by David Smith
Minutes ticked by as the Imperial fleet closed the distance to Tiger. Dave began to worry that they’d have to try a more direct approach when Shearer finally spoke. ‘Gorra ping, sir. Ah think they’ve herduz.’
Janus watched his tactical display carefully. ‘I agree, sir, they’re slowing. Not out of warp, but down to about warp 4.’
Dave smiled. ‘Ok Park, it’s show time.’
The little Korean looked even more nervous than usual and spoke softly as if worried the Imperial fleet night hear him. ‘Susan, load programme Park/HA/01A, please’
‘Loaded PO Park’ replied the ship’s computer.
Shearer suddenly sat bolt upright in her chair ‘Thair transmitten! Haaway the lads!!’
--------------------
On the Bridge of ISS Avenger, Captain Bart Mackie was feeling very pleased with himself. Ok, things could’ve been going better, but accidents did happen and he still had a very substantial force under his command.
It was odd that they’d picked up a message from Tiger, she shouldn’t have anywhere in the vicinity, but it was such a poor signal it was possible it might have been transmitted months or even years ago, and had been drifting through space at light-speed until they’d intercepted it. They still had plenty of time before they were actually supposed to meet LaCroix at Todot Hahn so he decided he had enough time to try and find the root of the signal.
His Comms Officer was transmitting a tight signal in the direction the incoming signal had come from, and they were waiting for a response.
The Comms Officer turned around with a smug smile on his face. ’Got a reply sir, incoming signal . . . ‘ he stopped as all the lights on the Bridge went out.
They flickered back on, then off again, and the Red Alert klaxon began to sound.
‘What the hell . . . who called for Red Alert?’ shouted Mackie. All the consoles around the Bridge suddenly went dead and the whole Bridge was plunged into total darkness.
--------------------
Janus turned, still looking unimpressed, and said ‘Looks like it worked, sir, the Flag-ship of the force has dropped out of warp and is drifting.
‘Good work Park, Shearer. What’s the prognosis for the Imperial Flag-ship?’ asked Dave.
‘Not good, sir. The programme replaced the personality engrams of their computer with elements from Susan’s. As well as that, once our programme was established, we over-wrote the warp-drive control functions and wiped the back-ups. If they don’t have a third back-up they’ll need to dock the ship to get the drive working.’
‘Excellent! One less thing for us to worry about. Let’s crack on and work out our next action.’
With half an eye on O’Mara, Janus said ‘I’ve got a couple of ideas sir, I’ll sort something out with Lyle.’
--------------------
Hollins was tired. They’d gone back three days and his body clock was suffering.
He allowed himself the luxury of a few hours sleep, confident that Janus and Lyle would come up with a workable tactical plan. He was just about to leave his quarters to go to the Bridge to discuss it with them, when there was a call at his door.
Dave answered the door and was surprised to find Aisling O’Mara outside. He beckoned her in. He liked the Science Officer very much, but had never really spent much time with her socially speaking.
‘Hey Aisling, this is a surprise, how can I help up you?’ he asked.
‘Well, I thought I’d come and sound you out about a thought I had while we were discussing this Imperial Fleet.’ She looked worried and that worried Dave.
‘It’s just that it occurred to me that we still think too linearly with regard to this time-travel malarkey.’
She watched as Dave raised an eyebrow in surprise but was otherwise speechless.
‘Think about it. Instead of going back a day and attacking the fleet in a different location, we go back and attack in the same place twice or three times, or four times . . . or a thousand times‘
Dave suddenly understood what she meant. ‘My god, Tiger is the ultimate weapon. We could outnumber the entire Empire Fleet on our own, as long as we had fuel and munitions!’
The smile that normally came when someone had understood her thinking was absent. ‘Yeah, that’s pretty much how I saw it.’
Dave followed her line of logic. ‘So we can’t afford to stay in this universe. If anyone captures Tiger or works out the complexities of the drive system, they could crush everyone else before they even realised they were in danger.’
O’Mara sighed. ‘That’s exactly the conclusion I came to. We can’t afford to let this technology out. From talking to Katrin I believe that when we were captured in Sector 212 the Magistrate’s attention was focused on Tiger’s stealth capability, but her engineers know we were using Tana coils to generate a warp-field. If they get a handle on our exploits and put two and two together, they could probably experiment with captured Tana vessels and discover the extra-dimensional properties just like we did. We’ve even left them a perfectly intact set of Tana coils in orbit around Todot Hahn.’
The Tana battleship. In orbit around Todot Hahn with a dozen Imperial ships. Christ, what a mess thought Dave.
O’Mara carried on even though Dave was already reeling from the sudden understanding of the potentially disastrous consequences their bodged warp-drive might have in this universe. ‘They only need six coils for a ‘Constitution’ class heavy cruiser. That battle-ship could fit out an entire fleet, making them invincible. Not only would they be invincible, the refitted ships will be ten times faster than anything in known space, putting hundreds and thousands more star-systems within the Empire’s reach.’
His head span with the vagaries of cause and effect, and after a painful few minutes he decided on their course of action.
‘We can’t stay here, but we have to finish what we’ve started or we’ll play all sorts of havoc with our own time-stream. We take out the rest of the fleet, get back to Todot Hahn, warn ourselves, and then get the hell out of this stupid universe.’
Another worrying thought popped into Dave’s head. ‘Hang on a minute. I’ve only just realised that we’ve told ourselves to go back in time. How did we originally find out that the Imperial Fleet was on its way??’
O’Mara wore a slightly nervous grin. ‘Ah. I was hoping you wouldn’t ask me that’
‘So you understand what I’m saying? That within our own time-frame, we never actually found out the fleet was on its way?’
She sighed. ‘Yeah. I spotted it soon as I heard the conversation between you and your future self.’
‘So where did that information actually come from?’ asked Dave, as his head began to throb.
‘Well, it’s . . . I mean . . . um . . . actually I just don’t know’ she said with an apologetic shrug. ‘There’s no way we can ever find out where the original bit of information about the fleet came from, but I suspect it’s damning evidence that at some stage we . . . or a version of ‘we’ . . . broke the temporal directive. My best guess would be that at some stage, we got surprised by the Third Fleet arriving at Todot Hahn, and things didn’t go well, so we escaped and went back in time to try and alter things. It almost certainly failed to put things right, but has created an alternative time-stream or parallel universe. At least we seem to have locked it out by warning ourselves and creating a loop which means any temporal damage is confined to this one reality . . . ’
She paused, and her brow wrinkled ‘ . . . I think?’
‘You’re not sure?’ asked Dave.
‘There really is no way of actually knowing. Whatever did happen, logically, must have happened in an alternative reality, and isn’t part of this universe any more. Sorry!’ she shrugged again.
Dave slumped in his chair, ‘I guess it doesn’t really matter, we are where we are. It’s just that I’m uneasy . . . we have no idea how much we’re stuffing up this reality.‘
O’Mara was now rubbing her temples too. ‘I guess this is pr
etty much why Starfleet are working so hard on a set of temporal directives. God only knows how much damage we’ve done to this universe already’ she sighed.
Dave tried to picture the events again, but gave up when his mind refused to work in anything other than three dimensions of space and one of time.
‘I don’t think I’ll ever get my head around this time travel lark. I guess we don’t really even have a choice other than to continue, as a failure to beat this fleet, or a failure to go on to warn our older selves will bugger up the time-stream again?’
O’Mara winced. ‘Yeah, that’s about the shape of it.’
‘Well there’s nothing for it then, I’ll go see Janus . . . ‘ he stopped as he realised he’d let himself get distracted from the job in hand. ‘Oh crap! We’re about to run into that fleet again!’
--------------------
Dave left O’Mara in his quarters and sprinted to the Bridge. The wait for the turbo-lift seemed interminable. Dave burst onto the Bridge just as Janus shouted ‘Torpedoes away!’
Dave took his place in the Captain’s chair, feeling a bit awkward at having failed to agree his Tactical Officer’s plan.
He watched the Tactical display and saw the mix of red, grey and blue dots converge and pass each other.
Janus read the data appearing on his tactical console and abruptly shouted ‘Awww WHAT?? I don’t frickin’ believe it!!!’
Worried Dave asked ‘What happened? Did something go wrong? Susan, replay the engagement in slow time please.’
In that instant, O’Mara arrived on the Bridge and the whole Bridge crew except Janus watched as the drama unfolded a million times slower than it had occurred in real-life. An enemy flotilla of red dots was reversing towards Tiger. Out of nowhere, two grey dots appeared either side of Tiger’s blue dot and began converging with her.
As the dots closed up, two pairs of tiny torpedoes appeared, marked with blue crosses. They raced towards each other as they had done in their previous attack, but Dave noticed immediately that these torpedoes hadn’t hit their intended targets. Oddly though, the two grey dots on the screen seemed to manoeuvre sharply, intersect, turn red and then neatly fall into formation with the rest of the red dots.
Dave was too tired to try and work it out ‘Can someone please tell me what the hell I’ve just seen?’
O’Mara wrinkled her brow. ‘Think of it in reverse. The Imperial fleet is quite happily sauntering along, minding its own business, when somebody raises an alert because they detected two torpedoes. The two torpedoes are heading towards the two ships at the rear of the group, but they don’t explode. However, the Captains of those ships didn’t know they weren’t going to detonate, so they panicked and took evasive action. One of them over-cooked it, turns towards the other ship and their warp-fields come into contact, collapse, and completely destroy the engines on both ships. Sound about right, Janus?’ asked O’Mara sounding distinctly smug.
‘That’s what seems to have happened’ he replied, sounding very, very aggrieved.
Susan confirmed this. ‘The two ships at the rear of the formation were a scout and a frigate. When they detected our torpedoes, both ships took evasive action without waiting for instructions from the Flag-ship. The scout turned to try and comb the track of the incoming torpedoes. However the frigate was not agile enough to attempt such a manoeuvre and simply attempted a ninety-degree turn to port followed by maximum acceleration. They came within fifty meters of each other and their warp-fields collided and interfered. The resulting field collapse resulted in catastrophic damage to both ship’s drive systems. It is unlikely either ship will be repairable.’
Dave had a moment of clarity and turned to face the disgruntled Tactical Officer. ‘You didn’t want the torpedoes to explode, did you? What was in the torpedoes Janus?’
Janus mumbled inaudibly.
Almost cackling with glee O’Mara said ‘Sorry Janus, I didn’t catch that?’
‘What was it Janus?’ said Dave very slowly and clearly.
Growling in frustration he yelled ‘FINE. WHATEVER. IT WAS HAGGIS, OK?? I just wanted to prove to myself that all this time-travel stuff is bunk, and that I’m in charge of my own destiny. So I got Chief Stevens to replace the photon warheads on two torpedoes with a hundred kilos of haggis and attacked two enemy ships with them. And we still took them out!!! How fucked up is this damn universe??’
Dave held his head in his hands and missed O’Mara jumping out of her chair grinning like an idiot and vigorously flipping the bird to Janus with both hands. He also missed Janus silently mouthing a reply that was probably an anatomical impossibility.
Dave looked up and O’Mara hastily returned to her seat. ‘Janus. You’re an idiot. If I didn’t need you in the chair, I’d have Chief Belle here by now to frog-march your sorry ass to the Brig.’
Janus seemed to calm down. ‘Sorry sir. I just can’t handle the fact that I’m not in charge of my own destiny. This whole business has shown that it doesn’t matter what I do or say. The effect will still be the same. Makes me feel . . . irrelevant.’
Dave understood that, but decided not to mention the fact that O’Mara had already concluded that it was far, far too possible to have an effect. Or that such an effect would either change the future or create yet another alternative universe.
‘Yeah, it’s a head-mangler, but that’s no excuse for being a prime ass-hole’ said Dave. ‘Man up and deal with it or I’ll frog-march you down to the Brig myself. Understand??’
‘Yes sir’ said the disconsolate Lieutenant. ‘Sorry sir.’
‘Forget it. It’s done, and weirdly it all worked out. Focus on tomorrow because according to our inescapable destiny, we still have at least one more attack to make.’
--------------------
The next day, the choice of target was obvious as they closed on the position where they expected to find the fleet. It was obvious that they’d reached the fleet’s assembly point. The Flag-ship was still on course, but the other ships were splitting away from her, and reversing off towards which ever target they’d attacked last. With her long range sensors, Tiger found one vessel that hadn’t even made it as far as the rendezvous point.
An older heavy cruiser of the Baton Rouge class and sister of ISS Hornet, ISS Princeton was amongst the oldest ships in the Imperial fleet. Like the Federation, the Terran Empire had retired its Baton Rouge class vessels many years ago. Unlike the Federation, the Terran Empire had been forced to recommission most of them to fill the gaps in the fleet caused by wars fought on three fronts.
A couple of fleet auxiliary vessels were also with her and Janus immediately recognized her role as an escort to protect the auxiliaries while the newer ships got on with the business of fighting. One of the auxiliaries was labelled as ISS Everest, a name Dave recognized. She’d been the vessel called to offer assistance to other ships they’d disabled.
The opportunity to disable this old ship had become apparent after yesterday’s debacle.
‘Ok Lyle get us in position.’
‘Oooohhhh yeahhhh!!!!’ replied Lieutenant Lyle as she brought Tiger about and dropped her out of warp space. Lying dead still, directly in Princeton’s path, they were again dependent on Susan for timing of the attack. The old cruiser was fitted with sensors that were years out of date and many of which were inoperable. Even if Tiger hadn’t been so stealthy, the old warhorse might well have flown by with only meters to spare and never noticed her.
As it was, her passage by Tiger was marked by Susan operating the ship’s warp coils for a nanosecond without pushing her through the field.
As Princeton passed by, her warp-field interacted with Tiger’s causing a surge of energy as both fields distorted wildly. Tiger’s more powerful and better protected engines blew a few power relays, but Princeton’s ancient coils exploded, destroying her engines nacelles completely. She immediately dropped out of warp space and cart-wheeled impotently, completely immobilized by the explosion.
Even as sh
e called for assistance from the two auxiliaries, Tiger was quietly gliding away, her mission complete.
--------------------
Over the next few days, Tiger shadowed the enemy fleet in real time, checking that things looked the same as they had during their attacks. Dave was relieved to see that Captain Mackie had at least rescued the crews of the stricken vessels and evacuated them via the two auxiliary vessels that had travelled with Princeton.
After checking the destruction of the two frigates, Dave authorized the use of the warped drive to make sure they arrived back at Todot Hahn before the remaining Imperial vessels. One oddity that he noticed was that at some stage the scout that they’d seen arrive with the fleet had detached itself, although where it had gone was a mystery.
The scout itself was inconsequential. Although it was fast and agile, it was lightly armed and poorly protected and would have little impact in a battle between heavier ships like the cruisers. Despite that fact it was still disconcerting not knowing where it had gone.
They didn’t have time to worry about it. They had to get back to Todot Hahn and fight the battle against the remainder of the imperial fleet for a second time.
--------------------
Dave was on the Bridge when Lyle dropped them out of warp, and once back in normal space, he asked Lieutenant Cavaleiro to hail the other version of Tiger.
There was a pause and Cavaleiro looked slightly freaked out as he tried to persuade his other self that this wasn’t a prank / dream / trip, and eventually, the other Tiger responded. Cavaleiro put the message up on the main-view screen.
Dave had had plenty of time to consider what to say, but as he stared at his other self he couldn’t help but try and remember what he’d heard when he’d been sat at the other end of the link. All he could think to say was ‘Good . . . er . . . morning Dave’
The other Dave sat staring at him, silently, unmoving and looking ever so slightly retarded.
‘You ok? Hey, that’s weird, I remember me saying that!’ said Dave, grinning as the direction of the conversation came back to him.
