I don't own anything, just the story idea.
Please let me know what you think.
A Different Future Unfolds.
Jonathan Archer stood very still as he stood in the turbo lift of one of the newest NX-class starships, his mind harking back to the day when he had first been given the honour and privilege of testing the engines of Enterprise. He sighed under his breath, thinking back to those far off days. It was so hard to comprehend, or even imagine that that happened less than two years ago. So much had happened in that time, so much had been learnt, so much had been gained, but so much had been lost.
Back then Earth hadn't been attacked yet by the Xindi. No human had known anything about the threat 50 light-years off and most of all nobody even had an inkling of the Temporal Cold War; he could be grateful towards Future Guy for his insights into the Xindi attack, Daniels for giving them help when the Suliban had framed him and his crew for the mass murder of hundreds of innocent colonists while the Vulcans were more than happy to have an opportunity to shut down Starfleet's deep-space exploration projects without caring about investigating the whole mess, but Noys Lambent's true agenda and its implications worried and concerned him.
Archer was also worried about the Xindi. It had been nine weeks since the last attack, and it was getting quiet. Back home the reaction was mixed; half the population were elated, hopeful the Xindi would stop launching these attacks, but the other half was more pragmatic, and many of them were in government office and in Starfleet Command. The tension was extremely high, the nerves were fraying. In the meantime, the shipyards were ordered to double their already quadrupled efforts to construct the starships as more and more of the technologies from the other realities was understood and scientists and engineers had had the time needed to understand how they worked. The newer NX-class starships were being constructed with a more refined weapons array derived from Dominion and 23rd-century Starfleet technology, and they had more impressive shields, and already Starfleet engineers and scientists had managed to reverse engineer the technology from the wreckage of the Xindi warships, and they'd integrated some of the findings into their newest ships.
One of the biggest surprises over the last few days was the arrival and the appearance of two massive alien starships that resembled a strange winged hammer, while the second was long, with a y shaped axis with a long neck featuring many beam weapons while the hull was dotted with many different types of weapons. The records of the Daedalus identified the hammer-headed alien ship as an Asgard O'Neil class warship. Onboard the ship was a padd containing a message from the time traveller.
Noys had not been able to resist the opportunity to steal the ships, but she had been taking a good long look at the timelines and she was attracted to the second ship, which was named the Victory. The ship belonged to an interstellar human state known as the Earth Alliance. She came from a reality where a version of Earth existed in a reality where some of the races Archer and the rest of Starfleet knew about had either not developed space travel or they had been wiped out over some of the frequent wars that occurred there.
In that reality, Earth had not developed warp travel. Much of the earlier history was identical with one or two strange differences, such as a more devastating attack on San Diego, and the sudden appearance of certifiable telepaths which spawned a worldwide panic while the space program sent out STL ships to distant worlds.
Archer was amazed they would even attempt to make such a risky journey; the ships were powered by ion or fusion-based rocket engines. They hadn't even discovered subspace technology that would give them the building blocks for warp travel. Yes, there had been theories of space warping on Earth and on other worlds for decades, but they involved warping space and time. The discovery of subspace and the energising of antimatter had given away to warp travel and impulse power.
But it had never happened in this reality, and it wasn't until Earth made contact with an alien race known as the Centauri who dominated an interstellar empire known as the Centauri Republic, who gave them access to a technology called jumpgates, which gave them access to a domain called hyperspace, which wasn't the same as what was found with the Asgard hyperdrive.
Archer wasn't sure what to make of the new ships, but what worried him the most was what was going to come in the future. What did the future hold with all of these ships' technologies which Starfleet and Earth were going to be using as a base?
What was the time traveller doing? He didn't buy her explanations, especially since there were time travellers like Daniels stopping people from meddling in history.
But the Victory's history worried him. In that reality, Earth had encountered and went to war with an aggressive, feline-like race called the Dilgar who practiced slavery and biowarfare which massacred hundreds of millions of worlds. Originally Earth had entered the conflict to form a reputation and a presence in the galaxy before their morals at seeing the Dilgar war crimes made them see they should fight. After winning the war, the EA became overconfident….and then they had gone against another, more powerful alien race known as the Minbari Federation. After a disastrous First Contact where the Minbari had approached the Earth explorer division opened fire on the Minbari ships, killing their leader, who was essentially the Minbari version of Jesus Christ. The Minbari had declared a holy war on Earth, and they had begun an invasion of human space.
Archer had flinched when he had discovered the Minbari had approached the ships with gunports open.
God, it was no wonder they'd opened fire, and the fact the Minbari scanners had caused the captain of the lead ship to panic, they were so powerful and caused intense interference that the ships could barely function. Later the captains of the squadron would claim the attack was deliberately and electronically provoked, prompting panic among the authorities since it meant the security was compromised.
But later events made that almost a moot point when the Earth-Minbari war began.
Another pointless war.
The Minbari warships were far more powerful and more advanced than the Earth Alliance warships they were equipped with some form of stealth technology which made it impossible for the Earth Alliance warships to lock on to them and hit them where it really hurt. The only way the Earth Alliance had inflicted any kind of damage was if they got a few lucky shots in, which usually resulted in misfires or the ships being destroyed resulting in higher casualties on Earth's side. And the causalities - civilian and military, were in the millions. The Minbari were so powerful that they just overran defences without any effort; their tactics were crap, not too dissimilar in fact to the tactics of ancient maritime warfare, and they weren't really adaptable. The Victory contained hundreds of surviving clips from the lucky ships which had survived and Archer could tell the Earth Alliance had used so many tricks just to stop the Minbari from wiping them out. They used tried and true Guerrilla warfare tactics against the Minbari, and while the tactics worked, especially the unorthodox ones, too many of the Minbari captains quickly learnt the humans were using whatever it took to win the battles.
Aside from one or two engagements, the war went badly. And then came the Battle of the Line. The final engagement where the Minbari launched an attack on Earth and destroyed the few surviving warships put in a line of a siege to allow the Earth's civilian population to escape to some random part of the galaxy. But it didn't work. The Minbari sent every ship back to Earth through applied and brutally precise firepower and through physically hemming the ships in and sending them back to Earth before they launched an invasion and occupation of the planet.
The surviving citizens of the EA launched a resistance movement that lasted throughout the occupation while the Minbari forced surrender on the whole planet. While that was going on, both sides discovered the truth of the first contact disaster; the humans discovered the open gunports were the Minbari Warrior Caste's tradition of approaching alien ships, as a gesture of respect. The Minbari soon discovered the Earth explorer division believed they were under attack, which was solidified by the open gun ports and the electronic interference.
Archer couldn't help but flinch in horror at the implications; the Minbari had believed they were the more powerful race in the galaxy, and the other races owed them without thinking some races would never understand how powerful they were, and they had gone over the deep end when they declared war against Earth, while Earth hadn't bothered to get intelligence on the Minbari to avoid this, or they had and the captains of the squadron ignored it. The implications there were horrible, but the end result was where the Minbari ignored the revelation their 'holy war' was based on a misunderstanding out of racial pride.
Earth didn't have any issues. They had secretly spread the truth around Earth, and pretty soon every human learnt the truth of the first contact. In the meantime, the Minbari solidified their occupation and turned Earth into a protectorate of their Federation.
The terms were harsh, but what sickened Archer and the others who'd seen the records was how the Minbari were filmed and recorded murdering human prisoners for fun. What sickened and angered him the most was the majority were children, and Archer could understand why they were being shown.
They were being used to stoke the fire of hatred for aliens. The occupation didn't last and the Minbari left after 2 years of hell. In the time after that, the human race in that universe captured and reverse-engineered Minbari technologies and they began a program of rearmament while they stayed isolated from the rest of the galaxy, ruthlessly sending out xenoarchaeologists and teams to other worlds to steal and plunder technologies to go to war with the Minbari again.
The Victory had arrived before the Earth Alliance could even begin, so Archer didn't know if they'd succeeded or not. And truthfully, Archer had no idea if he wanted to know.
Archer had to ask himself as the turbo lift car reached the bridge why the time traveller brought the Victory to them, was it because she was trying to point out they should never, ever give up, or was it because she wanted to show United Earth Starfleet and the admiralty they had survived and persevered and they could do the same thing.
Sadly, he couldn't summon Noys to discover the answer.
If he could then he would tell her to take her damn Temporal Cold War and shove it where the sun didn't shine, anything to stop time travellers from coming to their reality to interfere in their affairs.
The moment he stepped out of the bridge someone saw him. "Captain on the bridge!" A painfully young ensign yelled, making Archer flinch.
"As you were," Archer looked over his temporary new bridge crew, mentally smiling at the thought of them being temporary since he had been doing this for the past month, taking temporary command of the ships and flying them around the solar system and testing their engines and their basic weapons arrays. "Ship's status?" He went on.
"Warp engines are fully charged. The weapons array is online. Life support and impulse engines awaiting your command, Captain," the officer reported while Archer walked to the command chair and took his seat. The officer spoke so fast Archer was awed his face wasn't blue by now.
"Take us out, thruster's only. When we're cleared from the dock, one-quarter impulse," Archer instructed, turning to the officer manning the communications' station (he wished this was his own ship, he had half expected to see Malcolm, Travis, T'Pol and Hoshi, and the rest of the Alpha shift crew; this bridge was just too similar to Enterprise's for its own good).
"Aye, sir," the helm officer's hands flew over the controls of the helm console.
"Communications," Archer didn't even bother to pay the helmsman any attention, hopefully in a few more days they would be sending him back to his own ship. "send a message to the dock. Tell them…we're underway on impulse power."
"Aye, captain."
The ship shuddered at the sensation of the engines kicking in.
"We're clear of the dock," the helms officer reported.
Yes, I can see that, Archer thought to himself rather unkindly, but he didn't voice it aloud. This was a new crew they would learn quickly. Aloud he ordered, "Adjust the inertial dampeners a little bit. We don't want too many bumps. Proceed on our test course."
X
"I'll say one thing about these Asgard, they sure knew how to design sensors; I don't think I've ever seen anything so detailed in my whole career," Lieutenant Paige Warren smiled as she checked over the sensors from the Asgard console as she and a few of her colleagues and friends were working in the computer room of the Asgard ship.
"I know," Lieutenant Beltran came over, a smile on his face. "This technology is incredible. It's already being examined to see if we can put it with our technology."
"Yeah," Warren replied, but then the sensor readings changed. The ship had been scanning a sector of the planets closest to Earth. "Hold it," she suddenly said. "There's a subspace distortion," she read off of her scanner, which had been set to read Norse style runes. "It's very small, and it's been buried within the magnetic field of Earth's own North pole. That's why we can't detect it with our own technology, but I'm sure the Voyager's sensors are advanced and sophisticated enough to detect it. We can pick it up because this thing is more advanced than anything else we've got."
Beltran's expression changed from a smile to a grimace. "Send word to the other ships," he ordered, "pass on the sensor telemetry."
"Aye, sir."
Another officer turned to Beltran after overhearing the report, "What can it be, sir?"
Beltran sighed. "I hope it's got nothing to do with the Xindi, but these days who knows? Take us in closer."
"Aye, sir."
"Do we have enough control over this thing to bring the weapon systems up and running?" Beltran glanced over his shoulder at Bailey, who was manning another of the consoles.
"I think so," Bailey grinned grimly. "We're armed and ready."
"Sir, I'm getting a report from Starfleet Command. They've sent a message to the other ships. We're definitely getting something in there."
Beltran's face twisted into a scowl. "It sounds like the Xindi to me. Take us in."
X
On the bridge of the NX-class ship he was testing, the communications officer took the message. "Sir, something has been detected in Earth's north pole, some subspace signature."
Archer leapt out of the command chair, his mind jumping to the only conclusion he could picture. "Is it a Xindi subspace vortex?'
"Unknown at the moment, sir."
Archer was not in the mood for puzzles. "Contact Starfleet Command, ask them for more information."
"I'll try," the communication's officer said while handling the controls in a way that told Archer this officer was not really proficient with the communications console. "Sir, we've been advised to stay away from the situation due to our current status."
That was remarkably fast.
The officer wasn't finished. "But Starfleet is mobilising and they're keeping watch. Wait… they're saying they have already opened fire. Pieces of debris have come out of a matter stream."
"Do we know what it was?" Archer persisted.
"No, sir. It's too soon."
"Captain," the temporary tactical officer suddenly shouted - totally unnecessarily but in the current situation, Archer let him get away with it especially since he was young - "we're getting a report. A large fleet of Xindi warships has emerged from subspace corridors."
Archer took the news badly while the rest of the bridge crew took it badly with gasps of horror. He was onboard a ship that was underpowered and armed with only phase cannons and with hull plating defences. He'd already checked. The Jonathan Archer who'd returned to Earth months ago following the original Xindi attack had been underprepared for fighting off the Xindi who attacked in waves, but this Jonathan Archer was a veteran of these encounters.
"Go to Tactical alert. Polarise the hull plating and activate whatever defence systems we have," Archer ordered. "Helm, try to take us close to our fleet ships; we need as much protection as we can get."