Ashes of the Columbia

[Graywand2]

A/N: First off, this is a crossover between Star Trek: Enterprise and Avatar: The Last Airbender. Yeah, I know it's weird but I'm writing it to satisfy my inner fanboy. I hope you enjoy.

Historian's note: This story is set in August-September 2155, six months after the episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise "Demons" and "Terra Prime" and within days of the Avatar episode "Boiling Rock." Oh, and the Romulan commander and the mentioned Romulan crewmembers belong to great Star Trek authors Andy Mangels and Michael A Martin.


A/N: This fic disregards everything after Boiling Rock

Prologue:​

“Man's inhumanity to man
makes countless thousands mourn."
-Robert Burns, "Man was Made to Mourn"


Captain Erika Hernandez twisted in her narrow bed, pulling the silvery blanket over her. The fortyish woman, her dark brown hair framing her face, twisted her eyes, at the mysterious phantasms of the night’s dreams. The dark dreams forced her to open her brown eyes, planting her feat solidly on the metal floor as she shook her head to banish the fog of the world of dreams from her head. Oh, my head, she thought, putting her head in her hand. It’s been quite a night, one dream had me coughing up furballs. She shook her head disbelievingly at the thought of that last particular dream. I don’t even have a cat. I'm a dog person.

A loud ringing sound interrupted her musings. It rang around in her head like a chainsaw buzzing at full blast. It hurt so much she smacked the companel harder than she would've normally done to get it to stop.


“Hernandez,” she said tiredly, fighting the urge to go back to sleep.


“Captain Hernandez,” the voice of her Indian first officer, Commander Arya Naidu, her first officer, said, echoing through the room. “We’re entering the system sir, you wanted to be informed when we arrived."


“Of course,” she said. “I’m on my way.” She walked across her rather Spartan quarters to the dresser on the other side. She opened it and pulled out her uniform: a royal blue jumpsuit, a black, button-up mock turtleneck, and heavy black leather boots. The jumpsuit had epaulets on the shoulders, the four silver pips indicating Captain’s rank on the right breast, a patch on the right sleeve bearing the yellow delta logo of Starfleet, a mission patch on the left arm showing the Columbia surrounded by a red circle with her registry number, NX-02. Surrounding it were the words in Latin, Audentes Fortuna Juvat. Fortune Favors the Bold. It had pockets on the legs, arms, and chest, and a blue nametag, with her name E. Hernandez in red.


I miss the old uniform, she mused silently, thinking of the somewhat less elaborate Starfleet uniform that was replaced with this one a couple months ago as she got dressed for the day and and walked out of her quarters. As she walked through the corridors of her starship, pushing her way through crewmembers intent on the day's business, her mind wandered. They had detected this system on their sensors a last night, and eager to get some exploring done, and get away from the pre-war recon missions they were running so close to the Romulan border, they had changed course to explore it. She knew though, that the planetary survey data would have military value as well. It was then she felt a slight shiver up her spine, something she always got when they entered a potentially dangerous situation. But than again, any mission was potentially dangerous. But this was different.

This mission is about to change, she thought as she strode purposefully onto the turbolift. We were sent to this area of space to scout it in the event we had to fight the Romulans in this area, but I fear a far darker enemy than even the Romulans lurks out here in the Briar Patch. As soon as she thought that, though, she disregarded it.

Get a hold of yourself, Captain, she thought. This is just nerves, everything will be fine.


She walked out onto the bridge and stared around at the ship's nerve center. It was larger than the bridges of the previous generation of Starfleet vessels; primitive, cramped things that were incredibly uncomfortable. Granted, the NX class was rather packed and not that spacious but still, it was an improvement over the Republic, the ship she served on as XO before taking command of the Columbia. She walked down to the center of the starship sat down in the large leather chair in the center of the room. She swiveled her chair to face the science station on the port side of the bridge, and fixing her XO with a look of curiosity, asked, "Report."


Commander Arya Naidu, an Indian woman in her mid-thirties with shoulder length, jet-black hair, brown eyes, and with blue science colors on her uniform, looked up at her from her console with an excited look on her face. "One world in the system, M-class, and with a moon remarkably similar to Luna."


Hernandez, curious, turned back around to face the viewscreen built into the forward bulkhead. "Show me the moon," she said. And the starfield was replaced with an image of this planet's moon. It's amazing, she thought, wondering at the sight of the big white orb on the viewscreen. It really does look like Earth's moon. In her mind's eye she could see the thriving Lunar cities of New Berlin, Tycho City, and even the massive artificial body of water called Lake Armstrong. She didn't have to do any leaps of imagination to conjure that thought, the geography matched perfectly. This can't be possible, she thought, utterly amazed at the prospect.


"Show me the planet," Hernandez ordered. And the image of the moon was replaced with one of the planet. It was definitely M-class. The planet was two-thirds water, the hallmark for the majority of Class-M planets come across so far by either Earth or Vulcan. However there was land, the most obvious being the massive, green-brown continent that stuck out like a sore thumb in the middle of all that endless blue water. Off to the side though was a large island chain, dozens of islands, all looking nice and habitable from this vantage point. There were even two polar ice caps like the ones that graced the Earth. All in all, it would make a nice colony world; assuming that it wasn't already inhabited.


She was interrupted from her thinking about a possible Hernandez City planted on the world below by a loud alarm beeping on the ship's console. She turned around to see Arya, a confused look on her face, hurriedly pressing buttons on her console. It rang out again, and, looking more puzzled, she activated the hooded viewer built into the vast bank of consoles that extended that length of bulkhead and peered into it.


“Report,” Hernandez said. When she didn't respond immediately, she said, a tad more forcefully than she intended, "Report!"


“These are human biosigns," she said disbelievingly, looking up from her viewer and at her with an amazed look at her.


“Human biosigns?” She said, possibilities rushed through her mind. A lost freighter perhaps? “How many?”


“Millions,” she said, staring into her viewer once again, and pressing buttons to call up more data from the sensors. “And I’m detecting evidence of a preindustrial society." She got up and shook her head. "I can’t give you an exact figure, there’s something interfering with the sensors.”


“Find out what,” she said, eager to follow-up on this discovery. Now. “Take a shuttlepod to the surface, with the sensor interference I don't want to trust the transporters. Your priority is to gather information to help our sensors breakthrough the distortion. Once that is accomplished, we can begin a much more expansive survey of this world."


“Aye, sir,” she said. Stepping away from her console, she said, authority in her voice, “Gleason, Kalakos, you’re with me." And the tactical and helm officers left their positions on the bridge to join her on the turbolift. Five minutes later, the comm officer, Ensign Kowalski informed her that shuttlepods one and two had left the launch bay and were on their way down to the main continent. She sat back and waited for her first officer’s report.


She’d never get it.


Fifteen minutes later an alarm suddenly beeped at the tactical station. She turned to see the young Chinese officer who had taken the tactical station. She was an ensign, just out of flight school, with black hair down to her shoulders and a determined look in her dark brown eyes. The young woman looked at her and said, "Sir, there's a starship. Bearing 104 mark 69." She looked up at them. "It's Romulan."

Damn, she thought, fear coursing through her. This is going to get ugly. Aloud, none of her fear allowed to show in her voice, she said, “Show me." The screen changed to see a graceful looking green warship coming at them from the other side of the planet, with two large wings with curved warp pylons on them, attached to a body that struck her as similar to a horseshoe crab.


“Tactical alert,” she said, all the while wondering how the hell they managed to sneak up on them like this. Immediately the lights dimmed slightly, and red lights started appearing on every computer console, along with muted versions of the alarms no doubt ringing throughout the ship. Immediately, the other crewmembers on the bridge sprang into action, all light bridge banter ceasing abruptly as every hand attended to their duties with gusto.


“They're charging weapons,” the tac officer said, fear muting her accented voice.

“Ensign McCann,” she said to the young woman manning the helm, “evasive maneuvers, Zhao," she said curtly. "Return fire."

“Aye sir,” she said. She saw the Romulan bird-of-prey shift position on the screen as the Columbia swung out of the way of the green disrupter blasts emanating from the enemy vessel. She watched with some measure of satisfaction as the cannons bit the enemy starship back.


“Direct hits,” Zhao said, satisfaction evident in her voice. Then that satisfaction was abruptly gone when, she said, incredulously, “No damage.” Then the ship rocked as two further disrupter blasts hit them. Behind her she heard massive blasts as consoles exploded behind her, showering the crew with sparks and soot

What the hell? She thought. How did this happen.


Her question was answered an instant later, “Direct hits, engineering section,” Zhao said hurriedly. An alarm blared throughout the ship. “Damn,” she said. “The hull plating failed to polarize in the section over engineering." She looked up at her captain, a look of fear in her dark eyes, and said,



"There’s a core breach in progress.”


That information was repeated a second later, when the comm activated and the male voice of the Chief Engineer, filled the bridge. “Chief Engineer Kelby here, sir,” he said at a rapid clip, his tone laced with urgency and frustration. “We have a core breach in progress. I estimate ten minutes until the entire ship is destroyed."


Damn, she thought. With a heavy heart she switched on the All Decks button on the chair’s left arm, activating the communication circuits that would send her final orders as Columbia's Commanding Officer through the ship. “This is the Captain. All hands abandon ship! I repeat all hands abandon ship!”


Zhao, McCann, and the other crewmembers stared at her with looks of concern on their face, obviously unwilling to abandon their captain. She’d have none of it. They were going to get off this ship if she had to physically carry them to the escape pods herself and shove them in.
“Obey my order!” She shouted, glaring at each of them in turn. As they hurried from the bridge, she sat back in her chair and stared at the Romulan warship in front of her. She just hung there, menacingly, waiting as her vessel died around her.


She got me, she thought, anger at the prospect coursing through her.
She waited and watched as the bridge burned around her, the acrid stench tickling her nostrils. The Romulan vessel was still just hanging out there in the blackness, waiting. Her sensors detected the impending destruction of the Columbia and presumably the ship’s Captain didn’t want to waste resources finishing her dying vessel off. After five minutes she figured that enough time had passed for the overwhelming majority of the crew to have made it to the escape pods, she walked over to the turbolift and boarded it.


When the turbolift finally stopped on E deck, she saw what she hoped were the last of the crew being hurried onto the escape pods by the last of the security personnel, those personnel whose job it was to keep the way to the escape pods clear. She walked over to them and they stood at attention, half of them were MACOs, wearing the gray-brown MARPAT uniforms pioneered by the US Marine Corps in the days before the signing of the Traite D'Unification unified Earth's nations into one. And the other half were Columbia security personnel.


“Is that the last of them, ladies and gentleman?”
A young MACO private, with brownish skin, long dark hair and dark eyes, a Private Al-Tikriti, by her nametag was the one to answer, albeit ignoring protocol.



"Yes, sir."


“Then I suggest we depart ourselves.”


“Yes, sir,” they each said in turn. And they opened the pod doors.



Hernandez settled into the seat in the small, cramped, two seater pod and closed the door behind her. And, in the hardest moment of her life, she pressed the button that launched the last of the ship’s escape pods. She felt the floor and the walls vibrate as she watched her ship on the sensors for the last time. As she did so, she thought of the first time she laid eyes on her at the Oakland shipyards. Most non-Starfleeters would consider her ugly, the saucer connected to the two cylindrical warp nacelles not striking most people as the epitome of beauty, but her vessel was beautiful to her.


“Goodbye, Columbia,” she said, her words drowned out by the vibration of the thrusters thrusting her to the automatically programmed landing site on the main continent. She looked as the ship exploded, orange flame bursting out of the back of the saucer section, ripping the ship apart and sending the parts flying into the upper atmosphere. She turned away from the sight and began to cry, but suddenly she was knocked on her side and out of her seat as the alarms blared aboard her pod. She struggled back into her seat, as the acceleration pushed the re-entry out of control.


She hurriedly pressed the buttons that confirmed her worst fears: a piece of the hull had impacted her, throwing off her trajectory. As she felt the pod increase in speed she did something she hadn’t done in a long time.

Pray for me, Virgin Mary, she thought.


Commander Nveih i’Ihhliae t’Jaihen sat back with smug satisfaction as the Earther starship exploded on the viewscreen of the Lha Aehallh.


“The Earther warship is destroyed. Commander," Subcommander Vosleht, unnecessarily remarked from his station on the bridge’s port side. He refrained from rebuking him, he was too satisfied with the moment.
This ought to more than make up for what happened many khaidoa ago when I badly bungled along with the Qiuu Nnuihs the capture of the vaekhh that penetrated our borders, he thought.


“Centurion Tanekh,” he said to the female helm officer which had replaced S'Eliahn after he’d killed him for not engaging in sex with him and his wife. "Set a course for the Perimeter. "We need to tell Admiral Valdore and First Consul T’leikha about this and we can’t do that from within the Briar Patch, damn metaphasic particles disrupt everything.”


“Aye, Commander,” she said. As they left orbit he thought, Jolan’tru, Earther scum.


Katara stirred, groaning in the middle of the night. Her body's systems forced her out of her pleasant dreams, and it became immediately clear to Katara why. Her tongue was as rough and dry as a parchment scroll. Grumbling because she was for once having decent dreams instead of the nightmares that had gripped her recently, she threw the comforter off her and planted her feet solidly on the stone floor. There’s water in the main atrium¸ she remembered. She got up and grabbed a torch off the wall, setting a course deep into the tunnel dug into the heart of the mountain. She made her way to the atrium and found what she was looking for, a large fountain, still running off copious amounts of water even after a century of neglect. She grabbed a bowl, bended some water into it and walked out onto the balcony. There she stopped, and immediately considered going back to bed. For the man who tormented her and her friends for so long, who now had gone over to their side, even helped rescue her father was standing there. He had done good on his word to sincerely break away from Ozai, but she didn't trust him as far as she could throw him, and she didn't think she'd ever would.


“Zuko,” she said, coolly but civilly.


“Katara,” he said back in the same tone and manner


“Can’t sleep?” She asked as she sipped her water.


“Yep,” he said. Tired of engaging in conversation for the moment she looked out over the vast stony expanse before them. She was taking a swig of water when a massive orange burst in the sky above her caused her to look upward to see a massive explosion lighting up the night, along with hundreds of great fireballs filling the sky and streaking off towards the west.


All distrust forgotten, she turned and prodded Zuko, who didn't even seem to notice, hard in the arm. When he turned to glare at her she pointed up at the sky. He looked up and his jaw dropped.


“What is that?” he said, amazed. “It’s unlike any meteor shower I’ve ever seen.”


They stared at each other in amazement and watched the burning sky.

(Cont. in next post due to character limit)

 

[Graywand2]

(con't of previous chapter.)

Azula lounged in her vast four-poster bed. The red curtains and sheets pleased her, but what would've pleased her more was an attractive male consort to share her bed, but every attempt to rectify that problem had so far failed. And to exact a slow, exacting vengeance on the Avatar, his friends, and her mother for all the wrongs they'd done her. I will make them pay for their arrogance, she thought, anger briefly rising in her breast. A knock on the door boomed through the room, breaking her out of her angered reverie. She sighed, “Come.” The double doors pushed open to reveal a palace servant. Once inside the young woman in red robes bowed obsequiously.


“My lady,” she said meekly. “The Commander of the City Watch requests a moment of your time.”


“Tell her to come back later,” she said.


“She says it is urgent,” the servant said.


Azula sighed, throwing off her covers. “Fine,” she said. She banished the servant from the room and got dressed for the day, getting into the gilded armor she preferred when dealing with...well, pretty much anybody. It made her seem imposing, letting all who dealt with her that she was the master of the room, and all had better treat her with due deference as their Crown Princess. And, one day, when all her plans came to fruition, she would be Firelord. When she was dressed, she walked into her throne room and sat down in her father's throne.


The Commander of the City Watch Liu Mei, a stocky thirtyish woman in the red and black lacquered armor uniform of the Fire Nation Army entered the throne room's double doors and bowed to her princess.


“My lady,” she said, reverently. “Six great object fell from the sky and landed in the city square. They caused a swath of destruction as they fell, burning many, many city blocks.”


“I don’t need to be woken up for a meteor impact,” Azula said angrily. “Those happen all the time.” There were frequent meteor showers, and in about one in every five at least one asteroid fell from the sky. “I could’ve dealt with it when I woke up.”


“It was no asteroid impact,” she said, looking up slightly, and with a excited undercurrent to her voice she said, “They were great metal object, with seats inside, and many occupants.”


She sat forward, a slight smile and curious look on her face. “Really,” she said. “Bring them in.”


“Yes, my lady,” she said. And she stood up. As she went for the massive double doors, Azula, sensing the reason for her better than usual mood said, “And Commander, don’t think this will make up for your forces failure to stop the invasion during the Eclipse.”
The woman stopped and stared at her, a disappointed look on her face. She bowed stiffly and left the room


She came back a few moments later with twelve of her men escorting six of prisoners, a collection of men and women with various skin and hair colors. Many of them she had never seen before and came from no nation she knew.


“Have they told us who they are?” She asked.


“Yes,” Mei said. “This one,” and she pointed out a long-haired, brown-skinned woman, “speaks our language. She claims to represent a nation called United Earth, a nation encompassing an entire planet orbiting a distant and unknown star.”


“Take them to the prison,” Azula ordered. “I’ll be eager to begin…questioning them myself.”


“Yes, my lady,” she said. Turning around she barked orders that had the prisoners being shoved roughly out of the throne room.


I wonder if they feel pain like our people? She thought. She was eager to find out.


A/N: Avatar characters are property of Nickelodeon. Hernandez and Kelby are CBS/Paramount

 

[Mistral]

Interesting tale-I don't watch anime so I haven't a clue but its an interesting story, nevertheless.

 

[Graywand2]

Chapter One: Among the Lions​

“Penetrating so many secrets we cease to believe in the unknowable. Yet there it is, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.”

-H.L. Mencken

​

Captain Jonathan Archer strode purposefully into the mess hall. The fortyish, pale-skinned, brown-haired, powerfully built man, gazed upon the sea of blue jumpsuits before him, staring at the movie screen as if he wasn't even there and saw there was not a single seat. Sighing, he walked over to a supply closet, took out a metal seat and placed it at the end of the first row, next to Lieutenant Travis Mayweather. The dark-skinned, well-built, crew-cut chief helm officer didn't even seem to notice he was there. He was a little miffed that no one saved Enterprise's captain a seat, but it was really no big deal.

Trip would’ve saved me a seat, though, he thought sadly. But Commander Charles Anthony ‘Trip’ Tucker wasn’t going to be saving anyone on this ship a seat for the foreseeable future. He, Lieutenant Commander Malcolm Reed, the slimmer, brown-haired Brit with the red stripes on his uniform at the other end of the row, and Doctor Phlox, the portly Denobulan physician in a brown shirt and pants munching popcorn behind him were responsible for that. Back in March, the Romulan's latest aggressive moves had forced Commander Tucker to contact Mortimer Harris, the spymaster of an autonomous covert ops agency buried deep in the ranks of Starfleet Intelligence. With Starfleet Command at the time not accepting that the Romulan's were the guilty party, Trip asked Harris to help him deal with the Romulan threat. He agreed, but in order for this to work he had to fake his own death. Archer, Phlox, and Reed set up a situation where "pirates" boarded the ship, and Trip sacrificed his life to defeat them. In reality, they were mercenaries hired by Harris who were to get him to his contact. All their shady double-dealing paid off when information he provided gave the world of Coridan, the world with the largest stocks of dilithium in known space, the chance to reduce the casualties inflicted by the devastating Romulan suicide attack on Coridan, an attack which cost half a billion lives and destroyed half of Coridan's dilithium.

He missed the first minute or so of The Hunt for Red October. Captain Marko Ramius, had already walked into his quarters, intent on killing Zampolit Putin so he could defect to the United States without any undue interference. They were going over what Putin had seen in Ramius's wife's book right now and the conversation had switched over from Russian to English. "Armageddon,” Putin said, reading, his face unreadable. “And the seventh angel poured forth his bowl into the air, and a voice cried out from heaven saying, it is done.” He looked up at Ramius with a look of curiosity on his face. “A man of your responsibilities reading about the end of the world?”

He didn't here Ramius's counter for the noise of the companel rang throughout the room, and the calm, efficient voice of the communication officer, Lieutenant Hoshi Sato, filled the room, eliciting some grumbles from the annoyed moviegoers. “Lieutenant Sato to Captain Archer. I'm receiving a priority one message from Admiral Gardner, sir."

Archer sighed. I hate it when this happens, on movie night, he thought. Archer got up, walked over to the panel and hit it with the palm of his hand. "Archer here. Route it to my Ready Room, I'll be there in a few minutes."

“Aye sir,” she said, and the comm-panel shut off. It looks like this movie is over for me, he thought as he hurried from the mess hall. On his way to the bridge, striding purposefully through the corridors of his ship, he thought, Maybe the Romulan's have finally done something to trigger a war. I hope not. When he arrived on the bridge, he noticed a young-looking Vulcan woman wearing a royal blue jumpsuit with commander's pips on it sitting in the captain's chair. He was still surprised somewhat that T'pol was wearing a standard Starfleet uniform, not the tight-fitting civilian clothes she'd been wearing before. Despite the fact that she had been wearing it ever since Trip "died" four months ago.

"Admiral Gardner is waiting for you, Captain," she said in that cool, emotionless voice Vulcans spent years working to perfect and master as part of the discipline needed to suppress their powerful emotions.

"Thank you, Commander," Archer said, walking into his Ready Room, the small office off the bridge where Starfleet Captains did the work they needed to do other than command the ship. He looked around briefly, marveling at the fact that this ship had a ready room. The previous generation of Starfleet vessel were too small to accommodate one. However, the NX class was the vanguard of a new generation of Starfleet vessel. They would all be more spacious and all have Warp Five capability. It was a process that was being jumpstarted by the growing threat of the Romulans. And there were chalk drawings of other famous ships named Enterprise on the bulkhead across from his desk. From left to write were pictures of the HMS Enterprize, the eighteenth century British warship, the legendary carrier USS Enterprise that fought in World War II, the Space Shuttle Enterprise, and finally, his Enterprise, NX-01.

He sat down at his desk and activating the black and silver terminal. The ship's status screen disappeared to be briefly replaced by a green sine wave, and the words, incoming translation, and that was replaced by the white haired, brown-eyed image of Vice Admiral Samuel Gardner. He stared at them from across the light years from his office in Starfleet Command, the sunlit cityscape of San Francisco, Earth's capital, was clearly visible in the panoramic window behind them.

“Admiral,” Jonathan said cordially, doing a very good job of hiding the coldness he felt for him. A few months ago, he ignored his warnings that the Romulans were making covert and aggressive moves in the sector. They’d kidnapped members of a subspecies of one of Earth’s allies, the Andorians, a race called the Aenar. He’d had to violate orders to help his old friend, Commander Hravishran th’ zoathri, go after them and save them from the Romulans. And it was that incident that forced Commander Tucker to join Harris's organization in order to make a real difference in the war he knew was coming against the Romulan Star Empire.

“Captain Archer,” he said quickly, his eyes glowing with concern. “I’m going to be blunt. A week ago, the Columbia was sent on a survey mission to the Briar Patch." His face turned into a distressed look on his face. "You may remember it," he said. "In Klingon it is called Klach D'Kel Brakt."

Jonathan shuddered slightly at that name. He did indeed remember. Genetically engineered humans, grown by a renegade scientist Arik Soong from embryos left over from the Eugenics Wars, boarded a Klingon warship and murdered its crew, nearly starting a war between Earth and the Klingon Empire. Dr. Soong was released from a Starfleet prison to help track them down. He betrayed them, though, rejoined his ‘children’, and led them in an attack on Cold Station 12, a Starfleet installation where the remaining embryos were being held. However, Soong quickly turned against them when the Augments leader, Malik, turned out to be a sadistic monster. He stole the installations entire stockpile of infectious diseases along with the remaining embryos. After he tortured one of the scientists to death by forcing him into a chamber and exposing him to Symbalene Blood Burn, he was going to release the stolen weapons in the atmosphere of a Klingon colony world, Qu’vat, hoping to start an Earth-Klingon war that would allow them to escape. After they destroyed his ship, Soong claimed that they were going to hide out in Klach D'kel Brakt.

“The region is flooded by radiation from supernova remnants,” Gardner said, leaning back in his chair. “And it is on the border between the Klingon Empire and space claimed by the Romulans. We can’t speak for the Romulans, but the Klingons have never been able to map it. However there is evidence of at least two habitable planets in the region, possibly more. We sent the Columbia to scout the area in the event it becomes a theater in any future war with the Romulans. Communication between the Patch and the rest of the galaxy is impossible, so she was supposed to return to the Perimeter a week ago and report in. It’s been two weeks.”

Archer immediately felt fear grip his heart, Columbia’s CO was a personal friend for a long time. They’d dated for a while, until he got promoted to Captain of Enterpriseand he had to break it off.

“You’re the closest ship,” Gardner said authoritatively. “We need you to investigate."

“Aye, sir,” he said, quickly, trying very hard not to let worry for his friend show through in his voice.

“Good luck,” he said, quietly. “You’re orders are in the transmission. Gardner out.” And the image of the elder flag officer dissolved to be replaced by the Terran flag, the white on blue continents and laurel leaf flag first chosen by the United Nations Organizations in the aftermath of the Second World War over a century ago. Once the flag had disappeared and the status screen reappeared, he walked over to the wall-mounted companel.

"Commander T'pol," he said. "We have new orders from Starfleet Command. Set a course for the Briar Patch and engage at maximum warp. And alert all senior staff to report to the conference room in five minutes."



A week earlier

Katara looked at the Fire Nation airship that Zuko and Sokka had ‘liberated’ from Fire nation control. From her vantage point on the balcony it was a dark shadow against the even darker sky. However, she had to admit it looked imposing. In this light, it looked like the powerful whales she’d seen her entire life in the Southern Water Tribe. And it could act like them, too. They were fast, powerful, huge, and aggressive, and had a generally bad attitude, much like the people that built her. And now we’re going out on a mission to see for ourselves the damage that was surely done by those…whatever they were as they fell down from the sky, exploding as they went. Whatever they were, they were most definitely not meteors. We should be back in a few days, she thought. A week at the most. I’ve already left a message for the others.

“Where do you think you’re going?” A voice said from behind her. She spun around to see Toph looking at her. The blind thirteen year old was fixing her with a curious look on her face. She also noticed, rather disconcertingly, that she was dressed for the day, in the uniform she wore on the day of the Invasion when she was inducted into the Earth Kingdom Army. It wasn't a thought that encouraged her.

“Nowhere,” she said quickly, casting about for a way out of the situation. When a convincing lie wasn't forthcoming she said, very poorly, "I'm just going for a quick walk."

“Yeah right,” Toph said disbelievingly. “You’re heart rates through the roof, and your tapping your right foot like a madwomen."

I forgot about that, Katara thought, mentally forcing her foot to stop. She can tell the physiological changes in a liar’s body.“ Fine,” she said, sighing, finding little point in further subterfuge. “We’re going to investigate a bizarre meteor shower. We need to go now if we’re going to get to where we think they landed just a few minutes ago. Zuko’s on board and getting the ship prepared for takeoff. ”

Very well,” Toph said, her tone brooking no further discussion of the issue. “Then I’m coming with you. You might run into trouble.”

“Then we’re coming too,” another female voice said. And he turned around to see Suki, Sokka, and Teo. Suki's eyes were bright with excitement. She was also dressed in full Kyoshi Warrior uniform, complete with the full weapons loadout: katana, shield, and fan. Sokka just looked bored and tired, which from Katara's standpoint meant that Suki had seen what had happened and was dragging Sokka along for the ride against his will. Teo had the same "kid in a candy store" look people who loved science as much as he did got when they were on the verge of making a potential life-changing discovery.

“Why?” Katara said.

“One,” she said, with an awed and curious look on her face. “I saw that...event to. And I want to find out what's what as much as you do. And two,

She heard Toph growl slightly at the mention of Suki and Sokka’s relationship. She more than half-suspected that the girl had feelings for Sokka only Sokka was too clueless to realize that. As for Sokka's feelings, she was sure Sokka had feelings for Toph on some level, but that for right now he did love Suki.

“Sure,” Katara said, sighing. “Let’s go. But I should probably write up another note. And I’ll tell Aang the truth, other than the fishing story bull Zuko and Sokka pulled last time. The only reason I don’t want to wake him is because we need to leave. Right now.”

Zuko was sitting at a map at the corner starboard side of the airship’s small bridge. He was bending over a navigation chart, trying to calculate the most ideal place to start a search for evidence of...whatever landed when whatever it was they just witnessed had detonated. It was difficult exhausting work. As far as he could tell, most of it had either landed in the open ocean, or the Fire Nation. Entry into either obviously not being an option. However some debris had fallen to the east and hopefully some had made landfall in the Earth Kingdom. If any of that debris made landfall than we'll find it, he thought. Hopefully. The most important thing is to secure some of that debris, preferably before the Fire Nation. He was pretty sure the Fire Nation would get their hands on some of the debris. Most of it was traveling in that direction, and what did make landfall would probably be in their hands before the week was out. Assuming the wreckage had some sort of strategic or tactical value, it would be in their best interests to get their hands on some of it to counter anything the Fire Nation might come up with out of it. A distinct possibility as they were able to back-engineer and design the entire class of airship they were using.

He finished plotting out the final course they were going to follow when he heard the unmistakable sound of multiple feet walking on metal and he looked up from his course calculations to see Katara, Toph, Teo, and Suki. Katara looked like a woman who had been forced at swordpoint to accept the best of a bad lot of options. Zuko sighed. The whole point of just him and Katara going to investigate was not having to wake the rest up, convince them they'd actually seen something, and convince Aang to release Appa to them so they could investigate. They were supposed to just leave a note, take the airship, investigate, and return. But how did this happen? He thought.

“What are they doing here?" Zuko said, annoyed gesturing to the rest of the Team, who for whatever reason, didn't notice his attitutde. He sighed, "You didn't wake them did you?

“They were already awake,” Katara, who unlike him, was actually bothering to cover up her annoyance, said.

“Oh, well,” he said, sighing. There really was no point in fighting it They were coming along for the ride, and that was that. “Did you leave a note for the rest of them?”

“Yes,” Katara said in an exasperated manner, crossing her arms and glaring at him. “Now could we get out of here? We’re wasting time.”

He walked over to the helm controls at the front of the vessel, a bank of levers buttons situated directly in front of the viewing window. He grabbed a handle and shoved it, hard, into the On position. The ship shuddered around them, and the loud sounds of the mooring lines keeping the ship anchored to the Temple detached. As he pressed the button that would reel in the mooring lines safely into their docking bay at the aft end of the ship, he realized just than the importance and magnitude of their actions. That whatever they were going to discover out here, it was going to change their lives forever, and things would never go back to what they'd been before. He just hoped it was worth it.

(con't in next post)

 

[Graywand2]

Captain Jonathan Archer lay in his bed aboard Enterprise, throwing the water polo ball he’d prized since he was a teenager against the bulkhead. It collided with the wall with a dull banging sound and flew back to his hand with all the unerring skill of a man who played this sport in his youth. He was thinking about his last encounter with Captain Hernandez in a romantic situation. It had been after the Xindi Crisis. He'd been depressed, and she'd unexpectedly came to join him. After offering him support and solace, one thing led to another.
“Come,” he said. And the door opened to reveal his Vulcan first officer, Commander T’Pol.

“May I come in?” She asked.

“Yes, please,” he said, motioning her to come inside his quarters.

As the door closed behind him the pretty Vulcan woman stood in front of him with a look at him. “I take it from the way you’re behaving you’re worried about Captain Hernandez,” she said in that emotionless way that Vulcan’s had perfected in the thousands of years since Surak of Vulcan first led his people on the path to logic. Unfortunately, not everyone on Vulcan had agreed with him.

If the people on Earth only knew, Archer thought. If they only knew that Vulcans and Romulans are the same species, at a time when most people don’t even know what they look like yet, the fragile Coalition we’ve built will fall apart. The Coalition was a mutual defense pact made in response to the aggressive races Starfleet, i.e. Enterprise, had encountered over the years: the Suliban, the Tandarans, the Klingons, the Xindi, and now the Romulans, a race who’d done so much more damage than all of them combined. It consisted of United Earth, the Vulcan Confederacy, the Civil Union of Tellar, and the Andorian Empire, but it was incredibly fragile. The Andorians had fought wars with Vulcan and Tellar right up to a few years before the signing of the Coalition Compact. One whiff of that getting out and it was all over. Andoria would demand Vulcan's withdrawal from the Coalition, if not leave themselves. Andoria, and possibly Tellar, would most likely go to war with them almost immediately. And Earth being Vulcan's ally, they would be drawn in on the side of the Vulcans. And a long and pointless war would break out, costing the lives of millions of Starfleet and MACO personnel, which would allow the Romulans to waltz right in and destroy them. The Romulans don't have to invade us if they feel threatened, he thought. All they'll have to do is show their face and we'd destroy each other faster than it takes to get from Earth to the Moon at impulse: thirty seconds.


“It’s not just that, T’Pol,” Archer replied. “What if they encountered the Romulans. What if they saw what they look like?”

“If they did,” she said, logical as ever. “The Romulans would probably ensure not a single member of the Columbia’s crew survived.”

“Thanks, T’Pol,” Jonathan remarked sarcastically, throwing his ball against the wall a fourth time for effect. “That makes me feel better.”

The companel rang, and the voice of the third-watch commander, Lieutenant Commander Donna O’Neil, entered the room.“ All senior officers to duty stations. We will be approaching the Briar Patch in five minutes.”

Captain Jonathan Archer and Commander T’Pol stepped off the turbolift onto the bridge. Captain Archer immediately relieved Commander O'Neil of her station and Commander T'Pol relieved the third watch officer that had been manning the science station.

“We’re approaching the Briar Patch, sir,” Lieutenant Mayweather said, monitoring his station intently as they approached the region.

“Onscreen,” he said. The viewscreen changed to reveal a vast orange-red cloud glowing with a soft, almost fiery light; a light that only seemed to accentuate the ominous nature of Klach D’kel Bracht. Seeing it now, he felt an irrational feeling in his gut. It looked evil, it was ridiculous to think like that but it did. It looked like one of those places where ships got lost all the time, much like the Delphic Expanse before the Xindi Crisis.

“We’re about to loose all communication with Starfleet, Captain,” Lieutenant Sato, informed him, no trace of fear in her voice as she informed him that once they were inside they were essentially on their own until they returned to the perimeter to make their report."

“Captain," T'Pol said, angrily. "I'm detecting supernova remnants, false vacuum fluctuations, and large amounts of metaphasic radiation inside there. We'll have to operate with our hull plating polarized, sir."

"Do it," Archer said quickly. "We don't want to take any chances."

"Aye, sir," Reed said, as he worked his controls. He looked up at him and said, "Hull plating polarized, sir."

Archer sighed, gave one last look at the Briar Patch, and gave the order which, unbeknownst to him, would change the galaxy forever.

"Take us, in, Travis."

The jet-black Fire Nation airship scudded across the sky, her fearsome prow cutting effortlessly through the cumulonimbus cloud bank they were traveling through. She had once been named the Lord Azulon but ever since her new masters liberated her from Fire Nation control, she had been named the Fearless. Zuko had been initially opposed to it, citing the belief among primarily seafairing peoples like the Fire Nation that rechristening a ship after her launch was bad luck. The rest of them had put their foot down. The Lord Azulon was now the Fearless. And her current master wasn't on a mission of war for the time being.

Katara observed the ground at a viewing port mounted on the far side of the bridge. She was observing a killing field. Up until a few days ago the area had been held by Earth Kingdom remnant forces until a Fire Nation offensive ejected them from the sector. So far though, other than the signs of the recent battle, there was no sign of anything out of the ordinary; then she saw it. A massive dirt trench that seemed to have been dug out of the soil by some massive unknown force. She moved her telescope, following the trench to see what had caused it. A massive metal object that seemed to be half buried in the ground.


That seems to be it, she thought, a giddy, almost childlike feeling coming across her at that moment as she observed the mysterious looking object.

“Teo,” she said quickly. “I’ve got something.” She checked the heading using the techniques she’d learned pouring over the ship's navigational manuals. “Heading 1-2-0.”

“I’m on it,” the paraplegic helmsman/engineer responded. He’d taken most to the helm operation manuals so he was the one toggling the buttons to alter to the ship's heading. “ETA to target point three minutes.”

“When we get there," she said. Prepare to launch a War Balloon. “Me, Zuko, Toph, and Sokka will head down.” When he noticed Sokka and Toph nodding, clearly ready to obey her orders without question, she felt a small sense of satisfaction. It was good to be Captain. They’d pretty much made her their Captain when the ship had encountered a patrolling Fire Nation airship in a cloud bank about twelve hours after they’d left the Western Air Temple. The enemy ship, which Zuko had identified as the Devisor, recognized the Fearless under her original name, and she’d hailed her threatening to destroy their ship if Fearless didn’t immediately stand-to and prepare to receive borders. After Zuko had been knocked out when Devisor’s warning shot slammed into side of the ship, Katara sprang into action. She’d been studying the ships specifications and she ordered Teo to activate the vessel's experimental rockets, wasting three seconds of their precious ten-second fuel supply to get out of Devisor’s forward firing arcs. Once that little evasive maneuver had been carried out, she bended the entire cloudbank into a spear of water and slammed it into the top of the enemy warship, where it's armor was weakest. Devisor never stood a chance, her attack cut through them like a hot knife slices through butter. Teo had even taken to calling her captain.


The War Balloon drifted slowly down towards the surface. Zuko sighed inwardly at the signs of the violent confrontation that had occurred here. He saw the smashed faces of Firebenders lying scattered among the charred bodies of Earthbenders, as well as the cut and mutilated bodies of regular warriors who’d fought steel to steel. So much death he thought, so much needless destruction. All of it for a war of conquest and aggression that the world didn't particularly need or want, but was brought about by the avarice of lesser men and women. Men and women whose avarice and need for empire were so great they wrecked the lives of millions of people and threatened the destruction of the human species. He felt eternal shame that he had been apart of that mission of destruction for so long.

“Let’s be careful where we land,” Zuko said aloud. This is hallowed ground.

Katara, from her position at the front of the balloon, looked over the side of the small, cramped thing and pointed out a patch of ground a few kilometers away. “There it is," she ordered. "We should set down there."

When they were over the target site, Zuko reached up and began venting the balloon to bring them down. As he did so he caught a glimpse of the wreckage on the ground. The large metallic mass seemed to prove him and Katara's initial suspicions correct. This was no garden variety meteor shower. This was instead something much different. But what is it? He thought. What? He blew past all his mental reservations with one thought. That's what we're here to ascertain.


Katara was the first out of the Balloon. As soon as her feet touched Earth she immediately wished she hadn't left the ship. The stench of rotting and burnt corpses was overwhelming her, causing bile to rise into the back of her throat. With sheer force of effort she forced it back down into her stomach. However, not everyone else did. She heard a loud retching sound, and the unmistakable sound of vomit being deposited on the ground. She turned around to see Toph, pale as a spirit, her hands on the ground as she vomited up everything she'd eaten over the past few days. Everyone around her was giving her looks of nauseated pity, even Katara."

“Who died and left their corpse out here to rot?!” She growled angrily when she had pulled herself off the ground.

Zuko rounded on her, all pretense of sympathy for her previous ordeal gone. “A lot of people."

Toph lowered her head, chastened by Zuko's remark and said, “Oh. Sorry.”

Katara walked through the battlefield to the metal object. It was brown, oblong, and looked like it had been scorched badly on its side. She circled it and found two large pieces of metal that had been clearly once been separated but were now fused together by heat action. She touched it, expecting that because it had looked so hot coming down it would still be hot even now, days later. But, to her surprise, it was cool. A door, perhaps, Katara thought. There's only one way to be sure.

“Toph,” she yelled behind her. “I found what looks like a door here. Can you bend it open?”

Toph responded enthusiastically, a large smiling breaking out with the mention of the need of her special skills. “Of course I can.” She walked over and climbed on top of the object. “Right here?” She asked.

“Yes,” Katara said. Toph sighed, spread into an Earthbending stance, raised her hand and slammed the palm down. The door smashed inward, spraying metallic debris everywhere. When the dust cleared, Katara saw what she’d been expecting to see, a dark cavernous space, with the hint of a metal floor just inside. Whatever this thing is it took massive damage as it fell from the sky, Katara thought. She, Toph, Sokka, and Zuko walked into the clearly artificial space. It was dented inside, in places the metal bent inward, and panels of buttons lay strewn about the floor. Katara was amazed. She'd never seen anything even remotely like this.

“Katara,” Sokka said. She returned to reality and looked where he pointed. She gasped, for strapped to a chair was was a woman's body. She was fair-skinned, and had, to the shock of everyone sans Toph, red hair, a hair color no one had ever seen before. Her neck was bent at an impossible angle, and her brown eyes stared up at her with a cold and vacant expression. She was wearing what she guessed was a uniform, but one like anything she’d ever seen before. It was a blue, one-piece suit with a red patch on one shoulder. On it was a picture of some sort of strange vessel, next to what were clearly stars. The patch had...etchings on it, clearly words and numbers that were unlike nothing she'd ever seen.

Sokka drew his jet-black blade and cut the woman's body free of the straps holding her to their chair. Gently, they laid her body on the floor, and than Zuko and Sokka were searching the woman's pockets for anything else interesting she had on her. Katara felt a brief surge of disgust that they were, out of necessity though, defiling the dead woman's remains, but she had no choice. As she watched she had a disconcerting sense of epiphany. Wherever this dead woman came from, proved one thing. There was life among the stars, human life. She looked in Zuko’s eyes and saw that he understood it to, which is why he stood off them, his hand on his chin in a clearly disturbed position.




“We’re entering the system now, Captain,” Commander T’Pol said as she looked into her viewer. “One yellow G-type star and one world, Minshara class.”

“Onscreen,” he said. He looked at the world on the viewscreen. He was immediately was struck by the sheer wonder of it. The moon was remarkably similar to Luna, and the planet had one large continent, and one large island chain. When they’d settled into orbit he said, “Scan the system,” he said. “Any sign of wreckage?”

T’Pol played her science board for several anxious moments as she scanned the planet's surface. When it beeped she said, “I’m reading possible wreckage strewn across much of the main continent.”

"Show me,” he said. The image zoomed in on a rocky section of shore on one of the larger islands. It was a curved piece of metal shaped in a crescent, clearly part of the saucer section of an NX class starship. “Hoshi pull in just a little,” he said, his heart sinking. He saw the image start to zoom in but it suddenly started to break up, static playing across the screen. “Hoshi?” He said, turning to her.

“I’m sorry, Captain,” she apologized. And frustrated she said, “There’s something interfering with the sensors.”

“I can see that,” he said irritably.

He heard an alarm ringing from T’pol’s station. He looked at her curiously as she peered once again in her viewer. After a few moments she said, “We have human biosigns.”

“How many?” He asked quickly, thinking that they had found the Columbia's survivors. Maybe this will be an easier mission than I thought when we entered this place.

Those hopes were dashed when she gave her answer, "The sensor difficulties are preventing me from giving an exact count, but I believe that we're facing a population of at least half a billion."

Archer turned to the world on its screen, being rather forcibly reminded of the Xindi Crisis, where they'd ran across a population of 19th Century humans on a planet in the Delphic Expanse. They'd been brought to that world by a race called the Skagarans to serve as slaves. The humans overthrew their masters and severely mistreated their descendants. Starfleet had finally managed to get ships out there to help upgrade the human-Skagaran infrastructure. Now, he realized that this mission was a lot more complicated. This was a discovery that was going to rewrite human history yet again.

He just hoped that down there were the answers he sought.


A/N:What do you think. Oh, this uses information from the Augment story arc from Star Trek: Enterprise. As well as the Xindi Crisis arc.

 

[RobertScorpio]

I have no idea what I was reading, meaning the Avatar aspects, since I have never seen that show...but this was, none the less, a very good read...I hope we see more from your writing..

Rob
Scorpio

 

[Mistral]

Yeah, What Robert said.

 

[Graywand2]

I suppose I should mention now that all the MACOs except Chernyenko (mine), Chang(CBS/Paramount) and McKenzie (CBS/Paramount) belong to Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin. However all the aforementioned names were came up with by Mangels and Martin for their novels Enterprise: Last Full Measure and Enterprise: The Good that Men Do. Both of which are referenced.
​

Chapter Two: Through A Glass Darkly​

“War is fear cloaked in courage.”
-General William C. Westmoreland in McCall’s

Katara sat alone in the Fearless's cargo bay,looking over the bodies they'd discovered so far in this grisly endeavor. Normally she would’ve ordered the bodies buried immediately, but they were on the verge of a great discovery that could change their understanding of their place in the universe, and possibly change the course of the war. The bottom line was, they needed. To preserve the bodies until they could be given a proper funeral, she’d frozen the area inside the cargo bay down to the point where decay was arrested. They’d even undressed the dead and put them in Fire Nation funeral garb so they could study the uniforms in greater detail. To that end they'd entrusted the uniforms and the mysterious devices they'd discovered so far to Teo. He jumped at the opportunity, and hence hadn't been seen in twelve hours.



She looked at them; their skin was colors that she’d never seen before. Some of them had the pale skin of Fire Nation and some Earth Kingdom members, as well as the brown skin of members of the Water Tribe, some were lighter shades of brown, and some had absolutely dark skin. These humans are strange, she said. Good, she liked strange, it’s part of the reason she’d left home in the first place. But this, this was world-shattering, bizarre strange. There were other humans out in space, other nations and suddenly their world and all it's admittedly serious problems didn't seem like such a huge deal anymore. You have to wonder, though, what they were doing out here, she thought to herself. And what happened to whatever vessel or other conveyence got them here? Hopefeully Teo will provide some answers to this whole enigma. It was at that point the pipes that were used for communication on most warships activated and Teo’s voice, distorted by the pipes came through. “Guys,” he said, anxiety apparent even through all the distortions. “I’ve discovered the use of some of the mysterious devices. You need to see me in my lab right away.”



Katara sighed, opened the door to the freezing makeshift morgue, and walked out, closing the door with a final clang, leaving its secrets alone for the next time. She walked into Teo’s lab, in actuality another cargo bay, at the same time as the others. The makeshift lab was strewn with the items they’d discovered. She picked up one of the more interesting objects, a curved object with a straight stalk sticking out the back of it. There were buttons along the left side. She was about to ask a question about it when Teo shouted, "Captain, don't touch that"



"Why not?" She asked, fixing him a quizzical look. "What does it do?"



Teo's gray eyes gave her a disturbed look, "Just don't. You'll regret it. I'll regret it. Zuko will regret it because it's pointed at him." Katara looked up to see a distressed Zuko frozen as he stared at the device which was, indeed pointed at him. She quickly put it back on the table wth the others. "Now what is it?"



"I'll demonstrate momentarily," Teo said, and he wheeled over to the table and instead of grabbing the device she'd put down, he picked up a larger black-curved object with a straight handle with some sort of button sticking out of a ring connected to both the curved part and the stock. He gestured over to a targetting drone commonly used by Fire Nation ship crews to train in everything from Firebending to ranged attacks using arrows, basically a metal statue that had a wooden plank nailed into it and was dressed in whatever uniform of whatever Allied state they wanted to symbolically attack. He aimed the device and pressed the firing stud. And a great sound ripped from the device and a blue pulse of concentrated light slammed into the dummy, causing it to fall to the ground, relatively undamaged. Katara joined the rest of them, except Toph, in having their mouths drop almost to the floor. This could make Bending essentially obsolete. But Teo wasn’t done. He fiddled with a dial on the side of the weapon and he fired again. This time the blast, splintered the wood completely and burned the metal underneath. Finally, as if this wasn't enough to impress upon the scale of what they were dealing with, Teo fiddled with the device and a long beam of blue energy struck the drone spot on... and drilled a hole the size of Katara's head in the metal. When he turned it off he turned to stare at the mismatched group.


“How-?" Katara began, but she couldn't finish the words. This was just too much for her, for anyone in the room to comprehend.


“Does this work?” Teo said, finishing the sentence for her. “I don’t know. But I know results, and this is the result.”

“I can’t see what happened,” Toph said, her voice laced with surprise. “But judging by the smell it, something big happened." When Sokka explained she said, reverently, “cool.”

Katara didn’t know what to think. Mind-boggling, yes; earth-shattering, yes, but cool? She wasn’t so sure. But she was sure of that they had found either a potential ally or a potential enemy, she could only hope that if and when they made contact, it would be peaceful.




Lieutenant Commander Malcolm Reed looked around the landscape. The hilly, verdant countryside was very beautiful and covered in trees that the scanner in his hand identified as Earth species: oak, pine, elm, ebony, it was all here. All in all it wouldn't look out of place in parts of Texas. It’s almost like we never left Earth, he thought, shaking his head at the prospect. Though this land’s at war according to the evidence of battle we’ve picked up through all that ionization in the upper atmosphere, which is why everyone’s armed with phase or pulse rifles. He looked behind him to see Captain Archer talking with the leader of the contingent of MACOs assigned to Enterprise, Second Lieutenant Fiona Mckenzie. She had come onboard with the MACO contingent during the Xindi Crisis when the unit was under the command of Major Joss Hayes as a corporal. Upon Major Hayes', the only MACO officer onboard, death rescuing Hoshi from the Xindi-Reptillians, she had made him the unit commander, granting her a battlefield promotion to sergeant. Eventually, Archer convinced the MACO Chief of Staff General George Casey to grant her a field commission to Second Lieutenant, though like her predecessor she still answered to him. He had to admit, he worked with McKenzie better than he worked with Hayes, at one point they'd ended up beating the snot out of each other due to their rivalry.



It was at that point that the scanner in his hand rang out. He looked at it and saw that he had detected human biosigns entering extreme edge of sensor range to the west. He moved to show this information to Captain Archer when some shapes appeared on the horizon, at the extreme edge of the current visibility. He grabbed his binoculars and pulled them to his face to get a look. It showed four people, two were definitely male, and two were female, and that was about all he could tell from this range. “Captain,” he called out. “We’ve got people approaching from the west.”

"Show me," Archer said. Malcolm pointed out to the west. Archer drew his own pair of binoculars to his eyes. After a moment he turned to Lieutenant McKenzie, who was standing their absolutely



“Lieutenant,” Archer called back to her. “Deploy to secure the area. People are coming, they may be hostile we can’t be sure.”

“Aye, sir,” she called back. And she started directing her men, all thirty MACOs in Enterprise's detachment to positions in the undergrowth, out of sight of anyone coming in. Almost instantly, it seemed, the forest fell silent, the air heavy with expectation.


Finally they came close enough to discern facial features without binoculars. The youngest, a girl of twelve or thirteen had black hair, and milky eyes that suggested damaged eyes.That girl probably can’t even see, he thought. Two were two brown-skinned humans, a male and a female that looked to be brother and sister, the brother holding the phase rifle, and a not much older pale-skinned young man, with a scar over his right eye. He called over and said, “Hey!” he said. They stopped and all but one of them immediately entered hand-to-hand combat stances, though they were nowhere near close enough for them to have any effect. The brother brought the phase rifle up to firing position and drew a bead on their position. She noticed out of the corner of his eye, several MACOs bringing their weapons up and taking them off stun, prepared to engage the newcomers if they made the wrong move. I really hope that rifle he’s toting is set to stun, he thought, sweat forming on his brow. And the universal translator’s are working.






“We mean you no harm,” Archer said, holding out his rifle to his side, barrel pointed up at the sky. “We just want to talk.”

Three of them, the two boys and the eldest girl looked at them quizzically. The younger girl, the blind one suddenly reached up and whispered her in the young woman’s ear. Immediately the older girl got a look of distrust on her face. “Funny,” the woman, who was clearly in charge said. “Why do you have soldiers with these vicious looking weapons pointed at us?”

How does she know that? He thought

“We don’t know you’re intentions,” Archer said, immediately, trying to diffuse this situation before it dissolved into further bloodshed. “Why don’t you have your brother put down the rifle and we’ll lower ours and we can learn each others intentions without resorting to the need for a barbaric bloodbath, one in which you will be at a distinct disadvantage. And I don’t like killing people anyway. Much less people whom I’ve just meant and have done nothing to harm me." The young woman, whose demeanor and mien suggested she wouldn’t look out of place commanding a Starfleet vessel, thought about it, and said, “We’ll go first." She turned to her brother and said, "Sokka,” and the young man, Sokka was it, lowered his rifle to the ground. McKenzie and the other MACOs lowered their weapons. The young woman walked forward and she stuck out her hand.

“My name is Katara, she said. Captain Archer looked down her and decided he’d best not underestimate her, despite her age, and he walked out and put his hand in hers, making human history with every step, though he didn't know it at the time.


"Jonathan Archer."



It was at that a scream of pain was ripped out of one of the MACOs off to his left. He instinctively turned around and brought his pulse rifle to bear to see a horrifying sight. To see Private Chernyenko writhing in pain and trying to roll out a massive fire that was consuming his uniform. But then, as he watched helplessly, something wondrous happened, the water in the surrounding plant life suddenly jerked, and a mass of water came out of the grasses and wildflowers. He realized with a jolt that the water had come straight out of the cells of all those plants. The mass of water landed on Chernyenko and the fire was put out with a hiss. He stopped writhing and lay there moaning in pain.


"Medic!" He called and one of the Starfleet medics they brought with them rushed over and began administering to his injuries.


Archer turned to Katara and said quickly, the horror of that moment still in her eyes and said, "What the hell was that?"


Katara looked up at him and said, "the Fire Nation." She then fixed him a hard, steely glare and said, "Protect yourself, Captain or they'll destroy you."


=================================================================


Second Lieutenant Fiona McKenzie advanced into the underbrush, the squad of Sergeant Hideaki Chang beside her. She listened to the sounds of battle in the undergrowth. Her forces were already engaging the enemy she noted judging by the plasma bursts and fire blasts she was hearing in the surrounding woods. She also noted that the youngest girl, the blind girl, whose name she learned was Toph, was with them. She had immediately ordered her to stay put, she couldn't accept the concept of someone of her age and her disability fighting to kill. Toph wouldn't stand for it. She'd doggedly come along anyway, and now Fiona was just waiting for her to be scared off by the sounds of battle. It was at that point that a loud yell and several men and women in red armor and spiked helmets came at them brandishing swords. They managed to mow down three of them with their pulse rifles before they got too close. One of the men took a swipe at her head with a sword. She immediately dropped to her knees and drew her shock baton. The man raised his sword and she struck, ramming her baton in her gut. The man screamed and fell to the ground writhing in pain. When she stopped, she suddenly saw massive rocks coming out of the ground and slam into the other enemy soldiers, causing them to fall to the ground, either unconscious or dead, she couldn't tell. She turned around to see that Toph girl had her legs spread out and her hands pointed at the ground with a contented look on her face, and she realized Toph was the source of those rocks.


"Okay," she said weakly. "You can stay."


Toph fixed her with a fierce smile and McKenzie immediately thought, She's an adult male Klingon trapped in a thirteen year old human girl's body. Then the girl grunted in pain, and McKenzie lurched to see an arrow sticking out of her shoulder. She saw the girl struggle to stay on her feet only to hear the whip of another arrow and one was sticking out of her chest. The girl fell to the ground, and she screamed the name of their leader's brother. McKenzie turned around and raised her rifle and shot a young man in red armor with a longbow in his hand. The shot burned through armor and flesh, and he never shot anyone again.


Sokka for his part was savagely locking his jet-black sword with the sword of a rather vicious young woman with a scar running down the side of her face. For a brief moment they fought each other, equally matched until the woman raised her sword too high and her blade was sticking out of her chest a moment later. She turned around and caught the eye of one of Archer's soldiers, a woman who'd a few moments earlier said her name was Meredith Peruzzi. The two nodded to each other, just two soldiers fighting together on the field of battle against a common enemy. Than a blood-curdling scream ripped through the air, the voice of his rock, his best friend, someone whose invulnerability had become one of the bedrock tenants of his universe, now called to him in pain.



"SOKKA!" Immediately his mind was clouded with anger and he rushed forward toward what he fervently hoped wasn't Toph's death scream, for he didn't think that he'd live with himself if she died screaming his name. He charged through the undergrowth preparing to kill anyone who got between him and Toph. Fortunately for some poor unsuspecting MACO or Fire Army soldier, none did. And he came upon a scene of utter carnage. There were four dead Fire Nation soldiers in that field, all looked to be courtesy of Toph, and the MACOs were surrounding Toph's body as a blue suited young man waved some sort of device over her still form.



"Is she okay?" He asked what he presumed was some sort of medic.


The medic a young male with sandy hair looked up at him and said, "She's incredibly lucky, the arrows didn't directly pierce any vital organs, but one did knick one of her lungs." He sighed, and put the device in a case he was carrying. "She's going to need emergency surgery, we need to get her back to the Enterprise."

"Hey," Sokka said immediately. "She doesn't go anywhere without me."

The medic looked at him for a long moment and said, finally, "Why not," he said. He pulled out a device and pinned it to Toph's clothing and withdrew another device and handed it to Sokka. It was an oblong, silvery white object with a blinking blue light in the center of it.

"What am I supposed to do with this?" He asked.

"Hold on to it," he said. He pulled out a small black box with a golden metal grill. Sokka watched curiously as he opened the grille and spoke into the box. "Stepanczyk to Enterprise. We have a thirteen year old injured civilian here who was caught up in the attack on our positions. She needs immediate medical extraction to Sickbay. Tell Doctor Phlox he needs to prep for emergency surgery. Standby to transport two on my signal"

To Sokka's surprise, a surprisingly dispassionate female voice issued from the box, "Acknowledged crewman, sickbay responding."

"Energize," Stepanczyk said. And Sokka watched stunned as a glowing light spread from the center of Toph's body to engulf her. He was about to say something when he felt a suspicious tingle up his spine, and he looked down at himself to see a glowing light suffusing his body. He found himself powerless to say something as the light engulfed them both. He found himself standing on a glowing platform in a metal corridor, with a young woman in a blue uniform sitting at some sort of console. He was about to ask where he was when he was shoved aside by several other blue suited young men and women, who immediately surrounded Toph and gently lifted her onto a guerney. As he watched he grabbed a blue-suited young woman with brown skin and dark eyes by the shoulder.

"Where am I?" He asked.

The woman turned to look at him, and said, "The Starship Enterprise."

 

[Graywand2]

Katara, Waterbending Master of the Southern Water Tribe and Commander of the Fearless deftly swerved to avoid a blast from a particularly angry Firebender who seemed to be doing his level best to char her to a searing crisp. She was about to smash him into a tree with water summoned from the trees surrounding them when a red surge of light slammed into the Fire Nation soldier and sent him sprawling to the ground. She looked to see Captain Archer holding another one of the weapons she'd picked up on the deck of her ship.

"Thanks," she said.

Archer nodded to her and said, "Anytime." She saw an enemy soldier step out from behind a tree and raise his fist back, prepared to blast an unsuspecting Archer in the head. She rushed forward, summoning a whip of water from a tree and preparing to fling it at him when a blue burst of light exploded out of the undergrowth and slammed into the Fire Nation soldier, dropping him to the ground. She immediately let the whip drop when she saw more MACOs charging out of the woods toward their positions. She noticed something different about these soldiers, their uniforms were somewhat dirtier, and they were distinctly torn and ripped. And with a jolt she realized that the survivors of the ship that had come to their world were now coming to the aid of their rescuers.

"Captain Archer," the lead MACO, an older man with brownish skin and eyes and black hair, said. "Major Mirza Shadi, 3rd MACO "Furious Stars" Division, commander of all MACOs onboard the Columbia. Acting Captain Naidu sends her regards and wishes to inform you that in conjunction to us, we will have Columbia's Shuttlepods on station in a few moments to provide CAS."

Archer looked flummoxed at that last statement. "Columbia's shuttlepods survived?"

"Yes, sir," Shadi said immediately. "There was a survey team already planetside." It was then Major Shadi finally seemed to notice her. "And who is this?" He asked.

"A friend," Archer said immediately. It was then she saw a shadow pass overhead and she looked up to see two oblong airships at least twice as large as her ship's embarked War Balloons flying overhead. She watched stunned as they sailed a few feet to the west. They then came to a stop in mid-air and just as suddenly as the ships stopped, they started firing loud, bright, red pulses off into the forests, followed a second later by bright orange explosions in the forest. A few moments later, a loud chirping was heard from Captain Archer's pocket. Archer reached in and drew out a black box with a golden metal grille on it. He flipped open the grill and said, "Archer here."

"Captain Archer, sir," a male voice said as it emanated from the box. "We're reading a large enemy force. Approximately 2000 enemy soldiers. We won't be able to do much against the enemy, at least not right away"

Archer sighed, and said, "Break for high orbit. Archer out." Katara watched as the pods flew upwards, as she watched them recede from view, she heard Archer open the grille again. "Archer to Enterprise."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Commander T'Pol sat in the Captain's chair and listened to Captain Archer's request. "We can't hold this position," he said. "And Columbia's shuttlepods won't be able to do much more than slow down the enemy. We need Enterprise support now." This was not a good development, she knew.

"Acknowledged, Captain," she said immediately.

"Archer out."

"Sir," the accented voice from the tactical station said. She turned to face the brown-skinned, brown-eyed, and black-haired officer manning the tactical station. In Commander Reed's place, the tactical station was ran by Lieutenant (j.g.) Sana Al-Tikriti, a native of the Iraq region of Earth and, if she remembered correctly, she had a sister who was a private in the Military Assault Command and was a member of the MACO 3rd "Furious Stars" Division, the division which had provided the MACO contingent aboard the Columbia. "We can't target our weapons from this distance. We need to bring our weapons closer. A lot closer."

Commander T'Pol considered it, and saw that she was tactically correct, despite the fact that she was motivated by her concern for her sister. "Lieutenant Mayweather," she said. "Take us in."

Mayweather turned around and entered commands into his station for the forced reentry. "ETA to target point four minutes."

Zuko felt the dirt irritate his skin as he lay in the underbrush with the two squads of MACOs from the Enterprise and the Columbia. They'd beaten back yet another attack against the Fire Nation forces in the forest. As they waited for the enemy soldiers to renew their assault on their positions, Zuko thought about all that was going on, who he was fighting behind, the weapons their allies were using, in a way he was intrigued, the weapons made them a match for firebenders, and he was willing to bet they afforded a significant tactical edge against Earthbenders. He was also concerned how contact with them could affect their world's future. It was at that point that one of the MACOs put his hand on his shoulder.

"We've got to go," the young man said. "Enterprise is going to blast this entire valley."

"What do you mean?" He asked.

The soldier, who'd identified himself as David McCammon, said, "You'll see." It was then that a dark shadow passed over their position, blotting out the sun and he looked up to see a sight that nearly made him void his bowels, a massive ship floating in the air. It was a massive saucer connected by metal scaffolding to two cylinders which were themselves connected by a metal scaffold. She looked big, mean, and imposing. Things are going to get really quiet, really fast, he thought.



"Sir," T'Pol heard Lieutenant Al-Tikriti say. "We're being intercepted by some sort of armored airship."

"Show me," T'Pol said. And the viewscreen changed to show a clear blue sky, and four airships that looked like black armored slugs. "Armament?"

"Chemical explosives," Al-Tikriti said immediately. She smirked. "They shouldn't pose much of a threat." Then all four airships opened fire, four large bombs flying from a launcher mounted in the fore sections of the enemy ships. The ship rocked heavily under the enemy fire, far more than it should have, and she had to hold onto the armrests of her chair. A companel exploded behind her, the ship automatically going to tactical alert.

"That did more damage than expected," Al-Tikriti said, puzzled. "Hull plating at 95%." Then the proximity alert alarm rang out. "We got another airship closing, bearing 135 mark 43. She was surprised when one of the warships suddenly exploded on screen and was sent in flames back to the surface. "Sir, that other airship is engaging the other airships."

"Lock phase cannons," she said.

"Phase cannons are locked," Al-Tikriti said. Then another alarm rang out on her console and she said.

"Fire," she said.

Katara watched proudly as her Fearless destroyed one of the airships that had attempted to engage the Enterprise, and watched in awe as Enterprise struck out with the same type of weapons the other ships had used, annihilating what was left of the squadron in a few shots. The Enterprise suddenly fired yellow-orange blasts at the forces in the forest and she watched as explosion after explosion decimated the Fire Nation forces in the forest. Finally, Enterprise's guns, and the valley, fell silent. After a few moments, Katara saw the ship fly upward and he heard ragged cheers from the soldiers in the forest, celebrating the fact that the battle was over and their forces had carried the day. He heard a voice behind her and saw Captain Archer walk up to her.

"You should come with us back to Enterprise," he said. "I have shuttlepods on their way. We'll get you and your people on board."

"We should pick up the rest of our people at the Western Air Temple," he said. "There's only a few there."

"I see," Archer said. "Are they the mountaintop structures we detected?"

"Yes," Katara said.

"Fair enough," Archer said. "You've made a friend today. Hopefully you'll be able to help us accomplish our mission and rescue our missing crewmembers."

"You got my friend to safety," she said. "And aided us in battle. I'll do whatever I have to do to help you."

"Thank you," she said.

 

[Mistral]

Very interesting battle.

 

[Graywand2]

Chapter Three: Life Here Began Out There

"Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will."

-James Stephens, The Crock of Gold




Doctor Phlox collapsed into his chair. He had just finished the surgery on the young girl from the surface . Her injuries had been more extensive than previously thought, the scanner in Crewman Stepanczyk's kit had been miscalibrated and apparently missed the fact that the arrow had grazed her heart. If he hadn't gotten her into the imaging chamber as soon as she was in his sickbay she likely would've died on the operating table. But then again, he thought, she could still die. He looked at the black-haired girl who lay unconscious in a hospital gown on one of his biobeds: she was pale as death, though there was color slowly returning, largely due to the two IVs giving her replacement blood and other fluids, and the osmotic eel. It was at that point that the young man who had accompanied her from the surface walked up to him. He remembered that he had raised quite an argument when he'd gotten his friend into the imaging chamber, so much so that the security guards had to grab him to prevent him from trying to drag her out. He'd allowed him to stay if he didn't attempt to interfere again and so far he'd kept his word. "How's Toph, Doctor?" He asked, noticably calmer from the stammering, desperately scared emotional wreck he'd been just ten minutes ago. He noticed with a start that the imaging chamber door had been opened without him noticing, and he was staring at him with a suspicious look in his eyes. He wasn't surprised, people from pre-warp civilizations tended to be suspicious of advanced technology and those who wielded it.

Phlox sighed, there was really no point lying to him about her condition. He'd find out anyway if he lied to him. "Her injuries were extensive. If she manages to survive the next twenty-four hours she'll probably pull through, though that's up to her." He looked at the girl on the bed again, and shook his head. She shouldn't be lying on that bed, not for that reason, she thought.

The young man looked up at him, and said in all seriousness, "Toph is one of the strongest people I know. She'll survive."
​

"I hope so," Phlox said. "It hurts so much to lose someone so young." Phlox thought, thinking back to the late, lamented binary clone daughter of Commander Tucker and Commander T'Pol, Elizabeth T'Les Tucker. She had been named for Trip's sister and T'Pol's mother, both of whom had died in violence. Elizabeth Tucker had died in the Xindi Attack on Earth two years ago and T'Les had died in the Syrranite Crisis last year. And the little girl herself, the first known hybrid of human and alien DNA known to exist, had died soon after being rescued from the clutches of John Frederick Paxton and the Terra Prime terrorist group on Mars, and was later interred in a private ceremony on Vulcan, on the grounds of the T'Karath Sanctuary where her Vulcan grandmother had died in the last days of the dictatorship that would've broken the alliance between Earth and Vulcan and plunged Earth, Vulcan, and Andoria into war. Something which would've played right into the hands of the Romulan Star Empire. "To answer the question I saw written all over your face when you first came in here," Phlox began. "I'm not human. My name is Phlox. I'm from the planet Denobula Triaxa. In a system 97 light-years from the human homeworld of Earth."

The information seemed to hit the young man as if he'd stabbed him with a Klingon d'k tahg. His eyes widened and his mouth dropped to the floor. After a moment of standing there looking like a Denebian Slimedevil about to devour his prey he said, "Whootica Whatica?" His voice cracked and rather high-pitched. It would've been funny if the circumstances had been significantly different. Phlox was patient however. This young man had grown up in a pre-warp civilization, worse a pre-warp civilization at war with itself. And now he had been embroiled in a battle using weapons he'd never seen before, using a process which he could only describe as magical or supernatural in origin, and someone he obviously cared very deeply for had very nearly died. So, without getting angry in the slightest he repeated his homeworld's name, "Denobula Triaxa."

"So," the young man said, putting his hand on his chin. "You are what 'Denobuloid?'"

"Denobulan," Phlox said more forcefully.

"Right, sorry," he said. "Denobulan." After a moment, he decided to volunteer some personal information. "My name is Sokka."

-------------------------

Katara watched the ship approach out the window of the wonderous little vessel Archer had called a "shuttlepod." The pod really was quite wonderous, especially those small black boxes with glass screens displaying moving color images called "computer screens." He was sitting in one of the two soft leatherbound seats behind chair where the pilot a young man with brown hair and eyes and pale skin, was seated, manipulating the console in front of him that had taken her, Zuko, Suki and Teo farther than either of them had gone before, she couldn't believe it, they were in space, she'd wanted to open the door and let the wind blow through her hair. Than the pilot explained that there was no wind and they'd all die and float in space for all eternity, if they opened the door and they promptly sat down and shut up.

In all this she found herself looking over at Zuko, who sat in the other chair and was just as transfixed as he was at the scene out of the window, with Suki standing above her, and for the first time she realized she was glad that Zuko was here. Everything they'd discovered so far in the past few days had made their own problems seem petty by comparison to the far more complex universe they were just beginning to discover. It had gotten them talking, really talking for the first time since Ba Sing Se, and they'd discovered that they weren't too dissimilar in their hopes and fears after all. They weren't romantically interested, at all, but at least they'd managed to finally put the past behind them. It was at that point that two doors in the bottom of the dish-shaped front part of the vessel opened up to show a brightly lit room similar to the Bomb Bay on the Fearless, and two large magnetic cylinders dropped out. Katara watched as the other shuttlepod docked with the starboard column. They then felt the hull vibrate as the port docking arm connected with their pod and they were both pulled into the brightly lit bay.

"Don't leave, yet," the pilot said. "The bay has to repressurize, just wait for a few moments." After a few moments of waiting the door opened and they walked out onto the deck. As soon as she walked out, Katara heard a familiar voice shout out her name. He turned to see Sokka walking down a metal stairwell towards them, he was wearing a fresh set of clean, albeit unfamiliar clothes, a red shirt and pants made out of some sort of blueish material she'd never seen. She ran over and hugged her brother. After a moment they broke their hug.

"How's Toph?" Katara asked.

"She's clinging to life. They say if she makes it through the next twenty-four hours she'll pull through," Sokka said, eyes downcast.

I hope she'll pull through, she thought glumly. "If she dies because of this I'll never forgive myself. I don't want to go back to Aang bearing Toph's body."

"I know," Sokka said. "Anyway," he said. "Here's the ship's doctor, "Phlox." And she abruptly noticed the man and the woman behind him, and it immediately registered that they weren't human. The man was somewhat round and had ridges along the side of his face and oddly shaped ears. The woman had a slight greenish tint to her skin and even more oddly shaped ears, pointing upward in sharp points.

"Katara," he said excitedly. "This is Doctor Phlox. Phlox, Katara, Katara, Phlox. He's Denobulan."

"Greetings," Phlox said politely. Sokka turned to the woman, who wore a totally emotionless expression that disconcertingly reminded her for a moment like Mai, and introduced her as Commander T'Pol, a woman from a planet called Vulcan, who simply nodded, her expression totally unchanging when the introductions were concluded. Life just got a whole lot more complicated...again.


-----------------------

Aang stood at the vast entrance to the Western Air Temple, glider staff in hand, lost in thought, wondering how Katara and the others who'd gone with her were doing. The note they'd left was hastily written, all it really said was that they'd seen a mysterious event in the sky, and that they were going to track down its source. He hoped they'd return soon, possibly with something that could help win the war, he hoped so. Or something really amazing anyway, he thought to himself. It was then he saw a shape out in the distance, and getting steadily closer. As he watched them, the small dot slowly resolved itself into a small airship in the rough shape of a triangle and with small triangular wings.That doesn't look like any Fire Nation airship I've ever seen, he thought. Fire Nation airships are black and red. He watched it come in, getting larger by the second. "What is that?" He said to himself, getting his staff into firing position, in the event the ship turned out to be Fire Nation, though there was something in the situation that told him that this wasn't a Fire Nation airship and that he best not take any defensive action. "Hey, guys!" He called. "Get out here we have company! I don't know if they're Fire Nation or not!" Hakoda ran up, followed closely by Haru and Chit Sang.

"What's going on?" Hakoda asked, breathing heavily between each word, indicating he'd broken speed records to get out here.

"See for yourself," Aang responded. Hakoda walked over to the edge and looked out, by then, the pods were clearly visible and were on a course toward them, and not the top of the cliff.

"I think we should make a space for them to land, and retreat behind the rubble behind us," Hakoda said. "If they turn out to be hostile than we'll at least be behind cover. I don't think we should shut them out completely, because we don't know they're intentions."

To be honest Aang was going to suggest that anyway, but now he didn't have to, and it did make perfect sense. "Let's go guys," Aang said, and they ran to the back of the atrium, taking cover in the stone rubble from the final battle against Combustion Man before his death. And they watched the airship come in. They watched, waiting for any sign of hostile intent from the airship. The ship turned lazily on its side, and to everyone's amazement there was a blue light coming from the back of the ship. The ship settled onto the stone deck and the blue flame disappeared, everyone watched as a metal door that looked as if it hadn't been there before, and too everyone's amazement, Katara stepped out, followed by Zuko and a collection of men and women in blue suits a moment later.

"Katara," Aang said. "What's going on? Who are these people? Where's the others?"

And Katara began to explain.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Doctor Phlox sat at the computer screen, watching the Bei Fong girl's DNA as it scrolled across the screen, where something was missing. He'd used every DNA analysis method he could think of, he even used a Klingon method, and he'd found some very interesting anomalies in her genetic code, anomalies that probably explained some of her powers, but they'd failed to explain a very critical thing: why was she blind? There wasn't a single genetic anomaly that would've made her congenitally blind.. It's possible that she lost her sight afterwords, he thought. But there's only one way to be sure. He looked over Sokka, the young man had refused to leave the Enterprise as long as his friend was in his sickbay, and was now trying to pick his way through the noodles he'd ordered from the galley for him and marveling at the concept of the computer screen.

"Sokka," he said. "Could you come here for a moment?" Sokka looked over at him curiously and walked over, leaving his food on a biobed.

"Tell me about Toph," he said. "How long have you known her?"

"Seven or eight months," Sokka responded.

"And has she ever had visual ability in the entire time you've known her?"

"No, she was born blind," Sokka responded. "Why?"

"Because," Phlox said, standing up. "I can't find one single reason for her to be blind." And he grabbed a hand scanner and walked over to Toph's body. He opened Toph's eyes and ran the scanner over her body. When that was done he transferred the scanner information to the computer screen above the imaging chamber. And he saw the information, there were viral particles all over the place. Dead viral particles and the information he was reading indicated they couldn't have infected her congenitally. This was why she was blind, she had been infected soon after birth and lost her sight, and her caregiver's had been lying to his patient ever since. It also meant another thing, he could heal her sight.

 

[Graywand2]

Chapter Four: Prophecy and Change

"No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected."

-Julius Caesar



Toph floated in the void, she wasn't doing anything of importance. In fact, she wasn't doing anything at all, there was no one here to fight, no one that needed his or her ass kicked, there was just her, her and the darkness. Toph didn't know where she was or remember how she got there. Frankly, she didn't care. Here no one depended on her or judged her, here she knew peace, such peace as she'd never known. Her entire young life had been one battle after another. For the first seven years since she'd learned to walk and talk it had been a battle against her own family for her right to be treated as everyone else. A battle that had been finally, if not won, at least been brought to a close when she severed relations with her parents and left to join the Avatar in his quest to defeat the Fire Nation and become the salvation of the human species. That of course had initiated an entirely different battle to stay physically alive, and to defeat her enemies. Normally she thrived on battle, but lately she grew tired. But she couldn't rest forever, she knew, so she resolved to take this rest now, while she could.

So she rested.

------------------------------------------

Aang sat there, cross-legged around the cookfire with Hakoda and the newcomers Katara had brought with her. Their leader Archer was in the process of explaining why they were here, and he was amazed by the concepts he was putting forth. To explore the heavens, that there were humans out there and non-humans beside, it was mind-boggling. Katara and Zuko were energized by the concept, he could see that in their attitudes. Though one thing was still hanging between them. How did humans get here. It was fairly obvious with their level of technology that humanity had originated there. Though how they got here was another matter entirely.

It was Zuko though, who voiced the question. "How did humans get to this world to begin with?"

Everyone looked at each other, and it was the pointy-eared alien woman who opened her mouth to speak before being interrupted by a loud chirping sound. Archer pulled out a black box with a golden metal grille on top. Flipping the grille up he took the box to his mouth. "Archer to Enterprise," he said. "Report."

"Sir," a woman's voice said, causing Aang, Hakoda, Haru, and Chit Sang to jump back, though he noticed Zuko and Katara took it relatively in stride. "We're getting a signal from the surface, it's Captain Hernandez." Archer immediately stood up with a look of hope and apprehension in his eyes. She had explained that one of their ships had been destroyed and they were in the process of trying to find the survivors. Maybe he's their captain, he thought.

"Patch it through down here," he said, walking over to one of the ships that Archer had called a "shuttlepod". After a few moments the apprehensive but curious Avatar gaang followed them. They paid them no mind, they were apparently expecting them to follow them into the shuttlepod. The pod was amazing, the computer screens being all Katara had explained them to be. Their ability to marvel was cut short by a very unwelcome voice filtering through the speaker.

"You are speaking to Her Royal Highness Azula, Crown Princess of the Isles."

---------------------------------

Jonathan Archer heard Aang and all his friends swear behind him to varying degrees, the more pungent oaths coming Zuko and Katara. Immediately he made the decision not to trust this woman."How did you get this communicator?" He demanded angrily. "Where's Captain Hernandez?"

"She's a guest with us," the woman's voice on the other end of the line said. "And if don't wish to come to more serious harm, I suggest you tell me your name."
To himself he thought, Keep her talking, if I know my crew they're triangulating her position even now. And it sounds like they've probably tortured them, damn. It was for that reason he decided to play this woman's game. "My name is Captain Jonathan Archer of the Starfleet vessel Enterprise."

"Captain Archer," she said. "You killed a lot of loyal Fire Nation soldiers today. I was sorely tempted to execute your soldiers for that affront but I'm willing to negotiate a peaceful settlement with your people."

"I'm not a big fan of negotiations made under duress," Archer said. "So why don't you release all Starfleet and MACO prisoners and then we'll talk."

"Not so fast, Captain," she said. "We'll need some assurances that you won't attack us in the future. For starters why don't you give us some of those weapons you used."

"I'm not in the habit of trading weapons for peace," Archer said immediately. "How about this, give us a fortnight to leave, contact our officials, discuss this matter, and return."

There was silence on the other end for a long moment, than her voice reappeared, sounding hesitant. "I'll give you fifteen days. At the end of that fifteen days I can give no more guarantees for the well-being of my prisoners." And the comm-line ended.

He immediately opened a channel to Enterprise, if they managed to calculate the signal they can go after her."D.O. did you get that?"

"No, sir," Commander O'Neil said, her voice sounding contrite. "I tried to calculate the source of the signal but the difficulties with the upper atmosphere, which for some reason don't affect two-way communication, didn't help."

Damn, he thought angrily. "Did you at least record the conversation?"

"Of course, sir," she said, sounding offended that he'd doubted that.

"Prepare to break orbit as soon as we're aboard," Archer said. "We only have an hour, maybe two to stick around if we're going to be gone and be back within fifteen days."

"Yes, sir," she said immediately. And the channel closed. He turned around to view the locals who had crowded in after him.

"Tell me more about your war," he said.

-----------------------------

forty-five minutes later


Zuko watched as another shuttlepod landed on the stone deck of the Western Air Temple. As before the shuttlepod sat their for a brief moment before disgorging a load of either Starfleet or MACO soldiers. He knew the Starfleet personnel disliked being called soldiers, preferring to be called peaceful explorers, but there was no doubt they had the abilities and, when threatened, the attitudes of soldiers, so he named them soldiers. To be honest he was excited. He was going to go back to the starship. Katara had pleaded that they be allowed to stay with the starship when they left, pointing out that they wanted to be there when Toph woke up. Something Captain Archer had agreed to immediately. They had offered Aang a chance to go along with them, but he had wanted to stay with the Columbia crewmembers on the planet and help take care of Appa.

"Appa," Captain Archer said. "Who's Appa?"

"My pet sky bison," he said. At that point Appa roared, as if to punctuate the information.

"Ookaay," Archer said. "Well good luck with that."

"Zuko if you're coming you should move?!" He heard Katara shout her voice reverberating through the stone temple.. "The shuttlepod is leaving!"

Zuko sighed and ran off to meet the shuttlepod.

------------------------------------------------

"What do you mean you can heal her sight?!" Sokka shouted at him, fighting to keep his voice down for Toph's sake, despite the fact that she was heavily sedated and wouldn't stir if a bomb went off in the room, though Sokka of course, had trouble truly comprehending that.

Phlox sighed, "I can clone her a new set of irises to replace the ones that were damaged and repair the damage to her corneas. I've done the procedure a dozen times myself, Sokka." Which was true, he first remembered performing the surgery when he did a short stint in a hospital in Beirut on Earth. A family had bought a young girl in, an infant, for a surgery to repair her eyes. On Earth, it was a procedure rarely performed on anyone over the age of six months, as most parents whose children lost their sight due to injury or disease actually bothered to bring them in. Toph's parents hadn't had access to the procedure of course, and if what Sokka had told him was any indicator, in an attack of bad parenting they'd covered it up and lied to her telling her it was congenital, which told Phlox that they'd done something to expose the mother to the virus, which he'd identified as Scarlet Fever. I would never have lied to my own children like that, he thought angrily. "This decision isn't yours to make, Sokka. I will tell her if and when I think she's ready to know, and you won't say a word. Got it?"

Sokka sighed, signaling to Phlox that this conversation was far from done, "Fine." As he turned away he could've sworn he muttered, "for now."

It was at that point that Captain Archer's voice was heard over the intercom, "Archer to Sickbay. We're preparing to break orbit, and your ambulatory guest is invited up to the bridge."

"You should go," Phlox said. "The first time you see your world from orbit is unforgettable. You should get up there."

He looked over at Toph, and Phlox said, mustering all his compassion . "I won't let her wake up without you being there. Trust me."

Sokka hesitated for a long moment, then slapped the door control and left Sickbay. Phlox breathed out a sigh of relief and went over to check Toph's IV status.


Katara was sitting in the mess, alone, when it happened. She was trying an Earth dish, spaghetti with meatballs, using chopsticks, not knowing how to use what the Starfleet personnel called a knife and fork when she started to feel bile rising into the back of her throat. Katara stood up, gripping the table to support herself. For a few heart-stopping moments she stood there, breathing in and out desperately, hoping that she wouldn't vomit all over the mess hall. Then, blessedly, it passed. Then a headache slammed into her, causing her to collapse to the ground. What is going on here? Then just as suddenly as the headache came upon her, it stopped, the nausea went away and she felt as if it had never happened. What was that? Maybe I should head to sickbay. But first... she reached out her hand to bend some tea into her mouth. Only nothing happened. As fear gripped her, she decided to try it again, and nothing happened. Katara, stunned out of her wits, rushed out of the mess hall towards sickbay. As she ran, a thousand thoughts started racing through her head. What happened? Why can't I bend? Please, please don't be permanent? She rounded the corner to sickbay to see Zuko running in that same instant. Causing them to smack into each other.

The crash had gotten Phlox's attention for he appeared a moment later, medical kit in hand.

"What seems to be the problem?" He asked.

Katara and Zuko in that instant turned to look at him and, as one, said, "We've lost our ability to bend!"

-----------------------------------------------------

Toph felt the void change, grow less distinct as something, at long last was happening. She couldn't see anything, of course, but she had the distinct sensation that she was floating upwards. It's time for you to go now, a soft voice said in the dark. The thought galled at her. Never in her entire life had she ever been as content as she'd been there.

Why, she thought, desperate and scared. Why must I leave?

The night is coming, the voice said. And if there is any hope of keeping it from swallowing everything you're long-sundered human brothers and sisters have built in the century since they found peace with themselves from being consumed in fire and blood you must be there. Fail, or our Emissary will never be born.

Why should I care if your Emissary is born?

Because without him, worlds will burn for all eternity.

He heard voices. He heard a male voice say, "she's regaining consciousness."

And then he heard a blessedly familiar voice, "Thank you."

I love you, Sokka,


Captain's Starlog August 21st, 2155. After a fortnight's journey, we are approaching the border of the Briar Patch. It has been an interesting two weeks. Apparently two of our guests lose their powers in transit between star systems. It was briefly disorienting for them but they've seemed to have adjusted well enough. Our guests also seem to be sending much of their time immersed in Earth history. We haven't had much time, but I'm working on a theory as to how humans from Earth got hundreds of light years to this world in the distant past. Once we have concluded our business with Starfleet Command we have agreed to discuss the issue.

In another note many of our guests our immersing themselves in Earth history, a process aided by the universal translator, which is translating our historical database from English into audio files in their language, which is virtually identical to Mandarin Chinese. Many of them seem to be absorbing the information quite well, so well the youngest of their group Toph, knows ten times more of my people's own history than I did at her age. Lieutenant McKenzie has also seen fit to allow them to train with her MACOs, which I have signed off on. They're probably going to need it in the days ahead.

"T'Pol to Archer," his first officer's dispassionate voice said, filtering through the room. "We've reached the Perimeter and now have full communication ability restored."

"Thank you," he said. "Have Hoshi send a Priority One Message to Starfleet Command."

A/N:Guess what Star Trek beings are talking to Toph? And please read and review.

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[Mistral]

Still a weird and interesting tale....