Foreseeable future – Joint Futures
by HoD Ro' Matlh & Soghla' HIchop Matlh & Sogh Marla Varquis & Soghla' Terri (Tell) Hope & Sogh Germite Ephilom & Soghla' Jared

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Title   Joint Futures
Mission   Foreseeable future
Author(s)   HoD Ro' Matlh & Soghla' HIchop Matlh & Sogh Marla Varquis & Soghla' Terri (Tell) Hope & Sogh Germite Ephilom & Soghla' Jared
Posted   Thu Nov 15, 2012 @ 11:57am
Location   Prometheus Opperations
Timeline   Future
The operations area of the station was a large open plan room set in a wide circle. There were images of the starbase on the situation monitor, and a myriad of people at stations all around the walls. The architecture of the place was a little hard to pick. There were distinctive hard lines of the Klingons, but most of the consoles were of Federation make. There were also some Cardassian beams supporting the ceiling.

Hichop rose form the command chair as the turbo lift doors opened. He looked as old as Marie did as she stepped off the lift accompanied by an elderly Ferengi.

"It is good to see you Marie, how do you feel?" HIchop moved towards her trying to determine if she had been moved in time also.

HIchop and Marie had barely time to exchange pleasantries before the doors on the other side of the bridge opened admitting an elderly lady supported by two others, all in Federation yellow. It took the pair a moment to recognise Tell, or she them.

"What the hell is going on here." muttered Tell through teeth that seemed to have a mind of their own. "And who the hell are all of you?"

And again the central doors to the bridge opened allowing a rather aged and confused Doctor Ephilom. He took a moment to take in the bridge and the four other elderly people in the centre of the room. The Ferengi he did not recognise, but the others he felt he did.

Germite walked over to the others. He didn't know why he was here, but at least he knew he wasn't alone. "Why are we here?"

A human female in command colours and commander pips turns to you, "The Captain wanted to see the three of you urgently. I think it is about the experiment, but I would appreciate it if you could give him a medical as well. He fell and seems a bit shaken."

"Doctor Ephilom, Tell and Marie, it is good to see you old friends. For me it feels like only minutes ago we were aboard the Fhew fighting next to each other and now here we find ourselves." Hichop tapped his screen that had just come back on but was not yet fully secured to look to see if he had a ready room.

It turned out he did, quite a large one, adjacent to the conference room at the back of the Operation room. This current operations room. The Prometheus II station seems to have 6 Operations centres.

"Why are we here then?" asked Tell "Last thing I remember I was in engineering. What happened?"

The human glanced at her, surprised by the question, "You were in Engineering 5. Then the Lt D'ral ordered the evacuation. We assumed you had authorised it."

HIchop signalled for the others to follow him. He led the way to his ready room which easily accommodated Tell, one of her engineers, Germite, one of his medical staff, Marie and the Ferengi, HIchop and the Human Command and a Vulcan Science Lt.

Tell looked at everyone in turn, she was beginning to vaguely remember some of them in the room. Unlike her, Tell decided to let someone else have the chance to speak first. She didn't trust herself to ask anymore questions because that had got her nowhere. Something must have happened to them all.

Germite looked at his assistant and pointed to the others. "I want a full bioscan of everybody, myself included, and a comparison against the most recent scans."

"Sir," the medic responded, beginning his scans with the Captain while the discussion continued.

Hichop stands at the end of the table "To the issue at hand. I can tell none of us are where we thought we should be right now. It would seem we have jumped forward around 50 years and smack in the middle of a experiment using either Borg or more probably Romulan tech regarding chronoton containment. What I want to know is there something we did, the Borg did to us or our ship, or something we could have done to link us to this incident now?"

The Human 2IC looked confused, "Excuse me, sir? I am twenty eight. I couldn't be 50 years into the future. Besides which the Borg have been extinct for over 40 years now and the Chronoton Inversion Engines is a joint research venture. It was... well it was Commander Hope's idea. Her and the alien advisor."

Tell stood up. She was 28 but felt 90 in every bit of her body. "What the hell do you mean it was my idea and where is this so called alien advisor? Bring him in here now. I want explanations do you hear me, am I making myself clear?"

The woman looked back at her, steadily, "Perfectly, Commander, though I am not sure why you are making demands, or who you think you are making them of. Unless the Joint Empires have recently changed their policies, Chief Engineers do not get to order Executive officers around."

The medic closed his tricorder, "All bioprints read within nominal tolerances. There are heightened adrenaline levels, but that is to be expected. Also you have all had a wash in the Chroniton particles, but since you were in Section 5 that is to be expected as well. Although, I can't explain why the Captain has as well."

The human turned to the Vulcan Comms officer, "Trev, be a dear and see if you can locate the Vetus for Commander Hope."

"Yes, ma'am," he replied, turning to leave.

Tell sighed inwardly with frustrated anger and wanted nothing more than to slap the ever so smug face of the woman in standing in front of her. She may have aged fifty years overnight but she still had a hell of a lot of fight left in her. What was it about the Vetus? Last time she had made some acerbic remark to Jared he had told her off for some reason. What was it all about? Damned memory why was it so shot full of holes?

They had to wait for a short while before the Vulcan returned with a small fuzzy individual they recognised immediately. As far as they could tell he hadn't aged at all in the fifty years since they had last seen him.

Jared.

The little man looked around, and surveyed people's eyes. He smiled, and gave a little chuckle.

"Well... I guess it worked, judging by your faces..."

Tell lips were tight with irritation when she looked at him. In true Tell form a string of profanities were about to be unleashed however she didn't have the energy for it.

"Well Jared! This is a fine mess and how do you explain this?" Tell indicated to her aged body. "Just a pure and simple explanation will do just fine. Nothing complicated ok?"

Jared gave her a slightly incredulous look.

"Explain... THIS... purely and simply??"

"I forgot all about the whole impatience thing. Of course... we're all back to having 90 second attention spans again. OK. Right. Explain simply."

He deposited a PADD he'd been carrying on the desk beside him, abandoning any hope that the 20,000 word explanation it contained would get a look-in.

"As we all know, a number of us here in the room were present at the Battle of Nine Fleets, back when the Joint Empires first united against the Borg and the Nihlus, and laid the groundwork for what would become the Ninefold Alliance, and later the Joint Empires."

A number of the younger officers present nodded, a slight look of awe in their expressions.

"And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that some or all of those people might be feeling a little... disoriented, after the experiment a little while ago. Maybe having a few... memory problems?"

"Memory problems? The last thing I remember is being on the FHew in the middle of battle. I wake up here in the middle of of...." Germite looked around, "of this emergency."

Jared nodded, and then thought for a moment.

"OK... I'm going to explain this as simply as I can. You might not believe it, but just please save the 'That's not possible' and 'This is para-scientific nonsense' and such until the end."

He grabbed a light-pen, and started sketching on the display screen behind him, drawing a rough picture of a borg cube with sticky-outy bits, and three or four ships shooting at it. One looked roughly F'Hew-ish.

"Right... so back in 23-whatever-it-was, we're fighting Borg and Nihlus, and everyone was pulling out every trick they had in the book. I mean, Cardassians and Romulans are pulling out all their 'We're not supposed to have this' special weapons, Klingons are doing suicide runs. Breen are letting people know what they're about to do... all sorts of wacky stuff. And I'm the same! I mean... I'm pulling out every trick I know - even the ones that I normally wish I could un-learn. And so I manage to rig up some of my upgraded sensor systems, some exotic emitters on one of the Breen ships, and a temporal generator the Borg had been trying to rig up out of desperation and jury-rig a type of weapon called a metanet-charge."

"You... really don't want to know too much about it. It's one of those wish-I-could-unlearn ones. But if somehow you can make the damn thing work - which is anything but guaranteed, by-the-way - it lets you kinda... selectively eject something in a blast radius from our universe."

"Problem was, it's... sorta supposed to work on living things. Stuff with minds. The Nihlus don't really have anything to target on. So I kinda... used you all... as a sort of targeting system. I mean... you were all focused on the Nihlus in a really direct way, and I thought I could use that as a sort of... bio-electric targeting system."

"But metanet weaponry is... bad. And very unpredictable. And the Borg were trying to fire up the temporal reactor when I hacked into it, so..." he drew a sort of wormhole-shape in the middle of the borg ship.

"...your consciousnesses... sorta... arced through a temporal rift."

He quickly sketched the station everyone was on on the other side of the screen, and drew another wormhole-shape beside it.

"And fifty years later, with the Joint Empires doing chroniton propulsion experiments... your consciousnesses have sort-of... earthed... here... in your bodies. Now. Five odd decades later."

He glanced around the room, looking a little apologetic.

There was a thoughtful pause.

"The science behind your claims is... dubious in the extreme," the Vulcan Lt commented, with one eyebrow raised.

"But," the Female commander interjected, "It does explain the Cascade Flux and arythmic sympotis patterns we got."

Jared looked in her with surprise. This woman was turning out to understand his theories far better than any mortal he had met in... well since he could remember. What was her name again? Commander Nikita Maschnost, that was it. He had made a mnemonic to remember it.

"If," she continued, we are seeing an earthing of the bio-electric wave feed, then the hollow form should have collapsed by now. Instead our sensors are showing and inversion in the flux. You wouldn't by any chance be planning a Quatnum Resonance Meta-dump, would you?"

The Vulcan Lt looked at the others, "Sorry, she just lost me again."

Cmdr Maschnost looked at the others. She took the light pen from Jared and sketched four figures onto the station and four onto the FHew.

"Currently your concsiences have been projected through the rift to this point in time. That takes a vast ammount of energy and I doubt there is anything of your bodies remaining after the transfer. Normally, the rift would then close, since there is nothing to maintain it. However, the risk is not closed and a sympathetic pattern of meta... er... an echo of who you were still remains in the past. I suspect Jared is maintaining the Link, in the past as well as currently," here she shot Jared a dark look, "in the hope of projecting your... selves... back along the corridor to fill the echo."

Maschnost frowned, "That will take a phenomenal amount of energy, which would explain why the station is under such strain to contain it right now. But I would have expected less draw for only four people."

"Six," Jared supplied. "There were six on the bridge at the moment of activation. Hichop, Tell, Germite, Marie, Marla and Ro'. I need all of them to fill the pattern."

Tell walked over to the replicator. Trust jared to make it not so simple and flaming annoying as usual. "I need coffee, Trill blend number 6, triple strong, double sweet and make it quick." Then after a mouthful of the brew, that would have taken the lining off someone elses mouth, she turned back to the others in the room.

"So tell me this." Tell asked "Where the hell is our Captain then? Where is Ro'?"

Germite didn't follow a lot of what Tell and Jared were talking about, but he did notice that Tell was only asking for Ro's location. "If what Jared has told us is true, and I dont' see any reason that it wouldn't be, then we not only need to locate Ro', but also Marla, then we can get back to our rightful time."

"Really? So all we need is Ro? That may be difficult given he is dead," Hichop laughed.

Jared looked shocked, "Dead? I had no idea? And I only spoke to him an hour ago."

No sooner had the laughter started it stopped as the thoughts of Ro ran through Hichops mind. "That would make him 122 years old. What would a warrior like Ro be doing alive at 122. Jared where is his Song?"

Jared frowned.

"Well... he's... umm... perhaps it's easier if I just... show you..."