No Definite Answers

[Annabelle O'Halloran 0]

It had been more than 48 hours since she and the other 'survivors' had been picked up in the life pods. She'd viewed the sensor logs several times since then and had finally reached the place where she could watch them if not completely dispassionately, then at least with equanimity. She stepped into the turbolift, speaking as the doors closed in front of her.

 

"Main Engineering."

 

She was meeting with Wade Knight to go over something that seemed very obvious by itself but still offered no real solution to the disappearance of the survivors from their work stations and their subsequent reappearance in the life pods, surrounded by space junk that had once been the Reaent.

Anna exited the lift and walked into Main Engineering, pausing for a moment, looking around until she spotted Wade sitting at a console, head resting in his hands. She hesitated a moment before she walked to stand beside his chair, saying quietly, "Hello, Wade. Did you take a look at the time stamps?"

 

Wade looked from cradling his head in his hands, looking exhausted with the dark rings under his eyes, his blonde hair still unkempt. The viewer in front of him was displaying the long list of work orders, which were still coming in from all over the ship. He shook his head and placed a hand over his ear, frowning a bit before speaking up. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant. What did you say?"

 

Anna frowned as she got a good look at his face. He looked awful, and why hadn't he heard her? If she were standing any closer, she'd be sitting in his lap. "Mr. Knight...Wade..." They'd traded comms when stuck out in those life pods, so sure that the Romulans were going to kill them and then equally sure that they might end up as collateral damage as the Akiras had swooped in to decimate the Romulan ships. As far as she was concerned those were damn good circumstances for putting you on a first name basis with someone. "...is something wrong with your hearing? Are you all right?"

 

Shaking his head again he managed a slight smile. He was made sterner stuff than this, he thought. He raised his shoulders and nodded. "Aye, Lieutenant. I'm quite all right, just a little tinnitus is all. What's on your mind?"

 

"It's Anna, Wade," she replied tapping his shoulder, her smile fading as she once again took in how exhausted his eyes looked. "Did you forget we had an appointment--I asked you to take a look at the logs retrieved from the wreckage...?" Anna's voice trailed off as she watched him look back at her blankly.

 

It took him a few moments to realize the time, and he returned her look sheepishly. "Ahh, that's right. My apologies, Lieu..ahh..Anna. I have them here." Swiveling in his chair he turned his attention to the screen and pulled up the log they recovered from wreckage of what once was the Reaent. He hadn't put much though into what had happened, mostly because he didn't want to. This was the stuff to baffle philosophers.

 

"It's all right. The past few days have been...strange, and I know that Engineering was already swamped before that." She took the seat next to his console and swiveled so she could see his screen. "I apologize in advance for taking up your valuable time, but with what happened, I've started to have a feeling that possibly it was something about the ship itself, and by that, I mean the ship that was destroyed, that somehow the orientation of the crew upon her, might have contributed to who experienced her destruction and who experienced seeing the crew just up and disappear." Anna leaned back and looked at him enquiringly, "Did you have a chance to look at them yet?"

 

Scratching the back of his head, a slight grin played across his lips. "My valuable to time, you say?" He chuckled, his features becoming less harsh. "It's funny that you should say that..." He trailed off, and his grin was replaced by a worried frown. "I've looked over them. I've been comparing them with the logs on this Reaent and I think I've come up with where the...anomaly took place." Pressing his finger against a symbol on his screen, the two logs were displayed side by side.

 

Anna beamed at him, her entire face lighting up, before she turned to look at the logs on display. "You did see it." She leaned forward, glancing from one log to the other, noting the exact place coordinates in each and yet---the time stamps were different. "Some of us got to the Beta Quadrant just a little bit earlier than the others, and it cost them dearly."

 

He nodded, pleased to see that she was pleased. "Exactly. I also pulled up the logs from some of the escape pods. Take a look at this," he pointed at the time stamps on the log from the recovered recorder and those from the escape pods. "The log from the destroyed Reaent stopped recording at seven-hundred hours, five minutes, and forty-two seconds." His finger moved to indicate the time stamps on the escape pod logs. "However, the log I received from the pod that you were in after the Reaent was destroyed indicates that the Reaent was destroyed two minutes and forty seconds later. The sensors on my pod said it was destroyed three minutes and three seconds after. Now I'm no scientist, and I reserve conjecture for more intelligent men than myself, but it would seem to me that the Reaent was affected by some sort of temporal...hiccup. Possibly from the wormhole?"

 

"Yes, that seems very clear, however..." Anna's smile was quickly replaced with a scowl as she contemplated the screen and then turned her seat to face Wade's. "The wormhole is probably the culprit--it's an artificial construct that we don't understand very well, and the original tech that created it is not even Romulan in origin according to Jon Shamor. But the thing is...what kind of temporal anomaly is it? There were definite signs of a subspace weakness in that area in the Beta Quadrant, the last time we were there. It could have resulted in a subspace fracture that might have led to a temporal event and in so doing, the resulting explosion of the Reaent and a Warbird nailed by one of our doomed fighters could have resealed it and left the life pods ahead by two minutes and forty seconds, but that's a lot of 'could haves' for me and that's just my first idea...and actually the best of the bunch. And it doesn't explain why only some of us experienced it."

 

Turning to face Annabelle, he tapped the surface of the pool table, his features displaying his thoughtfulness. "That's what's bothering me," he confessed, but his voice trailed off as an Ensign passed them by, whistling to himself. "Doppler...," he whispered.

 

Anna looked at the report he'd put together noticing the time discrepancies were greater the further the life pod had been from the doomed Reaent. "I missed that, Wade." She turned back to him, "Doppler. You're thinking that the anomaly was a series of temporal waves?"

 

Wade nodded slowly. "Precisely. As the waves get farther away from their source they become fainter, creating a distortion," he explained with a speculative frown. He paused for a moment, placing his hand over his ear once more and shaking his head vigorously. "Ahh.. If such a wave were also produced on the other side of the wormhole, it could explain how a second Reaent may have existed simultaneously in that location, as it had before it entered."

 

Clearly his tinnitus was really bothering him and Anna wondered if exhaustion played a part. "Well, it's a good theory and it beats the heck out of a causality loop, a temporal inversion or even a temporal explosion. None of those seem to fit the bill. I hate temporal mechanics, really, I do." Anna swiveled her chair completely around so she couldn't see the dratted logs anymore and could stretch her legs out and cross them at the ankles. "But still...none of this addresses how the distortion or whatever it was played leap frog through the ship and dropped certain crewpersons, you and I among them, down a temporal rabbit hole."

 

"I believe that it does," he explained, shaking his head. Since we were furthest away from the Reaent when the wave hit, we were least affected by the temporal distortion, and if we are dealing with causality here...ahh... I don't know." He looked down at his feet, a sheepish look on his face. "I'm just a structural specialist.." he said wearily, his features becoming more tired.

 

"You're not a "just" anything, and you're exhausted. I'm not even going to ask you when you slept last, but the thing is, we disappeared off this ship right in front of the rest of the crew and we experienced something I hope we never have to go through again." Anna thought for a second, and realized that based on her experiences since coming aboard at Risa, that was probably a faint hope at best. "I simply don't know what the explanation for the random, if it was random, and not the result of factors we don't yet understand, for how only certain individuals experienced it. I think the change in time distortion of the life pods is the natural result of the temporal anomaly but not the reason for why we were selected." Anna leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes for a moment. "I was shocked to hear that our Captain has been relieved of his command pending an investigation."

 

Smiling softly, he again nodded in agreement. "You're absolutely right. There is something here that we are missing." He leaned back on his stool, tapping his chin. After a few moments, the second part of her statement sunk in and he sat up in surprise. "The Captain has been relieved?"

 

She opened her eyes and turned her head, seeing his surprised look. "Yes, Wade, he has. I only have the bare bones of it but It's pending an investigation into this past mission, which, granted I don't know what the details are, and nor am I likely to, but considering this ship and crew kept the Romulans from straying too far into the Gamma Quadrant and called for the task force that came to the rescue, you'd think they'd be pinning a medal on his chest." Anna shifted in the chair and pulled her legs up under her. "Commander Ridire has been put in charge for now." Anna could still see the Bridge recording showing Michaels horribly injured and still giving commands in between screams, calling for evacuation; to abandon ship. Giving the self-destruct sequence when he shouldn't even have been conscious. She wondered what the focus of the investigation was.

 

Wade let out an exasperated sigh and wondered to himself about the occurrences of the past few weeks. He looked up at Anna and shook his head, words escaping him; his eyes alight with what would seem ferocity if his face were not so otherwise expressionless. "I suppose I am thankful that we're all at least still alive."

 

"Yes, we are. That's one thing each one of us who made it to those life pods can definitely appreciate. We are still alive and those we thought for sure had perished, never went through any of it. We definitely have a lot to be grateful for." And things had a way of working out for the best, Anna thought to herself. The experiences of the past few days could certainly serve to illustrate that.

Edited May 5, 2009 by Annabelle O'Halloran