Chapter Text
* * *
Glal rose from the captain’s chair and strode around the perimeter of the compact bridge to look at the scan results currently being interpreted by his science specialist.
Petty Officer Divinali looked up from his sensor display at Glal’s approach. “They’re attacking a Rhaandarite transport ship, sir, one of the big corporate haulers. I’m seeing two aggressor vessels; both are older ships. One’s a Klingon Raptor-class, the other’s an Orion Wuidgabe-class corsair.”
“Again with the big cargo ships,” Glal muttered to himself under his breath. He called over his shoulder, “Ops, can we hail them?
“Negative, Skipper,” came the reply from Chief Ramsay at Operations. “The Rhaandarite ship isn't responding and the threat vessels refuse to acknowledge our signal."
“ETA?”
“Six minutes, seventeen seconds,” the helm officer apprised.
“Warn them off again.”
“Aye, sir. Warning issued, and they are receiving, but make no reply to our challenge.”
The deck plates were already vibrating madly beneath Glal’s hooved feet. There was no point in asking Engineering for additional speed. Any faster and the engines would trip the emergency cutoffs and leave them crawling along at impulse while his chief engineer recalibrated their injectors.
“Status of the cargo ship?” Glal asked as he reluctantly resumed his seat.
“Weapons fire has ceased, and the freighter’s shields appear to be down, sir. I’m reading moderate hull damage to the freighter and their weapons emitters have been crippled. One of the aggressor ships is coming alongside, likely to initiate a boarding action.”
Glal looked across to his executive officer, Lt. Commander Gael Jarrod. The younger man looked as if he’d just stepped out of a recruiting poster. Tall, trim, and muscular, he had bronzed skin and a rakish goatee and mustache which somehow served to compliment his slightly nasal Oxonian-English accent.
“Mister Jarrod, ready a boarding party,” Glal instructed.
Jarrod dipped his head in acknowledgement, as unflappable as ever. “Aye, sir. Seeing as we’ll likely be confronting Augments, I’d recommending we go loaded for bear.”
Glal’s tusks quivered in appreciation of his XO’s fearlessness. “I’d never send our people up against Augments, at least not until we’ve gassed and stunned them into a comatose state. If you go over at all, it’ll be a clean-up operation.”
“As you say, sir,” Jarrod replied evenly.
The chief petty officer at Ops whistled approvingly before noting, “Captain, the Romanii had just extended a boarding tube when the Rhaandarites set off some kind of explosive behind their airlock. It appears the Romanii boarding party in the tube is now sucking vacuum.”
“Good for them,” Glal growled with enthusiasm as he returned to his seat.
The minutes crawled past, each second seeming to stretch interminably as lives hung in the balance.
Finally, Gol dropped out of warp in close proximity to the vessels, her forward torpedo launchers savaging the more distant Orion skiff with crimson ordinance. The photorps depleted the Romanii’s shields before follow-on phaser discharges tore into the vessel’s weapons ports and engines.
As the corsair tumbled away leaking atmosphere and drive plasma, Gol turned her weapons on the old Klingon Raptor. The starship’s phasers punched through into the unshielded raptor’s superstructure, but they could not risk torpedoes with the attacker hull-to-hull with the Rhaandarite ship.
“Skipper,” Ramsay called from Ops, “I’m reading environment suits only outside the hull, they’re empty.”
"The Romanii, you mean?" Glal squinted at the viewer as if he could see the empty suits from his vantage.
"Affirmative, sir."
“Shit!” Jarrod barked suddenly, “Shields up!”
Glal slammed his fist on the armrest of his chair. “I knew that was too easy!”
“Ships decloaking, port and starboard,” Ramsay noted with a tinge of fatalism in his voice.
“Fire everything!” Glal roared as enemy weapons fire slammed into their shields from multiple angles of attack.
* * *
Davula entered the astrometrics lab to find Garrett once again seated at the controls. This time, however, rather than a geological cross-section of Magna Roma, the screen contained the concentric circles of the orbital paths of this system’s seven planets.
Garrett threw a glance over her shoulder, appearing visibly exhausted. “How’s things topside, sir?”
“Manageable, for the moment,” Davula replied. “The commodore and Ambassador Dax just returned from their initial talks with the Romanii. Apparently, the commodore punched one of them in the throat for tearing Helvia’s consecrated chain from his uniform.”
Garrett, who would usually have been morbidly amused at such a scandalous tale, merely frowned.
“Are you okay, Lieutenant?” Davula asked, sensing something amiss with the younger woman. “You sounded rattled when you asked me down here.”
Garrett waved a hand towards the massive display screen. “I’m… not sure, sir.”
Davula approached. “What have you found?”
“You might want to sit down, sir,” Garrett offered, still sounding out of sorts.
The Bolian looked askance at her. “I’m a scientist, Mister Garrett. I’ve seen my fair share of odd and inexplicable.”
Garrett merely nodded numbly, inclining her head towards the display. “I kept thinking that perhaps Magna Roma’s bizarre geology might have something to do with the star system’s collective formation. We’ve seen some systems where the planets are so rich in dilithium that the crystals begin to focus and refract geothermal energy into tectonic instability and volcanism.”
“Right,” Davula nodded, “piezoelectric generator strata. I’m familiar.”
“Yes, sir. So, I started to study the rest of the system, only to discover that nobody’s ever paid much attention to all the oddities here. Magna Roma’s alternate Earth status is so compelling that it seems that’s all anyone’s ever cared about.” She toggled a control at her station and the image drew back, showing an orbital diorama of the whole system.
“There’s only trace amounts of dilithium in the system, so that’s not our culprit. However, about thirty-five hundred years ago something happened in System 892 that tossed planets and moons around like a break-shot on a pool table. That asteroid belt between the sixth and seventh planets, that used to be the actual sixth planet and one of the fifth planet’s moons.”
“What happened? A rogue neutron star or a black hole transit?
Garrett shook her head. “That’s what I thought at first, too. I ran through every permutation I could think of for the gravitational and orbital dynamics necessary to create this hot mess of a star system, but nothing I came up with could account for all this chaos,” she said in a voice tight with an emotion that Davula couldn’t quite place. Garrett made a sweeping gesture towards the system displayed across the curved bulkhead in front of them before toggling the controls. “Here were the most likely events, but none of them panned out.”
A host of scenarios unfolded in quick succession, to include an asteroid strike on Magna Roma or other of the system’s planets, a rogue planet passing through the system along the plane of the ecliptic, and a similar systemic intrusion at right angles to the orbital plane by a Class III or IV quantum singularity. These simulations played out over millions or billions of years in mere seconds, but none of them resulted in a star system configuration that looked anything like what presently existed.
Garrett continued speaking, staring with a peculiar intensity at the display. “Apparently, my issue was that I was operating under the constraints of astrophysics as we know them. My parameters were too narrow. So, in a fit of rage and an attempt to prove that the analysis program itself must be faulty, I told it to show me anything, however unlikely, that would result in all the gravitational and orbital oddities here. The computer accepted my challenge and…” Garrett typed a series of commands into the station and sat back to let the simulation continue.
Davula’s eyes widened in disbelief as she watched the scenario play out. She ran it again to make sure she had seen it clearly and that her brain was accurately processing what the computer was telling her. Her knees gave out and she sat heavily into the chair next to Garrett. “That’s… that’s not…”
“Possible? Rational?” Garrett offered. “Funny?”
The XO propped her head in her hands, her eyes now riveted to the screen with an intensity matching Garrett’s own. “All the above.”
Garrett jabbed an accusatory finger towards the image. “The simulation ran a few times and then self-corrected the origin date by approximately four hundred years to get the model to match the system’s present configuration. It’s accurate to ninety-nine-point-seven percent probability. Everything we can see out there right now is accounted for.”
“Corrected forwards or backwards?” Davula asked in a weirdly distracted tone.
“Backwards. Incept appears to be 1000 BC, Terran Julian calendar.”
Davula glanced at the floor, considering potential target areas. “I think I’m going to be sick,” she said in a small voice.
“Yeah,” Garrett answered dully. “That’s how I felt.”
The simulation continued running on repeat. The seven planets of System 892 orbited their star in stately majesty with the clockwork precision of an indifferent universe, right up until sometime around 1000 BC as measured by one of Earth’s many culturally specific calendars.
At that time, Magna Roma and its moon suddenly appeared. It was not the gradual terraforming of an existing planet by an alien intelligence, but a world and its satellite blinking into existence instantaneously. The gravitational shockwave of their inexplicable arrival shifted the orbits of the other worlds native to this star. The next closest sphere, a massive gas giant in what was now the fifth orbital position, lost three of its moons which were flung out of its own Jovian-class mini-system. One of these moons eventually collided with the sixth planet in the system, annihilating both and creating the asteroid field that now occupied its place.
Another of the gas giant’s moons was cast so far out of the system that it only swung back through on an extreme elliptical orbit every fifteen hundred years.
The third planet’s orbit was so violently disrupted that it’s ecliptic was now a full thirty degrees off that of its original path around the star.
The second planet to the sun had been knocked forty-two degrees off its axis, shattering its single moon into a ring of rubble that now encircled the icy, lifeless world.
Out of the six-point-seven billion permutations the computer subroutine had analyzed in the past six hours, only this one laughably unlikely scenario could account for the disjointed and counterintuitive configuration that now existed in the star system.
“Planets don’t just… appear,” Garrett finally pronounced, though her tone was devoid of conviction.
“This one seems to have,” Davula replied heavily.
Garrett pinched the bridge of her nose as if warding off a headache. “And the Romans on Earth were just a small, unremarkable village on the Palatine Hill in 1000 BC. How the hell could they develop the same culture, traditions and language as their counterpart on Earth? From what Helvia’s relayed, they even have most of the same notable individuals until about 350 AD where their history and ours begin to diverge.”
Davula shook off her unease and turned her gaze on Garrett, her expression fixed in an uncomprehending scowl. “I can’t take this to the commodore in good conscience until we’ve vetted it through someone else. We had to have missed something. I’ve got a contact at Memory Alpha who has access to one of Daystrom’s M-7’s. I want to see what an AI thinks of this before I’m ready to risk my professional reputation.”
Garrett nodded slowly, her mind still reeling at the implications. “Understood, sir. I won’t divulge anything about this until you give me the word. Though, I do have a close friend at MIT in their Planetary Geology program. They’ve got a top-of-the-line Stellar Systems Evolution simulator. It’s not an AI, but…”
“Yes, contact them, discreetly. But keep it quiet and ask them to delete the query after we get the results.”
“Aye, sir,” Garrett affirmed, before adding, “You don’t suppose this is why the Science Council classified that cultural survey?”
“It could very well be,” Davula answered. She stood, patting Garrett on the shoulder. “We saw our fair share of weird shit on the Omega Centauri expedition, but nothing even close to this. You’re right, I should have sat down.”
* * *