Yes You Are a Commander Now

Posted on Sun Jan 16, 2022 @ 7:09am by Lieutenant Commander Elli-Navine & Captain Toron Pax

Mission: S2 M3 Stitch in Time
Location: USS Potemkin, Captain's Ready Room
Timeline: Following TBR#020
Tags: TBR#020

Pax was still unsure what had happened. In his decades in the fleet he had been 'forced' to deal with agents of the DTI on more than one occasion. It had always come out the same way, a stern talking to, a threat of demotion and a lengthy interview by two DTI operatives to cover every aspect of the incursion. To have a stern talking to and almost a 'atta boy' from the Admiral was most unexpected. Sure they had saved billions of people from death but they had done so but changing their history... he sighed well not really changing their history for it seemed as though they had always meant to have done it and it was impossible to know. He hated Temporal Mechanics, he didn't know an engineer who didn't.

His door chimed.

"Come in Elli" he said, he knew it was her; it couldn't be anyone else after the bomb he dropped by promoting her without running it past her first. This was bound to be entertaining at the least.

Elli stood in the doorway for a moment, then stepped inside his office far enough for the door to shut behind her. She folded her hands against her back, partly in a kind of respect, and partly just for something to do with them. "Captain..." Reflecting her inner conflict, her face was a confusing mix of emotions. She seemed like she wanted to say something, but then held back and re-calibrated. Taking a breath, she started again. "Thank you , Sir. I know what you risked today for the sake of all of those people, and I'm proud to serve with you." She was proud, and relieved, but all at once also broken-hearted and confused.

It might not have been what she had come to say but he smiled at her "I do not pretend to know the far reaching effects of my decision" he began indicating the chair across from him.

"And I appreciate that, honestly," Elli said. "I don't think anyone could claim to see the whole host of consequences stemming from something like what we just did. But I couldn't live with myself if we'd stood by and watched the world die for the sins of one."

"I do know that we were able to save those people and that is what mattered. When they are ready we will make contact and the Federation will guide them." he tilted his head a little, "I was expecting more fallout though, it is unlike the DTI to allow an intervention like this to go unanswered, and I had thought they would have at least spoken up." The Potemkin, under his command had not yet gotten a visit from DTI, but he had in the past and it had taken weeks of interviews before he was allowed to continue his mission.

"It did seem far too simple." Elli nodded in agreement. "Do you think they know something about the future that's got them holding back?"

He nodded. He seemed to be on the verge of saying something but had stopped himself. "Computer! Coffee, black extra strong" he said "Anything?"

"Um, hot cider," she asked, meekly, although she wasn't in the mood for much of anything.

He ordered her drink and then they both appeared on the table between them. Toron took a sip and then settled back a little. "There is a change i shouldn't tell you this. However, i feel it is reliant. About 40 years ago I Commanded a Miranda Class, the Oberon. She had been seconded by the DTI. We had come across a temporal event. Damn near destroyed the ship but we survived and found ourselves on the edge of tear, through which we could see an alternate timeline." he took another sip of coffee "We were ordered, by the DTI to seal the breach, just as we were about to fire a quantum pulse which we were assured would close the rift when a ship on the otherside appeared and headed right for it. We had seconds to react, the DTI made it very clear, very quickly that the other vessel wasn't to cross over" he was now looking down at his desk and rubbing finger and thumb together. A sign of anxiety.

"Oh, no, a quantum pulse would destroy an approaching ship, which would disrupt the seal anyway. What did you do instead?"

"We tried all the normal ways but they were ignoring us. The only other choice was to fire on them. I ordered their engines targeted and then to fire. Our weapons were mid range at that point, not overly powerful it should have taken several shots to disable them. Instead the rift magnified our Phasers to the point they punched through the other ship. The rift closed on its own, just before it did our sensors detected an energy release consistent with a core breach."

"It must have amplified the quantum resonance in the temporal displacement field...." Elli covered her mouth with her hand. "Were they.... lost?"

"We don't know that." he said looking at her "Worse still i later found out that the DTI was covering up a deliberate attempted breach by a past agent. The ship which we destroyed belonged sometime in the 2210's. The DTI used Oberon to clear up a mess before it had happened, we interfered with past events. I was assumed, again at a later date, that history showed that ship destroyed everyone on board killed. So no changes in the timeline..." he did not look as though he believed his own story.

Elli looked visibly perturbed. "What were they trying to cover up? Who was aboard that vessel? How could they use you like that?" Elli's mind was already trying to work out answers, or ways to find them. "What do you think they are up to now?"

"Well, that brings me to the second time i worked with the DTI. This was more of a 2 ways interaction, what it was is even more classified but what i learnt was that the DTI doesn't work in a vacuum, once you know that it is silly to assume they ever did. They often work with two future incarnations of the DTI, in the 29th century it is a Starfleet run origination and beyond that it is again a Federation department. There is a kind of a temporal chain of command with the agent from the furthest future out ranking their 'younger' version. In that second mission an officer from the 29th century over ruled a DTI operative as they had more information and a better understanding of how it would change the timeline." he shrugged "This could be a similar situation."

"Beyond the 29th century? I guess you're right. with a time department, you would be working with multiple timelines of your own department. Good grassy hills. I can't even...." She hugged the hot mug. "How can anyone work with that much time all at once?"

"I don't know" he said "As I understand it DTI agents share a very specific type of personality. Able to see the larger picture, able to hold the larger picture of how time flows and ebbs without letting it overwhelm them." He shrugged "I might never know how they can do it, I do hear that the turn over rate is so very high and fully 70% of the entire department are displaced in time themselves." he offered.

"No, that actually makes quite a lot of sense. It may even be that the ship you thought you destroyed was actually being recruited, plucked from their historical deaths for service instead... I guess I feel sorry for them that way. These time agents. They probably don't have a when to go home to."

"To that, I don't have an answer." He shrugged "With what we have seen, with the Protectorate, entire stars being displaced. A little meddling in the time line seems somewhat trivial. Either way I don't look forward to seeing the DTI. Not any more. I have heard rumors though" he said with a smile "That they have a massive database that is protected from changes in the timeline."

At the idea Elli perked in her seat, already thinking about the possibilities... "I wonder if it's cross-universe entangled.. certainly with tachyon micro-processing. It may even be in a hyper cooled subatomic pocket dimension."

He couldn't help but smile. She was an engineer through and through that was for sure. "Maybe in the future versions it is" he said "I think our current version is maybe protected with temporal phase discriminators. It is maybe a quick and dirty way of doing it but it would work" he had mused this questions more than once, had even go so far as to write a few papers and mock up from working prototypes.

"Oh, of course. That would be simpler. Still. It's a bit like if we were working with our own department centuries in the past and they were keeping paper files. So inefficient. Why wouldn't we just give them access to the future technology?" Elli sighed and motioned with her hand, waving her own question away. "I guess there's no sense asking into the wind."

He nodded "But can you imagination us giving 20th century humans a bio neural computer core? Even if it was kept secrete it is still too much of a risk. We would be exposing them to technology that is beyond them, even the basic operating system would give them insight in more efficient computers, which could creep into other aspects of their culture."

"Yeah, I know," Elli said with a sigh and a devilish little twist to her lip, thinking about her own Protectorate-technology. Even if the gear was from their own timeline, more or less, it still seemed an unearned edge. She could make a long list of advanced technology they'd either collected or gained knowledge of. To Elli's mind, it was hypocritical that Starfleet would take every opportunity to gain knowledge but be kept from giving much. Her grin faded as she tamped down the feeling with the very fresh warnings Scott had just given about playing with fire by tempting fate outside of the rules. She put her half empty mug down, losing her taste for it now. "Rules. They're not supposed to be gray. Still, I feel like more often than not we get tangled in all of the exceptions. I suppose if I stayed on Grazer, wore a proper head cover, and got a job in a lab, things would be a lot less complicated. But I dunno. Complicated is growing on me, I guess."

Pax smiled, one of those understanding smiles. "Rules are not meant to be ridged, they are meant to flex. No law maker can anticipate every situation. As Fleet officers we have to look at those laws and apply them the best way we can. At times though, we have to look at the bigger picture also, our own experiences inform our choices, sometimes, in a few occasions we break them for the betterment. I thought it was the right choice, I was lucky that someone up the chain agreed with me otherwise I would have taken the punishment."

"I would have too." She reflected as she put her cup back down. "It was the right thing to do."

As they talked, they observed the streaking starscape out of the portal, the Potemkin striding into certain peril and likely as not approaching more destruction and terror, yet somehow Elli found herself more at home than she had before in the Captain's ready room. Together, they continued to muse and posit over matters great and small and the time seemed to get away from them. Time, the experience and the passage of it ever unquantifiable, somehow both slipping away like the proverbial sands and yet standing eternally frozen in memory. Sure and Elusive. She'd had this feeling before, on a back porch overlooking a grassy knoll in another eternal-evanescent moment in her life. She fiddled with her new Commanders pips as she mused— Like Quantum Mechanics, It seemed to Elli, the contradictory experience of time was another thing where the acceptance of uncertainty was the only clear way to begin to master it.

Captain Pax recollected another story from his extensive experience and Elli wordlessly refilled both of their cups.