Star Trek: Fortitude
Season Three, Episode Seven - “The Way Things Were, Part 1”
By Jack D. Elmlinger
PROLOGUE
“... so why contact the government?”
Valerie Archer flexed her tired muscles, realizing that she had been sitting in the co-pilot’s chair of the Starfleet Danube-class runabout USS Snohomish, NCC-59876 for almost three solid hours.
Beside her, Ewan Llewellyn survived a mini-war with a powerful yawn in order to reply to her question. They were discussing, as everybody was these days, the Tah’Heen. Who had hired a Tah’Heen to attack and damage Starfleet vessels? What known Tah’Heen operatives were near the Santrag system? What was the motive behind such actions? Even now, the runabout shared by Fortitude’s Captain and First Officer was undertaking the long journey back to Earth to try and answer some of those questions, meeting with several intelligence experts on the way.
“Everybody knows that they make perfect spies,” Ewan answered, remembering the briefing that he had gotten from Erica Martinez the first time that the name Tah’Heen had been used in conjunction with the virus outbreak on Starbase 499 and aboard Fortitude. “While the actual government never endorses their actions, the simple matter is that their natural lack of fingerprints or residual DNA samples makes them excellent agents of subterfuge.”
“The question stands, Ewan,” Valerie pressed him, reaching for her coffee cup and finding it empty with a disappointed frown. “Why contact the government?”
“If they can help us identify which Tah’Heen has been following us around and messing with our ship, it can narrow down the search. Bloody hell, we’ve got to start somewhere. Otherwise, we’re just pissing off into the wind with a whole bunch of theories.”
“You know, sometimes you’ve got a wonderful way with words,” Valerie said, laughing.
“Benefits of a classical education, m’dear,” Ewan retorted in his best overblown Welsh accent, smiling through the confusion that had clouded his days. Suddenly an alert on his console added to that confusion, making him lurch forward. “Uh-oh, I don’t like the look of this.”
“Chronometric particle build-up,” noted his copilot. “Readings are off the scale!”
Through the twin viewports in front of them, Ewan and Valerie watched as the very fabric of space itself tore apart, unleashing sporadic arcs of lethal energy as the small runabout failed to make sense of the phenomenon and slowly started to fall inside of it. In a flash, and as quickly as it had appeared, the maw closed without a trace.
The Snohomish was gone.
Ewan and Valerie were gone right along with it.
ACT ONE
Coughing…
Lungs filled with smoke…
It wasn’t a nice thing to wake up to.
As he fought to breathe, Ewan Llewellyn found his feet and found the source of the smoke. A ruptured conduit stuck out of the bulkhead beside him. Shutting it down and venting the cabin of the thick clouds of smoke and replacing them with the sweet freshness of recycled atmosphere, he tended to his next important concern.
Valerie Archer was groggy but awake. She hadn’t moved from her place in the copilot’s chair, unlike Ewan who had been thrown backwards by whatever force had swallowed the runabout and thrown it… wherever they were. Checking her toned figure over for injuries, he found nothing major aside from a few dirty stains on the shoulders of her uniform which she probably sustained when the conduit blew. It was obvious what had tossed him across the Snohomish cabin like a ragdoll.
“Hey,” the Welshman said in a soothing voice as she opened his eyes.
“Hey,” Valerie replied with a weak smile. “I guess this is a silly question, but what just happened? I mean, besides all of the bright lights and loud noises? I got those…”
“You tell me. I was on the bloody floor.”
“This is no time to be lying about, Captain, sir,” she teased him, regaining herself to full capacity as he leaned forward, her hands immediately finding the LCARS display assigned to her station and getting to work. “It looks like you were right. Chronometric particle density is off the scale. The runabout is soaked in it.”
“All systems are operational,” Ewan noted after he moved back into the pilot’s seat and ignored the slight cut on his forehead, the blood nowhere near his eyes so it didn’t bother him. “Impulse engines are still running. Shutting them down, and answering full stop. I don’t want to go anywhere until we know where that anywhere is. Shields are raised. Okay, try and get a fix on our location.”
“Scanning,” Valerie confirmed, letting the computer work as she lifted the stray locks of her blonde hair away from her face and replaced them in her otherwise intact bun. The results would be in, momentarily, allowing her a second to glance properly at the Captain to make sure that he was just as fine as she was. As soon as she saw the blood, her expression quickly turned from relief to panic. “Ewan, you’re bleeding!”
“It’s nothing, just a scratch,” the Welshman said, dismissing it.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” the Commander countered, getting to her feet and finding the medical kit stowed nearby. Returning with a dermal regenerator, she set about waving it over the cut, sealing it up nicely in a matter of seconds. “There… that wasn’t painful, was it?”
“Don’t get all medical with me, Valerie. You know how I hate Sickbays.”
“Let’s just concentrate on where we are right now,” was her suggestion.
Ewan wasn't listening. He had spotted something out of the forward viewport. It was something that made him freeze up in his seat in shock. Everything around him was drowned out. The conversation with Valerie became a dull whisper, the flashing, and beeping of the systems that he was using faded into nothingness. All he could comprehend was the image that he could see before him… and even that was a challenge.
“I don’t think we should be worried about where,” he whispered,” but rather… when.”
Valerie followed his gaze and gasped in agreement with his shock.
Outside, looming over the runabout, was a starship.
It was a starship that both officers had seen before… in a museum.
It was the famous Enterprise, NX-01… from the 22nd century.
* * * *
“Do you recognize it, T’Pol?”
On the Bridge of the NX-class Enterprise, standing before his command chair in the blue jumpsuit of the 22nd century Starfleet and probably just as confused as his 24th-century counterpart aboard the Snohomish, the legendary Captain Jonathan Archer turned to his Vulcan science officer with a frown. Somehow, the vessel that was holding position directly in their flight path, had appeared out of nowhere, seconds ago. Their appearance was so sudden that Ensign Travis Mayweather had been forced to slam Enterprise into reverse, just to keep from colliding with them.
“This can’t be,” T’Pol answered from her science station.
“I’m sure it can,” Archer answered. “Come on, out with it, Subcommander.”
“They have Starfleet markings. At least. I think that they’re Starfleet markings.”
“It doesn’t look like any Starfleet ship that I’ve ever seen,” Lieutenant Malcolm Reed piped up from the opposite side of the Bridge, his tactical sensors now being deployed in an effort to back up or dismiss T’Pol’s claim. “Captain, I’m reading some powerful weaponry over there… antimatter warheads, phase cannons that are almost five times as focused as ours… and some kind of energy shielding…”
“Should I back us away?,” Travis asked from the helm.
“No, keep us here,” Captain Archer ordered him, stepping forward as his narrow gaze remained fixed on the viewscreen. “Hoshi, hail them.”
To the Captain’s left, Ensign Hoshi Sato typed several commands into her console and opened standard Starfleet communications frequencies, sending a pre-recorded audio message that she had recently programmed into Enterprise’s standard greeting protocols. Raising a smooth eyebrow in surprise at such a prompt response, she saw that the message was answered on exactly the same frequency before she could even blink.
The view on the main screen changed. It now showed the inside of the runabout with two Humans seated at the controls. Their concern and shock was also visible. Whoever they were, they obviously knew something that Archer and his crew did not.
“Captain Archer,” the youngish man said with a Welsh accent,” I’m Captain Ewan Llewellyn of the Federation Starfleet runabout Snohomish… and I’m sure that you’ve got some questions that you would like to ask us.”
“You’re damned sure that I do,” Archer replied. “You say that you’re Starfleet?”
“Yes, we are… but not the Starfleet that you know. We’re from the 24th century, and I think this is going to take some explaining…”
ACT TWO
Captain’s Log, Stardate…
… No, that’s not right. There are no stardates here. The actual date, as I’m told, is May 5th, 2152, and my runabout finds itself cruising alongside the Enterprise, NX-01 after encountering some kind of chroniton surge. It’s obvious that Commander Archer and I have fallen back through time and that we now face two challenges. The first one is convincing the crew of the NX-01 that we are who we say we are, and the second one is finding a way to reverse the time travel effect and return to our own century.
They sat across from one another, one Captain facing another Captain.
Jonathan Archer was having a difficult time assimilating the facts. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the idea of time travel. On the contrary, recent events in his life and his mission had found him stuck in the 31st century, literally leaping back and forth across timelines as a result. No, the problem that he had was with Ewan Llewellyn and his female colleague. They were open, honest, and entirely honorable… which put him completely at odds with all of the other time-traveling beings that he had encountered.
Meanwhile, Ewan was finding that the history that he had been taught in school to be mostly accurate. Captain Archer was a straightforward, no-nonsense hero who asked some powerful questions with a powerful presence. He came complete with T’Pol, his skeptical science officer and the first Vulcan to last more than a week aboard a Starfleet vessel. She sat beside Archer with an eyebrow that was permanently raised. Ewan could feel the excitement and giddy nostalgia of Commander Valerie Archer beside him as his First Officer being somewhat of an expert on this time period. It was only then that it suddenly occurred to him about the surname ‘Archer’ and the 24th century Captain did his best to hide the potential embarrassment and confusion that it might cause.
“Okay, suppose for a moment that we believe you. I mean, you’ve got a fancy ship over there,” Captain Archer nodded, motioning with a hand out of Enterprise’s Briefing Room window towards the runabout. “You’ve also got Starfleet insignias on your chests, albeit they look a little… modified.”
“One of the smaller modifications made by history,” Ewan said with a smile.
“With all due respect,” T’Pol interjected, her tone as cold as ice,” you have yet to demonstrate your ability to travel through time effectively. While Captain Archer may be open to accepting your story, the Vulcan Science Directorate had declared that time travel is impossible. As Science Officer, I remain unconvinced.”
“You always do,” Valerie noted. She simply couldn’t help herself.
“What does that mean, Commander…?”
“Valerie Archer.”
No sooner had the words left her mouth, Valerie realized what she had done. Seated across from her, her ancestor instantly glared at her, as did T’Pol, even though she had already been glaring. The minds of the 22nd-century officers went into speculative overload, kicked into gear by the woman who now regretted answering so quickly without laying some groundwork before the revelation.
“Archer,” the Captain of Enterprise asked. “You mean…?”
“Valerie means,” Ewan interrupted him,” that we have a set of rules to abide by called the Temporal Prime Directive. While we can’t engage in free and easy time travel in the 24th century, it had been known to happen inadvertently, hence the drafting of those rules. The most important of them is not to reveal the future to those dwelling in the past. Not historical events, not technological advance… or family trees.”
“Nice save,” Valerie whispered to him.
“You owe me one,” he replied back.
Before anything else could be revealed at that moment, the communications panel behind T’Pol came to life with a deep Southern drawl that could only belong to one man. Captain Archer got to his feet and pressed the response button as the Fortitude officer heard, for the first time ever, the voice of Charles ‘Trip’ Tucker III.
“We’ve got those readings that you wanted, Capt’n,” he called out into the Briefing Room.
“Go ahead, Trip,” Archer replied.
“Quantum scans indicate that the vessel is from the future,” Trip confirmed. “The numbers are in the minus, to the tune of over two hundred and fifty years.”
“The latter half of the 24th century,” T’Pol mused aloud.
“Thanks, Trip,” Archer said, signing off before returning to the table and clasping his hands together as he once again resumed staring at Ewan Llewellyn. “You check out, but that still leaves one important question hanging out there. How did you get here?”
“We don’t know,” Ewan answered truthfully.
“Then maybe I can help with that.”
Four heads snapped towards a corner of the Briefing Room where a fifth person had entered the room. Both Ewan and Valerie drew blanks on his face, failing to recognize him from anywhere but both Captain Archer and T’Pol stood, their faces wearing shocked expressions.
“Daniels!”
“This is all an unfortunate coincidence,” Daniels stated blankly.
Both pairs of Captains and First Officers did nothing to hide their unimpressed snorts and frowns of indignant dissatisfaction with the answer. Here stood a Temporal Agent from the distant future, a man who spent his entire life studying and maintaining the timelines, keeping them from becoming tied in knots… and the best that he could say was that the Snohomish had fallen back to the 22nd century by coincidence?
“We’re supposed to buy that?,” Jonathan Archer snapped, jerking his head as he paced back and forth along the length of the Enterprise Briefing Room. His scathing expression shot towards the black-clad Daniels as he paused for a moment. “Besides, it hardly fills me with confidence. The last unfortunate coincidence that I found myself involved in alongside you ended up in the eradication of the 31st century!”
“I understand that,” Captain,” Daniels nodded,” and this is linked to that incident.”
“Hold on. Slow it down,” Ewan interrupted them, feeling like he had just walked halfway in through the show and needed a recap. “What incident, exactly, are we talking about?”
“There is a cold war going on through time,” the young Temporal Agent relayed carefully to the Captain of Fortitude. “It is a Temporal Cold War and the 22nd century is a front in that war. Recently, events between Starfleet and the Suliban Cabal came to a head and I was forced to transport Captain Archer forward in time with some… rather… catastrophic side-effects.”
“I’ll say,” the Captain of Enterprise said, rolling his eyes.
“Wait a minute,” Ewan paused, holding his hand up for a moment of silence,” all of this sounds a little familiar. That’s it! I was given a refresh on the Temporal Cold War recently by Sollik when his genetic abilities were revealed”
Valerie nodded alongside him, remembering that little skirmish.
“Sollik?,” T’Pol asked, breaking her cynical silence.
“My Chief Engineer is a Suliban national,” Llewellyn told her flatly, ignoring the glare from his 22nd-century counterpart and wondering if he had just witnessed a hint of racism on the part of Jonathan Archer. No, that was unfair. “Carry on, Mister Daniels.”
“Anyway, due to the recent temporal activity and fluctuations in the timeline which stem from the incident with Captain Archer and myself, the Temporal Cold War has heated up. Different factions are becoming more and more emboldened, striking each other without any provocation. This has had a disturbing knock-on effect of creating random temporal anomalies through history. You might call them… collateral damage. This is what pulled you here, Captain Llewellyn and Commander Archer. Your runabout fell through one of those anomalies.”
“Pulled towards me like I’m some kind of magnet?,” Captain Archer asked him, starting to understand the flow of the conversation. “Because of my recent trip into the future, I’m somehow attracting this… collateral damage?”
“Yes,” Daniels confirmed with a sharp acknowledgment.
There were a few seconds where the three Starfleet officers and the Vulcan scientist were able to catch their breath and take stock of what they had just been told. Daniels had been right. This was all one big unfortunate coincidence… and what a circumstance of chance to fall prey to, Ewan thought to himself. As if events back in his own time weren’t pressing enough, he needed to be there, carrying out the investigation into the Tah’Heen mystery without any annoying interruptions like, oh, being thrown two hundred and sixty years into the past.
He was just about to ask the next logical question when, sitting beside him, Valerie pre-empted his words. She had been thinking exactly the same thing and asked exactly the same question. Damn, they were so in tune…
“This explains how we’re here,” she pointed out,” but home do we get back home?”
“Honestly?,” Daniels replied, the timber of his voice being higher than usual. “I don’t know yet but I’m working on it. The timelines are very delicate at the moment. I’ll need some peace and quiet to figure out a feasible solution.”
“And what do we do about it in the meantime?,” Ewan asked him.
“Remain with Enterprise and don’t break your Temporal Prime Directive.”
Jonathan Archer and T’Pol shared a concerned look. It was a look that they usually shared when they both sensed a complication on the horizon. Whenever Daniels appeared, confusion and chaos usually followed in short order. Having a 24th-century runabout drifting alongside them couldn’t be as simple as all that.
Ewan simply turned to Valerie with a wry smile. “You don’t have any plans for the next few centuries, do you?”
ACT THREE
Captain’s Log, supplemental;
Mister Daniels continued to work on a solution to returning Valerie and I to our own period in history aboard Enterprise. In the meantime, I’m trying my best to keep our interaction with the famous men and women serving aboard Earth’s first Warp Five starship to a minimum. It’s bad enough that I’ve got Captain Archer’s direct descendant with me, and to that end, we’re both returned to the Snohomish to finish off repairs and prepare for the journey home… whenever it may come…
Ewan handed Valerie the tricorder that she had asked for, crouching down beside the open hatch in the runabout’s deck plating where the Commander was working. With his own task complete for now, the Welshman fetched two mugs of black coffee from the replicator and returned, handing one of them to his First Officer.
“You’re loving this, aren’t you?”
“Repairing a plasma conduit isn’t my idea of love, Ewan,” Valerie answered, trying her best not to look at her superior officer’s eyes when she mentioned the L-word. Nevertheless, despite all of her tough exterior, she felt her cheeks grow hot.
“No, I mean being stuck in this time period, getting to see the Enterprise and meet Jonathan Archer. Seeing your favorite chunk of history up close and personal… You know that there are not many people who get the chance to actually do that.”
Valerie emitted a wistful sigh as she traded her tricorder for coffee. “I must admit that staying here for a while would be rather nice,” she finally revealed to him. “I mean, this was the time to explore space, Ewan. Think about it. There’s a starship out there with eighty people aboard, and that’s it! No backup from Starfleet, no starbases to dock with, and no knowledge of what’s out there… yet…”
“Mmm,” Ewan mused, countering her optimism. “We both know what’s coming for them. It’s not an all happy-go-lucky adventure in the coming years.”
On that rather downbeat note, foreshadowing the coming tragedies of the next twelve months to strike Earth and the crew under Jonathan Archer, the comms system rang off an alert, stopping their conversation before more positive examples could be pointed to. Upon answering, Ewan turned to see Valerie’s ancestor joined by Daniels on the Bridge of the NX-class starship. Their faces set the tone perfectly.
“Captain Llewellyn, we’ve got bad news,” Captain Archer told him. “Our sensors indicate that a small group of Suliban Cell Ships are on a direct intercept course.”
“Suliban,” Ewan repeated. “They’re the bad guys in this time period, right?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” Daniels chipped in. “They’re being led by a man named Silik, an agent of the Temporal Cold War. Somehow he detected your arrival in the 22nd century and he’s demanding that you, Valerie Archer and your runabout be handed over immediately for interrogation and analysis… or he’ll destroy us all.”
“How many vessels do they have?,” Valerie asked, joining Ewan at the controls.
“Lieutenant Reed estimates almost twenty,” growled Captain Archer.
“Even with your advanced weapons and shields aboard the runabout, and using Enterprise as backup, the odds of beating them in a firefight are slim,” Daniels added, just to add that extra weight of pressure. “All we know is that they’re after you.”
“Understood,” Llewellyn nodded, ending the transmission. “Valerie, raise shields.”
* * * *
Stars… darkness… silence… shattered by the screams of weapons fire.
The dirty burnt orange armor plating of the Suliban Cell Ships stood out as terrifying examples of one possible outcome as a frantic dogfight broke out between them and two temporally-challenged Starfleet vessels instantly the Suliban broke formation, diving for the Danube-class runabout. It was their target, their prize, the trophy that Silik would take back to his master and be rewarded with yet more genetic tricks for retrieving them. Opening fire, the Suliban scored three powerful hits against the USS Snohomish, but the benefit of the 24th-century shields rendered them mostly redundant.
As soon as more Cell Ships banked together for another strike, Captain Jonathan Archer of Enterprise proved his heroism. Without even thinking about his own safety, he ordered his ship on a course that intersected the life of fire. With only polarized hull plating instead of energy shields, the several hits that they subsequently sustained did some serious damage.
“Malcolm, return fire!”
“With pleasure,” Lieutenant Reed grinned, achieving the destruction of a Cell Ship with a single blast of their aft phase cannon. “One down, nineteen to go.”
“Bring us about,” Archer demanded, lurching forward to lean on the helm console beside Travis Mayweather as Enterprise shook violently around him. “Keep us circling the runabout. I don’t want Silik getting any more shots on target.”
Travis did as he was told, but with nineteen Cell Ships creating a thick swarm of plasma fire and hull plating around both vessels, it wasn’t long before the unfairly-stacked odds finally paid off for the attacking Suliban. Four of them slipped through the defensive flight pattern of the NX-01 and together, fired in concert at one specific point in the runabout’s shields. The maneuver was a success.
Captain Archer watched in horror as the Snohomish burst into flames.
EPILOGUE
Inside the Snohomish’s cockpit, the fog of concussion slowly lifted from Ewan Llewellyn as he staggered, once again, back to his feet. The computer was calling out something about a hull breach. It was quickly followed by a statement about how it had automatically sealed the breach with emergency force fields. Feeling the obvious deja-vu kick in, he turned back towards the controls of the runabout. Instead of finding his First Officer safety in the copilot’s seat, this time, he found Valerie Archer was sprawled out on the deck beside him… and she wasn’t moving.
“Valerie,” he gasped, falling to her side and lifting her head tenderly.
She gurgled something, her pupils coming back into sight. Dirt covered her forehead. Her uniform was torn in some places and as Ewan continued to look down the length of her crumpled body, he felt his stomach nearly explode in panic. Sticking out of her abdomen, there was an ugly blade of shrapnel. It was part of the LCARS display that had destroyed itself and sent shards of transparent aluminum flying.
“How… bad?,” Valerie asked, weakly, flickering back to life.
“Oh, nothing that we won’t be able to fix,” Ewan lied badly, tears forming in his eyes.
“Don’t get … all… medical on… me,” she chuckled in reply, fighting the pain and horrible sense of numbness that her limbs were succumbing to in order to echo Ewan’s own words from the last time that they had found themselves in this situation. “Listen, I… we… well, I think you… know what I… what I want to say…”
“I think so,” Ewan nodded, letting the first tear meet his cheek.
“Last big chance… to say it, I guess…”
Ewan tried to find some words, any words but failed. He was experiencing just as much pain as Valerie was. It wasn’t physical and it wasn’t from shrapnel. It was killing his heart as he cradled the woman that he loved in her final moments. The sounds of the firefight outside provided the soundtrack that both of them ignored as, after two and a half years of serving together aboard Fortitude as Captain and First Officer, all pretense of rank and position were discarded.
At that moment, they were just Ewan Llewellyn and Valerie Archer.
They kissed.
It was her final act, her final ounce of strength… her final breath…
To Be Continued…