Ad Astra :: Star Trek Fanfiction Archive ^{Beam me up, Scotty.}

Chapter Text

The datapad in his hands feels like a leaden weight as Lt Commander Piper Hawthorne makes his way to the briefing room. It had been a marginal bit of relief that Cap had asked him to come to the briefing on ‘what the fuck just happened with the Gamma Hyperion anomaly’ early—he had been hoping for some additional answers to his several thousand questions. Just a few of them, maybe.

Now, with the information on the datapad he carries, he has the sinking feeling that any answers are going to be even worse than he expected. Which, given him, is vaguely impressive in a horrific sort of way.

When he gets to the briefing room, he finds Cap is there already. She’s clearly nervous, fidgeting with a datapad she’s clearly not reading, strands of dark hair falling loose from her long ponytail. She looks up at him—an unusual experience for someone about a foot taller than him—as he enters the briefing room. “Hi, Piper. Thanks for coming early.”

“It’s just as well you asked, because I have something you’re going to need to see.” She frowns, giving him her full attention. Clearly, she’s not expecting anything good.

She’s right. He sits down, holding the datapad in front of him. “We’ve been very cautious about going over the alien ship, since we have no idea how anything works.”

“Trust me, Piper, you don’t need to tell me you’re being cautious.” A tiny quirk of a wry smile accompanies that.

 He grins for a brief moment. “But there was a system that was isolated from the rest that we identified as a communications system, and… well, one of my engineers managed some decrypting and got a bit excited about activating it. We got a recording.”   

He pulls the video up on the datapad. There is a human, bearded, in long layered robes. Piper hadn’t recognized him, and neither had anyone else in Engineering, but Diane straightens with a jolt, her frown deepening. Clearly, she does. Which raises even more questions to add to Piper’s very lengthy list. 

The man on the screen visibly takes a deep breath, and begins to speak.

"This is Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. I regret to report that both our Jedi Order and the Republic have fallen, with the dark shadow of the Empire rising to take their place. This message is a warning and a reminder for any surviving Jedi: trust in the Force. Do not return to the Temple.”

Piper glances away, toward Cap. She frowns thunderously down at the recording, mouthing a sentence— any surviving Jedi.

The man in the recording goes on. “That time has passed, and our future now is uncertain. Avoid Coruscant. Avoid detection. Be secret—but be strong. We will each be challenged: our trust, our faith, our friendships. But we must persevere and, in time, I believe a new hope will emerge.”

He pauses for just a moment, something wounded flickering in his eyes. “May the Force be with you always."

Cap closes her eyes, briefly.

Piper doesn’t recognize the proper nouns, but it’s not a message that bears anything good. The grief is palpable, even watching it a second time. ‘Order’ could mean anything, but ‘Temple’ is clearly religious. Piper does some simple social math—violent political turnover plus religious group under threat and dying en masse—and comes up with a terrible gut feeling.

It sounds an awful lot like a survivor of genocide, sharing a warning for other survivors. 

Which throws the survivor in their medbay into a whole new context.

Watching Cap only throws those fears into higher relief. Her expression now is one of muted grief, like she was on some level expecting this; it reminds him acutely of his own reaction when they first tangled with Section 31. Cap had been shocked. He had not. Mostly enraged, but not surprised—and it’s the same thing he sees in her dark eyes now. 

“You know,” she says, in a tone that might just pass for conversational to someone who doesn’t know her that well, “there were a lot of children in that Temple.” 

His stomach drops. ‘Genocide’ ratchets up several notches in the odds.

And then she sits, looking at the face of the man in the message, her fists clenched. Piper’s known her for almost two years now, through some pretty horrible stuff he’d prefer to have kept to himself and some stuff he’s sure she would have preferred to keep to herself , and it’s clear she’s pissed . Most sane people get loud and impulsive when they’re this angry; Piper knows from experience that Cap doesn’t. She sits, she makes decisions and plans, and then she carries them out–and she doesn’t give a shit if they almost get her killed, like with Section 31 last year.

Granted, the secret police didn’t come out of it much better. But it’s making all the remaining hair on the back of his neck stand on end. “Hey. Cap. Talk to me here?”

She takes a deep, steady breath in, then rubs both hands over her forehead. “Yeah. That—that lines up with Plo’s condition. That lines up with what I saw there. God , I hate being right sometimes.”

He reels—there’s a lot to take in, from the name of the survivor in their medbay, to Cap’ having been there, having seen it coming and–

She takes the padd she was looking at and flicks through it, tapping send on a memo. “I was wondering how much I could get away with telling everyone on my own authority,” she says. “With this—well, it’d better be everything.”

He bites back the urge to ask, Were you going to tell me? because it’s so far from being the priority right now, but he can’t imagine it doesn’t show on his face.

She looks back at the recording, and her mouth goes tight and angry. “We are very likely about to be dropped in the shit.”

Amid everything going on in Piper's head, his default snark wins out. “Oh, of course we are.” he says dryly. “Any notes on how some … religious genocide on the other side of the anomaly is going to drop us in the shit? Someone coming after the survivor in our medbay?”

Cap looks at him and gives him a crooked smile. “That, and among many other things, because I picked personal fights with both of the assholes who might have been behind this.” She taps a finger on the padd with the message on it, glances at him. “So, I take it you’ve got questions.”

Diane is still fighting to claw back something like calm. She’s—she’s angry, that’s easy to identify, and grieved, but the very worst horror is her own hideous deep lack of surprise. She saw the doom barreling toward them, and she really hoped that she was being paranoid, and now it turns out that she wasn’t. That she was right. “I told you so,” is never a welcome comment. “I told you so,” about a genocide …

She feels guilty, for seeing it coming in the first place. She feels guilty, for not being able to do anything at all about it. For not finding the right magic words to help them avoid what she saw coming, what her studies of history and interstellar relationships and society all screamed warning at her about. That the Galactic Republic was a culture tipping over into horror, the war the hand on its back shoving it off the cliff. 

The whole reason she was there, the whole reason she made contact with them and met Plo—the very thing that’s sent him to them, at the end of his world–that was evidence enough of a deeply dysfunctional society. She’d seen the doom of the Republic even as she stepped into the Temple for the first time, though she hadn’t known she’d grow to care about it. About them. 

She’d warned them, back then, full of anger and arrogance, when she’d only known the Jedi as her captors. When societies threw away their ethics, they would always look for scapegoats; it was never the people in power urging the moral compromises who went to trial for them.

She was right, and it feels unforgivable. 

She saw the beginning of the tragedy and now its epilogue. The question is what to do with the pieces.

The question is what’s going to come out of that anomaly, looking for those pieces. She’s got a pretty solid suspicion someone will. Tarkin had never struck her as a man fond of loose ends. Dooku hadn’t either. The Chancellor, Palpatine, had seemed like a harmless old man in comparison—but history is peopled with harmless old men presiding over atrocity. 

But now, she’s got her crew and her ship, and far behind them in the Alpha Quadrant, Starfleet on high alert. She was alone then. She is not alone now. 

Hawthorne is watching her, worry making his freckles stand stark against his skin. He and the rest of her officers need to know everything before another ship comes through that anomaly. 

J’etris won’t need updating. J’etris was there— she'd  been one of the security guards dealing with her abduction, trying to track her down. Her other officers are more than willing to take these things in stride. Tanek is suspicious, asking pointed questions about why the urgency about this particularly badly injured refugee, but that’s his job. If he seems a little more pointed in his interest than usual, somewhat concerned by her reactions—well. She’s going to pretend not to notice, to spare all three of his alleged feelings. 

But Hawthorne… 

They’ve fought Section 31 together. She’s well aware that Piper trusts her, even last year, when she gave him some pretty good reasons not to. But he still trusts her; his trust has held up to a lot, but it still feels like a delicate thing to her. 

“Just a few questions,” Hawthorne says dryly. “That’s… not what I was expecting to pull off that ship.” His voice is tentative. 

“I’ll bet not,” says Diane, equally dry. “I wish I was surprised. I’m sure it wasn’t the most surprising thing there, either.”

“I don’t think I’ve reached the point where I can identify, much less describe the most surprising things on that ship,” he says, then sighs, pushing a hand across his forehead. “Let’s just establish some things. You’ve been to this, this Temple. There were children there. This Jedi Order is—some sort of religious order? This message is–” Hawthorne stares down at the frozen image on the datapad for a beat too long. “This message is a warning from a survivor of genocide to others to—to not come home. And in our medbay, that’s a survivor of that genocide named Plo. You know them. How am I doing so far?”

“Yes,” she says, and because it’s Piper, she can let her voice crack a little. “The Jedi are a religious order, yes, a distinctive culture, and they also play—played—a similar role to Starfleet, in some ways. Diplomats and peacekeepers—but when I was there, they had been drafted as generals. Down to their apprentices, some as young as fourteen.” She rubs a hand over her face. 

“Child soldiers. Always a great sign.”

“The excuse was that even those apprentices are better able to defend themselves than most trained adults; the Jedi practice mental disciplines that seem to cultivate certain psychic, empathic, and telepathic abilities, including use of their traditional weapons, lightsabers—they’re uh. Essentially swords, made of plasma.”

“And… we don’t know about this wide ranging former-Republic and its order of conscripted space Jean-Grey-wizards because…”

“They’re from another galaxy, Piper. That’s why Gamma Hyperion is so classified. Look at what the wormhole landed us in, and it only goes to the Gamma Quadrant.”

And then she braces herself for the reaction, because she knows she just threw a gallon of oil on the flames of Piper’s paranoia.

Piper stares at her and then at the other padds in his arms. “Well. That would explain why that ship’s tech is completely unrecognizable. I’m putting more quarantine around that thing.” He looks back up at her. “I take it that however you know about this is very very off your record.”

She shrugs, finding herself smiling a little despite herself. It feels like a betrayal. She remembers the Temple, all sunlight and high ceilings, and all the children, an entire culture obliterated. “It had to do with some trouble I got into while I was first officer of the Bedivere ,” she says. 

“Well that narrows it down,” Piper mutters.

“I’ll be going over it in the briefing—all of it. I’m not trying to keep you in the dark, but the entire mess was highly classified. It’s going to be entertaining explaining why I disclosed it to Tanek, among other things, but with what that galaxy’s like—we’ll do better to read the Romulans in sooner than later.”

He waves a hand, “We’ll get to it. Just—you really think we are going to get dropped in the shit? With this new extragalactic Empire?”

“Possibly.” She revises that. “Other people might say possibly. Having been there myself, it’s almost a certainty.”

“Right, then I’m going to act under the assumption that it is going to end with us getting dropped in the shit. And if they decide to become a problem—they may not have warp drive but they’ve got some other FTL tech that is completely incomprehensible. I’m going to figure out how that ship works in case we come up against something that works similarly, Cap. If there’s nothing you know that makes you think it’s going to abruptly blow up—I don’t suppose you can give my team any insight into how it works, or what any of the unconnected tech we found on board is?”

“Shitty manufacturing’s the biggest risk. They’re still a capitalist society, and their military gear is mostly built by the lowest bidder. But if it made it out here, we’re probably all right.” She pauses. “As for tech—well, I can tell you something about their comms systems, apart from… what your team already figured out here.” She looks down at the datapad, and then back up. “I had to get a little creative with one while I was over there. That’s about it.”

The door swishes open. She looks up, tucking her alarm away and doubly glad to do so when she sees Tanek standing there. “Good afternoon, Subcommander.”

He inclines his head. “Captain. I take it our guest’s arrival will entail some form of explanation for your behavior.”

He can make it sound like the most perfectly reasonable things are utterly damning. Sometimes she admires it, and sometimes it makes her want to strangle him. “Yes. Commander Hawthorne here just brought us some crucial data.”

“To be shared with us, I trust,” he says, and quirks an eyebrow. His version of a joke. But he’s cut short from a secondary, sharper remark by the arrival of J’etris and the rest of the senior staff. 

“Good afternoon, everyone,” says Diane, as they get settled. “Doubtless you have questions.”

Her senior officers look at her with a dozen different species variations on No shit, Sherlock. J’etris is the sole exception. 

“Thanks to Dr. Tyrell, our guest is alive and in much more comfortable a state. I’m told he will remain unconscious for another day or so to ensure his recovery goes smoothly.” She reaches the head of the table, meets Mr. Tanek’s eyes briefly; he’s just watching her, calm and flat in a way that’s probably served him well in a thousand interrogations. Joke’s on him, she’s gotten to know him well enough in the last few years to read this impassive expression as do go on, entertain me with this week’s absurd Starfleet nonsense. Sometimes it feels like a game; her trying to shatter that Romulan smugness by force of improbability, him trying to keep a straight face as he works out whether she’s pulling his leg. They've been saddled with each other by one of the thousand awkward compromises the Federation and Romulan Empire have made in the wake of the war--the Interpreter operates primarily in the Gamma Quadrant, and the Romulans have made it clear they do not trust the Federation not to come over all imperialistic. Or at least, if it does, they don't intend to be left out. And so Diane and her fellow captains heading Gamma Quadrant activities have liaison officers on their bridges. Under those circumstances, you take your fun where you can get it. 

So this time, she goes right for the point. Not like the situation needs any exaggeration. “As most of you have probably concluded, the Gamma Hyperion anomaly doesn’t pose a navigational threat,” she says. “It’s a security threat; a stable connection between our galaxy and another.”

“A security threat about which the Federation has declined to share information,” says Tanek. Got him , Diane thinks. That’s the fastest she’s managed to get him to actually frown—and he’s folding his arms, too; that’s significant disapproval. “As did you , Captain; you clearly know our guest, you have had experience with this other galaxy. And yet you declined to share this information with your own, nominally trusted, officers.”

“All of this is highly classified,” says Diane, quirking an eyebrow at him and not bothering to hide her satisfaction. “Had I not been involved in the initial incident, I wouldn’t have been read in on it, either. Much less had permission to read you in—our respective governments aren’t that friendly yet. Indeed,” she turns to the rest of the table, “my decision to discuss this with you is going to be called into question. But if this goes to hell we’re all going to be dropped in it shortly, and blissful ignorance isn’t a blessing.

“The primary government on the other side of that anomaly is both large and well-established. They have tens of thousands of member worlds, and a history of thousands of years, spanning almost their entire galaxy. They have completely novel propulsion technology, vast industrial and biological engineering capabilities, and a volatile political situation. When First Contact was made with them, they were at war. That war has now ended—in what I believe to be genocide. Genocide of our guest’s people.”

She places her padd on the table and plays Obi-Wan Kenobi’s message. There’s a cold silence afterward, slow horror creeping into the room like frost. Tanek, bless his shrunken green heart, is putting on a careful veneer of nonchalance that’s nevertheless ragged around the corners. She waits a few moments to let the information sink in.

“That government was still nominally a republic at the time of First Contact, albeit an increasingly authoritarian one. It was then engaged in a galactic-scale civil war against a similarly large and authoritarian breakaway state. At present it is not clear which party has become the Empire mentioned. We can hope that they’re still getting their house in order.” She feels her mouth twist bitterly, thinking of the Jedi Temple; given what Obi-Wan said, this new Empire ‘getting their house in order’ has likely not gone well for the children she saw there, much less the rest of them. “But I think it likely they will come after our guest—I think it likely they will come after us, even without that excuse . A new, unstable government loves an external enemy.”

“So we’re standing guard,” says J’etris. 

“On the off-chance someone pursues the stray we’ve acquired,” says Tanek. He sneers a little, but it’s more genteel than usual, which tells Diane that he doesn’t disagree with the assessment. “Perhaps you are correct. Lt. Commander Hawthorne’s paranoia is contagious.”

“Only way any of you would behave half sensibly…” Piper mutters.

“Starfleet Command wants us to hold position,” she says, giving both of them a quelling look. “Examine our guest’s ship, work on a way to closely monitor the anomaly so we don't get surprised by the next guests that pop out. They’re sending the Enterprise out to reinforce us, but it will be several days before it gets here; the Negotiator is closer and can reach us in twelve hours if we have to call for help. Deep Space Nine is on high alert, and the Defiant will be standing by. Klingon and Romulan representatives are being briefed as we speak; there’s potential for a joint operation, but I’ve been told not to hold my breath.”

“That’s a lot of firepower,” says J’etris. “They’re taking this seriously.”

“As they should,” says Diane. “It will take them three days to reach us at maximum warp, if things go to hell. Their average warship is easily twice the size of the Interpreter , and carries three times as many personnel. In terms of sheer manpower, we’re so outclassed it’s not funny. But they don’t have transporter, replicator, or warp technology; and I’m fairly certain our photon and quantum torpedoes give us an edge in firepower. Furthermore, if I did my job right when I was over there, they don’t know we have any of those technologies. I hope we’re wrong, I hope it won’t come to a fight, but we should be able to hold our own.”

They’re looking at her again—not because they’re impressed by the enemy, or what the enemy lacks. 

“When you were over there,” repeats Dr. Tyrell. “Is this how you know our guest?”

“Yes,” she says. 

“You were on the First Contact team,” says Commander Salera, raising an eyebrow. “This was Dominion space during the war; I find it difficult to believe that Starfleet prioritized a First Contact mission in this area.”

Diane draws a breath, gives everyone a crooked smile. “Gentlebeings, I was the First Contact team. All thanks to a case of mistaken identity.”

“A case of mistaken identity,” Hawthorne deadpans. “Yes. Of course. Of course your case of mistaken identity would lead to possible intergalactic war. ”

Diane stifles the desire to laugh, but not the grin.  “Well, these things happen.”

A moment while the gravity of the situation squelches any remaining amusement. Then she starts in on the story. “During the war, Starfleet was considering Gamma Hyperion II as a covert monitoring station.” J’etris is nodding–she at least remembers. “The USS Bedivere was sent to evaluate the planet and project feasibility…”