Welcome to my headcanon ;) ST:Voy "From Here To Eternity"

Discussion in 'Fan Fiction' started by Rowenaster, Sep 5, 2019.

  1. Rowenaster

    Rowenaster Ensign Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Dec 28, 2017
    *** Alpha Quadrant. Tempus fugit, tempus obscura ***
    (picking up at a particular moment from the Voyager series finale)


    Admiral Janeway ordered her shuttle's computer to activate the tachyon pulse. With Captain Harry Kim's ship, the Rhode Island, dealing with the angry Klingon she’d been forced to steal from – after he'd dishonorably changed their bargain, like the opportunistic Klingons of old – she had a clear path to the rift that had opened. She was looking forward to seeing all of her crew again, and looking forward to the wonderful future she was buying for them, the future she hadn't had. Additionally complicating things were the nanites she’d loaded into her bloodstream to combat the Borg Queen; she'd only been grazed by a Klingon phaser, but that had awoken them somewhat. It was taking considerable willpower to settle them back down.

    As the rift opened, she launched the probe sitting prepared in her shuttle’s launcher, a probe that had been sent to her originally by a cross-temporal data smuggler, now repurposed for her intentions.

    Moments after it sailed through the rift, a telltale on her console lit up, telemetry from the probe confirming it's location as the intended one in space and time. Not a moment too soon, as the Klingons had gotten around Rhode Island and were zeroing in on her.

    Her transit through time and possibility, as she entered the rift, should have been completed almost instantly. It wasn't. Her shuttle lurched, hard, and the ineffable substance of the rift froze around her. Temporal stasis.

    Her personal mission to change history and bring her ship and crew home ahead of schedule had been a major gamble. There were a great many things that could go wrong, one of which had just happened. A quick check of her sensors confirmed that she’d been intercepted by a Federation timeship.

    Timefleet, like Starfleet, normally didn’t resort to mindprobes or torture, but she may have pushed them beyond their virtue this time; she wasn’t going to take any chances. She’d prepared for this contingency by having the Doctor set up a personalized application of Starfleet command training. It was the same technique used to protect command codes and other secrets, a key phrase that would erase all memory of the target subject – in this case, her ever preparing the message contained within the probe, a planted memory of the time-probe she had obtained self-destructing shortly after she'd found it, and the crafted recollection that the probe she’d launched was perfectly ordinary in every way. Her message had to reach Voyager-that-was, even if she herself could not. She subvocalized the code trigger. Moments later, she felt the transporter take her, and materialized in an unfamiliar transporter room.

    “Welcome aboard the Federation timeship James P. Hogan, Admiral Janeway,” said the dark-haired woman standing in front of the platform. “I am Captain Romana Devora-Trelundar, commanding officer of this vessel and flag captain. Admiral Smith would like to see you, at your convenience.”

    Meaning, in quintessential naval courtesy, without delay.

    “So, I rate the attention of a Timeskipper Admiral, now, do I? Well, let’s go, then.”

    “You really shouldn’t use that term for us, Sir.” the flag captain said, disapprovingly.

    “One who works so intimately with history should know I prefer 'Ma'am'.” Kathryn snapped back. “And what should I call your lot? Time Lords?”

    Captain Devora-Trelundar didn’t dignify that with an answer. After an awkwardly silent turbolift ride, they arrived at the ready room of one Admiral Theodore Smith.

    “Thank you, Dee-Tee,” he said, dismissing the flag captain. That worthy nodded to Kathryn, and with a barely audible “Ma'am,” took her leave.

    “Let's dispense with the preliminaries, shall we?” he said, returning Kathryn's parade-ground salute perfunctorily, and gesturing for her to sit. He was a husky, red-haired man, and his voice carried the distinctive rasp of deep Midwest North American roots.

    “As you wish, Sir,” she said, taking the offered seat.

    “We know that you intended to import technology into the past,” he continued, the moment she had touched down, “and to radically change history by bringing Voyager home over a decade early. This is completely unacceptable. If it were up to me, I'd lock you away and keep you there until the heat death of the universe, but fortunately for you, it's not. You cannot disappear from history, because the Federation needs you to be where you will be. But I can, and will, dissuade you from attempting to repeat this horribly misguided intervention with the one weapon unstoppable in any time: simple truth.”

    She was naturally skeptical. However, as she listened to what he had to say, though, she realized, with growing horror, that he was right. Later, in the quarters they’d provided, she reflected on his revelations.

    The Borg would ordinarily weather the loss of their Queen quite easily. They had before. Captain Picard, commanding Enterprise-E, had killed the Queen just a mere decade before her. The Borg simply selected a new one, long live the Queen. What would have made Janeway’s intended “rat-poison” assault unique in the history of the Borg was its ultimate effectiveness. She (or rather, her virus cargo) would have infected and destroyed not only the Queen, but the entirety of Unimatrix One, the lens that focused the Collective’s datastreams into the Queen. This would fragment the Borg as never before, and leave them no immediate means to reintegrate.

    Many cubes simply ceased functioning. Some self-destructed in despair. Some formed small ad-hoc collectives. Ships with high relative percentages of Dreamers, like Seven and her comrades from the former Unimatrix Zero, tended to mutiny and individualize. Some succeeded, others were destroyed by counter-mutiny or still-Collectivized vessels. All the races of all four quadrants had a field day hunting Borg. Days, weeks, even years of hunting.

    In a mere decade, the Borg sphere of influence was much smaller and split five ways between proto-Queens contending for primacy. And while they fought each other, non-aligned Borg lived by piracy and were hunted by the vengeful remnants of former conquests. The Federation and other enlightened polities, on the other hand, worked to repatriate as many members of their native races as they could, and took in refugees from outside. As a side effect, Borg-related improvements in technology become common. From that, a new arms race emerged, and where the unintended effects began.

    Approximately fourteen years after her intervention, Smith told her, Spock’s Revolution on Romulus was derailed by Borg tech which otherwise would not have been there; somewhere along the line, a large Romulan mining ship went missing, but its fate was considered to be of no import.

    The Khitomer Accords broke down for good shortly thereafter, and the Klingons started their own Borg works. Smarting from their failed alliance with the Founders, the Cardassians developed Borg-tech in a big way, and again attacked the Federation. DS-9 was swiftly occupied and the Gamma Quadrant wormhole once more denied to the Federation. In the Gamma Quadrant, Ketracil White was rendered ‘irrelevant’ by a Borg faction assimilating the Jem’Hadar, and while being immune to assimilation themselves, the Founders found themselves completely without allies, as any “solid”, like the Vorta and the Breen, could be and were assimilated.

    The Federation aid that would have been provided to the Founders simply could not pass the unbreakable Cardassian blockade of Terok Nor.

    Circa intervention plus forty-five years, as Smith put it, the three surviving proto-Queens, one of whom was actually a King, finally worked out a shared-power arrangement, and merged their forces. They were now well behind the curve technologically – Borg didn’t (couldn't!) innovate, they only collected and copied, and they hadn’t been collecting much. So when they started aggressively collecting again, the Borg-derived designs they found were that much easier to assimilate and integrate, along with all the innovations of a thousand races. When they couldn’t assimilate outright, they masqueraded as their semi-Borg neighbors and stirred up wars. Once sufficiently weakened, those races were assimilated as well.

    Circa intervention plus seventy years, the surrounding Delta Quadrant star empires had all fallen.

    Circa intervention plus ninety, the entire Delta Quadrant was Borg, and skirmishes were reaching into Beta, Gamma, and the near corner of Alpha Quadrants. The Romulan Empire, desperate, reorganized itself into a Collective, to better compete with the Borg. Romulans could do one thing the Borg themselves could not – cloak their cubes. Hearkening back to the original Romulan-Federation War, no Romulan Cube ever allowed itself to be taken intact. The main Borg forces pulled back to consolidate their holdings.

    Intervention plus one-hundred-ten, the Romulan Collective finished assimilating the Federation and the rest of their Alpha Quadrant neighbors, and went after the Borg. The Borg had long since determined the weaknesses of the Romulan Collective; anticipating the aggressive move, they simply assimilated the Romulans and the entire Alpha Quadrant in a single mass action. They'd let the Romulans do all the heavy lifting first. With cloakable cubes, the few remaining pockets of resistance scattered throughout the galaxy were quickly eliminated. In less than three centuries, the entire galaxy was Borg.

    By comparison, in the unaltered timeline, the one she had been trying to prevent for her own personal, selfish reasons, the Borg Collective grew at a inexorable (but mercifully slow) rate, allowing the major individual races to innovate and improve at the same rate. Eventually, the Borg-Founder war in the Gamma quadrant occupied the Borg fully, causing them to reduce operations everywhere else. That “breathing room” gave the Federation’s improved MIDAS broadcasts a chance to reach receptive governments in Delta and Beta Quadrants, not to mention the near half of Gamma, and led to the forging of what came to be called the Grand Alliance. Ships from thousands of races gathered under the leadership of four Grand Admirals, one from each quadrant, and the four Grand Fleets hit the Borg in coordinated simultaneous strikes from literally all sides. The Vodwyr redeemed themselves and rehabilitated their image by striking the Borg within their own subspace tunnels. The Alliance hammer and Founder anvil shattered the Borg once and for all, a mere four centuries “downstream” from her present.

    Admiral Smith’s final words to her haunted her still: “Let the dead go, Kathryn. You can’t get them back. They will be avenged, but only if you let history take its intended course.”

    She wept, quietly, in the the solitude of her guest quarters, because now Seven, Chakotay, and all the rest were truly gone, forever. She had given her word to return home and live out her life there, she couldn’t do otherwise.

    ^^^^^ ^^^^^ Endgame, redux ^^^^^ ^^^^^

    Delta Quadrant, Stardate 549XX



    Voyager had paused to investigate a temporal rift that had opened up almost in front of it. After detecting Klingon-signature weapon fire within (or on the other side of?) the rift, a small object with a Federation signature sailed out of the cloud, which then, abruptly, closed. A probe that, unknown to both launcher and recipient, was designed by the time-traveling equivalent of the maqui to conceal itself from TimeFleet sensors and shrug off a stasis-tractor beam. It contained a holographically encrypted database, addressed to a junior officer on Voyager who specialized in such work. Normal decryption efforts failed, but by intuitive understanding of his own methods, he opened it up. It contained bombshell “spoilers” that not only confirmed Janeway’s inclination to withdraw from the Borg “transwarp nexus” she'd been lurking around (no wonder there had been so many cubes!), but also outlined a basic plan for the next decade-and-a-half that would get her, and Voyager, home in better shape than the “Admiral Janeway” who'd recorded the heartbreaking missive had managed. This treasure trove of spoilers was fenced about by a semi-autonomous expert program, Base One, that would only release information if it found the applicable circumstances at the appropriate time; otherwise, it just lurked in Voyager's computer core. It was designed to resist being cracked, and would delete all the data it held if it failed. Kathryn quickly learned that when B-1 awoke and dispensed advice, it was best to pay heed.
     
  2. Rowenaster

    Rowenaster Ensign Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Dec 28, 2017
    Dammit, I wasn't finished editing this when accidental posting occurred. And as a newb I can't friggin' edit it now. But Oh Well This Too Shall Pass.

    Bonus points for anyone who can identify the sources and/or rationale for the "easter eggs" from other universes I've slipped in here.
     
  3. Rowenaster

    Rowenaster Ensign Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Dec 28, 2017
    I don't know if "winning the battle but losing the war" being turned into "losing the battle but winning the war" qualifies for the current writing contest. I just happened to have this snipped of fiction ready for prime time. I'd be honored to be considered.
     
  4. Count Zero

    Count Zero No nation but procrastination Moderator

    Joined:
    Mar 19, 2005
    Location:
    European Union
    If you want this story to be considered for the contest you should post a link in the contest thread and ask.

    What did you want to edit? I can do edits on your post. If there's more story you could just post the rest in a new post in this thread.