February 3, 2387

USS Yeager

"What's the trouble, Doctor?" Tom asked as he arrived in Sick Bay, after he was summoned by his CMO, Dr. Conlin, a former associate from Starbase 47.

Conlin looked grim, worried, as he hunched over the control panel. "Ensign Gallagher came to see me this morning…complaining of memory loss."

Alarm bells started ringing in his head, but he kept a calm face. "Explain," Tom ordered crisply.

"It's not work related, per se. But he was concerned…as was I. He apparently had a conversation with Commander Kim about participating in the jazz ensemble two evenings ago. You know, he plays the bass, and he was—" Tom cut him off.

"I'm fully aware, Doctor," he said. Harry was a virtuoso with the clarinet, but had also taught himself saxophone and oboe while they were stranded in the Delta Quadrant. He oversaw most of the crew as part of his job, and he also worked hard with off duty things like that which promoted cohesion among the crew. "What happened?"

"Harry approached him this morning with the rehearsal schedule, nonchalantly, considering he had agreed to participate a few days ago. He sort of fumbled his reply to him, but then came straight here. Because he didn't remember the conversation. Normally I wouldn't worry. Stress, new situations…all of that can interfere with concentration, even in young minds. Considering what I know from Starbase 47, I was concerned. As you know," he explained.

"Tachyon radiation?" Tom asked, dreading the reply, knowing in his gut what the reply would be.

Conlin nodded tightly. "Same bizarre configuration. I can't explain it. Tachyon radiation should not cause memory loss. Ever. At least, nothing we know about anyway. Starfleet is still investigating that new type we just discovered. I'd bet my life this is the same thing," Conlin said.

Tom assessed in silence. He needed to check internal sensors as well as shield integrity. The Owen Paris had highly advanced shields, but the Yeager didn't have mere standard shielding either. Tachyons of any kind should not have been able to penetrate the ship. "I'll investigate further. Study this. Let me know what you find. Check everyone on board to see if this is isolated or if we can find some kind of pattern. Don't alarm anyone, just, you know, standard scans, that type of thing."

"Aye, Captain," Conlin replied. Tom was already moving out the door when he heard Conlin grumble, "Nothing those hot-headed pilots love more than forced medical examinations."

He was worried, but Conlin's jab made him smile nonetheless. He needed all the chances to smile he could garner, he thought. This multifaceted mission was taking its toll on the crew, more so on those who were aware of the duality of the true mission. Even with no hiccups or snags, the workload was gargantuan. This unknown specter of tachyon radiation was connected somehow, and it was being investigated, but he knew there was more they should or could be doing to understand it.

God, B'Elanna, I wish you were here, he thought suddenly, surprised and sad, concerned that he was speaking to her internally as he had been doing to his father, who was deceased. She was alive, although just existing really if he thought about it. Not for the first time, he thought about the Klingon tradition, and how her condition as it stood would be perceived. Klingon honor would have demanded a mercy killing, for living the way she was at the rehabilitation facility would have been considered dishonorable by any standard or interpretation. All the time he had known her, she had struggled to find the right balance between her human and Klingon half. At the very least, he had always believed his love for her had allowed her to make peace with her Klingon side. She had learned that he accepted her the way she was, both halves of her. She never had to hide her Klingon-ness from him.

Had she fully embraced her Klingon heritage, perhaps if her mother was still alive, he would have been required to perform the hegh'bat, considering at the time of her incapacitation, she had no sons and he was her closest relative. The idea of plunging a knife into her heart was incomprehensible…it would have been easier to plunge it into his own heart, and the frightening realization that he would have done just that if the situation were different. There was no version of reality that existed where he could hurt her, no matter what it was she believed. He had made her furiously angry the one time on Voyager when he had fought against her wishes to allow her to live when honor dictated he let her die. His argument then was still what he was following. He hoped again, like a flash, that if she would have wanted him to do that, and he hadn't, that she could forgive him.

He shook off the morbid thoughts, the self-reproach. He was headed for the mess hall and another night of eating their evening repast in the company of the crew, rather than detach himself from them. He forgave himself for the brief failure, knowing at least factually, his thought had been correct. If B'Elanna were here, which was impossible because if she were suddenly alright again, he would be with her and not hundreds of light years away on a starship, she would have already figured out the mystery about the tachyon radiation. She was the best engineer he had ever worked with, one of the smartest people he had ever known. There was no problem they had ever encountered, in either quadrant, that she hadn't found a way to solve.

He felt his blood run cold as the thought invaded his mind, the moment before he was due to walk through the doors to the mess hall. Maybe that was part of the plan. It was as if someone else had whispered those words in his ear, though it was his own voice in his head.

}LS{

"Live long and prosper!" Tom and Harry said in unison, both of them slightly snickering, as they finished telling the tale of practical jokes the two of them had played on Tuvok while they were on Voyager in the Delta Quadrant. They had both told the story before, at a crew dinner, once Tuvok had been reinstated as a Lieutenant Commander, after Janeway had demoted him early in their voyage for insubordination.

The junior officers seated around the table with them, all pilots, were hesitantly laughing along with the comical story. Hirae and Gim were there, but there were also two other pilots, both human, Ensigns Ani Patel and Andy Sakazaki.

"I can just picture the look on Commander Tuvok's face," Patel giggled. "He was the most serious instructor we had at the Academy by leaps and bounds."

"'Your argument is flawed and illogical,'" Sakazaki mimicked, making a very good approximation of Tuvok's flatly inflected tone. "'However,'' he added, stressing the older Vulcan's favorite word both Harry and Tom knew well, "'It does display creative thinking, which is necessary for any decent Starfleet security officer to have.'"

Harry picked up where the story had left off, recounting stories of playing kal-toh with the chief tactical officer for years during their voyage. Tom was only partially listening, suddenly pulled back roughly into the memory of the night of that dinner they had been recounting.

It had been day three of Tom and B'Elanna avoiding each other after they had almost asphyxiated in space…prompting B'Elanna to admit that she loved him. He had been nervously participating in that roasting of Tuvok, feeling her eyes on him from across the table, though every time he flicked his eyes over to try and make eye contact with her, she purposely looked away. She had tried to duck out, but he had chased her out into the corridor, telling her they needed to talk…that they couldn't keep avoiding each other. She had agreed.

He had kept Harry's advice in his head, but he still gave her a pass, a way out, telling her they had been moments from death and it was ok if she didn't really mean what she said. At last, she had admitted the truth, and affirmed it to him again, even though he hadn't told her he reciprocated her feelings, even when she told him she didn't expect him to…and then he'd kissed her…and she kissed him back.

The Doctor had interrupted, babbling about duty shifts in Sick Bay due to Kes' recent departure. He had yes-ed his way out of the conversation, then hurried to catch B'Elanna in her quarters. You know that I do, right? He had asked her once she let him in.

You do what? She had asked in reply, whispering due to her near breathless state, so long removed from the kiss, but still full of longing for him.

He still didn't answer with the words in his head… Love you. Instead, he had spent almost the whole night showing her, passionately twisted with her beneath her sheets for hours and hours as they'd made love for the first time.

"Captain?"

That was Hirae, breaking into his reverie, inappropriate and intimate recollections he couldn't clear from his mind, even in his present mixed company. "I'm sorry, Ensign. Just a bit of daydreaming," he murmured distractedly. Tom saw the concern flash in Harry's eyes. Harry was well aware of what had happened after Tuvok's dinner back then. Did he suspect what Tom may have been thinking about?

"She asked when was the last time you saw Tuvok," Harry added gently.

"Oh…" he sighed, thinking. "It must have been back in May, when I went to Earth to make the quarterly report for the Admirals at Headquarters…back when we were running the Design Lab. He lives in San Francisco with his wife. He has since he took the position at Starfleet Academy once Voyager returned."

No one seated at the table had served on Starbase 47 with them. Harry was the one who paled slightly, but he didn't say anything. Tuvok had attended Miral's funeral…part of the missing gap of time in Tom's memory. Harry knew about the peculiarity and how it related to their current mission and issues. Tom had known Harry for a long time, and he saw the look immediately, understanding why right away.

Tachyon radiation…Tom couldn't keep it from shuffling through his thoughts. Cloaked ships…and evidence of time displacement. Those were the key factors that would make sense for tachyon radiation, perhaps even the variant that they were dealing with now that didn't match the specific phase variance of any previously encountered evidence of that radiation.

Tom had been over Archer's logs and mission details backwards and forwards. There had been no way to detect tachyon radiation in 2153. That was over 200 years ago. Archer had encountered crudely cloaked Romulan mines in 2152…so they had at least been aware that cloaking was possible, even if they'd had no way to detect it. As he recalled, the Enterprise had been badly damaged after colliding with that cloaked mine.

Tom thought quickly to the ghost left behind inside the anomaly. Archer had found the pod in 2153 and tractored it out. The ship couldn't transverse the anomaly due to the radiation and hydrogen sulfide, but the pod was plainly seen. Tom also knew the sphere builders had some sort of temporal technology that allowed them to see alternate timelines–Janeway had told him that. He felt the thoughts in his mind shift, as something seemed to finally make sense.

The sphere builders had acquired the technology required to cloak the spheres, even in 2153. The pod, the one they had collided with inside the anomaly, had been cloaked. What if all of the readings from Starbase 47 were evidence of cloaking? Aaron had said they had never detected a ship back then. But what if it hadn't been a ship at all? What if the sphere builders themselves were somehow interfering in normal space? What if they had found a way to leave their realm?

Aaron and B'Elanna…

"Captain? Is everything alright?" Gim asked, breaking into his second, more desperate reverie.

Charged, Tom pushed himself to his feet. "I'm sorry…I…will you excuse me?" he added hurriedly, then quickly rushed to leave the mess hall. His dinner companions exchanged curious looks, but Harry's slight shrug acted as a way to ease the stress, and no one else questioned it.

Tom was on his way to Sick Bay with a head full of questions for Conlin when he was paged. "Bridge to the Captain," Lt. Commander Baytard said over the comm.

"Go ahead, Commander," Tom said as he tapped his badge.

"We're picking up a distress call on long-range sensors. It's spotty…and we can't pinpoint it, Sir," Baytard responded.

"I'm on my way, Commander," he said in reply.

}LS{

"Report," Tom said crisply as he strode through the open doors of the turbolift and onto the bridge.

"This is what we heard, Sir," Baytard explained, motioning with his hand in the air for the conn officer to playback the transmission.

"...thrusters have failed…inertial dampers are offline…repeat…emergency landing…"

The words were patchy, interspersed with sharp bursts of static, sounding like the transmission was fading at long range, gradually getting farther away from the Yeager. The pilot was female, speaking Federation standard without a universal translator.

"Can you triangulate the location of the transmission?" he asked urgently, trying to shake the strange sensation that the voice on the call sounded familiar. It was haunting him, and he found himself almost asking Baytard to replay it…not because he thought he could get further information, but because…he merely wanted to hear the sound again. He couldn't fathom why…and it was disconcerting.

"I'm detecting an ion trail…spotty, just like the transmission. But there's a class M planet within one light year…with almost twenty moons, some of which are possible of sustaining life," Ensign Granger replied from the con station.

"Set a course, Ensign," Tom ordered tightly. "Send a reply that we are responding on all frequencies. I don't know if she'll receive it, but we can still try."

"Aye, Sir," came the brisk reply.

They arrived in a little over 40 minutes.

"This is Galada IV, Captain," Granger called. Tom recalled Galada IV was the only planet in the system that was inhabited. They were trade partners with the Federation, having experienced first contact in 2154 during Archer's first five year mission, before the Romulan War. It had been damage incurred on their world, caught in the crossfire between Starfleet and the Romulans, that had made them leery of outsiders. Their world was rich in natural resources, so trade was beneficial, but a world the Federation had been wooing ever since.

"Any reply? Any signs of the craft?" Tom asked.

"The ion trail points to the largest natural satellite, Sir," Granger explained. "I'm detecting wreckage on the surface…largely intact, Captain. The metallic alloy composition of the hull is Federation, but I'm not reading any craft designation…and no response on normal Starfleet channels."

"Lifesigns?" Tom asked anxiously.

"The moon is uninhabited," Granger said, then directed his attention to the scanner again. "One lifesign, Captain," he explained, then swallowed a gasp before he spoke again. "Klingon, Sir." He hadn't completely masked the wonder in his tone.

Tom was on his feet, electrified with that strange information. The hair on the back of his neck rose and a shiver traveled down his spine. A Klingon piloting a Federation craft? In 2387, there were only ten Klingons, both of pure and mixed blood, who had ever served or were currently serving in Starfleet, including his wife, whose commission had been indefinitely suspended due to her disability. He was hyper focusing, listening to the sound of the distress call in his head, rolling those few words over and over in his mind, searching for the words he knew were in his memory…why she sounded so familiar to him.

"Pablo, you have the bridge," Tom said to him hurriedly. "Dr. Conlin and Commander Kim, please report to Transporter Room One," Tom added, tapping his combadge as he moved toward the turbolift. Tom saw the curious look Pablo gave him over his shoulder as he turned, just before the turbolift doors swished closed. Tom knew he had been about to question why the captain and the first officer were taking part in an away mission, with the CMO no less. It wasn't standard procedure, but, not unheard of, and not something he even thought to question, once he saw the determined look on his captain's face.

Harry arrived in the Transporter Room only a split second after Tom. "You mind telling me what the hell this is?" Harry demanded immediately.

"A tricorder and a phaser," Tom shot back, holding each instrument out for Harry to see.

"You know what I mean. What's the purpose of such a top-heavy away team? For a shuttle crash," Harry finished. Harry wasn't on the bridge, and only had general information prior to beaming down.

"A female Klingon pilot in an unknown Federation-designed craft," Tom said quickly, the words running together in his haste. Harry's eyes widened in shock, but he remained silent. "Her voice…is…bothering me," Tom mumbled, unable to put the feeling he had been having into words.

"O…kay," Harry replied, curious but not questioning out loud. Something was cranking inside his friend's head. In those situations, he had learned it was best to let them work themselves out in silence. Anything else he would have added stayed inside his mouth as Conlin breezed into the room, completing the team complement.

"Sir?" was all Conlin added, realizing the unique situation he had just been placed into.

"The moon is class L," Tom stated, completely ignoring Conlin's concern. They were all appropriately dressed in their standard issue outerwear, as the surface temperature was below optimal for comfort. He knew that colder temperatures were less tolerable to Klingons than humans in general circumstances, which was a concern now. "Scanners only detected vegetation on the surface. There also appears to be some form of nucleonic particles in the atmosphere that will make scanning on the ground challenging. Make sure your tricorder is adjusted. The one lifesign we detected is not in the same location as the wreckage."

He hopped up onto the transporter pad, turned to face the operator, and waited for his team to move into position behind him. "Energize," he ordered the transporter operator.

The comfortably familiar neutral gray of the transporter room slowly dissolved around them, bit by bit replaced by an alien landscape. When the effect subsided, he surveyed their surroundings. Immediately, Tom felt a sense of deja vu. The surface of this moon was eerily similar to the barren planet where the Kazon had marooned all of Voyager's crew minus him, Suder, and the Doctor, once they had seized the ship with the help of Seska, Chakotay's Cardassian spy crewmate. Tom's exposure to the planet had been minimal, just a brief visit after he had landed Voyager on the surface when he had arrived to rescue the crew. He glanced at Harry, seeing the same thoughts as they played out across his friend's face, for Harry had been with the rest of the crew, stranded there for days.

I can't believe you're alive, Harry had gushed, once they had seen each other again. Tom had been in the process of making a joke to ease that rush of emotion he felt, knowing how heroic everyone thought he was, when he had only been doing what needed to be done. Any words he would have said had died in his throat when B'Elanna, without saying a word, squeezed him in a hug that made it almost painful to breathe, but only for a second, and then walked away. She missed you too, but she will never admit it, Harry had teased…

Tom shook off the memories, forcing himself to focus, at the same time he was wondering why all of a sudden he kept getting reminded, distracted, by the past. "I'm reading the shuttle and the automated distress beacon…just over that crest, about 0.2 kilometers east," he said, holding his tricorder out in front as he scanned. He moved forward, tilting his head ever so slightly to indicate they were following.

The particles in the atmosphere that had been detected from orbit were sparsely distributed, he noted. Where they were, the interference was minimal, although the readings got increasingly scrambled at greater distances. The sky was pale gray, looking vaguely like an overcast sky on Earth, but it wasn't due to cloud cover, just the pattern of light from the distant sun. The gravelly ground crunched as they walked and left a fine white particulate on their boots. What vegetation they could see was visibly at least similar to lichen, moss, and dry tundra-like brush.

The terrain sloped upward as they walked. Slightly out of breath from the steep climb, they paused at the top of the rocky crest. The crashed shuttle was in plain sight, perched on a pile of rocks and not the smoother ground that separated where they stood from the crash site. If the pilot had any control whatsoever, she would have aimed for the largest patch of level ground she could find. Tilted at an angle on the rocks like a boat run ashore told him the pilot had no control. Still, the craft looked relatively intact for such a landing, where heavy damage to the fuselage would have been expected.

He approached the craft and started making detailed scans as Harry did the same. "This is a Class Two. They decommissioned the last of this type of shuttle five years ago," Harry explained.

The insignia on the side of the shuttle was blackened and unreadable, which would have told them more information, like the starship for which the shuttle had been a complement, or call numbers that matched its mothership. It was Class Two, Tom thought, but it just didn't look right. The nacelles, perfectly intact, were oriented higher than on any Class Two shuttle he had ever seen. "This ship isn't that old," he told them, scanning the readings on his tricorder. "They were decommissioned in 2382 because the newest models of them were still over ten years old in 2382. The flight chronometer reads this ship is only four years old."

The hatch was open and Tom leaned inside, curious but reading no lifesigns. The situation got stranger. The control panel in the craft was configured unusually compared to anything he remembered in the past. If he thought about it, it appeared to be almost an amalgamation of the standard Starfleet panel on which he had learned to pilot and a primitive version of the controls he had designed on the first Delta Flyer, the one destroyed by the Borg. "Have you ever seen anything like this?" Tom asked Harry.

Behind him, Harry spoke. "It's not modified, if that's what you mean. The panel is configured differently than standard, but all of the hardware is original Starfleet issue. Is this some type of prototype?" he asked, almost to himself.

"I would say that…if I didn't know literally every prototype Starfleet has considered in the past seven years came out of the lab at Starbase 47. We never designed anything remotely like this. In fact, we designed the replacement for the Class Two," Tom explained. The design had been accepted only a month after Aaron had started treatment for his substance abuse issues. It had been such a major accomplishment for his first officer, considering the obstacles he had overcome to get to that point.

"There's also a…slight phase variation, Tom. It doesn't make sense. Maybe it's the interference from the nucleonic particles. Are you reading that?" Harry asked.

"Roger that," Tom muttered, most of his attention still riveted on the bizarre configuration of the control panel.

"This is blood, Captain," Conlin stated as he scanned over the shattered components in front of the seat. "From the pilot. This is the blood of a Klingon female," he explained. His brow furrowed as he studied the readout on the tricorder screen. "Although, it appears, she has human DNA as well," Conlin offered.

"What?" Tom exclaimed, almost dropping his tricorder as his shock registered. There were ten Klingons associated with Starfleet in any way. There were only two who weren't full blooded Klingons, and B'Elanna was one of them. It just didn't make any sense.

"I'm detecting that phase variance you mentioned, Commander," Conlin added. "I can't tell if it matches the readings you're getting from the shuttle."

"Why would she leave the shuttle?" Tom asked as he wondered. "The damage is minimal. Only about an hour or so of repairs could make this space worthy again."

"She's injured," Harry reminded him. "If she hit her head, maybe she's disoriented."

"If that's the case, then we need to find her, ASAP. If she is disoriented, she may not be properly equipped to deal with the atmospheric conditions. On foot, at most, the area to search is about a kilometer. Let's spread out," Tom told them. She was injured, yes, but her presence, her very existence, was questionable. And he wanted answers.