With Admiral Stroffa's approval, I have detached two frigate groups from the Stellar Survey section to accompany our force. I do not know how effective they will be, since we have no idea what awaits us at Delta Gracilis.
Tapiola has neither the King Estmere's subtranswarp engines, nor the Falcon's advanced transwarp capacity. Our speed to Delta Gracilis, therefore, is restricted to that of my ship. If the others object to this, at least they do not say so openly.
At least, during the journey, we have time to confer. We meet aboard the Falcon, to take advantage of its more standard Starfleet conference facilities. It is helpful to review the data we have, concerning both the Delta Gracilis incident and the Stygmalian Rift.
"The Rift," says Ronnie Grau. "Ah, yes. My own personal white whale, from hell's heart I stab at thee, yadda yadda. What do you need to know?"
"Background, I suppose," says Tylha. "I mean, the data is on file, but... that doesn't give your personal impressions."
"What is the origin of the name, for instance?" I ask.
"Oh, right," says Ronnie. "Well, you know stellar nomenclature, basically it's an unholy mess. We've got a mix of native names for places, names given by explorers, names based on old star charts from all the Federation founding worlds, names made up by people who felt they couldn't do without constellations and invented new ones for the planets they landed on... hmm, we're going to one of those now, aren't we? Delta Gracilis? Fourth brightest star in the constellation of, umm, the Graceful One, as seen from some planet who the hell knows where. Gets confusing."
"This is true," I say. "I prefer to refer to stars by the catalogue numbering devised by the Academy of Sciences."
"Yeah, well, great," says Ronnie. "So where are we going by that reckoning, then?"
"Our destination is one dash four comma two seven eight sub one six four seven three," I inform her.
"Oh, the poetry of it, it sings to my soul," says Ronnie. I believe this to be the human sociolinguistic construct known as sarcasm. "Anyway," she continues, "some bright spark with time on his hands - and oh, did you have time on your hands, back in the days when you could only get to warp four with luck and a following wind - sorry, I'm rambling - anyway. Some guy was naming stellar features after the labours of Hercules. Only the names got garbled in transmission back to Earth. 'Stygmalian' really ought to be 'Stymphalian'. I think. Maybe."
"But you said it was a Tellarite who alerted you to it?" I ask.
"Right. Yeah. The Tellarite name translates loosely as 'stay the hell away from this, something weird is going on'. But they put that name on a lot of anomalies anyway. The Rift was part of the old Tellarite Commercial Preference Zone, you see."
"The what?" says Tylha.
"Well, you know," says Ronnie. "Founding of the Federation, mutual ideals, high-minded union of civilization, all that... only, behind the public appearances and the pledges of eternal brotherhood and suchlike guff, a hell of a lot of horse-trading went on. Technology exchanges, mutual defence treaties, commercial agreements.... The Tellarite mercantile interests wanted a region where they'd have guaranteed preferential trading rights. The Denobulans backed them quid pro quo for something, I forget what, it doesn't matter now, the Andorians and the Vulcans had no particular interests in that area, the human commercial traders just had to suck that one up."
She takes a deep breath. Clearly, the memories have some emotional resonance for her - I suppose this should not be surprising. "But, it turned out that the CPZ contained this - patch of space - where sensor readings went all skew-whiff. If you'll excuse the technical jargon. We know, now, that some of the sensor pings they sent into this area didn't ping back until roughly a hundred years in the future. At the time, no one had a clue. So muggins here went in to investigate."
"Repeatedly," Tylha observes.
"I wanted to know," says Ronnie. "First I wanted to know what it was... then, I wanted to know how to fix it. Which we did, in the end. Saval's chronometric beam... rotated the rift, so that it was still, well, a tunnel in space-time, but instead of leading a century or so through time, it became a wormhole leading about thirty thousand light years through space. Into the Delta Quadrant. Into, as it turned out, a bit of a rough neighbourhood in the Delta Quadrant."
"And you concluded, after that, that the Rift was destroyed?" I ask.
"It acted like a normal wormhole," says Ronnie, "subject to the normal, well, wormhole decay that all wormholes get, if they're not stabilized somehow, like the Bajoran one. Of course, the Bajoran wormhole has the help of the Prophets... and, well, it turns out the Rift had its own prophets, or at least one prophet-like entity."
"Possibly two," says Tylha, softly, "if Martin Hudson's last words mean anything."
"Maybe," says Ronnie. "In any case, the records from the Merlin's saucer section seem to indicate that the wormhole underwent typical... wormhole decay... and collapsed on schedule. I didn't see it myself, of course. I was kind of busy."
"I have asked for a science team to be diverted to the vicinity of the Rift," I say, "to observe and report if there have been new developments."
"Mmm," says Ronnie, doubtfully. "I suspect I would have heard if there'd been any new activity there - I do try and keep my ear to the ground where the Rift's concerned. Mind you, after so long on the charts as a major navigational hazard... people sort of got into the habit of avoiding it."
"I can confirm that it is not a heavily trafficked region of space," I say.
"Even so," says Ronnie, "if it was active again... I'd know. I mean, I'd have heard." Her gaze seems to be focused on something very distant. "Anyway," she says, "that's one thing. What about the other? Delta Gracilis, the mad scientist and his infernal machine? What's your story?"
"Dr. Tamik's device was a quantum-state superpositioner on a large scale," I say, "created with the intention of temporarily imposing abnormal quantum signatures on macroscale objects."
"Essentially," Tylha adds, as Ronnie takes a deep breath to say something, "it put things into a temporary state of unreality, phased out of the normal universe and normal timelines. Anything affected by Tamik's device could move through normal spacetime unseen and undetected, because it literally wasn't there any more. Until Tamik turned the field off, and it came back."
"The problem was unanticipated interactions in the altered quantum state," I continue, "leading to fractally branching event structures in a multiplicity of quantum-fractional substrata."
"Things in the altered state were affected by stuff in the alternate reality they were now a part of," says Tylha, "and the results of that couldn't be predicted, and fed back into the overall area of Tamik's device, to create an out-of-control proliferation of realities and subrealities."
"Thank God I've got an Andorian to translate for me," says Ronnie. "So what went wrong?"
"Tamik's hypothesis was that a superordinate meta-causality structure would enable him to retain control of the overlapping quantum realities," I explain. "This hypothesis was not borne out in practice."
"He thought he could control it, but he couldn't," says Tylha. "We ended up with multiple overlapping realities in the station - in the course of which, a whole bunch of the station's staff got injured or killed when something that might have happened, did happen - for them. When I pulled the plug on Tamik's machine, the different quantum realities all merged back into the real world." She shakes her head. "Or, at least, into this world. Sometimes, I still wonder if I actually succeeded or not - if this is the real universe, or just one sub-reality that spun off from my actions. I don't know for sure if I'm real or not."
"Well, welcome to my world," says Ronnie. "I feel that way most days. What's it got to do with the Rift, though?"
"Beats me," says Tylha.
"Unknown at this time," I say. "We will need to make a careful investigation of the records left by Dr. Tamik, and compare those with your own data recordings of the Stygmalian Rift. Perhaps a correlation will then become apparent."
"Sounds like lots of work for the science division," says Ronnie, "which I will unhesitatingly leave in your highly capable hands. What's the catch, though?"
"We can't be sure what state the station's in," Tylha says. "When the realities merged, bits of it came back with all sorts of exotic damage. The computers crashed from multiple conflicting inputs... basically, we evacuated the surviving staff and got out as fast as we could. So we'll have to go back in... very slowly and cautiously."
"And that sounds like work for the highly skilled and redoubtable engineering division," says Ronnie, "which means you, kiddo. So, what's in it for me?"
Tylha and I exchange glances. "The facility is currently abandoned," I say, "so we do not expect any tactical challenges."
Ronnie nods pensively. "So tactical division stands around and gets bored," she says. "You know what? I like the sound of that. It's always a good day when tactical division is bored."
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