Forwarded by the ASC-VSO Posted: Tue, 20 Jan 2004 07:10:08 -0800 In: alt.startrek.creative From: "Jay P Hailey" JayPHailey@TIC1.NET Title: Star Trek: Outwardly Mobile Author: Jay P Hailey (JayPHailey@yahoo.com) Series: MISC - TNG OCs Codes: None Part: 9/335(?) Rating:[PG] Archive: Fine with me, just tell me where. Disclaimer: Paramount owns all things Star Trek. I claim Original Characters and Situations for me. The Holly Hop Incident By Jay P. Hailey And Dennnis Washburn The Harrier warped into Andor's solar system, and towards the fifth planet. Our sensors detected about the same thing as on Vulcan. The planet Andor had been bombed right out of the `habitable' category. There was debris. The Andorians were quite capable of violence in defense of their homes. Evidently they had put up a stiff resistance. This is where we discovered the smoking gun. There were destroyed ships and a ring of debris orbiting Andor. Among the wreckage were bodies. Dead Andorians and Humans littered the sky of Andor. We kept going. "Set course for Mereau 4." I ordered. "Maximum sustainable speed." This got a reaction from the bridge crew. Back to the starting point? Perhaps there had been a break in the problem. I had been thinking that being lost had been a blessing in disguise. It had given Green, Holly and Snoopy a chance to ferret out the true workings of the device. It had also given me a chance to evaluate the effect of it on the Federation. "Lt. Commander Flagg, please come with me." I started to the turbo lift. Flagg entered the lift behind me. I gave the turbolift the destination of engineering. As it started to move, I said "Hold." Flagg looked at me expectantly. "Do you know what Holly just said to me?" I asked. I told him the whole story. "Look," I said "Sending a ship from the future is a brute force approach. I don't even want to imagine what steps might have been taken by a subtle person. They would have had years to prepare!" Flagg took the whole story in with his usual poker face. I could his face flush slightly and a vein start to throb in his head. I didn't think this was unusual, given the circumstances. "Hey!" New wrinkles of this mess were occurring to me all the time. "That might explain the sabotage. If the Federation thought it wouldn't work, then they would stop working on it, leaving an enemy power to develop it!" "Huh?" Flagg was having a hard time following my reasoning. "That would be a paradox. How could they develop it, if they stole it from the Federation? If the Federation abandoned the experiment, how could they steal it in the first place?" "That's part of what I mean! A time travel device this easy to use throws causality right out the damned air lock!" I was excited now. I felt like I might be getting a handle on what was going on. "Anyone could be the saboteur, absolutely anyone! With time travel that easy, a mole could be implanted in the past, and build a trustworthy record the hard way. It might be someone we think we know! Hell, if it were an emergency, you could send someone into the past undercover as themselves. It would a nearly unbreakable cover." Flagg just looked at me. It was clear to me that I had lost him. "The effects of this device are too crazy. Once this thing becomes well known, then there will be no stopping it." My train of thought was leading to a conclusion that I didn't like. "Continue." I said to the turbolift. Flagg said "Why are we going to engineering?" I said "I didn't know at first, but it's becoming clear to me now. That device must be destroyed." "Wait, didn't you just say that this would just give the advantage to the enemy?" Flagg seemed confused. "If the device was destroyed by their efforts, maybe. I'm hopping that if we destroy it, and never reappear back home, then it will never have happened." I wasn't really clear on why I thought that this would work. I had to try something. "That means we'll be stuck here, in this place." Flagg pointed out, "Caught between psycho-Earth and the `Bugs'." "Maybe. Perhaps it's one ship versus the whole Federation, and maybe reality as we know it." I didn't like those odds. I really didn't like the idea of Romulan ships from the future appearing from nowhere and blowing us up. The turbo lift arrived in Engineering. The door opened and I stepped out. I was in a hurry. I was racing a specter from the future, and I didn't know what would happen next. Flagg said "Just a minute." I turned to see Flagg holding a phaser on me. "Not so fast, Captain." He said. "What...?" Too many horrible possibilities crossed my mind for me to deal with. He could be the agent. He could be one of any twenty agents. "That was excellent." Flagg said. All signs of confusion were gone, replaced by a self confident smirk. "You had me fooled this entire time. Right up until the end. You didn't expect me to by the `sudden dawning' routine, did you?" "I.... er... wait." I said. I had no idea of what Flagg was talking about. "Who are you? The Romulans? The Obsidian Order? It doesn't matter, now, does it? I have you." Flagg was enjoying his moment of triumph. With a sicken creak, the turbolift car fell down the shaft. I stood there for a moment, in shock. I had heard of such catastrophic failures in turbolifts before. They were only simulations, used for training purposes. The turbolift crashed to the bottom of the shaft, four decks below. I went and looked at the edge of the door. There were shear marks in the metal. The metal itself looked fatigued. "No way!" I said to myself as I turned towards Engineering. The coincidence was too convenient. If it had been a story, I would have stopped reading that point. Only real life could be that inconsistent. A writer who pulled that trick would have been incompetent. I entered Engineering. It was filled with the usual shift. There were the young Ensigns and Crewmen running like mad and the old NCO's running the place. It looked busy. There was work going on all around the compartment. "Attention!" I bellowed. Engineering was still one of the few places where a bellow was still a useful command tool. Everyone in Engineering Section heard me, and stopped where they were. "Set your panels on remote and clear the section!" I bellowed. There was a split second of hesitation while most of the youngsters tried to figure out what I meant. The old-timers started to move. They knew there would be time to discuss my sanity after the section was cleared. Soon, the Engineering Section of the USS Harrier was cleared. There we a few panels left open, and tools left laying out. I went to a panel where the impulse control sub master station was open and found a plasma cutter. Set correctly, this tool would do, nicely. As I approached the master systems monitor, where the Holly Hop drive was attached, a voice interrupted me. "Hey!" Dr. Charles Holly yelled "What do you think you're doing?" "I'm going to destroy the drive, Doctor." I said "You can't do that! What are you, Mad? That's our ride home!" Holly approached me and began to yell in my face. I tried to explain what I thought might happen if the drive were returned to the Federation. Holly would have none of it. "What utter hogwash!" He shouted. "What if I'm right, Doctor? What if the things I describe start to happen?" I asked. "Impossible! No one in their right mind would use my drive that way! It would be suicidal! The effects on the space time continuum would be devastating! It would far outweigh any political gain!" "But, what if they didn't care? What if they didn't understand the consequences? Haven't you thought of that?" "And I thought Flagg was paranoid! Give me that!" Holly lunged for the plasma cutter. Holly and I scuffled for a bit. I was hampered by the fact that I really didn't want to hurt the little guy. He had no idea how to go about fighting at all, but he didn't let that stop him, I have to give him that. "All right, break it up!" Flagg shouted. Holly and I separated quickly. I was shocked. Flagg should have been too injured to move, after falling four decks in a turbolift. But there he was. One of his ankles was badly swollen. He was holding one arm close against his torso. His face was red, and he was out of breath. "Caught you, didn't I?" Flagg said. He was using his good hand to hold his phaser on me, and was leaning into a bulkhead to keep from falling. "Good!" Holly yelled "The Captain has obviously gone mad!" "Shut up!" Flagg yelled at Holly. "You're the one who started all this, you loon." Holly's eye bugged out, but he stayed quiet. Flagg returned his attention to me. "You may think you've won, but we in the Federation have a few more cards up our sleeve than you might think." "Huh?" I said "But, I thought you were the saboteur." Flagg said "I was, but that was only to get the Harrier away from your pursuit. We're in a random alternate universe. It's still too hard for your side to track these jumps." "A random alternate universe?" I couldn't believe my ears. This made the whole thing much worse. "Not for long, you bastard." Flagg said "Soon I'll take the Harrier to our new hidden base. From there, with ultimate control over the Holly Hop, we'll safe guard all of time from your depredations." "Please don't call it that! I hate that name!" Holly looked pained. "What happened?" I was curious "What was different?" "Huh." Flagg said " In this universe, The warp drive was discovered in the in the year 2008, by a scientist named James C Jones." I recognized the name. He was the scientist who laid the theoretical foundation that later led Zefram Cochrane to discover warp drive. Flagg continued "In this universe, the government had access to certain materials from a downed Vulcan scout ship. It was used to give Jones a boost to his work. But the Earth wasn't culturally ready for contact. Remember that they were still discriminating against each other on the basis of skin color. It was like giving cannibals the warp drive. As soon as they met real aliens, humanity as a whole went psychotic. The Vulcan and the Andorians were too similar to humans in many ways, and too different in others. Despite a small percentage of xenophiles, most humans couldn't handle it." "I don't believe it! It was only sixty years later when our universe had first contact. There's no way we could have changed that much!" "But it was two generations of people who were inundated with Science Fiction! It was two generations of people who grew up watching TV shows like Galaxy Quest and Babylon 5! The small minority of xenophiles had expanded to a majority by the 2060's." "You used my drive to come this place?" Holly said "You used my drive to travel time?" He seemed to be in shock. "I am also talking too much. It's time to take action." Flagg raised the phaser towards me and took a step forwards. --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.564 / Virus Database: 356 - Release Date: 1/19/2004 -- Stephen Ratliff ASC Stories Only Forwarding In the Pattern Buffer at: http//trekiverse.crosswinds.net/feed/ Yahoo! Groups Links To visit your group on the web, go to:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ASCL/ To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:ASCL-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. From ???@??? 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