Garm Bel Iblis
Commodore
Chapter One:
“Red alert, all hands to battle stations.”
“Tuvok, fire phasers!”
“Who the hell are they?”
“Shields are failing.”
All of this went on as Tom Paris valiantly tried to keep Voyager on an even keel and fired the thrusters and impulse engines in an evasion pattern he’d come up with. The Intrepid-Class ship rolled to port, inverted, rolled back to starboard and came about. But it wasn’t enough. Another spread of torpedoes tore through the ships tattered deflector shields and breached the hull just aft of Sickbay.
“B’Elanna,” said Captain Janeway, jumping out of her seat and approaching the engineering station. “Try to re-modulate the shields with a tachyon beam; that might slow them down.”
The chief engineer and Tom’s newly found lover struggled to comply as the ship was hit again. Suddenly an array of alarms went off. Tom stole a quick glance at the EPS manifold network and cried out in terror. “B’Elanna! Get away from there!”
It was too late. The EPS conduits running behind the bulkhead overloaded. The explosion took out the entire engineering station, the deck plating and vaporized both B’Elanna and Captain Janeway.
“Hull breach on deck seven,” Harry Kim announced, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. “We’re losing life support.”
“Evacuate the deck,” Commander Chakotay said, stepping in as Voyager’s new CO. “Tom,” he said quietly, stepping down into the lower level. He put his hand on Paris’ shoulder. “I need you.”
“Aye, sir,” Paris said, settling back into his chair.
“Commander,” said Tuvok. “If we reconfigure the phaser array on a parametric frequency, I believe I can detonate their torpedoes before they fire.”
“Do it,” Chakotay said defiantly.
Tom got them clear as Tuvok fired the phaser barrage against the alien ship and tore it into a thousand fragments of duranium. “No other ships within sensor range,” he said, turning around to face Chakotay. “Captain.”
Chakotay looked up at him harshly, returning to his seat, the first officer’s chair. “I want damage reports from all decks. Tom, why don’t you go give the Doctor and Kes a hand.”
Paris didn’t object. The burning remnants of B’Elanna were still scattered about what remained of the engineering station. Once Ensign Culhain settled into the seat at the conn, Tom entered the lift and ordered it to take him to Deck 5. It was only after the car started moving, that the emotion welled up inside him. He and B’Elanna had been growing closer and closer over the past months. When they’d been stranded after the Cochrane had been destroyed and they were minutes from death, they’d both professed their love for one another and their loved had been born.
Now she was dead. Along with god knew how many others. Tears stung his eyes and fell freely down his face. Grabbing vainly at his wrecked emotional state, Tom squared his soldiers and tried to emulate the one person in the galaxy he knew who could handle such loss:
His father.
He shook his head at the irony.
When the lift deposited him on deck five, he was nearly trampled by a damage control team rushing down the corridor on their way to put out the next disaster on their list. When he neared sickbay, the smell was the first thing that he noticed. Burned hair and flesh. Several crewmen lie on the deck in the corridor outside the compartment. From the looks of them, it was a lot of blunt force trauma and broken bones. Which meant what awaited him in Sickbay was going to be gruesome.
He wasn’t disappointed when the doors parted. All three biobeds were occupied and the burnt remnants crewmembers were isolated within forcefields. The Doctor and Kes were working frantically in the surgical bay. “Twenty cc’s inoprovoline,” the Doctor ordered as Kes pushed the hypo to the person’s neck. Tom took a few steps closer and gasped. Neelix lie under the surgical arch, his body burned beyond almost all recognition except for the few mottled patches of skin left on his forehead.
“My God,” Tom said. “How can I help?”
The Doctor looked at him, then at Kes and back to Tom. With a resounding snap, the Doctor shut his tricorder. “I’m afraid there’s nothing more we can do.” From the other side of the biobed, tears were streaming down Kes’s face. The Doctor began to speak to her, then changed his mind and addressed Paris. “Record the time of death, eleven twenty three hours.”
Time entered the data into the computer and turned back to Kes. “I’m so sorry, Kes.”
The Ocampan didn’t’ respond. She brushed her long blonde hair back behind her ears and wiped away the tears. “There are so many more that need help,” she said quietly.
<><><>
They spent the next six hours treating the eleven injuries, losing three more crewmen in the triage process. Voyager had retreated to an inversion nebula and was currently using the plasma fields to mask their presence from any further attacks.
“Including B’Elanna and Captain Janeway we lost nine people,” Harry Kim reported at the briefing that evening.
Chakotay stood at the head of the table where Kathryn had always led these meetings. “We’re all going to have a lot of grieving to do when this is over.” He looked at the assembled officers in question. “Tom, I want you to take over as First Officer, I’m going to need your help.”
Paris didn’t respond verbally, only nodded his head. “Harry,” Chakotay said, “I want you coordinating with Lieutenant Carey in engineering. He’s taking over and I want you to help him get things moving down there.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Kes,” he said. “You did good work today, the Doctor has noted a commendation for your efforts. If there’s anything we can do, name it.”
“We need to get away from here,” Kes said. “Since the attack, I’ve been filled with a short of dread and fear. We need to get away from here as fast as possible.”
Chakotay was well aware of Kes’ telepathic powers. “Believe me, that’s top of the agenda. Harry, what is our operational status?”
“Overall we’re at fifty percent,” Kim said. “Impulse engines are iffy, warp drive can do about four point eight. Weapons and shields are fried.”
“Repair time?” Chakotay asked.
Kim didn’t respond right away. He looked back Chakotay out the port and the nebula beyond. “A couple of weeks. Maybe more.”
“That’s not the answer I was looking for,” Chakotay said, becoming agitated. “Get on it. Use whatever resources you need.” He looked around the table. “I know this hard. We’ve all been through so much and we’ve always come away from it a little battered but intact. This attack has hit us all pretty damned hard. But we’ll get through it. Dismissed.”
Everyone filed out in silence. Tom remained behind, seated at the table.
“I know,” Chakotay said. “I miss her too.”
“I spent three years working with her,” Tom said, “and a few weeks after we get together she’s gone,” he snapped his fingers, “just like that. Not to mention the captain. If it weren’t for her I’d either still be in New Zealand or lying in a bar drunk somewhere.”
“I know. Captain Janeway changed all of our lives for the better, despite being stuck out here.” He sat down in the chair and put his hands on the table. “But we’ve got to make their sacrifices mean something. We’ve got to get this crew home. Captain Janeway carried that burden on her shoulders for three years. Now it’s shifted to me and you. We need to come through for them.”
Paris shook his head. “We’re in bad shape,” he said after a few moments. “If there are more of those guys out there we don’t stand a chance.”
“That’s never stopped us before,” Chakotay said with a wry grin. Standing, he patted Paris’ shoulder. “Come on.”
<><><>
Repairs continued for the next two days around the clock. The engineering teams were running ragged trying to get things up and running. Lieutenant Tuvok had completed an analysis of the alien vessel’s weapons array and discovered their weapons were chronioton based. Literally phasing in and out of the space-time continuum the weapon were able to pierce any deflector shield. He and Ensign Kim had so far been unable to devise a defense against it.
Tom was overseeing the efforts from the bridge while Chakotay was busy in his ready room. When Harry called and asked for him to meet him in engineering without giving specifics it turned Tom’s stomach upside down.
“Your call sounded urgent,” Paris said as he entered the engine room. Near the powered down warp core, Kim stood with Joe Carey, going over the system status displays. “What’s up?”
Kim turned to face him. “The initial attack did a lot more internal damage to the warp core than our original scans indicated.” He handed Tom a padd. “The tellurium supply was destroyed.”
Paris took the padd and read through it. Tellurium was used to stabilize the matter-antimatter reactions of a class nine warp drive. Without it they were dead in the water. A couple of years ago, an away team had nearly been killed trying to obtain a small vial of the rare substance. “I’ll have Sam start running some long-range scans,” Tom said, referring to Ensign Wildman, the alpha shift science officer on the bridge.
“We already did,” Harry said. “There’s a planet about four light-years away that has a tellurium deposit only a couple of meters below the surface.”
Paris nodded. “Good. I’ll get Chakotay’s approval and take a shuttle out.”
<><><>
“You’re not going alone.”
The defiant words from Captain Chakotay grated against Tom. “I’m not risking anyone else out there,” Tom said. “I’ll be fine.”
“There could be more of those ships out there, Tom, it’s too risky.”
“Chakotay, we need everyone we have at their posts. I can do this. I need to do this.”
“If this is some sort of point you have to make about B’Elanna…”
“It isn’t,” Paris snapped. “It’s damned risky and I’m willing to go out and do it, I don’t want to risk anyone else. We’ve lost too many already.”
Chakotay eyed him for several long seconds. “Okay. Get out there, get the tellurium and get your ass back home. Good luck.”
<><><>
The trip the to the planet went pretty smoothly all things considered, Tom thought as the transporter beam deposited him on the surface of the Class-M world. Surveying the area with his tricorder, it was only a short time before he drilled down far enough with his phaser to the vein of tellurium. The amber liquid flowed through a rock formation and Tom quickly filled his sample containers and returned to the Drake.
He was just starting to breath easy on the return course when the antimatter containment unit collapsed.
“Damn it,” he cursed as the ship tumbled out of warp. He’d gone over the ship from stem to stern before launch. It’d been banged up pretty bad during the attack, but all of the diagnostics read green.
As the ship settled into normal space, Tom ran systems check. The com board flashed red with SYS ERRORS beeping at him again and again. A complete check of all systems showed the shuttle without main power and auxiliary circuits were fried.
“Should have brought Harry along,” he muttered to himself. A quick check of the internal systems came up empty. He was stuck in the middle of nowhere and his power reserves were running dangerously low.
He waited for seven days and no sign of Voyager was picked up on his hampered sensor grid. He’d turned off everything accept sensors and minimal life support. Shivering against the growing cold, he’d been dismayed to find the environmental suits had been damaged as well and would provide no help to him. As the co2 levels began to rise and his vision began to blur, his last act was to purge the main computer and set the shuttle’s autodestruct. If those aliens found his ship drifting out here it could lead them back to Voyager. IF she was still in once piece that is. As he slid the safeties off the magnetic constrictors, the computer alarm sounded.
“Warning, magnetic constrictors disengaged. Warp core overload in twenty seconds.”
“Yeah, tell me something I don’t know,” Tom said, barely able to breath. The countdown continued until he was enveloped in a column of energy and swept away.
His first thought was that he was dead.
His second thought was one of panic as a human male in his mid forties approached him and smiled. “Tom Paris of the USS Voyager. I’m Captain Robert Ducane of the USS Relativity. Welcome aboard.”
Chapter:
After a trip to the ship’s medical bay and a complete checkup, Tom was escorted back to the bridge of the Relativity and brought up to speed.
“Think of us as guardians of the Temporal Prime Directive,” Ducane said. “In fact, we’ve had a couple of dealings with your crew over the years. “
“Captain Braxton?” Tom asked.
“Yes, the former commander of this ship in fact.”
“What happened to him?”
“Well, that hasn’t happened in your frame of reference yet,” Ducane said.
“So why am I here?” Tom asked. “Not that I’m not grateful, it just seems odd that you’d pull me out of there.”
“You were never supposed to be in that shuttle in the first place, Mister Paris. In fact, we’re still trying to track down what exactly is going on. A number of temporal incursions were set off in the sector your ship was traveling through by a Krenim scientist hell-bent on tampering with the timeline.”
“Krenim, huh? That’s the guys that beat the stuffing out of us?”
“Right. They used to dominate a region of space comparable to the Federation, but a temporal experiment went horribly wrong and set them back about two centuries in technology. That’s caused a rupture in the normal flow of time, branching off to an alternate flow of history that you and your crew were caught in. We have to set things right.”
Tom’s head was swimming. “Then why didn’t you go back to Voyager and just send them to the right timeframe.”
Ducane shook his head. “It’s not that simple; the Directive has very specific regulations on altering past events. We’re going to have to find the focal point that was changed and make as minor a correction as possible to the time stream. For that I’m going to need your help.”
Paris nodded, thinking immediately of B’Elanna. “If you’ve got a way to set things right, let’s get started.”
<><><>
Tom still marveled at the holographic control interfaces and sleek design of the Relativity. He’d had his fair share of time travel in his short Starfleet career, but nothing prepared him for the Relativity. Ducane led him down a long stretch of corridor to a large room, covered floor to ceiling in holographic diodes. “A holodeck?” Tom asked as the doors closed behind them
“Of a sort,” Ducane said, removing a padd from the wall. “This is a temporal imaging chamber. I enter commands and criteria here and we can create scenarios based on information picked up on our temporal scanners.” He pressed several keys into the device. “We can also scan different temporal planes. Kind of the ultimate “What if” scenario can be played out here in detail.”
Tom crossed his arms. “So you can use this thing to figure out what happened to Voyager? And since I’m here, I must be a focal point of some kind.”
Ducane didn’t’ respond, he entered several commands into the device and took a step back. “This information that we scanned from your memories when you were brought aboard. This, coupled with the data obtained by our deep space temporal network, should provide us a direct correlation to those events. We’re going to start from square one, which will erase you from the chain of events in its entirety and we can work our way out from there.”
“This I gotta see,” Tom said. “A world without Tom Paris. Probably a damned dreary place.”
“We’ll see,” Ducane said. “Computer, Run Program Paris Alpha-One.”
“Red alert, all hands to battle stations.”
“Tuvok, fire phasers!”
“Who the hell are they?”
“Shields are failing.”
All of this went on as Tom Paris valiantly tried to keep Voyager on an even keel and fired the thrusters and impulse engines in an evasion pattern he’d come up with. The Intrepid-Class ship rolled to port, inverted, rolled back to starboard and came about. But it wasn’t enough. Another spread of torpedoes tore through the ships tattered deflector shields and breached the hull just aft of Sickbay.
“B’Elanna,” said Captain Janeway, jumping out of her seat and approaching the engineering station. “Try to re-modulate the shields with a tachyon beam; that might slow them down.”
The chief engineer and Tom’s newly found lover struggled to comply as the ship was hit again. Suddenly an array of alarms went off. Tom stole a quick glance at the EPS manifold network and cried out in terror. “B’Elanna! Get away from there!”
It was too late. The EPS conduits running behind the bulkhead overloaded. The explosion took out the entire engineering station, the deck plating and vaporized both B’Elanna and Captain Janeway.
“Hull breach on deck seven,” Harry Kim announced, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. “We’re losing life support.”
“Evacuate the deck,” Commander Chakotay said, stepping in as Voyager’s new CO. “Tom,” he said quietly, stepping down into the lower level. He put his hand on Paris’ shoulder. “I need you.”
“Aye, sir,” Paris said, settling back into his chair.
“Commander,” said Tuvok. “If we reconfigure the phaser array on a parametric frequency, I believe I can detonate their torpedoes before they fire.”
“Do it,” Chakotay said defiantly.
Tom got them clear as Tuvok fired the phaser barrage against the alien ship and tore it into a thousand fragments of duranium. “No other ships within sensor range,” he said, turning around to face Chakotay. “Captain.”
Chakotay looked up at him harshly, returning to his seat, the first officer’s chair. “I want damage reports from all decks. Tom, why don’t you go give the Doctor and Kes a hand.”
Paris didn’t object. The burning remnants of B’Elanna were still scattered about what remained of the engineering station. Once Ensign Culhain settled into the seat at the conn, Tom entered the lift and ordered it to take him to Deck 5. It was only after the car started moving, that the emotion welled up inside him. He and B’Elanna had been growing closer and closer over the past months. When they’d been stranded after the Cochrane had been destroyed and they were minutes from death, they’d both professed their love for one another and their loved had been born.
Now she was dead. Along with god knew how many others. Tears stung his eyes and fell freely down his face. Grabbing vainly at his wrecked emotional state, Tom squared his soldiers and tried to emulate the one person in the galaxy he knew who could handle such loss:
His father.
He shook his head at the irony.
When the lift deposited him on deck five, he was nearly trampled by a damage control team rushing down the corridor on their way to put out the next disaster on their list. When he neared sickbay, the smell was the first thing that he noticed. Burned hair and flesh. Several crewmen lie on the deck in the corridor outside the compartment. From the looks of them, it was a lot of blunt force trauma and broken bones. Which meant what awaited him in Sickbay was going to be gruesome.
He wasn’t disappointed when the doors parted. All three biobeds were occupied and the burnt remnants crewmembers were isolated within forcefields. The Doctor and Kes were working frantically in the surgical bay. “Twenty cc’s inoprovoline,” the Doctor ordered as Kes pushed the hypo to the person’s neck. Tom took a few steps closer and gasped. Neelix lie under the surgical arch, his body burned beyond almost all recognition except for the few mottled patches of skin left on his forehead.
“My God,” Tom said. “How can I help?”
The Doctor looked at him, then at Kes and back to Tom. With a resounding snap, the Doctor shut his tricorder. “I’m afraid there’s nothing more we can do.” From the other side of the biobed, tears were streaming down Kes’s face. The Doctor began to speak to her, then changed his mind and addressed Paris. “Record the time of death, eleven twenty three hours.”
Time entered the data into the computer and turned back to Kes. “I’m so sorry, Kes.”
The Ocampan didn’t’ respond. She brushed her long blonde hair back behind her ears and wiped away the tears. “There are so many more that need help,” she said quietly.
<><><>
They spent the next six hours treating the eleven injuries, losing three more crewmen in the triage process. Voyager had retreated to an inversion nebula and was currently using the plasma fields to mask their presence from any further attacks.
“Including B’Elanna and Captain Janeway we lost nine people,” Harry Kim reported at the briefing that evening.
Chakotay stood at the head of the table where Kathryn had always led these meetings. “We’re all going to have a lot of grieving to do when this is over.” He looked at the assembled officers in question. “Tom, I want you to take over as First Officer, I’m going to need your help.”
Paris didn’t respond verbally, only nodded his head. “Harry,” Chakotay said, “I want you coordinating with Lieutenant Carey in engineering. He’s taking over and I want you to help him get things moving down there.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Kes,” he said. “You did good work today, the Doctor has noted a commendation for your efforts. If there’s anything we can do, name it.”
“We need to get away from here,” Kes said. “Since the attack, I’ve been filled with a short of dread and fear. We need to get away from here as fast as possible.”
Chakotay was well aware of Kes’ telepathic powers. “Believe me, that’s top of the agenda. Harry, what is our operational status?”
“Overall we’re at fifty percent,” Kim said. “Impulse engines are iffy, warp drive can do about four point eight. Weapons and shields are fried.”
“Repair time?” Chakotay asked.
Kim didn’t respond right away. He looked back Chakotay out the port and the nebula beyond. “A couple of weeks. Maybe more.”
“That’s not the answer I was looking for,” Chakotay said, becoming agitated. “Get on it. Use whatever resources you need.” He looked around the table. “I know this hard. We’ve all been through so much and we’ve always come away from it a little battered but intact. This attack has hit us all pretty damned hard. But we’ll get through it. Dismissed.”
Everyone filed out in silence. Tom remained behind, seated at the table.
“I know,” Chakotay said. “I miss her too.”
“I spent three years working with her,” Tom said, “and a few weeks after we get together she’s gone,” he snapped his fingers, “just like that. Not to mention the captain. If it weren’t for her I’d either still be in New Zealand or lying in a bar drunk somewhere.”
“I know. Captain Janeway changed all of our lives for the better, despite being stuck out here.” He sat down in the chair and put his hands on the table. “But we’ve got to make their sacrifices mean something. We’ve got to get this crew home. Captain Janeway carried that burden on her shoulders for three years. Now it’s shifted to me and you. We need to come through for them.”
Paris shook his head. “We’re in bad shape,” he said after a few moments. “If there are more of those guys out there we don’t stand a chance.”
“That’s never stopped us before,” Chakotay said with a wry grin. Standing, he patted Paris’ shoulder. “Come on.”
<><><>
Repairs continued for the next two days around the clock. The engineering teams were running ragged trying to get things up and running. Lieutenant Tuvok had completed an analysis of the alien vessel’s weapons array and discovered their weapons were chronioton based. Literally phasing in and out of the space-time continuum the weapon were able to pierce any deflector shield. He and Ensign Kim had so far been unable to devise a defense against it.
Tom was overseeing the efforts from the bridge while Chakotay was busy in his ready room. When Harry called and asked for him to meet him in engineering without giving specifics it turned Tom’s stomach upside down.
“Your call sounded urgent,” Paris said as he entered the engine room. Near the powered down warp core, Kim stood with Joe Carey, going over the system status displays. “What’s up?”
Kim turned to face him. “The initial attack did a lot more internal damage to the warp core than our original scans indicated.” He handed Tom a padd. “The tellurium supply was destroyed.”
Paris took the padd and read through it. Tellurium was used to stabilize the matter-antimatter reactions of a class nine warp drive. Without it they were dead in the water. A couple of years ago, an away team had nearly been killed trying to obtain a small vial of the rare substance. “I’ll have Sam start running some long-range scans,” Tom said, referring to Ensign Wildman, the alpha shift science officer on the bridge.
“We already did,” Harry said. “There’s a planet about four light-years away that has a tellurium deposit only a couple of meters below the surface.”
Paris nodded. “Good. I’ll get Chakotay’s approval and take a shuttle out.”
<><><>
“You’re not going alone.”
The defiant words from Captain Chakotay grated against Tom. “I’m not risking anyone else out there,” Tom said. “I’ll be fine.”
“There could be more of those ships out there, Tom, it’s too risky.”
“Chakotay, we need everyone we have at their posts. I can do this. I need to do this.”
“If this is some sort of point you have to make about B’Elanna…”
“It isn’t,” Paris snapped. “It’s damned risky and I’m willing to go out and do it, I don’t want to risk anyone else. We’ve lost too many already.”
Chakotay eyed him for several long seconds. “Okay. Get out there, get the tellurium and get your ass back home. Good luck.”
<><><>
The trip the to the planet went pretty smoothly all things considered, Tom thought as the transporter beam deposited him on the surface of the Class-M world. Surveying the area with his tricorder, it was only a short time before he drilled down far enough with his phaser to the vein of tellurium. The amber liquid flowed through a rock formation and Tom quickly filled his sample containers and returned to the Drake.
He was just starting to breath easy on the return course when the antimatter containment unit collapsed.
“Damn it,” he cursed as the ship tumbled out of warp. He’d gone over the ship from stem to stern before launch. It’d been banged up pretty bad during the attack, but all of the diagnostics read green.
As the ship settled into normal space, Tom ran systems check. The com board flashed red with SYS ERRORS beeping at him again and again. A complete check of all systems showed the shuttle without main power and auxiliary circuits were fried.
“Should have brought Harry along,” he muttered to himself. A quick check of the internal systems came up empty. He was stuck in the middle of nowhere and his power reserves were running dangerously low.
He waited for seven days and no sign of Voyager was picked up on his hampered sensor grid. He’d turned off everything accept sensors and minimal life support. Shivering against the growing cold, he’d been dismayed to find the environmental suits had been damaged as well and would provide no help to him. As the co2 levels began to rise and his vision began to blur, his last act was to purge the main computer and set the shuttle’s autodestruct. If those aliens found his ship drifting out here it could lead them back to Voyager. IF she was still in once piece that is. As he slid the safeties off the magnetic constrictors, the computer alarm sounded.
“Warning, magnetic constrictors disengaged. Warp core overload in twenty seconds.”
“Yeah, tell me something I don’t know,” Tom said, barely able to breath. The countdown continued until he was enveloped in a column of energy and swept away.
His first thought was that he was dead.
His second thought was one of panic as a human male in his mid forties approached him and smiled. “Tom Paris of the USS Voyager. I’m Captain Robert Ducane of the USS Relativity. Welcome aboard.”
Chapter:
After a trip to the ship’s medical bay and a complete checkup, Tom was escorted back to the bridge of the Relativity and brought up to speed.
“Think of us as guardians of the Temporal Prime Directive,” Ducane said. “In fact, we’ve had a couple of dealings with your crew over the years. “
“Captain Braxton?” Tom asked.
“Yes, the former commander of this ship in fact.”
“What happened to him?”
“Well, that hasn’t happened in your frame of reference yet,” Ducane said.
“So why am I here?” Tom asked. “Not that I’m not grateful, it just seems odd that you’d pull me out of there.”
“You were never supposed to be in that shuttle in the first place, Mister Paris. In fact, we’re still trying to track down what exactly is going on. A number of temporal incursions were set off in the sector your ship was traveling through by a Krenim scientist hell-bent on tampering with the timeline.”
“Krenim, huh? That’s the guys that beat the stuffing out of us?”
“Right. They used to dominate a region of space comparable to the Federation, but a temporal experiment went horribly wrong and set them back about two centuries in technology. That’s caused a rupture in the normal flow of time, branching off to an alternate flow of history that you and your crew were caught in. We have to set things right.”
Tom’s head was swimming. “Then why didn’t you go back to Voyager and just send them to the right timeframe.”
Ducane shook his head. “It’s not that simple; the Directive has very specific regulations on altering past events. We’re going to have to find the focal point that was changed and make as minor a correction as possible to the time stream. For that I’m going to need your help.”
Paris nodded, thinking immediately of B’Elanna. “If you’ve got a way to set things right, let’s get started.”
<><><>
Tom still marveled at the holographic control interfaces and sleek design of the Relativity. He’d had his fair share of time travel in his short Starfleet career, but nothing prepared him for the Relativity. Ducane led him down a long stretch of corridor to a large room, covered floor to ceiling in holographic diodes. “A holodeck?” Tom asked as the doors closed behind them
“Of a sort,” Ducane said, removing a padd from the wall. “This is a temporal imaging chamber. I enter commands and criteria here and we can create scenarios based on information picked up on our temporal scanners.” He pressed several keys into the device. “We can also scan different temporal planes. Kind of the ultimate “What if” scenario can be played out here in detail.”
Tom crossed his arms. “So you can use this thing to figure out what happened to Voyager? And since I’m here, I must be a focal point of some kind.”
Ducane didn’t’ respond, he entered several commands into the device and took a step back. “This information that we scanned from your memories when you were brought aboard. This, coupled with the data obtained by our deep space temporal network, should provide us a direct correlation to those events. We’re going to start from square one, which will erase you from the chain of events in its entirety and we can work our way out from there.”
“This I gotta see,” Tom said. “A world without Tom Paris. Probably a damned dreary place.”
“We’ll see,” Ducane said. “Computer, Run Program Paris Alpha-One.”
