have originated form your point of origin. With more details I may be able to extrapolate a cause for this occurrence." The woman sounded like a, well like a computer actually. She was so precise and articulate, there was just no other way to think of such speech, was there?
"Alright. I'll tell you whatever you need to know, but it wasn't really my field, I'm just an engineer." She was really getting tired of having to explain that to people over and over again.
She slowly began to recount how she came to be in her current situation. She left nothing out; she included the purple light, the bubbles, and Marks insistence that it was a variable window and nothing more.
When she was done the woman simply raised one of her sculpted eyebrows and turned her attention to the captain who had waited patiently through the narrative.
"I believe I have a rough estimation of what is happening down on the surface."
"Go on." The Captain urged her.
"I believe her collogue was, as she stated trying to make a window, an observation, if you will, on space-time. With inexperience this window proved random and uncontrollable, which resulted in its transformation in to a door. A portal through space-time to this point. What seems to have occurred is that because of her passage through said portal it has become wedged as it were, to this time and place. Unfortunately, though, the other side of the portal remains unstable and continues to shift. I believe what we experienced was one such shift that took the other side dangerously close to a supernova aftershock." She paused to let her hypothesis, most of which went way over Maggie's head, to sink in.
"I believe, Captain, that the wisest course would be to destroy the portal at this end before more damage is done." Archer was nodding thoughtfully at T'pol's suggestion. Maggie on the other hand, was shaking her head enthusiastically.
"If it's wedged I may be able to get home though." She desperately wanted nothing more. Never again did she think she could ever feel this misplaced. She was determined to be nothing but outgoing and approachable when she got home, the life of the party.
"That would be quite impossible. The exit vector is completely random at this point; there would be no way to get you to where and when you came from. Not to mention the considerable snag in space time your return would inevitably cause."
Maggie just blinked at her. If she was not mistaken, which, considering more then half of that was just un-understandable, could likely be the case, she had just been told she could never get home. The nerve of this woman. Who was she to make such a decision?
She was about to tell her just that when her thoughts were rudely interrupted by the man seated across the room.
"Captain I'm picking up a life form on the planet. It appears to be in much the same place as Ms. Claims was." He had a strong English accent. It was almost comforting to know things as familiar as foreign accents hadn't changed. How did he know her name?
Ok losing it again, she had to stay on track.
Archer walked over and pressed a button on the center chair.
"Archer to engineering."
"Tucker here, sir." Wow that was fast Maggie thought.
"Trip I need you to prep a shuttle for immediate launch.
"Sorry sir no can do. That shimmy damaged the docking clamps, it will take me at least twenty minutes before any of the shuttles can be disengaged."
"We could use the transporter, sir." The English man suggested.
"Are the transporters still working Trip?" the Captain asked into the speaker.
"As far as I know, yes sir."
"Good enough, Malcolm why don't you go down there and bring our new friend aboard before it freezes."
"Aye sir." Malcolm said as he left the bridge.
To Be Continued…
this would be a lot easier with a little more feed back : (
That was when it really hit her. She walked in to the mess hall behind Hoshi, looked up and out the windows, and stopped. She couldn't move any further. She was in space. She was terrified of heights and she was in space, how much high can you get, not much.
"Are you ok?" Hoshi moved in front of her line of vision, cutting off the view of the stars. Maggie shook her head to clear it. She was ok, it was just like flying in a plane, she liked flying in planes, and she would like this.
"I'm fine, just caught me a little off guard is all." Hoshi turned to look at the windows herself.
"It did me too at first. Flying through space was never something I aspired to do. You get used to it though. Just like living in a high-rise I think." She turned back to smile at Maggie and motioned her to another wall.
This one had a slight recess in it with a lighted shelf. Maggie assumed this must be where they got food.
"The shifts don't go on break for another half hour, so we have the mess to ourselves. Chief can make you just about anything you want."
"Anything?" She told herself she was really just hunting for clarification is all.
"Anything." Hoshi answered with a slight giggle in her voice.
"Can I have a slice of pizza then?" she was nothing if not a simple girl. If it can be delivered, she could eat it. Pizza, though, had always been her weakness, always.
"Sure." She turned and talked in to the recess. "Chief, one slice of cheese pizza for our guest please, and one for me too." There was a blinking light panel that indicated he had gotten her message. Hoshi grabbed two glasses off of a near by tray and moved past Maggie to a smaller wall recess on the adjacent wall.
"This is were we get something to drink. It can give you just about whatever you want to." She then waited for Maggie to supple the drink she wanted.
"Oh, um milk please." Hoshi gave her a slightly puzzled look but then turned and placed one of the glasses in the recess and requested milk, cold. Almost instantly milk poured from a spicket in to the waiting glass. Hoshi turned and handed it to her.
"I've decided not to follow you on that one, sorry." Hoshi said as she placed her own glass in the recess and asked for coffee, hot. And from the same spicket came her drink.
"That's amazing. Dos it have, like, voice activation and a store of certain drinks?" She needed to know how everything worked. She hated feeling out of place. Even though it was her general state, she still didn't have to like it. Maybe if she could just figure things out here, use them like she always had, she wouldn't feel so lost. These were the little things she could control, she like them.
"It's a gene resequencer. Its really complicated, you'll have to ask Trip about it, I was never good with machines. I just know it takes what we have and makes what we want." She took a sip of her coffee. "And it seems to work just fine."
Maggie laughed a little in the back of her throat. At least she wasn't the only fish out of water. Hoshi motioned for them to take a seat while they waited for the food to get done.
"So what do you do on the ship? You're not an engineer obviously, and you don't like space so I'm guessing being a pilot wouldn't be very practical. So what do you do?"
"I'm the communications officer. See I have this talent for languages and seeing as we're on a mission of exploration, the Captain decided that was defiantly a talent he needed. Plus I have a bit of a weakness for new and unusual dialects. There have been so many even just in the short time we've been out here. Its like a dream job on the good days."
"And on the bad days?" she took a sip of her milk and eyed Ensign Sato with new respect. What she wouldn't give to have an ear for languages. She could barely say 'si' or 'hola' with a straight face. Really she had enough trouble with her own language that another one was simply out of the question. Probably why she chose a field where interaction was only a sporadic nuisance and not a daily routine.
"On the bad days its almost a nightmare. But you take the good with the bad, and in this case the good defiantly wins. What about you, you don't like space, why are you developing an engine to travel faster through it?"
"Sure turn my question around on me, that's not fair." But she smiled and answered anyway. "It was really more a puzzle to solve in the beginning. I saw it and I wanted to know how to make it work. So I studied and tried different combinations. Its like seeing something you just know goes together but someone lost the lid to the box so you just have to wing it."
"The lid to the box?"
"You know like a puzzle lid." Hoshi was shaking her head.
"Never mind. It was just this problem in front of me that I was sure I could solve. And I think I did. I had the model ready and every thing. It was just the numbers that threw me. I've never been any good at numbers. I was on my way to getting someone to help me with them when I ended up hiking with hypothermia."
"That will change your plans I suppose."
"Yea, a little. Then I saw those engines though. They are so beautiful, everything I imagined and more. I don't think I'll ever be able to top that." She was becoming wistful and depressed; she could feel it coming like an approaching thunderstorm or a really mad bull. Either way it was not something she wanted to wait around for.
"But its nice they got made anyway, or else where would you learn new languages. Only some many on earth right?" she put on a mock smile, hoping against hope that Hoshi would catch the hint and let the subject die and silent peaceful death.
It turned out she didn't have to.
The whole ship shook violently on its artificial axis. Glasses and their contents careened across the floor and in to the opposite wall with a crash. Unfortunately the people hand it no better. Maggie hit the wall with a sickening thud and clutched her wrist to her chest. Well that hurt a little more then she would have liked. Life was just continually getting better for her. It seemed some higher being really wanted her in sickbay, like with a vengeance.
She heard Hoshi groan and looked over to see her get thrown in to a table headfirst. Thankfully she had her arms above her head and didn't seem to be unconscious.
Then just as suddenly as it had begun, the shaking stopped.
Maggie had the irrational urge to get in to a doorway before the aftershock hit. Instead she crawled over to Hoshi who was lying on her back trying to catch her breath. Now it was her turn to ask 'are you ok?' and it wasn't nearly as satisfying as she thought it would be.
"I'm alright. Just got the wind knocked out of me." Hoshi answered as Maggie helped her to sit up.
There was a beep that echoed through out the mess hall, followed by the Captains voice.
"Ensign Sato report to the bridge, and bring our guest with you if you would."
"That would be us." She said as she got completely to her feet. She motioned Maggie to follow her and walked gingerly out the door.
The halls were one mass of activity. People ran or walked quickly about, either inquiring after the situation, hurriedly making there injured way to sickbay, or just as quickly scurrying to there posts. Maggie found it all a bit unnerving. Shouldn't these people be more hardened, more military? Didn't they know they were in space and could die from a micrometer in the hull? They all seem shocked and appalled something had dared to shake their world. Yet it seemed to Maggie, what with it being space and all, they should kind of be expecting the unexpected. Now her on the other hand, she was allowed to panic. It was her right as a woman of the twenty-first century.
They reached the bridge through the elevator, which Hoshi referred to as a lift. Maggie seemed to recall an old English film she had once watched had called elevators that. It had seemed so charming.
Yep she was losing it again; she was now to the point of analyzing word structure. Great, just great.
She had expected there to be more people on the bridge then there turned out to be. When they exited the 'lift' Hoshi had gone straight to her post. The Captain was talking with a woman dressed in what appeared to be a brown cat suit, but hey, whatever works right. The rest of the people present consisted of, a young black man seated in front of a consol facing a large window, or view screen, and a short dark haired man seated on the opposite side of the room from her. He too had a consol in front of him. They all seemed to have very important and specific things to do, and were so doing them.
She felt extremely out of place. More so then normal. So she just stood off the side and tried to refrain from literally twittling her thumbs.
Finally the Captain looked up from his discussion and motioned for her to join them. Which of course caused her non-to smoothly to look behind her to see whom he was talking about.
"Me?" she asked, pointing to herself as if just incase one of those present happed to be named Me.
He nodded and so she approached with no small amount of trepidation.
"This is T'pol, my science officer. I would like to you tell her how you came to be here." Maggie nodded to the woman he had indicated and thought she may have seen pointed ears when the woman retuned the gesture, but at this point who cares.
"You want me to explain it now? Aren't you like under attack or something, surely there could be a better time." The last thing she wanted was to die just because the Captain thought it fair to fulfill is obligation to her.
"The shockwave we experienced seems to have originated form your point of origin. With more details I may be able to extrapolate a cause for this occurrence." The woman sounded like a, well like a computer actually. She was so precise and articulate, there was just no other way to think of such speech, was there?
"Alright. I'll tell you whatever you need to know, but it wasn't really my field, I'm just an engineer." She was really getting tired of having to explain that to people over and over again.
She slowly began to recount how she came to be in her current situation. She left nothing out; she included the purple light, the bubbles, and Marks insistence that it was a variable window and nothing more.
When she was done the woman simply raised one of her sculpted eyebrows and turned her attention to the captain who had waited patiently through the narrative.
"I believe I have a rough estimation of what is happening down on the surface."
"Go on." The Captain urged her.
"I believe her collogue was, as she stated trying to make a window, an observation, if you will, on space-time. With inexperience this window proved random and uncontrollable, which resulted in its transformation in to a door. A portal through space-time to this point. What seems to have occurred is that because of her passage through said portal it has become wedged as it were, to this time and place. Unfortunately, though, the other side of the portal remains unstable and continues to shift. I believe what we experienced was one such shift that took the other side dangerously close to a supernova aftershock." She paused to let her hypothesis, most of which went way over Maggie's head, to sink in.
"I believe, Captain, that the wisest course would be to destroy the portal at this end before more damage is done." Archer was nodding thoughtfully at T'pol's suggestion. Maggie on the other hand, was shaking her head enthusiastically.
"If it's wedged I may be able to get home though." She desperately wanted nothing more. Never again did she think she could ever feel this misplaced. She was determined to be nothing but outgoing and approachable when she got home, the life of the party.
"That would be quite impossible. The exit vector is completely random at this point; there would be no way to get you to where and when you came from. Not to mention the considerable snag in space time your return would inevitably cause."
Maggie just blinked at her. If she was not mistaken, which, considering more then half of that was just un-understandable, could likely be the case, she had just been told she could never get home. The nerve of this woman. Who was she to make such a decision?
She was about to tell her just that when her thoughts were rudely interrupted by the man seated across the room.
"Captain I'm picking up a life form on the planet. It appears to be in much the same place as Ms. Claims was." He had a strong English accent. It was almost comforting to know things as familiar as foreign accents hadn't changed. How did he know her name?
Ok losing it again, she had to stay on track.
Archer walked over and pressed a button on the center chair.
"Archer to engineering."
"Tucker here, sir." Wow that was fast Maggie thought.
"Trip I need you to prep a shuttle for immediate launch.
"Sorry sir no can do. That shimmy damaged the docking clamps, it will take me at least twenty minutes before any of the shuttles can be disengaged."
"We could use the transporter, sir." The English man suggested.
"Are the transporters still working Trip?" the Captain asked into the speaker.
"As far as I know, yes sir."
"Good enough, Malcolm why don't you go down there and bring our new friend aboard before it freezes."
"Aye sir." Malcolm said as he left the bridge.
To Be Continued…
this would be a lot easier with a little more feed back : (
