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Chapter 22

Jonathan Archer lifted his fork and listlessly prodded the contents of his plate. Eggs Benedict. It had always been his favorite breakfast, and yet, for some reason the sumptuous egg-covered muffin didn't seem quite as alluring as usual. Even the smell of Chef's sauce hollandaise wasn't the same. He poked the muffin again and almost wrinkled his nose at the way the poached egg wobbled on its perch. Chef would blow a blood vessel if he knew that the Captain was treating one of his masterpieces with such disrespect, yet Jon knew that he would not be able to finish his breakfast today. There wasn't even a potted plant in which he could hide the remains of his meal, so he would just have to bite the bullet and face Chef's offended pride. Not something to look forward to; it wouldn't be the first dish he sent back untouched, and Chef didn't take kindly to that sort of thing. His cuisine was supposed to keep up the morale on board and if the crew refused to eat, Chef concluded that he was failing his duties. If the Captain refused to eat, it was the ultimate insult, the one thing that could not be ignored. In that respect, the temperamental ruler of Enterprise's galley was almost worse than her Armory Officer. Former Armory Officer.

Jon laid his fork aside and leaned back in his chair. Malcolm hadn't touched his Eggs Benedict either, the time Jonathan had invited the young Lieutenant for breakfast. Knowing that Malcolm would feel uncomfortable, Jonathan had considered asking Chef to prepare a full English breakfast, complete with fried tomatoes and baked beans, but eventually he had dismissed the idea. Unlike Trip, Malcolm didn't seem like the kind of person who would be put at ease by "a little bit of home" on the breakfast table. Or by most things, come to think of it. It had taken a near-fatal encounter with a Romulan mine to get a full sentence out of the man that wasn't in some way related to his duties. Of course, he might have liked the English breakfast, after all. Jon would never know for sure. The chance to find out more about his reticent Chief of Security was gone, as was Jonathan's best friend. He had never realized how dull meal times could get, now that Trip was no longer there to talk, joke and gobble up most of the food. In fact, they were so boring that there were times when Jon no longer bothered to sit down in his mess. Eating in his quarters with a padd propped against his glass had become a regular occurrence. Jon liked T'Pol's company, but she wasn't Trip. She never smiled, for one thing.

Stop it, he told himself and resolutely picked up his fork again. He didn't want to take a stroll down that particular side street of Memory Lane yet again. His breakfast was growing cold, and although it was a Captain's privilege to keep his own duty roster, Jon didn't want to be late for the alpha shift. It was a policy he had kept to from his very first day on Enterprise, remembering only too well how he had disliked superiors who took advantage of the prerogatives of rank. Just like Trip, who had more than once shot his mouth off with both Starfleet's top brass and the Vulcans.

It's a small miracle that none of them threw a monkey-wrench into things when he was made Chief Engineer. Jon found himself grinning a little. Trip might seem harmless and friendly enough, but his humor could be stingingly sharp when he was provoked.

He looked down at his plate and dropped his fork with a resigned sigh. Next time he would take his food back to his quarters again, where he could work on his reports and keep his mind from straying to places where he didn't want to go. Like the memorial service two months ago, the two empty coffins that were now drifting somewhere in the cold emptiness of space. Or the fact that every time he went into Engineering, he expected to hear a Southern drawl and found himself confronted with Commander Narayan's soft Indian accent instead. Or that every time he turned on the bridge to ask Malcolm for an analysis, there would be Lieutenant Inga Carlsson smiling at him, a smile that made Travis go slightly mooney-eyed but which only reminded Jon of the changes that had taken place. The fact that two of his friends were just... gone.

Stop it. He pushed his plate aside, giving up all hopes that he would convince himself to eat his breakfast today. He didn't want to think of the day four months ago, when Trip and Malcolm had failed to show up for duty. When Security had called him to let him know that their quarters were empty and that they were nowhere on the ship.

Nowhere on the ship? That's impossible.

Sorry, sir, but there's not a trace of them on the internal scans we ran.

How could two people just disappear? That kind of thing didn't happen, and it wasn't the kind of thing people would accept. The crew, himself included, hadn't accepted it for a long time. They had searched in the most unlikely places, had scanned the area of space again and again, had run internal scans until T'Pol stated that it was illogical to conduct the same procedure a forty-second time when there was obviously no result. Jon had turned Trip's quarters inside out in search of a message or a sign that something had happened, and after a short hesitation had done the same with Malcolm's, yet there had been nothing. It was as if Malcolm Reed and Charles Tucker III had never existed. It was what he had told the Tuckers when he had eventually called them, and for the first time ever, Susan Tucker had yelled at him, telling him to go find her son, right now. The Reeds hadn't yelled, had only sat there in stony-faced silence until he was finished. Then, Malcolm's father had coldly remarked that he had never expected any better of Starfleet and had cut the connection. Three hours later, Mary Reed had called Jon to apologize for her husband. "It's what he does when he's worried out of his mind," she had said, her eyes filling with tears. "You're going to do all you can, right?"

He had. After T'Pol had come up with her theory about a technologically advanced species abducting the two officers, Jon had spent hours persuading the Vulcans to give him "classified information" about the scan traces various alien technologies left behind. In the end, the High Command had been surprisingly helpful, but once again T'Pol's scans had revealed nothing. He had fought with Starfleet Command, who, after two months, had been reluctant to let him continue the search. It was Admiral Forrest himself who eventually ordered him to hold a memorial service. "You need some sort of closure, Jon. Your crew does, too. And Starfleet needs its flagship."

So, Lieutenant Carlsson and Commander Narayan had come aboard, and Jon had done his damnedest not to make them feel unwelcome. And they did a good job, even though deep down Jon knew that they could never replace the two men he had originally picked for their positions. No one could.

Will you stop it already. Shaking his head, he got up and walked over to the window. He was beginning to sound like a stuck record, telling himself the same thing over and over again. In fact, his thoughts had been chasing their own tail for the last sixteen weeks. How could two men simply be gone, leaving only two rumpled bunks behind? Once or twice, Jon had caught himself thinking that it would be easier if the empty torpedo casings they had released into space had carried two bodies instead of the good-bye notes and tokens the crew had collected. Closure, Forrest had called it. Jon smiled a little, but there was no humor in it. Yeah, right.

The door opened, but Jon didn't turn away from the window. Maybe the steward would take pity on his Captain and would dispose of the untouched eggs before Chef saw them, maybe not. In any case, Jon didn't want to meet the man's questioning eyes when he picked up the full plate.

"You didn't have much of an appetite, did you?"

At that, Jon's head snapped around. He was sure that he was mistaken, that his mind was playing tricks on him. Lack of sleep will do it to you.

The person standing there holding his plate of cold Eggs Benedict was obviously not a figment of his sleep-deprived mind, though. He looked as inconspicuous as always; a thin, average-looking man in a crewman's uniform, his dark hair combed back so that his long forehead looked even higher. The only thing that was different about him were the dark circles under his eyes.

"Daniels." Jon took a step towards him, but the other man raised a hand.

"Please, Captain. I would really appreciate it if we could keep this quiet."

"What are you doing here?"

Daniels smiled a little, an expression that turned out rather pinched. "Clearing your table," he said, lifting up the plate. "Although it seems that Chef needn't have gone to the effort."

Jon didn't even smile. "What do you want?"

If there was even the slightest chance that this was about Trip and Malcolm, then he didn't intend to waste time with formalities.

Daniels sighed and set the plate aside. "May I, Captain?"

Jon nodded, sat down again and indicated one of the chairs. "Please," he said curtly.

Daniels sat down, a little too stiffly to be comfortable. Just like Malcolm when he first came here, Jon thought, then pushed the memory aside.

Daniels folded his hands on the table. "Captain, there are several things we'll have to discuss. First, though, I'm sure you'll be pleased to hear that your officers are alive."

Jon stared at him, then, very slowly, leaned back in his chair. His mouth was suddenly quite dry and he had to clear his throat before he could speak. "Are you... are you sure?"

Daniels smiled his tense smile. "Yes Captain. They're alive, and we'll do our best to keep it that way."

Jon's voice was still a little unsteady as he answered, and it was all he could do to keep himself from grinning like a madman. Trip and Malcolm were alive. "Where are they?"

"On Earth," Daniels replied. "It's not so much a question of location, though."

"Time travel?" Jon asked. His sudden moment of euphoria was rapidly replaced by worry. Daniels' expression didn't bode well.

"Yes," he said simply. "I'm afraid we have quite a problem, Captain."

Jon folded his hands and rested them on the table top, unconsciously mimicking Daniels' gesture. "Explain."

Daniels sighed. "I'm not authorized to reveal all of the details, Captain, which I'm sure you'll understand. Suffice it to say that there has been an unfortunate development and that my superiors are currently faced with a temporal crisis of a magnitude we have never encountered before."

"A crisis?" Jon repeated. He had felt anger stir within him when Daniels mentioned the classified "details", and the feeling grew stronger the longer he listened, mingling with worry. "I want to know what happened to my officers."

"As I said, there was an unfortunate... incident." Daniels glanced at the window. "A group of rebels from my time managed to seize control of our headquarters. Their belief, if you want to call it that, is that my organization has desecrated the timeline beyond all hope of repair by subjecting it to human influence. They are convinced that it is their destination to create an entirely new timeline, a fresh start, so to say, and sacrifice the old one for the greater good of mankind. They had already done a great amount of damage when our troops finally subdued them."

Jon knew better than to ask about the troops and the "subduing" of the rebels. "What did the rebels do?"

Daniels looked back at him. "They abducted people from all over the timeline, erased their memories and abandoned them in a different place in time. They hoped that the temporal disturbances those people were bound to create would be enough to make the entire timeline collapse."

"But it didn't."

"No." There was a small tremor in Daniels' voice, which was a first. Jon had never seen the man look anything but calm and confident. "If you believe in any gods, you should be thanking them on your knees that it didn't."

"Why my officers, though?" Jon wanted to know. "Why would they pick Trip and Malcolm?"

"The rebels chose "key figures" in the timeline, often people who have in some way been involved in time travel before," Daniels replied. "That way they hoped to create the most damage. It's not surprising that they picked crewmembers of Earth's very first Warp 5 ship."

Jon slowly shook his head. "Probably not. So where in the timeline are they?"

Daniels sighed. "That's another problem, Captain. The rebels are amateurs, they didn't really understand how the timeline works and how to control it. They simply... threw their victims into the temporal vortex, without knowing at which point in time they would end up."

Jon's heart sank. "So you don't know where the victims are?"

"We're working on it, Captain. We've restored the timeline to a point where we can start checking it for disturbances and thus locate the victims. Of course, we have to wait until the victims actually create a disturbance before we can pinpoint their position in time. Fortunately most of them show up sooner or later. Socrates, for example, was chased through the streets of London by an angry Norman mob, somewhere around the 11th century. A little girl was trampled to death in the process, which is how we discovered him and brought him back to his own time."

Jon didn't even try to picture the scene Daniels described. "Are you saying that you've found out where Trip and Malcolm ended up?"

Daniels nodded. "Yes, we have. We've located them in North America, in the year 2048. It seems..." He hesitated, and Jon leaned forward.

"What is it?"

Daniels' eyes had returned to the window. "It seems that they somehow caused the death of a man called Paul Lendon. It didn't create too much of a disturbance in the timeline, only a small ripple, but enough for us to pinpoint their temporal coordinates."

Jon frowned. "You mean, they killed this man?"

"We don't know that, Captain," Daniels replied. "It might have been an accident. We don't know the circumstances."

Jon sensed that Daniels wasn't being quite honest, but he didn't press the point. Details, even the disturbing ones, could wait until later. "Do you know how long they've been in that time before this incident happened?"

Daniels shook his head. "No, Captain, I'm afraid not. Some of the victims we rescued had been there for only a few days, some for several years. It's only when they create a large enough disturbance that we can locate their position."

"They've been gone for four months..."

"Time is not always a linear constant, Captain. It can be fairly unpredictable. Maybe your officers were there for approximately four months, maybe more, maybe less. All we know for sure is where they can be found at the point of Lendon's death."

Jon nodded. "What do we do now?"

Daniels smiled thinly. "You, Captain, aren't required to do anything. It's my job to travel to the temporal coordinates where your officers were located, prevent Lendon's death and return Tucker and Reed to your time. The reason why we informed you at all is that you'll have to take care of the treatment."

"Treatment?" Jon repeated. "What do you mean?"

Daniels' smile vanished. "The rebels submitted their victims to a fairly crude procedure to erase their memories. My organization has developed a method to treat the amnesia. I will leave all the necessary instructions with your doctor."

Jon nodded slowly. "That sounds like a plan."

Daniels seemed relieved. "I'm glad you say so, Captain. You wouldn't believe the trouble some of our operatives had returning the victims to their own time and finding explanations for their initial disorientation." He shook his head. "One of them was almost burned as a witch when she administered the treatment."

Again, Jon didn't even try to wrap his mind around the fact that Daniels was talking about actual occurrences. "There's one thing, though."

Daniels looked at him. "What's that, Captain?"

Jon got up from his chair. "I'm coming with you."

Daniels stared at him, then he got to his feet as well. "You can't, Captain. That's impossible. My superiors would never-"

"Your superiors," Jon interrupted, "are in no position to give me orders. You let a bunch of fanatics fool around in your headquarters and play havoc with the timeline. My officers are my responsibility, and I'm going to make sure they get back safe and sound."

Daniels' mouth had become a thin line. "Captain, I can't take you along. It would be too dangerous."

Jon took a deep breath, then let it out again. There was a turmoil of emotions within him, most of them negative and directed towards Daniels and his superiors, who seemed to have no qualms at all when it came to pushing people around the timeline like pawns in a game. Giving the man a piece of his mind would get him nowhere, though. "Look, Daniels... I know my officers. They're not going to come peacefully, if you know what I mean. I could be of help in that department."

"I'm sure I can handle them, Captain."

Jon gritted his teeth before he said the word. "Please, Daniels."

The man gave him a long look, then let out a sigh. "You're not going to change your mind, are you?"

"No," Jon said. He didn't say that he would also never trust Daniels, his superiors, or anyone related to the Temporal Cold War. These people had power he admittedly didn't comprehend, and yet they seemed frighteningly human in their approach; bungling their way through, keeping the timeline together with duct tape and a prayer. It was not an idea he would ever get used to.

Daniels sighed again. "Well, Captain, in that case, we don't have any time to waste."

"No," Jon said quietly. "We don't."

TBC...

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