The Shadow of ch'Rihan

[Cptn Moose 0]

It had been 36 hours since they began their journey, searching for signs of the Delegation through Romulan space. It already felt like an eternity. Who traveled at warp one, wondered Christopher Moose? No one, he thought, other than an unmanned ore freighter or an occasional rogue satellite. He wondered if Ambassador Moose had felt the same anxiety.

 

Moose had been skeptical from the first moment Lt. Bailey had shared his findings. Bailey had been working on the data reconstruction team that had been searching for information about the squids amongst the ruins of the Saulk Observatory's data core. Instead, he found an encrypted message describing the path they were currently taking. It claimed that the Federation Delegation to Paktar had not followed a conventional flight path, but instead was sneaking through Romulan space, seeking an abandoned transwarp conduit leading directly to Coalition space.

 

It sounded preposterous, truly. But as he stood at the window of the observation room ... as the stars stubbornly refused to rush by the window any faster ... as only the vibration of the deck plates betrayed any sense of warp movement at all, Moose had no doubt that his other self had taken this same journey once before. He wondered if Zephram Cochrane had even imagined someone thinking warp travel was too slow.

 

But fools errand or not, the journey and its slowness bought them time. They were given rare dispensation to conduct this investigation, and they needed every second they could drag out of it. Because once it was over, they either had to hand Dacotah back to the Romulans, or choose to abscond with her and shatter the peace that they had fought so fiercely to establish.

 

Hayden couldn't go back to the Romulans. She had undergone the surgery to restore her former appearance, and he were allowing her to resume some of her former duties. She could visually resume her former life. But a piece of her mind was still Romulan; was still emotionally tied to her abductor. Until she could let it go, she was still one of them. There was no telling what she would do if he tried to cross the border back to Federation space.

 

He gazed out the window and picked out the Romulan star. In his mind, he could see Romulus slowly moving in its orbit, with Remus following exactly opposite. The duality of the system served as an uncomfortable metaphor. Like Remus, the Arcadia was in the shadow of ch'Rihan. Two Dacotahs tried to become one, while one Moose slowly drifted in search of his other self.

 

Other self ... he pondered those words. Grammar failed him in regards to Ambassador Moose, which was not surprising given the circumstances. Once there was one, suddenly there were two. They weren't brothers, but they weren't the same person either. Language failed to describe the relationship. The only other people Moose knew who had been permanently split by a transporter where his cousins Bill and Tom, and the four of them collectively were not a large enough concern to create an entirely new tense in Federation grammar.

 

It had never been an issue before. After the split, the two Mooses had gone on to different lives. Their paths had rarely crossed. And even though the Ambassador had once been Captain of the Arcadia, they had never been there at the same time. The crew who had served with him had adapted to the notion that their new Captain looked like the man but was another person.

 

But now, Moose followed the Ambassadors path, like Remus following behind Romulus. He wondered what calamity would be caused if the two orbits ever collided.

 

Cptn Moose

USS Arcadia, NCC-1742-E