Cerulean Stars - Chapter 121

Chapter 121

Stardate 48495.32 - June 30, 2371 - 19:00:11

Raine breathed a sigh of relief as the transport resolved and she saw the stark interior of the Defiant's transporter room in front of her.

Sisko grunted, and Raine turned to the wounded man with a look of concern. “Are you going to be good to make it to sickbay, sir?”

“I should be.” He confirmed, gingerly stepping down from the platform.

“We'll all be joining him.” Bashir interjected firmly. “Because I'm going to need to do full workups on everyone to make sure there weren't any adverse effects from our trip to the past.”

A sensible insistence all things considered, but Raine knew there were things more important than their own health to deal with at the moment.

“In my case that will have to wait till after I head to bridge to try and get in touch with Starfleet, Doctor.”

Bashir opened his mouth to object, but a glare from Sisko seemingly caused him to reconsider and he gave a reluctant nod instead. “All right, but the moment you're done I expect to see you on one of my biobeds.”

“You have my word.” Raine agreed as she headed for the door.

“Brooks.” Sisko called out before it could even finish opening for her. “Your hologram.”

Raine blushed in embarrassment at having forgotten, and reached over to deactivate the device on her arm. “Thanks.”

As always it was a quick trek from the transporter room to the bridge, though the tension Raine was feeling at the possibility that they hadn't actually fixed the timeline somehow made it seem longer.

Most of that worry bled out of her however as the door to the bridge opened and she saw the instantly recognizable form of Federation orbitals on the main viewscreen.

The red shirted Lieutenant Strek currently sitting in the captain's chair turned as she stepped into the room, his eyes tracing over Raine’s 20th century outfit for a moment in confusion before he reached her face and realization seemed to set in.

“Ma'am.” He said, smiling in relief as he rose to his feet and motionioned that she was free to take the chair. “It’s good to see you back.”

“It’s good to be back.” Raine admitted, waving off his overture as she walked over to stand next to the chair. “Please tell me that’s actually what it looks like?”

Strek nodded. “Com traffic confirms everything’s back where it should be.” He grimaced, turning to shoot a worried look at the viewscreen. “At least, as far as we can tell.”

Starfleet’s temporal mechanics classes always tried to teach them that close enough was good enough when it came to time travel. Mostly Raine suspected, because to do otherwise would foster the type of obsessions that could get really really dangerous.

“And my duplicate?” Raine inquired, not particularly expecting her to still be around if the timeline had corrected itself, but feeling the need to ask nonetheless. 

“Sorry ma'am.” Strek admitted with an apologetic shake of his head. “She and her ship vanished in a flash of white light a couple hours after the Chief and Major beamed down.”

Raine twitched.

“A flash of white light?” She repeated to be absolutely sure she had heard the Lieutenant right.

“Yes ma'am.” Strek confirmed with a nod. 

That absolutely wasn't how temporal erasure was supposed to look to an outside observer, and a sudden niggling worry hit Raine since there was one thing she knew of that more or less fit that description that could mean several dangerous things for them.

“Was the flash accompanied by a sound you can only describe as the conceptual sound of a flash?”

“Actually, yes.” Strek confirmed, giving her an odd look. “At first we thought it might have been a transporter effect, but internal and external sensors didn't pick up anything other than the flash of light.”

That all but confirmed it to the Asari, and she steeled herself for whatever was waiting in the wings to happen next, because for some reason, a Q had stopped by the Defiant and kidnapped the alternate future version of her.

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Universe - 126.934.047

Stardate 48495.33 - June 30, 2371 - 19:05:26

The fading dregs of a pounding headache brought Raine back to consciousness, and she moved to pull herself out of bed only for the realization to hit her still waking mind that she had apparently fallen asleep at the Dolphin’s helm again.

“You know.” A familiar voice mused from somewhere behind . “I always found it funny how fragile mortals can be when it comes to the little things.”

A surge of adrenaline hit her, and she spun her chair around to see the green grass of a driving range where her ship's second control stations had previously been with a bearded version of Q in full golf outfit standing on it practicing his swing.

“Q.” Raine muttered in shock. “Did I…”

Memory suddenly hit of being in the middle of a docking approaching with the Defiant, and with a sharp inhale of breath she spun back around to see only the hanging form of a green and overgrown Earth mid center on her viewscreen.

“Four!” Q yelled out, and Raine felt a golf ball whizz by mere millimeters from her cheek on it’s way out through the viewscreen.

Her eyes followed the ball for a moment as it disappeared into the distance on its trek towards Earth, and she ignored the sudden urge to set her sensors to track the ball knowing it would likely just make confusion worse.

Rising to her feet as she turned back to Q, she mentally went over the many questions she had before settling on the one she figured he was most likely to answer. “Why golf?”

“For the full experience of course.” Q answered cheerily as he pulled another ball out of somewhere and set it down on the tee. “It’s rare I feel inclined to play doctor for a mortal after all, so it would be a shame to miss out on the fun part.”

Raine supposed that logic made at least a little sense from the perspective of a being with abilities like Q, though it also brought one specific question to the fore of her mind.

“I needed a doctor?” She inquired, taking a few steps to the side so as to avoid being in the path of his next ball. 

“Tuterian interspatial parasites.” Q confirmed as he swung again, the ball flying out the viewscreen on a similar trajectory to the last. “Their eggs began to hatch when you passed through the polarized chroniton field around Sisko’s little ship.”

“All right.” Raine said, seeing no reason not to take Q at his word. “So… Um…” She glanced back at the instantly recognizable version of Earth again before offering Q a wan smile. “Thanks for saving my life?”

“Oh, I didn’t do it for you.” Q said, pursing his lips slightly while once again tracking his golf balls path. “I did it for me.”

He leaned on his golf club and motioned at her. “See, there I was with Q, Q, and Q enjoying the aftereffects of my glorious passing from this universe when all of the sudden we're interrupted by the annoying buzz of those blue glowflies causing my favorite timeline to erase itself.”

It took Raine a moment to work out that blue glowflies was likely a derogatory name for the Prophets.

“At least it wasn't the red ones.” Raine offered in an awkward tone.

“Q would have just swatted those.” Q scoffed. “But of course the Continuum wants us to actually get along with the blue ones. As if such circular beings actually matter in the long run.”

Q snapped his fingers, and with a flash of white light the golf motif vanished and he was standing before Raine in a TNG era Starfleet uniform with Admiral's pips on its collar.

“Would you believe the only time they've ever even tried to change is with that Sisko of yours?”

Raine didn't really know what to say to that, so she just nodded in agreement, which was apparently the right answer as Q grinned back at her in response.

“Now you're probably asking yourself, what does any of this have to do with my magnanimous decision to save your life. And well, I'm amused to say it doesn't. That was just my chance to pay your other self back for the little bit of help she gave me with Picard by keeping you from killing everyone on that ship before she could return from her little temporal jaunt.”

Like a record skip, Raine's thought process ground to a halt.

“I would have done what?” She squeaked in a manner much less dignified than she intended.

“Oh yes, the crew wouldn't have stood a chance.” Q confirmed, sounding oddly amused at the thought. “Centuries of running into interdimensional rifts and strange energy fields have left you quite a bit less mortal than you would probably like.”

Frowning at his words, Raine took a moment to look over herself and confirm that she hadn’t spontaneously turned into a ball of energy or something.

“Not like that.” Q corrected, rolling his eyes at her. “Think more the angry little blond Ocampan that boring future version of you sometimes hung around with.”

The only future version of herself that Raine could ever recall running into had been the one that had taken Daniel’s place during her re-enactment of Archer’s Enterprise kicking the Sphere Builders out of their dimension. And she couldn't remember her hanging around anyone, let alone an angry Ocampan with what sounded like at least some level of cosmic power.

Though of course, given the level of psychic power Ocampans could manifest the Asari supposed there was–

Q gave an overdramatic sigh. “How about we skip past the slow realization that she blocked off your memories of encountering her and move on to the reason I'm still talking to you.”

“All right.” Raine agreed slowly, filing that away to worry about later since the being in front of her now was much more of an immediate concern. “So why are you still talking to me?”

“Why to congratulate you of course.” Q returned with a grin as he motioned to the viewscreen where a quick glance showed a small mushroom cloud rising up from Earth's surface. “You birthed an entirely new and stable timeline through the irrevocable paradox of your own existence.”

A flash of white light next to Q distracted Raine from the deluge of panicked thoughts that had begun to take over after hearing those words. 

The being that appeared after the flash of light looked like a tall human man in his late twenties with wavy chestnut hair and a thin build. Nothing particularly stood out about him, yet somehow the Asari got a distinct sense that there was a familial resemblance between him and the Q she was familiar with.

“Are you almost done?” The younger Q asked. “Because Q is getting tired of waiting, and you know how she can get when that happens.”

“I just finished.” Q said, motioning to Raine with a grin on his face. “See, she's right as rain.”

The younger Q looked over at her only for an odd look to flash across his features. “Aunt Raine?”

Q reached over and smacked the younger Q upside the head. “What have I told you about checking dimensional variances?"

And with those words both vanished in a flash of light, leaving Raine to stare dumbly at the now empty spot the pair had been standing as she tried to process everything that had just occurred.

For all that it had been the only source of advanced temporal knowledge she'd had access to, she'd never trusted the Guardian’s words entirely. But that lack of trust had always been tempered by her knowledge that temporal branching events were so rare that in all her years across both timelines there had never actually been a recorded case of one actually occurring.

Further lamentations on the subject were thankfully cut short by the sound of the bridge door swishing open, and Raine looked over to see Data walking in.

Locating the Android's head after the bioweapon had wiped out human life on Earth, had been a particularly difficult endeavor given the roving zombie hoards. Thankfully however Guinan had been able to point her towards the cave system where he'd been abandoned.

“I take it from our continued existence that you failed in your attempt to repair the damage done to the timeline?” He inquired as he walked over to the thankfully returned secondary stations.

“I don’t know.” Raine admitted, flopping back into her chair with a sigh. “You just missed Q, and he claimed I somehow created an irrevocable paradox that caused the timeline to branch. But it’s Q, so for all we actually know he might have just found the whole situation amusing enough that dropping us into another universe before the temporal pressure could erase us from existence seemed like an exciting idea.”

“Given Q's personality such an act would not be outside the realm of possibility.” Data admitted. “However my scans are showing a match between our quantum signatures and other structures in the general area. In addition, we are receiving signals from Commonwealth beacons in all previously applicable star systems.”

“Well fuck.” Raine muttered, knowing that basically cinched it. “Now I'm going to have to go back to dealing with politics.”

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Author’s Notes: And next chapter, we’ll have the DTI interview.