2416 – Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Earth
It was a beautiful early summer’s day, and Lightner had left the windows open to enjoy the fresh breeze carrying the scent of honeysuckle. Outside, his home’s three cherry trees were fruiting nicely, and he anticipated a good harvest in a few weeks’ time.
The home was a fashionable townhouse built in the mid-22nd century, part of the development of the once decidedly rural Aktepa-Chigatay area on the outskirts of the city proper.
He was preparing dinner in the kitchen, half-listening to an audio-only media report on the latest Klingon-Cardassian war, currently being fought across a half-dozen sectors as the Federation and other interstellar governments lobbied in vain to get the two sides to the negotiating table.
Lightner still had friends in Starfleet, and he worried that the Federation would be dragged kicking and screaming into the conflict to assist one side or the other.
His personal comm trilled as he was making sauce.
“I’m making dinner,” he announced, preempting the question he knew was coming.
“Oh, good,” she replied. “It’s been a hell of a day. FOSAB staged a surprise inspection at the lab, so everybody’s frazzled. I hope you don’t mind but Ajva and I are going out for drinks. I’ll be home by six-thirty, if you can wait that long to eat?”
“Not a problem,” he said gamely. “I’m just doing prep work now. I’ll hold off on putting it together so that it’ll be hot off the stove as you walk in the door.”
“You’re a good man,” she said with an appreciative laugh.
“Don’t tell anyone, you’ll ruin my hard-earned reputation as a bastard,” he retorted.
She laughed again. “Your secret’s safe with me. I’ll see you in a bit.”
He returned to his prep work, adding spices pinch by pinch, tasting, stirring.
The news story droned on, ‘Corroborated reports from the Klingon High Command and Cardassian Central Command indicate that attack squadrons from the Klingon 41st Shock Detachment met heavy resistance during their advance into the Ozcaris Cluster…’
The front door chimed, and Lightner called up a holo-screen in midair to surveil the visitor. He saw someone who appeared either Vulcan or Romulan, perhaps a bit past middle age for either species, with dark skin and tightly curled hair just beginning to show signs of greying. The man wore a nondescript suit in muted greys and browns, which might have gone unnoticed on a dozen worlds.
“Hello?” he said, opening a channel to the doorbell’s intercom.
“Captain Lightner?” the man asked in a slightly accented but melodious voice.
“Speaking, though nobody’s called me that in over a decade. What can I do for you?”
“I was hoping we could talk. I’d like to discuss the events at Chedrova and the Klingon time crystals.”
Lightner froze. Those events were not only fourteen years in the past but had been highly classified on the orders of Starfleet Command and the Department of Temporal Investigations. As it happened, that crisis had also precipitated the end of his career.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lightner said automatically.
“I believe that you do, Mr. Lightner. I have some information which you might find beneficial, and which might, to use a Human idiom, give you some much-needed closure.”
Lightner hesitated for a moment before his curiosity got the better of him. He was embittered against Starfleet anyway, so what did he care about their overdeveloped sense of secrecy? At worst this man might be a Starfleet intelligence asset testing Lightner’s discretion. He should at least give this individual five minutes of his time before reporting him to the authorities.
He wiped his hands off with a kitchen towel and went to the door.
Lightner opened the front door with a dramatic flourish and swept his arm back towards the interior of the home. “By all means, come on in.”
* * *
The man introduced himself as Salmis, a Romulan scientist, claiming to have been involved with the Revisionist faction during the unpleasantness in and around the Chedrova system.
Lightner had invited Salmis into the kitchen where the man sat awkwardly atop a barstool at the kitchen counter while Lightner stood across from him, preparing chicken tetrazzini.
Lightner spared his guest a quick glance. “Let’s say, hypothetically, that I knew something about these ‘time crystals’ you’re referring to. What possible motivation would I have to discuss a matter that would have undoubtedly been labeled ultra-classified by my government?”
Salmis sipped at the cup of chai tea he had accepted from Lightner. “Because in more than one sense, you’re still there, Mr. Lightner.”
Lightner paused his stirring of the white bechamel sauce to give his visitor a speculative look that begged elaboration.
The Romulan smiled thinly, setting his cup down on the counter. “The events that we are exploring so hypothetically at this moment derailed your career and ultimately resulted in your separating from Starfleet.” He gestured to the surrounding house. “While all this is perfectly lovely, I suspect that given the choice, you would have remained in the service.”
“Would’a, could’a, should’a,” Lighter said dryly, unwittingly quoting a former captain.
“It’s funny you should say that,” Salmis offered, having now become the stirrer as he absently worked a splash of cream into his tea while holding Lighter’s gaze. “I’m here to have a discussion with you from fourteen years ago.”
Lightner frowned. “Okay, now you have lost me.”
“Let’s say for the sake of argument that I could somehow occupy two places in time simultaneously. Let’s also imagine that I needed to speak with you rather desperately during that crisis fourteen years ago but was unable to do so at the time without interference from Starfleet Command or your impertinent time police.”
Lightner resumed stirring, his expression quizzical, but tolerantly so.
“So, here I am, a decade-and-a-half later, finally able to sit down with you to discuss matters of critical import that might have made a significant difference back then.”
Lightner almost laughed. “And what do I get out of this? A warm feeling of self-satisfaction that perhaps I was right all along? Are your revelations going to result in a formal letter of apology from Starfleet for tossing me out on my butt?”
“In the here and now, no, they won’t provide you any such satisfaction. However, fourteen years ago they might make all the difference.”
Finished with the sauce, Lightner now moved to begin slicing the raw, replicated pasta noodles. “You’re confusing your tenses, Professor.”
“I am not,” Salmis countered. “After we’re finished with this discussion, you’ll wake up fourteen years ago with memories of this conversation.”
Lightner raised a hand, as if soliciting a teacher. “Now, I may not have been the most promising student in quantum-physics during my admittedly abbreviated academy career, but I’m fairly certain that’s not how time or Human memory works.”
“They’re your memories,” Salmis explained patiently. “It’s only our limited understanding of time that complicates the issue. In some dimensions, you would know everything you’re ever going to know all at once without the confusion of before, now, or after. The Prophets of the Bajoran wormhole operate in this manner, for example.”
Lighter stopped chopping noodles and wiped his hands off before starting to rub his temples. “I feel a Janeway headache coming on,” he muttered.
“Quantum entanglement can work across time as well as space, Mr. Lightner. Your memory engrams are your memory engrams, and if someone can just pierce the temporal veil, you could access them in any order you like.”
“What is it that you’d want to discuss with me all those years ago?” Lightner prompted.
“It took years of planning and an extraordinary expenditure of lives and resources to acquire those time crystals. We sincerely believe that with the crystals and Dr. Kemet’s assistance, we can successfully bring Romulus in its’ entirety back into our universe. We’ve located a star system in Romulan territory with a very similar type of main-sequence star, far more stable of course, which would support the planet.”
Lightner blinked. “So, you’re proposing not only bringing a planet through time, but shifting it spatially by whole light-years? That’s crazy, utter madness!”
“Not at all. Just because it’s never been done before to our knowledge doesn’t make it impossible.”
A frustrated sigh escaped from Lightner and he shook his head. “Okay, let’s entertain this fantasy of yours for a moment. Let’s say you were able to do this thing and bring all of Romulus through time to a safe harbor, so to speak. You have no idea what the sudden shift of a planet into a new star system would cause. The vast differences in gravity, for one, unless you were planning on bringing Remus with it?”
Salmis shook his head. “No, Remus was not part of our plans. The Remans have become thorn enough in our side without bringing another billion of them into the present. As for the aftereffects of the transition, we have projected massive seismic activity across the planet, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, perhaps millions, but billions more will live who had otherwise perished.”
“Hunh,” Lightner mused, absorbing this. “Tough luck for the Remans, eh?”
“Romulus was the cultural, economic, and spiritual center for our species, and its loss has cast us to the winds. Warring factions, civil strife, and economic chaos have reigned in its wake. Remus was not the capital of the empire. The crystals would only enable the rescue of one world, not two.”
“How close to the event would you take the planet? Too far removed from the incident and you’d end up with duplicates of the billion people who did get evacuated before the end.”
“Seconds before the supernova,” Salmis said confidently.
“I don’t believe you,” Lightner snapped suddenly, his patience with this charade evaporating. “All this sounds like a load of pseudo-scientific crap and wishful thinking. Did Intel put you up to this, or DTI? You’ve already torpedoed my career, now you can’t leave well enough alone?”
“I’m not Starfleet Intelligence, nor DTI, although the Revisionists effectively mirrored much of DTI’s work in their own explorations of temporal phenomena.”
Lightner stared daggers at the man across the kitchen island. “What do you want?”
“I want the Klingon time crystals fourteen years ago while Gibraltar is parked in the Chedrova system trying to decide what to do next. My compatriots are about to stage a catastrophically inept raid on your ship that gets a lot of people on both sides killed and gains us nothing.”
Lightner slammed his hands palm-down on the countertop. “I remember! I was there!”
“Good, it’s important that you remember. More importantly it’s vital that you remember remembering… in the past.”
“Get out!” Lightner shouted, his temper flaring. This encounter had reopened many old wounds he had thought entirely scarred over.
Salmis obligingly slid off the stool. “You can raise me on subspace frequency zero-zero-five-point-four-nine. The encryption key is the atomic weight of the time crystals, easily accessed from your science personnel.”
Lightner fairly pushed him towards the door. “Enough! Get out of my home!”
Though undoubtedly far stronger physically than Lightner, Salmis offered no resistance as the Human opened the door and shoved him across the threshold.
The Romulan’s expression was one of knowing confidence, as though he had somehow succeeded in his mission.
“Go to hell!” Lightner snarled for want of a better parting shot at the man.
“Remember," Salmis repeated before taking the steps down to the front walkway.
…remember…
…remember…
He started awake and flailed against the confinement of his sheets for a moment before gaining his bearings.
His bed. His cabin. His starship... for now.
Lightner took deep breaths to center himself. “Computer, situation report,” he ordered.
The computer provided the requested information. It was 0432 hours, five hours after he had gone to sleep. The ship’s situation was unchanged from before his sleep-cycle had begun. Gamma-shift was on duty, and all stations reported normal operations.
As one who had more than his fair share of nightmares due to his PTSD, Lightner well knew the difference between a disturbing dream and an actual flashback. What he had just experienced had the concrete reality of memory, rather than the hazy, undefinable quality afforded dreams or nightmares.
He remembered rather enjoying his forced retirement. He remembered his wife, a woman he'd not yet met. He could not account for these new memories and associations, and that fact courted a sense of vertigo.
Lightner contacted the on-duty science officer, who was all too willing to provide him with the atomic weight of the time crystals.
Lightner created a holographic comms panel in the air before him, manually entering the frequency and encryption key from his dream. He toggled the frequency scan function and experienced a flash of disbelief as the computer informed him there was an active, encrypted subspace channel open at that frequency.
“Hello?” he broadcast, already feeling foolish at entertaining this nonsense, unexpectedly open frequency or no.
“Captain Lightner?” It was Salmis’ voice, unmistakably. “How good to hear from you. Are you ready to continue our conversation?”
* * *
