Previously in Quantum Divergence Book I: False Vacuum
The year is 2376. After a brutal war with the Dominion and a long overdue and comprehensive overhaul on Earth, the Starship Eagle and her crew are all set to embark on their first long-term exploratory mission in years.
That mission is put on hold when a medical emergency on Piqus, a Kellonian colony world, has led the isolated and highly xenophobic Krellonian Star Alliance to request Federation help, asking specifically for Eagle.
But before Captain Michael Owens and Eagle cross the magnificent and star-packed Amargosa Diaspora to be one of the very few Federation starships to ever be allowed to enter Krellonian space, he is briefed by Starfleet’s Department of Special Affairs and Investigations, the very same secretive agency which his recently departed father used to run for decades.
Jarik, Michael’s old Academy roommate now runs Special Affairs and Michael is surprised to find that Amaya Donners, the captain of the Agamemnon and the woman with whom he shares a romantic relationship with, is also working with Jarik. Together, they warn him of an impending invasion by subspace aliens and their theory that they are working with elements within the Star Alliance. Michael is disturbed to learn that his father left him a message, recorded shortly before he died and delivered to him by Donners, telling him not to trust anyone.
After their arrival on Piqus it is revealed that Eagle has only been requested for this mission because of Lif Culsten, one of the few Krellonians in Starfleet, and who serves on the ship. A high-ranking member of the Star Alliance government and his uncle appears to be involved in a political stand-off with Lif’s aunt Garla who is a sentinel, an influential and powerful spymaster, operating on Piqus.
Culsten who had left his home due to his disillusionment on how his people treat the Outlanders, a group of alien races the Krellonians once enslaved after conquering their worlds, is reluctant to help his uncle learn more about Garla’s secretive dealings on Piqus but is ultimately persuaded, partly by Owens and first officer Tazla Star who suspect that Garla might be involved with the aliens planning to invade the Federation.
Under the leadership of its veteran physician Elijah Katanga, Eagle sets up a field hospital on Piqus but the ship is called away before it can be completed after receiving an urgent distress call from Amaya Donners’ Agamemnon, leaving a team led by Star and Katanga on the planet to deal with the deadly disease affecting the local population.
After rendezvousing with Agamemnon, Michael finds out that an increasingly distant Donners has called him out into the Amargosa Diaspora in order to secure his help to gain access into subspace and learn more about the aliens’ plans to invade their space.
When Donners’ designs fail, Bensu, Eagle’s enigmatic bartender and close personal friend to science officer Xylion, surprises everyone when he successfully creates a fissure into subspace right on Eagle even if he’s unable to explain how he has gained this knowledge.
Owens decides to lead an away team into subspace himself where he has a powerful vision of a subspace portal. The away team is able to secure a prisoner and returns the creature onto Eagle but not before Bensu is killed in the getaway.
In the meantime on Piqus, Culsten begins to work with Garla and learns of her plans to reshape Krellonian society and to steer it away from certain civil war with the Outlanders while Tazla Star and Elijah Katanga learn that the disease ravaging the population has been created by an industrial accident while attempting to synthesize the extremely powerful and dangerous Omega Molecule in a nearby asteroid belt.
On Eagle, it turns out that Bensu is still alive and what is more, that he and Xylion have kept his true and synthetic nature from Owens and the crew. When Owens refuses to torture the subspace alien for information on Jarik’s orders, he is stunned to find that his father is also still alive, having faked his death weeks earlier. Owens ultimately facilitates the creatures escape when Jarik and his father continue to torture it.
On Piqus things come to a head when Garla finds out that Culsten has betrayed her. He is rescued from her wrath in the nick of time by Tazla Star, security chief Nora Laas and a team of Starfleet special forces which have recently joined Eagle's crew. And while Katanga has been able to create a cure for the disease, the away team is forced to escape the planet while being chased by Garla’s forces.
The away team is reunited with Eagle after a tense stand-off at the Krellonian border. After learning that Garla was involved with the subspace aliens, supplying them with the Omega Molecule, Owens, along with his father and Jarik who have joined him on Eagle, locate a massive ring-shaped superstructure in a hidden pocket of subspace thanks once more to Bensu’s unexpected involvement.
A gateway opens suddenly, pulling Eagle inside and after a disturbing vision, Michael Owens is stunned to encounter another Starship Eagle, this one commanded by his former friend and first officer Eugene Edison who was killed in the Dominion War.
Prologue: Catch Me If You Can
May 2370
Now
The sky was raining fire.
That was Susan Bano’s first thought as consciousness was slowly beginning to assert itself once more.
Her vision was blurry, her ears were ringing and she felt something very hard and uncomfortable underneath her. It took her a moment to realize that it was the wet, durasteel ground.
Her body felt broken and her mind was still playing catch-up on how exactly she had ended up like this. She had a vague memory of chasing something or someone. But who that could have been or why she had no idea.
‘You will find that there comes a time in your life when no matter how hard you have tried, no matter how well you prepared, no matter how strong you thought you were—there will inevitably come a moment when you fall down and everything will appear to be lost.
And that, Susan, will be the exact time when you will have to decide if you get back up and try again or if you lay down, give up and die.’
It was her mother’s voice she heard in her head. The autocratic Bolian woman had always possessed a penchant for the melodramatic, and certainly, that specific life lesson she had imparted on her at the tender young age of nine had seemed a little high-handed at the time.
It had never rung truer than in that particular moment, however.
“Yes, mother,” she whispered even if she couldn’t hear her own words coming out of her mouth due to the persistent ringing sound in her ears.
Trying to move and feeling a sharp pain shooting up her side, she was fairly certain that she had broken her left arm, or at the very least dislocated it from her shoulder.
She still wasn’t sure why she was here, but she knew her mother had been right. She had to get back up and finish what she had started. Whatever the hells that had been.
It took tremendous effort and pain so excruciating, it forced tears into her eyes, but somehow she managed to get back onto her knees.
The rain was pelting down with a vengeance and it wasn’t just water; there were little droplets of fire pouring down from the sky alongside it.
It was nighttime on whatever planet she was on, but it might as well have been daylight considering the bright fires all around her.
She felt a sudden burning sensation on her back and then, realizing that she too was on fire, she quickly shrugged out of her leather jacket.
She considered the discarded garment lying on the ground for a moment and seemed to remember that she had used to like it quite a bit. It was ruined beyond repair now.
Susan forced herself to her feet and looked around
She stood on the landing platform of a spaceport. Or at least it had been one once, it was difficult to tell now with all those fires which even the torrential downpour didn’t seem to be able to douse.
One of the things on fire were the remains of what looked like had been a transport ship once.
She took a few steps towards it, not entirely sure where else to go and immediately stumbled over her own feet.
It took her a moment to try again.
There were three bodies near the ship, all clad in black. One of them still looked alive, blood trickling out of the corner of his mouth and his piercing dark eyes staring up at her as she looked down at him.
She recognized those eyes.
She had been chasing him. He had the Object.
Things were slowly coming back to her.
She knelt down next to him and grabbed him by his black jacket with her good arm, pulling him off the ground slightly. “I’m a goddamned science officer, you bastard. I don’t do this kind of stuff. High-speed chases, phaser fights, and explosions and all this holo-novel crap. That’s not my thing, do you read me? I've had it up to here with this place and this nightmare ends now. We're finished, you and me, we're done. It's over.” She had no idea where this sudden rant had come from but by the end of it, she realized that she was more right than she had guessed. After all, she was holding on to a dead man. "Good riddance," she said and allowed the now lifeless body to slip out of her grasp.
She lowered herself to her knees next to him and started to pat him down until she found what she had been looking for, what she had been after for so long. It was such a tiny and unremarkable little thing considering what she had been through to try and get her hands on it.
She couldn't help but stare at it for a moment. It still had the same effect on her it did when she had first seen it. There was still some inexplicable power to this small device which she could somehow feel vibrating against her entire being.
She quickly slipped it inside her boot and then, still barely managing to endure the pain she was in, she got back on her feet.
She reached for her right lobe, hoping that her in-ear communicator was still working. “This is Bano. I have the Object. Could use an extraction.”
There was no response.
“Does anybody read me?” she said. “Is anyone still alive?” she added much more quietly, fearing the worst.
Uttering a heavy sigh she considering the flaming wreck of the transport ship. “Not getting off this damned planet in that.”
Something made her look the other way and into the darkness of the night. The lights of the city twinkled in the distance and she knew her best bet was to try and find another spaceport somewhere within it.
But it wasn’t the city that held her gaze.
It was something else.
The bright flames which engulfed what remained of a large fuel tank revealed the shadows first.
Five shapes of black-clad men were emerging from the darkness and slowly moving to approach her. They looked almost identical to the man she had just liberated the Object from.
All five of them held weapons, all of them trained on her.
She was surrounded on all other sides by fire.
She was trapped.
“I guess I was wrong after all,” she said, addressing nobody. “This isn’t over yet.”
4 Hours Earlier
There was something to be said about working covertly, not the least of which was the freedom to ditch the restrictive Starfleet regulation uniform for something much more comfortable and to her style, such as the chic, sepia-colored, imitation leather jacket she’d chosen, along with a lightweight vest and matching tan pants. She certainly wouldn’t have gotten away with wearing those tall, white boots while on regular duty. The boots were currently resting on top of a conference table, inside a compact meeting room of a civilian freighter.
Just beyond the tips of her white boots, the man who was her de facto superior was considering her from half a quadrant away via a computer screen.
“I am pleased to find you this relaxed so close to your imminent mission, “ the half-Vulcan said as he peered at her.
She just shrugged. “I just have a good feeling about this.”
“Eteron is not a place to be taken lightly, Susan. There is no Federation presence on the planet, and its close proximity to both the Klingon Empire and the Romulan Neutral Zone makes it a hot zone of smuggling operations and other criminal activities. The Orion Syndicate is reportedly the only true authority on that world.”
“That’s why I’ve got Lieutenant Sorenson and his team of elite security operators along for the ride. Those guys know how to handle themselves,” she said and then removed her boots from the top of the table to lean in closer towards the monitor. “This is the closest we’ve been to obtain the Object in four months. This is the culmination of years of studying those blasted boxes and the shards contained within them and I just know that we’ll find what we’ve been looking for on Eteron.”
But Jarik looked doubtful. “In the hands of a group of Pakled traders?”
She shook her head. “They don’t even realize what they’ve found. I still believe it was a complete coincidence that they managed to obtain it at all. But I’m convinced that it fell into their lap on Gordian XI and they’ll be more than happy to part with it considering what we can offer them in exchange. Nobody’s ever accused a Pakled of being particularly bright.”
“Just promise me you’ll be careful down there. The Pakled may not be smart, but they can be dangerous. And we have no additional assets in the area to support you if things go bad. You’re on your own out there.”
She offered him a smirk. “I’m a science officer by trade, Jarik. I'm no gung-ho, damn-the-torpedoes-type starship captain of yesteryear. I understand risk and I know how to manage it."
“I’ll hold you to that, Commander Bano.”
“Have you made any progress on determining who our competition might be? I still think we’re not the only ones after the Object. Somebody very nearly got to those Pakled after Gordian XI, I’m sure of it.”
Jarik shook his head marginally. “Not yet but I am working on it. Whoever they are, it is absolutely critical that we obtain the Object first.”
Bano nodded. “I know, I’ve seen the same data you have. Whatever these Pandora Boxes truly are—“
She stopped herself when she spotted his noticeable frown, remembering that he didn’t appreciate that term for the mysterious artifacts which had provided them with clues to the location of a possibly even more powerful device which for now they had simply designated as the Object.
It had been her friend and colleague Terrence Glover, who had coined the term Pandora’s Box after they had come across the small, shard-like artifact secured inside a translucent and ornately crafted box during a mission in the Pandorian system.
That had been thirteen years ago while she and Glover had both served on the Kitty Hawk. The discovery of the enigmatic and clearly immensely powerful artifact had changed her entire career path, since only a short while later she had started—in between other gigs—to work for the Department of Special Affairs and Investigations, the secretive Starfleet agency which had long since taken a significant interest in objects and artifacts which seemed to defy easy explanations.
She had worked with Jarik ever since she had joined the organization which was led with an almost singular vision by the Old Man.
It hadn't been until a second box had been found, a discovery once again involving Terrence Glover who seemed to be attracting these kinds of things like a magnet, that they had started to gain an understanding of the true power of those artifacts which were seemingly able to communicate with certain individuals. The boxes had revealed a number of secrets, including the location of Iconian gateways but also, perhaps most disturbingly, the possible whereabouts of an artifact even more powerful. It had been that latest revelation which had brought her to the farthest most reaches of Federation space.
“I know the Old Man prefers to call them shard artifacts,” she said to Jarik who seemed much more pleased with that term. “But I can’t help but feel that the Object the shard artifacts have revealed to us was hidden for a very good reason and that perhaps it was never meant to be found.”
“It seems a bit late for that conversation now. Besides, if we do not get to it first, somebody else will and I fear that if that were to come to pass, we might find ourselves facing a crisis the likes of which we’ve never encountered before.”
“Right,” she said with a dark grin. “End of the galaxy kind of stuff. And all of that because of our damned curiosity.”
“You should take this matter more seriously.”
“Don’t worry, I do. And I’ll get that Object—whatever it turns out to be—and bring it back for the good guys. Besides, as a science officer, I have to believe that a good dose of healthy curiosity is the first step towards real progress,” she said and stood from her chair to get her mission underway. “Unless, of course, you’re a cat.”
The half-Vulcan’s blank look seemed proof that he either didn’t care for her joke or simply didn’t get it.
* * *
Last edited:
