Temporal Wake (Part 2 of 2)
Posted on 24 Nov 2024 @ 7:59pm by Commander Morgan Tarin & Commander Allyndra illm Warraquim & Lieutenant JG Delainey Carlisle & Lieutenant JG Sofie Ullswater & Lieutenant JG Montgomery Vala & Lieutenant JG Nusien & Lieutenant JG Hovar Kov
4,038 words; about a 20 minute read
Mission:
Episode 20 - Reconstruction
Location: USS Galileo-A - Deck 1, Conference Room
Timeline: MD 05, 2218 hrs
Previously, on Temporal Wake (Part 1)...
Vala nodded once more, his face barely hiding the dripping contempt he had for the situation. "Millions have," he said pointedly to the Klingon, "in the entire galaxy, untold billions." He turned his attention to the rest of those gathered, "Who has the right to decide the things that were decided in that future. Must the timeline be tweaked and toyed with whenever the Federation faces an existential threat? Is it an empire that must, under no circumstances, be allowed to fall? Who has the authority to decide that one timeline should remain as another is sliced into oblivion, regardless of the cost. It is an abominable thing." He bared his teeth in disgust, his voice slid entirely into his native accent, "Mhr'vaat!"
And Now, the Conclusion...
[ON]
Nusien's head rested on one hand as his other two hands wrapped their fingers on the table. He listened intently in this pose to everything that had been said. "The bottom line is that we will never know, for there is no way of knowing. As I understand it we can never know if the timeline we are living in is the correct one, or one that was created or one that should not be existing. You see destiny is a finnicky thing and the way I see it we should simply leave it alone and move on."
"To think in terms of 'correct' timelines is exactly the problem," Vala clicked his tongue, "This is not about the philosophy of it all. A crime was committed. We were likely complicit and thus surely we should rectify it as we can."
Hovar blinked at the Science Officer who he has not become familiar with, he did his best to speak as gentle as possible.
"Philosophy has everything to do with it, Sir. Science says nothing, scientists do. We are all mortals, with our own unique drives, passions, and our unique philosophies of life, religion, science, what have you. The philosophy of the scientist who is focused on preventing a war before it begins to save someone might become blind to the conclusion that they might be the cause of starting a war that should never have happened and damning another."
The Klingon paused for a moment,
"If there was a crime committed, Sir, it is the one crime that cannot be tried under any jurisprudence of any society. It is the crime of becoming so selfish and blinded by our passions that we forgot the foundational rules of Star Fleet: the first rule is innocent people die; the second rule is, no Star Fleet officer can change rule number one."
"So, you believe Starfleet is above tampering with fate only because it acknowledges that some must die for others to live?" Vala tilted his head, his green eyes narrowing. "A noble philosophy, one that the Federation invokes often, perhaps to absolve itself when outcomes turn to tragedy."
His words were sharp, delivered with a clipped precision, "Yet here we stand, all of us grappling with a reality we did not consent to - a reality forced upon us by those who ignored such rules. I beg you this question, Chaplain: If the Federation reserves for itself the power to alter time, what force or principle prevents others - Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians - from seizing that same privilege? Would we not, by example, invite a galaxy where every empire preserves its survival by twisting the fabric of causality itself?"
He paused, letting his gaze sweep across the room before it settled on Hovar again. "Perhaps the greatest risk here is not merely to those who were denied life but to the very integrity of existence. What stops us all from claiming a future not meant to be? And if so," his voice grew taut, a subtle undercurrent of contempt now, "who decides what is meant to be? One 'righteous' group rewriting the universe to avoid their own demise? I cannot call it anything but a violation, and not one to be excused by the Federation's ideals of peace."
With a final glare, he added, "No one power should be so certain of its own survival as to shackle others to its existence."
Hovar kept his eyes on the, as far as Hovar was concerned, very passionate Lieutenant. It was not as if he was wrong from a particular point of view. However, with a tilt of his head, Hovar gave a response.
"To the first, as unpopular of a position this might be, I believe there is only one power who should have the right to twist the very fabric of space-time, and there is but one breath of us mortals between us and it.
To the second, the person who decided on this particular outcome, the one who started this chain of events, is in this very room. She is the Captain, she made her decision, and she has to live with the decision. I for one am sorry that she was forced to determine the fate of us all. Are you willing to turn your gaze to her and openly condemn her? Shall we all openly declare that she committed a great crime to ensure the survival of this crew and this ship? Shall we not ask the powers that be on this ship to relieve her of her command to stand trial? Shall we find every officer above her with power over her to also stand trial?"
Hovar motioned his head to the Captain, unknowing what might become of him openly suggesting that the Captain is at fault, therefore should take the blame. Hovar's soul was ready to be sent home. He isn't talking about Earth.
"To the third highly philosophical statement, I ask you, are you willing to subject yourself to your philosophy that no power, including the power that you hold within yourself, should be so certain of your own survival as to shackle others to its existence as you put it? Is that not what you do as an officer to your subordinates? Is that not what a parent does to their children. Is that not what we do to prisoners?"
Hovar's eyes narrowed slightly at the Lieutenant, making it very clear that Hovar speaks from experience.
"All we can do with the power that is bestowed upon us by those with more power is to make the best decision that we can, in the moment, and live with said decision. I for one do not wish to be judged for making a decision by those who were not able to, or had the power to, make such a decision in real time without the gift of hindsight and forensic analysis."
He nodded his head once in curiosity, his eyes never wavering from the Lieutenant.
"Would you?"
Vala met Hovar's gaze with a hard, measured look, his expression devoid of any sympathy for the chaplain's attempt to frame the captain as the only moral actor in the room.
His voice dropped to a steely edge, each word delivered with precise contempt, "To equate temporal manipulation with some divine mandate is, at best, a misinterpretation of power - and at worst, an excuse for reckless hubris. My people watched billions die in a supernova, Chaplain. They did not twist time to save our homeworld, nor impose a reality where ch'Rihan stands unharmed in defiance of nature's own course. They accepted their losses, their grief, and their survival without tearing at the seams of existence to do so."
He leaned forward, traces of disdain breaking through his composure. "This isn't philosophy. It's principle. If we open the gates to temporal meddling under the guise of righteous necessity, then we are all no better than empires grasping at eternity, no matter the cost to others. And I, for one, will not apologize for condemning that path."
"I must say, the timeline that is now, the timeline that was or perhaps existed, or perhaps something that is not either, we cannot know at this point. We cannot know if we turn it over, or keep it hidden what course that sets. All we do know is what has possibly occurred and is now over. Where do we go from here?" Allyndra asked of the people gathered there.
Hovar maintained his look at the science officer; the glances that he received in the past were much more deadly. While he enjoyed the discussion they were having, and he would love to continue having the clash of ideas. Should the other officer be willing is an entire separate question. The Klingon had no idea what passions were spawned from the gentleman, but there was one that Hovar returned in kind: respectful disappointment. The officer's body language, his voice, the inflections in said voice, all of them provided the Klingon with information about the officer to come up with an informed opinion. Sadly, Hovar was not too happy with what he concluded. There was no anger from the Klingon, just disappointment. The Klingon shifted his gaze to the others, curious as to what the others were thinking.
For her part, Delainey was adding things to her mental list to discuss with the impassioned chaplain. While she had successfully resisted the urge to caution him publicly, ultimately not believing it was her place to stifle healthy debate, she also knew he hadn't done himself any favors by being so adamant in his own opinions that he could not acknowledge the validity of others' points, if only to lower the temperature emotionally speaking so as to facilitate proactive discussion about what came next.
Talking about the Captain as if she weren't in the room was a particularly reckless action and the counselor was truly surprised no rebuke from the woman herself had come, at least not yet. Granted, he had more than enough reason to be on edge, to put it mildly, but that didn't mean he could forget his role wasn't just about speaking his mind and representing a particular viewpoint, but also remaining aware of how his words were or were not contributing to this very crew's sense of cohesion in this moment, in this time.
Sofie had pulled loose a strand of hair and was fidgeting with it with one hand. She had tried to, with her last question, avoid discussion of time travel ethics. To her there was a much less philosophical aspect to this question. She couldn't blame the two of them for not knowing what she had been stabbing at, they hadn't experienced the horrors. They had not communed with the flayed man. She had to admit though that it had been fun to watch the two of them spar.
"Where do we go from here? We hold evidence of horrible crimes committed by federation scientists." Ullswater tucked the strand of hair back behind her hear for a moment as she started to speak but after just a couple of seconds began to fidget again. Her hands wouldn't keep still. "I believe they demand public scrutiny, or at the very least a more convincing argument for their maintained secrecy. As I said, if we let these crimes be swept under the rug I believe they will begin again. That is not divination based on timeline strands, it is obvious. There will be more deaths."
"Public scrutiny..." Tarin's sharp hazel irises trained on Kov, then Vala, then Ullswater. The contentiousness of the differing opinions in the room was to be expected with this new and disturbing revelation and she didn't feel compelled to adjudicate any of her officers' personal convictions. Not at this juncture, at least, but that didn't mean correction wasn't warranted. "Mister Hovar, you're new here so I'll cut you a single piece of slack; I didn't decide to bring Galileo into the future. Once we were pulled into the temporal anomaly, this past we've apparently returned to would never have been the same as it once was. The ball was on the court and we played it. This isn't a debriefing to place blame."
Galileo's captain then bit her bottom lip. "I decided to retain the cold station's research and experimentation logs and forward them directly to Starfleet Command. Ullswater, I hope for our sakes that at full and complete investigation will follow. But I can't promise that or a timeline."
"So we do the opposite and hope that whatever happened won't happen." Allyndra made a brief shrug. "A not easy decision."
"I'm not sure 'opposite' is the correct term," replied the captain to the first officer. "The logs indicate this is a 'different' course of action and without additional information, we don't have any way of knowing what effect it'll produce in the future." Tarin steeled a discerning gaze across the entire officer corps, lingering especially long on Vala. "Each of you should make no mistake in my actions - my goal isn't to change the future and take orders across time...it's to do the right thing and expose clandestine research occurring under the Federation's purview. I can't predict where that'll lead us in 10, 20 or 30 years, but when history looks back on us, this crew's moral convictions won't be questioned. I hope."
Tarin had not been an immediately popular captain when she had joined the ship. Ullswater hadn't liked her at first either. It only took the science officer a few days to change her mind though. She trusted Tarin. More than once in the last few days had she doubted that judgement but in moments like this she saw the captain embodying those things she had so pointedly highlighted at the ceremony the other day: most importantly a duty to the truth. Light in darkness.
Ullswater felt a sudden urge to reach out, perhaps touch the captain on the shoulder, as if that could somehow communicate the miasma of emotions inside her. Her hand even moved slightly, or perhaps it was just a twitch of pain. But no that would be unprofessional, inappropriate and all sorts of other things that Sofie did not want to be seen as.
"I am a cynical person, captain." Again Sofie was fidgeting with that strand of hair "I can't shake the feeling that I have a moral obligation to be a whistleblowers here. I wish I had faith that Starfleet's investigation will bring light on what happened. But do you really think it will?"
The second officer's question crushed the soul of the matter they now faced as a group. Beyond their collective interpersonal differences which were one of the first forms of this temporal fallout, the questioning of Starfleet and the Federation's integrity presented a much more acute dilemma. Tarin was a career fleet officer born from career fleet officer parents - she was Starfleet personified in the most proverbial sense. "Faith in our institutions is what holds the Federation together; hundreds of billions of individuals spanning over a hundred worlds consisting of even more different species. Many represented here, in this room." She paused to rub her forehead and glance down to the carpet her feet rested upon. "If we can't trust that an investigation will or won't be suppressed, then how can we trust any orders delegated to us by Command?" It was a hypothetical question meant to hopefully reinforce a succinct point. "You were there, Number Two, in the cold station. No one knows what you saw except you and we're six months away from Earth at maximum warp. We all need to trust our colleagues back in San Fransisco because we ultimately have no other option. I'll support you to my fullest ability if you want to play these cards, but I won't lose you as my second officer."
Ullswater listened to her captain and she thought. She let herself continue to think for a few moments before forming a response. In those few moments the voice of the cold station came again to remind her of an old apocalyptic verse. Conviction was needed. "Turning and turning in the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Do you know this poem captain? It's by an Earth writer called Yates." She sighed, tucked the stray strand of hair behind her ear again and turned to look the captain in her eyes "The people you ask us to trust are the people who allowed these experiments to happen, after what we've seen I don't think I can. Maybe there is a duty to the truth that supersedes that duty to the centre."
"'The Second Coming'," Tarin recognized. An impactful written work of art from ancient Earth's early 20th century history and quite a fitting reference given their current conundrum. "I don't believe the actions of a few represent the entirety of Starfleet or the Federation. I share your concern but this...unfortunately, isn't the first time amoral personnel within our organization chose the wrong path. They're the outliers who aren't fit for service - or possibly, not even part of our geopolitical alliance at all." That was her diplomatic fashion of revealing her suspicions of a research and/or intelligence compromisation within their greater ranks.
"I agree with you. I think that this is the actions of perhaps a few bad eggs. But if those are powerful eggs, and I must assume they are, then the normal channels no longer function, they must be circumvented." Yeats one minute, powerful eggs the next. This was no moment to mess around with flowery language but Sofie wished she'd thought of a better way to phrase that. "I would not ask anyone else in this room to in any way jeopardize their careers, I do not want to cause that kind of harm to any of you, but I feel I must act."
Allyndra had again simply listened to everyone. "If I may, captain, make a suggestion. Perhaps it might be worth talking to someone that you could take into your confidence that is not a part of this crew. A different perspective."
Delainey understood the logic of the suggestion, but she couldn't help but feel a twinge of regret that someone else would be acting as a confidant to the commanding officer. Their interactions thus far had been anything but easy, but that didn't mean she was going to abandon her role as an advisor to Tarin. "Whom did you have in mind, ma'am?" The counselor asked, referring to Allyndra.
"Perhaps the administrator of the station. A little unorthodox perhaps with the Klingons, but it was the correct move. Secondly, she is not Fleet, so not bound by the same rules the rest of us are." Allyndra made a slight shrug.
"No." The curt word came out of Tarin's mouth accompanied by an annoyed shake of her head. "I fail to see the need for any different perspective and there's nothing to confide - I'm not holding any secrets. What's done is done and we're all, for better or worse, continuing our journey in this timeline." The science chief's continued investigative determination, meanwhile, needed to be quelled for the moment. "We go through the proper avenues and chain of command first before subverting them. Approach this with professionalism to ensure any further actions we might need to take are above reproach. Understood?"
Allyndra disagreed that someone not in the chain of command. She thought that it was going to be all too easy from things to be swept and filed away and nothing more to be done. However she was not going to argue the matter in front of the captain with everyone here. She had put her though out there and that was that.
"Of course, sir. The proper avenues. Please forgive me for being so full of passionate intensity." Sofie quoted the verse once again. The missing other half of the couplet lingered in the air leaving no doubt what Sofie was saying about Tarin. The scientist was not going to rest until she had her justice, she had conviction in that. That was maybe for another day though. Now was the time for outward acquiescence.
Tarin dropped her eyes from the collective group down to her PADD which she momentarily fiddled with. She couldn't be certain if Ullswater was being serious or flippant in her remarks by referencing Yeats once more, but this wasn't the time or place for that interpersonal exploration to take place. "This is a tough pill for all of us to swallow," she quietly spoke to the group while raising her gaze again. "We're responsible for changing the timeline, inadvertently or otherwise. It's easy to look for blame but harder to take responsibility. I expect all of you to maintain your composure in the weeks to come and do your jobs whenever our next orders come down. Resources are available for anyone questioning our role in this...moral quandary. And my door is always open." Her discreetly troubled eyes flicked to both the blond Human counselor and Klingon chaplain who were Galileo's psychological keepers.
Vala clenched his jaw and allowed himself to shift backwards into the seat of his chair. It was clear there was little appetite to challenge the machinations of the future-ones who had planned out their path. He could only hope that they had not foreseen this 'great remembering' of the Galileo crew and the knock of effect it may have. Perhaps that would be sufficient to divert them from the path that had been forcibly laid before them.
Hovar had observed everyone, and he was stuck on two words: moral quandary. His eyes couldn't help but look at the Captain. Moral quandary? Seriously? Within Hovar's mind, a moral quandary is whether someone should stay or should they go. A moral quandary is asking is it right to dine on white cake and frosting while there are struggling people who haven't recovered from the previous war. This was no moral quandary. For Hovar, there was so much he could say, what he was most concerned about. However, Hovar broke the eye contact, looked down at the table, shaking his head gently as if he was already accepting a sorrowful conclusion. Instead, he hoped that Counselor Carlisle, his boss, would speak for him.
Although the counselor was not a telepath, her human instincts were were well honed and it didn't take much for her to feel the weight of the chaplain's gaze in her direction. Delainey assumed he was looking to her to speak on the counseling staff's behalf as expected given her position.
Of course, she also understood he still felt passionately about the course of action that should be taken, but she understood the times for debate, at least at this time and place, it was over. For the sake of this crew, in this time, she had to consider how to respond, not because she was interested in being a good soldier or because she was incapable of asserting her own strong opinions, but because she had more than just herself to consider in this timeline. "We, as always, will be a sounding board to anyone, and in doing so, we will encourage everyone to focus on the things that are in their control."
"I'll stay behind if anyone wants to express their thoughts or concerns to me directly, here," added Tarin, affording the opportunity for a brief moment of one-on-one time with the starship's senior executive. "You're all dismissed. I'll contact Command to try to get us some time off over the coming days. You've worked hard and I'm not blind to this ship's deployment pace or the challenges we've all faced. Let's hope...we never find ourselves traveling through time again."
[OFF]
--
CMDR Morgan Tarin
Commanding Officer
USS Galileo-A
LTJG Sofie Ullswater
Chief Science Officer/Second Officer
USS Galileo-A
LTJG Montgomery Vala
Deputy Science Officer
USS Galileo-A
CMDR Allyndra illm Warraquim
First Officer
USS Galileo-A
LTJG Delainey Carlisle
Chief Counselor
USS Galileo-A
LTJG Nusien
Chief Medical Officer
USS Galileo-A
LTJG Hovar Kov
Chaplain
USS Galileo-A