First Duty (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on 13 May 2024 @ 12:41pm by Rear Admiral Lirha Saalm & Commander Morgan Tarin & Lieutenant JG Rafe Caradec & Lieutenant JG Montgomery Vala

2,258 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: Episode 19 - Tomorrow's Galileo
Location: USS Galileo-B - Deck 2, Captain's Ready Room
Timeline: MD 04, 1510 hrs

[ON]

If there was one thing Vala had learned as a temporal scientist, is that there was never quite enough time when it came to examining the ebbs and flows of chronology. He had spent days going over the new timeline data with the A's science team, scrutinising, tweaking, and challenging it as good scientists did.

It still wasn't perfect. No projection ever was. Even accepting that the data provided by their future 'colleagues' was authentic, and that their temporal mathematics was sound, it seemed unlikely that whatever moves were made in the near future (or 25 years past) would be easy to predict.

Such ideas played in Vala's mind as he walked through the corridors of the Galileo-B. He was feeling the effects of exhaustion mixed with caffeine. His knee ached worse than it had for many years, causing a slight limp and his face was slightly sullen due to a lack of sleep. His green eyes, though, keenly took in the surroundings. Under his arm he held a PADD and a binder to his side - the sum of days of hurried work.

It did not take particularly long until he found himself at the door of the Admiral's ready room. He gave his head a little shake, then without any ceremony pressed the chime.

"Come," responded Saalm's light and slightly-accented Yrevish voice. The door to the ready room hissed open for the science officer then presented the interior of a room so very familiar to Galileo-A's own senior administrative office. But where Tarin would normally be seated behind her desk, it was instead the Orion rear admiral, and she had company already present. A tall and brown-haired officer donning a red-collared uniform from the past sat in one of the seats across from her desk. She turned her attention from the man and to the new arrival.

"Lieutenant Vala, you must be telepathic. I was about to summon you. Please sit," she gestured to the chair next to the other Galileo-A officer. "I assume you remember Lieutenant Caradec, your vessel's senior conn officer?"

Vala gave each of them a nod in turn, "Admiral," he matched the Orion's gaze, "Lieutenant," he glanced at the familiar helmsman before taking a seat, "Will Commander Tarin be joining us, sir?"

"Lieutenant", Rafe acknowledging Vala. "It's good to see you, again."

"I'm here, Mister Vala," replied Tarin's familiar dry voice from Saalm's small personal LCARS terminal screen which the Orion swiveled outward to present to the science officer so he could see her face. "Have you and your team uncovered any new information from your temporal investigation so far?"

"Greetings, sir," Vala said plainly, pausing briefly to give a nod to the screen, "After running many simulations, examining causality in relation to the current conflict, we have discovered some anomalous data which was missed by the temporal experts of this time." He tapped the PADD he had brought with him, broadcasting the timeline projections onto the LCARs terminal for all to see, opened a binder, pulling out a page covered in spidery Rihannsu script and calculations.

"A ghost in mathematical form, difficult to catch, ensured that the presence of the Cold Station files lived on beyond Commander Tarin's decision to delete them. I have highlighted it here," he gestured to the screen where a faint line began to glow a livid green, tracking beyond the fateful point that the files were meant to be no more, on to the Galileo's visit to Regula I and spreading out beyond.

"Having examined various projections, I would surmise that there is a likelihood that this retained data was the very same that ended up being leaked by Rihannsu agents," his accent gripped the name of his people, "precipitating the war."

Rafe saw the timeline projections spring forth from the anomalous data. He could've crapped his pants! Why did he feel like his eyes were going to bug out of his head?!? "I see, Lieutenant. Did you see any chroniton readings in your data?", Rafe looking up at Vala, trying to cast doubt on his work. He mentions "There were several inter-dimensional portals opened on Cold Station. It's possible your projections may be off if those are not taken into account." He looked back at the LCARS terminal thinking, if they trace that back to me, I'm done!

"A sensible consideration, Lieutenant," Vala turned his attention to the slightly nervous looking man, "and indeed I suspect that the temporal scientists of this age discounted the digressive mathematics for that very reason."

He gently picked up the much worked upon paper and glanced at it for a moment, "While my expertise lies in temporal mechanics I was..." he paused for a moment, recalling from his distant past the unpleasantness of it all, "lucky enough, in my youth, to have worked closely with those studying certain aspects of dimensional physics."

He paused and refocussed his gaze on Caradec, "Thus I was able to ensure that the chaos and aberrations of natural order at the Cold Station did not intefere with the hypothesis I present today."

Well, son of a ..., thought Caradec. "Excellent, I'm thankful for your expertise. Are you able to detect exactly when the anomaly begins? Maybe that can help us detect a point of origin in time, and thereby an actual point of origin in locale."

"It is challenging to do so," Vala said with a slightly frustrated tone. He tapped his PADD and zoomed in on the relevant part of the timeline, "I have not been able to pin the exact moment as the anomolous data coalesces with the existing data up to the point of Commander Tarin's deletion. After that we can safely say it continues aboard the Galileo to Regula I and beyond."

Tarin had been listening in silence while simultaneously reviewing the new information her deputy science officer had collected and displayed on the large monitor. This apparent new data leak could no doubt explain why her own misguided attempts to maintain secrecy had failed - because she was not the only one to retain the sensitive information. She held up a hand across on her side of the screen to collect her thoughts before speaking. "Are you saying the cold station's scientific data logs survived aboard Regula I AND Galileo even after I purged them from the ship's computer banks?" she attempted to clarify.

Vala shifted a little, placing the paper down on the table. "Unequivocally," there was no doubt in his tone whatsoever, "The extent of the data that survived is not clear, but it seems likely that it was a majority, if not the sum total."

He paused for a moment to allow this information to sink in.

"If I were to speculate, I would suggest a copy existed separately from the ships databanks," he cursed internally that the data had not allowed him to do more than make educated guesses, "Likely taken directly from the source or some time significantly prior to the formal deletion by yourself and Commander Blake."

The Human captain's eyes narrowed through the computer monitor while her stomach painfully tightened. And not from a lack of food. "A second facsimile of this data was acquired on the cold station then brought to Regula I? With Galileo as its means of transport?" she again queried, this time with more force and latent anger expressed in her tonality. "Speak with certainty, Mister Vala."

"Listen, Mr. Vala, I respect your expertise.", Caradec interjected. "However, I don't think there's any way you can tie this to one specific ship or shuttle, even with the sophisticated stochastic methodologies you have available to you. The shuttles and the ship were all together and you can't even tell when the timeline diverges. You said it yourself, it's speculation. And to speculate is not fair to the captain, either crew, or even either timeline. We all want to get to the point in time when this happened. But it's clear to me we don't have the necessary means at our disposal to make that definitive assessment."

Rafe stood up after looking at the display. "All that's clear to me is that the information lived beyond the Galileo. We truly don't know for certain that it wasn't the scientists, or some method of transmission from some apparatus designed to do so. We all saw the level of abandoning of all scientific best practices on that station, and me more than any of you." Rafe started to speak more slowly, deliberately, and with a Viking-like fire in his eyes. "I freaking guarantee you, if they went to that extent to keep those types of experiments secret, then they went even further to keep that data." Renewed with that deep slow burning anger and hatred for those that cast aside Starfleet personnel like cannon fodder, the righteous Lt. Caradec wanted to see a good old fashioned hanging. And he would volunteer to pull the lever!

Vala blinked, slightly taken aback, then fixed Caradec with a imperious look, "Do not misrepresent me, Lieutenant, when I speculate I do so on the balance of probabilities. We are discussing causality and the infinitesimal impacts that one action or another might have on the correct order of time."

This individual clearly knew nothing of such things. The arrogance of pilots transcended empires. He met Caradec's gaze, "These are not wild guesses or ideas plucked from the ether. I have done the anaylsis and these are my findings."

He shifted slightly, calming his ire as best he could, before turning back to the screen displaying Commander Tarin, "Sir, I am afraid I cannot offer certainty beyond the following: first, that the data was taken from the Cold Station and left there at the same time as the Galileo, and second that the data arrived on Regula at the same time as the Galileo, and was transferred onwards thereafter."

"Lt. Vala, I'm not saying anything contrary to that. I'm saying to pinpoint any more detail than that is entirely speculative. We can not know for sure anything more than that. And that leaves a lot of to be discovered. I need to go through the video logs. If there's anything there, I'll see it.", Rafe proclaimed.

Though it wasn't outwardly obvious to many, Tarin could detect signs of a squabble propagating between her conn and science officer. Both appeared to have valid points of view but she couldn't help but wonder about the nature of Caradec's forceful rebuttal of the scientist's findings. In the wake of Vala's findings, however, one thing was certain. There was more to explore.

"Lieutenant Caradec, I share some of your concerns," Tarin said through the monitor, "but Lieutenant Vala is a subject matter expert in this field. As valuable as you are to this crew, you're a pilot, not a scientist. He's not a pilot, he's a scientist, and if we're going to solve this mystery together, we need to trust each other. It appears Mister Vala determined someone who was on board Galileo is responsible for this leak, so we need to investigate immediately. And I want the two of you to work together to solve this."

A short pause of silence followed while Tarin sipped a glass of water then set the cup down out of sight. "If we want to find the culprit, we need to start looking within. Vala says the cold station research logs left with Galileo to Regula I. That means the culprit could be any person from either of our away teams or someone we recovered, including Doctors Quil and Mulder. As well as you, Caradec. And because all of us returned back to Regula I together, then it stands to reason whoever is responsible...might still be on board our ship..."

"Agreed, Captain.", Rafe responded. He then turned to the Lieutenant and reached out his hand. "No hard feelings, Vala. I do appreciate your expertise. I think this whole situation has all of us on edge. I mean, in our current timeline I'm not even supposed to exist. And that's really hard for me to swallow. I must...we must get to the bottom of this, and soon. Time can be cruel. Yet right now, it's our most valuable commodity and we need to make the most of it."

Vala gave Caradec the smallest nod of acknowledgement, still slightly bristling, "Indeed. If a security breach has occurred that is obviously worrying from many angles, but my focus is the impact this new data has on the objectives of this mission."

He straightened his uniform and continued, "I believe that this aberrant data provides an alternative path for the alteration of the timeline. If the Galileo goes back and prevents this information from being passed on at Regula, it could allow the war to be averted and this terrible research to be surpressed for good."

Tarin opened her mouth to speak then closed it, pausing with consideration for a short moment. "Admiral?"

To Be Continued...

[OFF]

--

CMDR Morgan Tarin
Commanding Officer
USS Galileo-A

RADM Lirha Saalm
Commanding Officer
USS Galileo-B
[PNPC Tarin]

Lt. JG Rafe Caradec
Senior Conn Officer
USS Galileo-A

LTJG Montgomery Vala
Deputy Science Officer
USS Galileo-A

RSS Feed