THE ONLIES

Doppelgänger Orbit
USS Enterprise (NCC-1701)
Stardate 2261.24

- 1900 hours -

The guest quarters in Compartment 102 were usually set aside for civilian guests, the sort of passengers and evacuees who needed to be brought aboard as something less than crew but more than cargo. Mainly for this reason, C102 didn't have the large spacious atriums of the other habitat compartments, or even its port-side counterpart, VIP suites in Compartment 114. It was a much more traditional habitation space, essentially a conglomeration of airtight cylinders packed together in an array, joined by common access tunnels through which the Enterprise's familiar corridors joined the different modules and the half-dozen two-person suites crammed into each of them. Three weeks earlier, Miri had helped arrange her fellow refugees - who sill called themselves "the Onlies" - into something of a working order not too different from where they had been when they were still the ad hoc crew of her father's fishing boat. That all twenty four of them could fit into just two modules - along a single length of corridor with pressure doors at both ends - was both convenient and fortunate, since most of the children didn't completely trust their saviors after all.

Actually, neither did Miri. Certainly she had no doubt of their intentions, in fact she was still half convinced that this was a ship of angels sent by God just to deliver them to paradise. What she doubted was their understanding of the situation at hand, and their ability to predict everything that might go wrong with their current mission. It may have been a vibe she'd picked up from the senior officers, or maybe just experience from her own struggle for survival and all the strange things that seemed to go wrong with her world. But even with all their technology and knowledge, the Enterprise's crew was only human, and they no more understood what was happening to her world than she did.

So Leila and Nabi set up defenses. Quietly, discretely, and always out of sight of the security officers who guarded this length of corridor. Miri used her status as a Ensign-in-training to get access to the cargo bay, and from there she'd managed to recover most of their weapons, plus a few other goodies that Lieutenant York's people had found. Using these, Ramsi and Jasmine had managed to rig the doors of all twelve quarters with old clusterbombs and a crude but reliable fuse that could be armed and disarmed with a pull string or a switch, just in case someone decided to enter who didn't believe in knocking. Sami and The Other Jasmine drew up a patrol schedule, so at any given time at least six of the children were stationed in the corridor, two at each junction just beyond the pressure door armed with well-hidden Steyer guns and two at the midpoint with RPKs. Then during Spock's training seminar she learned more about the actual layout of the ship, and with its double-hulled configuration the fact that there was nothing beyond the walls of the corridor but vacuum and forcefields; at that point, Miri revised their defense plans, planning escape routes through the access tubes and providing six of the Onlies - one for each patrol watch - with the access codes for the emergency bulkheads, and then spent the better part of the next week teaching her crew how to use the space suits.

Since then, the Onlies had learned most of the safety and auxiliary systems of their little slice of the ship, and except for occasional (and predictable) visits from Doctor Ayash, were mostly left to their own devices for the better part of the month. That their little section of the corridor was technically a pair of completely independent modules with their own battery and life support systems (if only for emergency use) was not lost on them, and by now they had come to consider this part of the Enterprise to be already their space ship. And Peter the Rabbit had already sent out feelers and discovered what the most acceptable name for their ship would be. "We should call it Al-Kahf!"

Miri looked at him surprised and amazed, as if he'd suddenly grown a feathers and a second pair of arms. "Are you serious?"

"Absolutely!" Peter the Rabbit sat down behind the short little desk in the two-bunk cabin he'd shared with The Other Jasmine for most of the month. Miri couldn't remember what she came in here to talk with him about, she'd only found him in here bouncing around, totally excited for some reason when he suddenly announced his good news. "It totally fits what we're going through right now, don't you think?"

Miri thought about it, and in a vague sense she figured he was right. On the other hand, Peter the Rabbit - whatever his real name was, nobody could remember anymore - was the only one of the Onlies who might actually pass for religious, unlike Miri, who never got much farther than a vague half-remembrance of what Al-Kahf was actually about. "Weren't there only seven sleepers in the cave?"

"That's not the point. The thing is, they fell asleep in the cave and they didn't wake up for three hundred years. When they finally came out again, there was nobody left to persecute them."

"Right..."

"Oh, and then there's the part about the Green One."

Miri squinted at him.

"Don't you remember?"

"Why would I? I haven't seen a Quran in six years."

Peter the Rabbit rolled his eyes. "He's that crazy ancient prophet that taught Moses, and then Mohammed taught him."

"Oh, I get it." Miri smiled, "You're thinking we can teach these Starfleet guys a thing or two."

Peter the Rabbit flashed a big toothy grin and nodded.

"You're insane, you know that? These people are three times your age and most of them have been to college. You didn't even finish kindergarten."

"Yeah, but what do they know about Earth? Nothing, that's what. They've only seen a few parts of it and they haven't seen what we've seen. Plus, we still haven't told them about the dreams."

Miri stared at him for a moment, grappling with the implications of this. "What difference does that make? They're just dreams."

"They're premonitions."

"No they're not. Obviously not since none of the things we dreamed about are ever going to happen. I mean, think about this, we're already on a space ship right now, and this ship looks nothing like the one from the dream. And besides only seven of us in this entire group even have..." it occurred to her now what Peter was getting at. She wasn't sure even he realized what an odd coincidence it was until just this minute, how the fates just seemed to line up to put it all together. "How does that verse go again?"

Peter the Rabbit actually had the page up on his monitor - and so ended the mystery of his sudden scriptural recall - and read the passage breezily, "You would have seen the sun rise and set, from the right side to the left, while they lay in the open space in the middle of the Cave. You would have thought they were awake, while they were asleep, and We turned them on their right and on their left sides: their dog stretching forth his two fore-legs on the threshold. If you had come up on to them then, you would have turned back and fled, you'd be filled with terror from the sight of them. Such as they were, we roused them from their sleep, that they might question each other. Said one of them, "How long have we been here?" They said, "We have stayed perhaps, a day, or part of a day." But in the end they all decided, "God alone knows how long we've been sleeping in this cave..."

Miri skimmed a few verses down, reading the part she'd been looking for all along, "And they'd stayed in their cave for three hundred years, some say nine more."

At this point, Peter the Rabbit looked at Miri with an idea, "Did you know Mister Spock thinks our planet is only a hundred sixty years old?"

"He may be right. Remember all that business a few years ago about the second moon?"

"My dad said that was a miracle. The moon split in half..."

"But they were both complete moons. Totally round. How could that just happen like that?"

"God works in mysterious w-"

"We're on a space ship, Peter. Be serious."

Peter the Rabbit groaned, "How should I know? I've just finally figured out how to use this stupid computer."

"Never mind..." the thought was still bothering her, though. At the risk of trying her friend's already strained patience, she asked, "Peter, what if... you know, the things we remember from way long ago, before the mutations started... what if none of those things actually happened?"

He looked up at her for a moment, processed the question carefully. Then failing that completely, he asked, "Huh?

An electronic chirp from Miri's communicator put this tortured conversation out of its misery. She answered it as promptly as she'd been taught to, and immediately heard Lieutenant Uhura's voice ordering, "Ensign Hallab, report to Transporter Room One. Bring your field jacket and hand phaser."

Miri flinched, "Lieutenant, I haven't been issued a field jacket. Or a phaser."

"See the Quartermaster on the way there. Compartment One Oh Four, Deck Five."

"I'm on my way. Hallab out." snapping the communicator shut, Miri leaned down and patted Peter the Rabbit on the shoulder.

"Hey Miri," he said, responding to her touch, "Do you ever get this feeling... like... like there's something really important we were supposed to remember?"

"All the time." She marched right out of his cabin - pausing, naturally, to disarm the small antipersonnel bomb mounted to the door - and then greeted the guards in the corridor on her way to the turbolift. The Onlies could hold down the fort while she was gone, she'd taught them well and prepared them even better. Some of them, she knew in the back of her mind, were uniquely qualified for the job, trustworthy in ways that went beyond their abilities or even their experiences. Trustworthy in ways that Starfleet was trustworthy.

"Are they really just dreams?" she wondered as the turbolift quickly deposited her in the corridor near the Enterprise's quartermaster. For the millionth time, she dismissed it as just a fantasy or a half-remembered book from somewhere; fiction, certainly, nothing more. Even if the Americans did have a space ship named Calypso, she was the last person in the world they would ever let near it.