When conversation had just about resumed to the ordinary Perdita turned
to Burgundy. “You know the fate of Lone Star-D,” they said. It wasn’t
clear whether it was a question or a statement. “I saw your name on the
paper two years ago.”
Burgundy looked up. “Hm? Oh, yeah, I led a group in my science class
when we helped our professor prove his theory. We built a pretty
advanced simulation to test it all.” He left it there, fully focused on
trying to get some dessert down. The chocolate was overwhelming.
“Well what was the theory, young man?” inquired Regina impatiently after a few moments.
“Oh! Sorry, Uhm. They crashed into a telescope,” the ensign offered. “I
mean, it was a little more to it than that, but basically they… uh,
crashed into a big damn telescope.”
“Expound,” said Perdita Animo. It was clear that the inebriated scientist needed some nudging along.
Burgundy cleared his throat. “It was a big mystery for a really long
time. The ship was a Constitution refit on a survey mission back in
2321. They flew through a nebula and just bam! Exploded.” He took
another couple of bites of the chocolate cake, but swallowed it down
with a full glass of champagne, while holding up a finger to indicate he
would continue soon.
“So, here’s the thing. The thing we proved, or at least proved to be
very, very, very likely. The ship hit a big glass lens. Right at the
edge of it. According to our calculations the ‘lens’ so to speak was
about a kilometer in diameter, but only about half a foot thick. Coming
at it at full impulse from an angle where only the side of the disk is
visible… it’s pretty much invisible. It would show up for a
couple of seconds and look like a glitch in the forward sensor array,
just a thin vertical line. And if you hit the disk at that speed two things happen.”
Felix winced. He wasn’t the galaxy’s finest mathematician but the
physics of torsion, shear and acceleration were no stranger to him. He
hated this story.
“The first is that the disk cuts straight through your deflector shield.
It almost doesn’t matter how powerful your shield is: the sheer
physical force of the lens is just too hard and too narrowly focused. It
slows you down like a hammer, which would save you if it weren’t for
the second thing. The disk loses structural integrity and explodes. The
tension inherent in the structure causes that explosion to spiral out
along the sides of the disk, sending dust particles out like a saw blade
at up to two per cent of light speed. It cuts through your ship like a
hot knife through butter. When that hits your warp core… You know the
rest.”
He finished his story with a shrug and tried to pour himself more
champagne, but the bottle was empty again. de l’Isle wafted an
instructive hand towards Edie to pull the open bottle, of red, a hint
further from his reach.
“What they found afterwards was a dust pattern that didn’t match up with
previous scans of the nebula. It makes more sense with this theory. As
for that disk? We think it’s part of a telescope, probably left
somewhere else by an ancient civilisation and drifted over millions of
years. We’ll probably never know.”
“Chopped to death,” whimsied Monkfish, somewhere near Touvoy’s shoulderblade. “Obliterated. Quite literally.”
“Thank you for your contribution, Mister Burgundy,” Felix intoned
grimly, while Lester developed a sudden and intimate fascination with
one of his rear heels. Checking the faces of his primary staffers, he
double-checked that the forcefield between his balcony and the Arboretum
was absolutely, certainly intact. “Shall we take a break with coffee?”
Coffee and a reasonable amount of brandy replaced the dessert. Expectant
eyes turned to the lithe blond at the head of the table.
Felix surveyed his bridge crew. Anticipations, expectations and
antagonism had all laid themselves bare this evening. He commanded the
room silently for a tick longer. His way to command was through unspoken
authority: it was often through their manner, gait, speech or calm that
the best captains, in his observance, took the space to claim that
command.
And, anyway, it was one of his favourite stories.
“Computer. Display file de l’Isle, ell-ess-kay-twenty-three.”
Above the dinner table, as the waiting staff moved away, a
three-dimensional representation of the Kappa Upsilon system manifested.
It rotated alluringly, designed to present to, and then attract the
attention of, the company. Tendrils representing traffic lanes, spacial
aberrations, known elements and quantum stringing took different colours
on the map.
“The year is 2368. Picard’s been at the tiller of the Enterprise for
four years. Voyager’s just fucked off to the delta quadrant for a few
years’ holiday and the USS Lone Star-K, under the command of Captain
S’tep, sets course for the Mostade Cluster. It takes them 17 days, four
hours and 51 minutes to reach the phenomenon, where it will study for
covert fleet build-ups by the Romulans, the Breen, the Maquis – and the
Cardassians.”
The see-through screen shimmered. The same lines appeared, magnified:
varicose strands in the Milky Way’s infinite and confusing muscle. When
Commander Animo had said there were 87 dimensions, how could that be?
Where were those planes?
“Meanwhile, in 2370, NCC-28513-L turns out of spacedock into the hands
of Captain Ursula A’nat’na. Wasn’t her first command; she’d led patrols
across the frontiers of Typhon, Romulus, survived Wolf 359; every
powerhouse of that era you can think of. Their first mission? To fix a
node on the Argus Array. A’nat’na’s helmsman, charted an innocent enough
course bisecting the eastern cluster of Dranten Prime, here in sector
771.” Knowing it by heart, Felix drew its waves with its finger. “And
then, something extraordinary happened.”
Burgundy, who had already helped himself to a second brandy, snorted
loudly. “‘Meanwhile in 2370’ is wrong,” he explained to a waiter who
wasn’t listening. “2368 and 2370 are two different years.”
From the head of the table the Prepondrian received the shut the fuck up glare. Felix continued, otherwise unperturbed.
“The LS-K never filed a flight plan and was officially declared lost in
2369, assumed to have been destroyed by whichever aggressor it found at
the other end. But the fate of a mid-range science vessel wasn’t much on
A’nat’na’s mind as she took her spanking new Galaxy-class ship out for
its maiden voyage. The helmsman, one Lieutenant Commander Wu, plotted
the following course. I might have done the same myself, using the
scanners available at the time. A course that drags the Ell through this
minute cluster of baryon radiation – here.”
The captain’s audience adjusted along with the display. “Except it’s not
a cluster of baryon radiation. It’s a dichromatic spacetime shear with a
very precise causal calibration point.” In the bottom right hand corner
a hysterical list of numbers processed rapidly.
The science chief was focused solely on that list, for the moment. Time
was just one of the four most simplistic dimensions in its experience.
”The shear’s pivot point around its temporal axis appears to be centered
around a radiation frequency common to Starfleet sensory and
communication instruments,” they noted without emotion.
“Exactly. This near-impossible numerical catalyst is struck because an
administrator at Starfleet Command failed to advance the Lone Star
marker along the board. The transponder for the K and the L therefore
give off exactly the same latent carrier wave. So, when Captain
S’tep orders a level-three scan using an anti-baryon beam and Captain
A’nat’na orders a level-three subspace pulse using a positive baryon
wave to stabilise it, the two accidentally incubate a singularity within
the shear.”
”Fascinating. That event would close the integral circumference of the
axis. Time ceases to be in a normal manner; those ships are either
looping through a repetitive pattern, frozen in place or a variation of
the two. Forever.” Animo tilted their head, taking in the full imagery
for the first time.
“Theoretically for ever.” Felix wasn’t often in the habit of
correcting scientists. “Computer, provide live telemetry from grid
nine-delta-four-beta.”
As sure as the dinner was long, two Starfleet vessels ignited the point and began to encircle one another.
“The two ships are examples of four types of temporal paradox
simultaneously. Starfleet’s tried everything: we’ve sent in ships,
appealed to twenty-ninth century temporal specialists, infiltrated both
vessels. Even just asked the Klingons to blow it to shit in the late
2380s. Nothing has worked.”
“Do we know why?” came a query from the assembled company.
“Because neither captain is in the habit of listening. It’s a causal
distortion that will simply never end due to its mathematical perfection
and dimensional integrity. And it remains one of the great scientific
mysteries of our time.”
-= [to be continued] =-