[He's back and on your ship... but why? Let us know.
((Who is "The Traveler"? Learn more about him here: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Traveler))]
"Scanning now," Zdanruvruk rasped. The Reman science officer's beady eyes were intent on the console display. Aitra glanced at him, briefly, before returning his own attention to the tactical readout. So far, it was blank. The Romulan offered a silent prayer to the Elements that it would stay that way.
"Let me know as soon as you discover anything," T'Laihhae said from the command chair. If she was tense, there was no sign of it in her voice.
"Is there anything there to find?" Retar asked from the engineering station. She did have a knack for asking insubordinate questions, Aitra thought. In an Imperial ship, that might have cost her her rank. But, of course, the Messalina was not an Imperial ship. And T'Laihhae was never one to stand on ceremony.
"My sources suggest there should be," T'Laihhae said, equably enough. And just what are those sources? Aitra wondered, not for the first time. "Nothing is certain... but they have proved reliable in the past."
"I have something." Zdanruvruk's brow was furrowed to start with - still, the Reman looked puzzled. "Particle traces... suggesting, perhaps, a subspace inclusion... or some sort of disruption." He blinked and glanced up from the console. "It's hard to tell. Recording data for analysis."
Aitra turned in his seat to look at his commanding officer. "What do you expect to find?" he asked, directly. T'Laihhae's dark eyes focused on him. She looked at him dispassionately for a fraction of a second, then favoured him with a flicker of a smile.
"Subspace disruption," she said. "There are two possibilities - according to my sources. One is that the Tal Shiar have been carrying out tests, attempting to reconnect to a defunct Borg transwarp hub. The second... is that they are experimenting with more direct means of causing subspace ruptures. They may be creating isolytic weaponry."
"That would put them in violation of... how many treaties, exactly?" asked Retar.
"Quite a number," said T'Laihhae. "Either possibility, of course, would excite interest among our allies. Bringing proof of either one to the Federation or the Klingons would further lower the Tal Shiar's reputation in their eyes... and advance the Republic's cause."
And the Tal Shiar would be keen for the evidence never to be found, Aitra thought, and turned his full attention back to the tactical display. The spiny shape of the Messalina was hanging in empty space, five light years or more from the nearest star system - in a point amid the infinite void that, as far as eyes could tell, was no different from any other. How did she know to come here? Aitra wondered again. He stared at the readouts, checked the visual display, looked at the stars, shining bright and cold, twinkling there....
He blinked. Twinkling?
Starlight twinkled when it passed through a planetary atmosphere. Out here, the stars should be steady and clear. Unless something was interfering with them....
"I think there's something out there," he said. "Possibly a cloaked ship."
"Go to full alert," T'Laihhae ordered. "Tachyon detection on. Zdan, do you have everything you need?"
"Still recording," the Reman answered. "I will need more time."
"I'd be glad to oblige," said T'Laihhae, "but it may not lie entirely in my hands. Keep going as long as you can." She turned back to Aitra. "Do you have confirmation?"
"Nothing on scans, still," Aitra replied. "If there's anyone out there, they're good. I just saw a - a visual discontinuity -"
"Good enough for me," T'Laihhae murmured. She trusts me not to jump at shadows, Aitra thought, and felt a fleeting glow of pride. He scanned the readouts, and the visual displays, tension mounting with each second that passed. There was a nebula within visual range, close enough to show as a filmy pale cloud... and something flitted, briefly, across it: distorting, but not obscuring it.
"Got a glimpse," he reported. "Something - angular. It might have been the wing of a Scimitar...."
T'Laihhae swore under her breath. "Then the only confirmation we will receive is a surprise thalaron barrage. I don't think we should wait to be sure. Raise shields, move out, maximum combat speed."
Readouts shifted before Aitra's eyes as the Messalina began to move. "Singularity core reaching criticality," Retar reported crisply. "Warp speed at your discretion, sir."
"We stay sublight as long as we can -" T'Laihhae began.
"Ships decloaking!" Aitra yelled. The flickering wraiths in the visual displays were suddenly solid, real, and deadly. "Two Scimitars, and an adapted destroyer. Bearing oh-two-nine mark one-four, range twelve."
"Maximum evasive," T'Laihhae ordered. Messalina was an adapted battle cruiser, heavily modified with Reman and Federation technology... but she was outgunned and outmatched by the approaching Tal Shiar ships. Aitra stiffened as more images shimmered into view on the console.
"Two battle cruisers and another Scimitar behind us! They're sitting on our departure vector!"
"Then we change departure vector. Come about," T'Laihhae ordered. Her voice was absolutely calm. "Heading three-two-eight mark four-nine. Maximum warp. Ready quantum slipstream."
"Sir." The android, Ruby, spoke for the first time. Her voice was no steadier than T'Laihhae's own. "That course takes us directly across the region of subspace disturbance."
"Yes. I'm hoping they haven't planned for that." T'Laihhae gave another flash of smile. "At the least, we should get some great close-ups for Zdan."
"Lead Scimitars are powering up thalarons," Aitra reported. His mouth was dry.
"Then we just outstayed our welcome. Punch it," T'Laihhae commanded.
The whole vast bulk of the Messalina shuddered as the warp engines came on line, twisting a hole in spacetime that was smoothed and widened by the energies of the quantum slipstream field. The ship leaped forwards -
---
"What happened?" Aitra heard someone ask. The words seemed to echo oddly in the air of the bridge.
Aitra blinked. The tactical console was still in front of him, glowing steadily... and every light, every luminous display, seemed to have a strange halo about it, an ethereal glimmer filled with nameless colours. The familiar edges of the console itself seemed blurred, wavery, unsteady. He reached out a hand, and that too was blurred, and the motion felt strange, slow, almost as if he were under water -
Head injury? he wondered. But he felt no pain. He turned his head and looked around.
The bridge seemed undamaged - no damage control lights flashing, no sparking and banging of overloaded EPS conduits. But it was all blurred, every light source ringed with that spectral glow, the whole place having that slow, dreamlike quality about it.
"What happened?" It was T'Laihhae who had spoken, and again the words had an odd echo to them. As if they, too, were wrapped in some kind of halo, audible rather than visual.
Aitra turned back to the console, struggled to make sense of the display. "No hostiles on sensors," he said, and his own voice sounded strange. "Can't make out - can't make out anything outside at all." The visual displays were a meaningless riot of shifting coloured shadows.
"Warp drive is offline," Retar reported. "I can't... I can't reestablish a warp field. Not sure why."
"Trying to get sensor readings," said Zdanruvruk. "This - We must have taken damage, sir. These readings don't make any kind of sense."
T'Laihhae put one hand to her forehead. "Is anyone else hearing things... strangely?" she asked.
"Now you mention it...." said Retar.
"Everything seems odd," Aitra said. "Sounds, lights... everything."
"Thank the Elements it's not just me," said T'Laihhae. She turned to Ruby. "What about you?"
"I. I. I," said the android. Her face was expressionless. "I. I. I. Input malfunction. Attempting to correct. I. Attempting to correct."
"That is so not a good sign," said Retar.
"We seem to be in... something of a hole," said T'Laihhae. "Well. The first thing we must know is, how deep? Do we have any sort of positional fix?"
"I can't make out anything on these displays," said Aitra.
"Comms?" asked T'Laihhae. "Do we have nearby subspace chatter? Any beacon signals we can pick up?"
Retar crossed over to Ruby's console, elbowing the android out of the way. Ruby sat there, passively, metal eyes blank, the bare patch on her forehead sparkling as status lights winked on and off in rapid succession. Each one had its own strange halo: it hurt to watch them.
"Nothing," Retar reported. "All channels dead."
"I'm trying to replay our sensor logs," said Zdanruvruk. "Should have details of everything... I had every sensor we've got out."
"Let me guess," said T'Laihhae. "Something happened when we hit the region of disturbed subspace."
"Seems a safe bet," said Retar. Aitra looked at her carefully. The auburn-haired engineer was trying hard not to show any sort of nervousness... but it was there, all the same. He knew it was there. He could feel it himself, deep in his bones.
"Looks like," Zdanruvruk said slowly, "we moved across the subspace rupture and it... synchronized with our warp field, and... and inverted, somehow. Moved us... randomly, across the space-time continuum. I can't work out how, or in what direction. Sir, I think it moved us along directions we don't even have names for."
T'Laihhae nodded, pensively. "So," she said, "the important question: how do we get back?"
"I don't know, sir."
---
The atmosphere in the Messalina's conference room was tense... and strange. I should be growing accustomed to this, Aitra thought, but I'm not. The fuzzy lights, the strange echoes, were... too strange. They were wrong, on some deep and fundamental level, something that he could feel, down in the core of his being. And he knew the others must feel it too... even if, like T'Laihhae, they were hiding it successfully.
T'Laihhae's "in" group, though - the ones Aitra thought of as her particular friends - weren't all hiding it so well. Tovan Khev looked as though he'd aged years; Satra was clearly scared; even the old engineer D'Vek and the big scientist Hiven were plainly worried. Hiven was making his report now.
"Nothing on the scans, and I mean nothing," the big man rumbled. "Can't even establish a metrical frame for reference. It's like - outside the ship, there's nothing at all. Like the rules of the universe just haven't been written yet."
"But we're still alive," Retar said. "That means - power, gravity, chemical reactions in our bodies - all sorts of things must be functioning normally -"
"Force of habit, maybe," said Hiven. "Nothing to stop these things carrying on, either. Or..." He looked doubtful. "There might be something... something mental going on. Sentient minds having an effect on their surroundings.... We know the artificial lifeforms are having trouble, right?"
"Ruby is still out of action," said T'Laihhae. "Are there others in similar difficulties?"
"EMH won't engage," said Hiven. "None of the sophisticated holograms will start up - we can switch on dummies and programmed characters from holonovels and stuff, but nothing with any self-awareness or decision making capacity. They all fail with initialization errors in the holo-matrix."
"Hmm," said T'Laihhae. "I suppose it's good to know that old-fashioned organic brains can cope better with this - whatever it is - than the cybernetic ones." She laughed, shortly and without humour. "Good to know we have any advantages. But it does further reduce our options."
"What options do we have?" asked Retar.
"Two, that I can see," said T'Laihhae. "The first is to explore our surroundings - to see if we can find some recognizable feature, some signpost we can use, in order to get back to normal space. The second - which is not incompatible - is to use our sensor logs and see if we can backtrack, by dead reckoning, along the same route we took to get into this place." Her eyes turned towards Zdanruvruk. "I don't expect it to be easy, of course."
"Sir," said the Reman, "it may - it may not be possible, even. We're dealing with movement across dimensions we've never encountered before - just describing our position might need the invention of a new mathematical notation -"
"As I said," said T'Laihhae, "I don't expect it to be easy." Her gaze swept around the conference table, measuring, appraising each one of them in turn. "I don't need to say this," she said, "but I will. I have every confidence in this crew... in all of you. All of us. We will prevail."
---
The shape of the Messalina made her internal architecture complicated. Aitra's quarters were at one corner of the curved, triangular upper hull, near where one of the forward weapons spines joined on. He was starting to unbutton his uniform jacket when there was a knock at the door.
"Come in."
The door slid open, and Retar stepped through. "I didn't want to be alone," she said, directly. "And I decided I wanted to be... not alone... with you."
Aitra smiled, and stepped forward to take her in his arms. Even in this place of altered sensations, her slim body felt very comfortable -
Then the intercom squawked, "Intruder alert! Intruder alert! Auxiliary control!"
Aitra swore, and ran for the door, grabbing up his disruptor rifle as he went.
"Stay safe!" Retar called after him as he left.
He raced down the corridors, his footsteps echoing like the sounds of alien bells, his heart pounding. More steps sounded as he approached the control room: he glanced warily around. Two familiar figures, coming up the passageway behind him - the other security officers, Sislyklut and Ril'ell. Aitra relaxed a little. The burly Reman was a good friend to have in a tight corner - and as for Ril'ell, she might look like a waif and dress like a cheap Hfihar streetwalker, but Aitra knew she could fight like an armoured hatham in a pinch.
Weapons ready, the three of them burst into the auxiliary control room. "Don't move!" Aitra yelled.
The figure at the navigation console did not move. It simply stood there, a humanoid shape, tall, thin, in a hooded tunic. "Turn around," Aitra commanded, "slowly."
The intruder complied. The face beneath its hood was humanoid, but neither human nor Romulan; a placid, mild-featured face with kindly eyes beneath hairless brow ridges. Cautiously, the intruder raised his hands in a gesture of surrender; the hands had two fingers and a thumb, Aitra noted. He didn't know this creature's species. He decided to take no chances, and kept his rifle aimed squarely at the narrow chest. Sislyklut and Ril'ell sidled around him, careful not to cross his line of fire as they approached the intruder.
"I mean you no harm," the stranger said. His voice was as mild as his face.
"No weapons." Sislyklut had a scanner in his hand. That meant nothing, Aitra thought. Any number of aliens could be dangerous with no visible weapons at all.
"I have no need of weapons," the stranger said. "I am here to help."
T'Laihhae's voice sounded, suddenly, from the doorway. "Who are you, and what are you doing on my ship?" Aitra hoped, devoutly, that he would never hear her speak to him in a tone like that.
"I am called the Traveller," the stranger replied. "I came... because you need my help."
---
The atmosphere in the conference room was tenser than before. Even T'Laihhae's eyes were narrowed, her mouth thin with strain. The only person who wasn't stressed, Aitra thought... was the one with three disruptor rifles pointed at his hairless head.
"I have a capability for travel across multiple axes of reality," the Traveller said. "Innate in this, of course, is an ability to... well, to put it simply, to see where I'm going. The irruption of your ship into this... region... was a very visible event. You must by now have realized that you are alien to this place."
"So you came to see what had happened?" T'Laihhae asked.
"It was clear enough what had happened. I came to render assistance."
"Why?"
The Traveller sighed. "Might it not simply be... because you need it?"
T'Laihhae studied him with a frown. "I must admit, I don't have a lot of experience of your kind. Altruists, I mean."
The Traveller smiled faintly. "There might be some disagreeable repercussions to your presence here, I suppose. Your mere presence creates waves of... change... which may or may not be desirable. And that change can work both ways. You are able to function here, because the living mind can influence its surroundings - to an extent - in this region. But the living mind is adaptable, and malleable, and the influence does not only work one way. If you remain here too long, you may change and adapt in ways that might not be beneficial."
"I've heard case studies of the psychological effects of interspatial rifts," Zdanruvruk spoke up.
"So have I," said T'Laihhae. "Some of them were uncomfortable reading." She turned her gaze back to the Traveller. "So. You say you can help?"
"If you will permit me access to your navigation systems, I can take this ship with me on a course back to normal space."
T'Laihhae's fingers drummed a brief tattoo on the conference table. The taps of her fingers raised strange echoes: she stopped. "We're trying to use dead reckoning to chart our own course back. We may well be able to manage without your help - or are you telling me that's not possible?"
"It is premature to judge anything impossible," the Traveller said, "but the task is a formidable one."
"Could you help with that?"
"My abilities are largely innate, and intuitive," said the Traveller. "Let me present an analogy. Suppose a blind man were to ask you how you saw - could you explain to him in detail, sufficient for him to make eyes for himself? The task before you is... of that order of difficulty."
"So you think we need your help... your way." T'Laihhae seemed to come to a decision. "All right. What must we do?"
"Merely provide me access to your navigation systems - and, of course, you must give me a destination."
"We can do that. The place we left, before we came here - could you reach that?"
The Traveller shook his head. "No. I mentioned, I believe, the effect of living minds on this - region of reality. The destination must be a real place, on which you can focus your will. It must be somewhere in the here and now that means something to you, somewhere you would strongly wish to be. The most common, the simplest, place for you to aim for... is, simply, home. Where is your home?"
T'Laihhae frowned. "We're citizens of the Romulan Republic...."
"Too vast an area. You need to be specific."
T'Laihhae drummed her fingers on the table again, and stopped again. "When I think of home, I think first of Romulus... but Romulus is gone."
"I had heard. A great tragedy."
"Well, then. We're citizens of the Republic. New Romulus."
There was a short pause, and, for the first time, a faintly strained look showed on the Traveller's face. "No," he said, eventually. "It is not... suitable."
"Why not? It's a real place, it's our administrative centre -"
"Yes, but -" The Traveller looked apologetic. "It is - I see the resonance your minds create - it is something you aspire to. It is a goal, an ideal; it is the home you are building for yourselves. And, because of that, it is something from your future, just as the destroyed Romulus is something from your past. I need a point that is real to you, now."
There was a pause, that grew longer, and uglier. "Most of us," T'Laihhae said thoughtfully, "perhaps all of us, are dispossessed. Refugees. Places like Virinat, Crateris - all shattered or swept away by the war. I don't know if any of us has a home - in the sense you seem to need." A wry smile tugged at her mouth for a second. "I'm rather regretting having persuaded Commander Yousest to take some leave." The Federation liaison officer was normally a thorn in her side, Aitra knew; still, a trip to his homeworld of Ysmer Pelagia wouldn't have come amiss just now....
"You will have to give the matter some thought," said the Traveller. "With your permission, I will remain... as long as you need me."
---
Aitra paced nervously up and down the length of his quarters, while Retar, curled up on his single chair, watched him curiously.
"Home," he said aloud. "Such a simple idea - or it should be. Shouldn't it?"
"I never had one," said Retar quietly. Aitra stopped pacing, turned to look at her. "I was born on one of the refugee ships... would have grown up on it, too, if it hadn't been captured by the Orions. Growing up in Orion space, now -" she shuddered. "Let's just say I don't have fond memories."
"I'm sorry." It was the first time she'd spoken about her past. She shrugged.
"It's all over now. And I guess it's the same with you?"
"That's what I'm trying to work out. Hfihar... the damn mines, and the damn arrogant Ferengi...." And the last time he'd seen it, through the porthole of a Starfleet shuttle, the town burning on the horizon, the ground alive with the leprous hairy shapes of the vampires.... "But I still think about it. I even dream about it. Maybe that's enough? He never said it had to be a - a pleasant emotional connection, did he?"
"But if it's somewhere you want to get away from - and why wouldn't you? - then it wouldn't work, would it?"
"Maybe. Maybe not." He gave a short, forced laugh. "Maybe it'd put us at the other pole of the universe, the place that's furthest possible from Hfihar in every way. Now that's got to be worth a try, hasn't it?"
Retar smiled at him, with a slightly rueful look. "You're going to try it, aren't you?"
Aitra squared his shoulders. "I guess so."
"Then good luck," she said. "Only, whatever happens... remember you and I have some unfinished business, all right?"
Aitra was smiling as he left his quarters. The smile faded, though, as he made his way down Messalina's corridors. They were empty, deserted, and he thought he knew why. Every step he took woke plangent, discordant echoes... was it his imagination, or were those echoes becoming steadily stranger and wilder as time went on? It was no wonder that no one else was walking about.
He heard voices as he neared auxiliary control - the echoes, though, made it impossible to make out the words. Now or never, he thought, took a deep breath, and stepped into the room.
Its two occupants looked up: the Traveller, and T'Laihhae. "Subcommander Aitra," T'Laihhae said.
"Sir. I thought - well, my planet of origin is often in my thoughts, and even though I'm glad to have left it -"
"I see," T'Laihhae interrupted. Her dark eyes were thoughtful. "Well, it's worth a try. But we'll try it if our current plan fails - Three hands are steadier than two. Take the helm, I'll handle operations, and the Traveller will be at navigation."
"You have a way out?"
"Potentially. Take the helm."
He did so, automatically, checking the console and the readouts, shooting a glance at the still figure of the enigmatic alien. "Status is nominal," he reported.
"Good. Warp engines are... well, we know their status. Go to full impulse and stand ready for the cross-link from navigation."
As if in a dream, Aitra punched the commands into the console, felt the faint shudder as the ship's engines woke to life.
"I am laying in the initial coordinates," the Traveller said in that mild voice. "Please stand ready to initialize the warp field as discussed."
"Ready," said T'Laihhae.
"Activate."
Before Aitra's eyes, the helm console readouts began to change. The ship was under way. Under way where? he wondered, and how? Hiven had said there was no way to establish a warp field -
- but there it was: the transwarp engines were on line, the ship was coming about, on a course... the coordinates made no sense. There was no way the Messalina was moving in any recognizable direction. But moving she was, and with steadily gathering speed.
"Hold her steady," T'Laihhae commanded.
Aitra's mouth went dry. The numbers on the helm console were insane; the massive ship was moving at ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times the speed her transwarp drive could attain. Hold her steady. Indeed, for the slightest wobble, the least variation in the inertial damping field, at this velocity, would spread Messalina's crew over her decks like so much paint.
The ship gathered speed. The figures on the readouts were a blur, meaningless and terrifying. Aitra sneaked a glance at the navigation console, and what he saw terrified him still further. The Traveller was shimmering and fading, the metal of the wall behind him clearly visible, bands of transparency racing up and down his slender body. His face was absorbed, intent, ultimately unreadable. Aitra forced his own attention back to the helm controls.
When the change came, it was sudden. The lights - the lights snapped back into focus, their coloured haloes winking out. Aitra felt a shock run through him as the weird underwater feeling drained away. The helm display cleared, stabilized, the numbers falling back to sane levels - to normality, as the ship eased out of warp and back to sublight speeds. Aitra let out a huge sigh, and it woke no weird echoes from anywhere. He turned to look at the navigation console.
The Traveller was gone. He had faded away entirely, as if he had never been.
"Check our position," T'Laihhae ordered.
"On it." He crossed over to the nav console, engaged the standard checks, and watched almost in disbelief as the system reported with uneventful normality. "We're in Federation space, near a star system - Priyanapari, I don't know it -"
"I do," said T'Laihhae. "It's where we aimed for. Now, get us back into warp, and steer for Starbase 39-Sierra - from here, the heading should be two-two-seven mark four-five."
"Is this place... dangerous?" Aitra asked, as he set up the course.
"No. But it's inadvisable to remain. All hands," T'Laihhae keyed the intra-ship address. "This is the commander. We have returned to normal space, and are proceeding at best speed to a Federation starbase. I'm sure you're all as relieved as I am. Thank you for your efforts. That is all." She snapped off the speakers and sat back in her chair. "I don't mind admitting just how relieved I am."
"Course confirmed, and we're under way." Aitra turned to face her. "So... is this Priyanapari system your home, then?"
"No."
"Then... I don't understand."
"The Traveller needed a definite point to reach, somewhere he could identify. There are ways in which this star system is unique. I talked it over with him, and we decided it was worth making the attempt."
Aitra looked hard at her. Her dark eyes looked back at him; her face was unreadable.
"You want to know, unique how?" she said.
"And you're not going to say... sir."
She flashed a quick smile at him. "I have my reasons," she said. "I have said before, I don't employ Tal Shiar methods... but some things need to be kept secret."
Aitra said nothing.
"I was a dutiful officer of the Imperial military," T'Laihhae said. "Once, serving on an outpost whose name really doesn't matter, I reported an off-hand remark made by a friend of mine. Our superior officer used that as a pretext to have my friend killed. I escaped that outpost, and made my way to Virinat, hoping to make a new life for myself there. Now, you know everything about me that, say, Tovan does. Before I found my way to Virinat, though, I passed through several systems, one of which was Priyanapari. I made some contacts along the way, who have been very useful to me, and to the Republic." Her smile flashed on and off again. "And now you know more about me than Tovan does."
Footsteps sounded in the passageways outside. "We'd better transfer control back to the regular bridge," T'Laihhae said. "And then I want to get some sleep - I don't think I've slept since this began."
The door of the control room opened, and Ruby stepped inside. "Sir," the android said, "I think I deserve some sort of explanation. I have been deactivated for some time, and regained consciousness on the bridge, with -" her voice became indignant "- a dust sheet thrown over me -"
Aitra laughed. "With your permission, sir," he said, "I'll let you sort this out. Me, I have some unfinished business to attend to."
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