conundrum
2011-06-06 23:00:41 UTC
Star Trek: Paradox
Plot synopsis
Leaked 06 June 2011 by "Anonymous"
Kirk, Spock and the rest of the new crew of the USS Enterprise
(NCC-1701) begin their five year mission on schedule having defeated
the Narada in battle.
Their first task, to contact the battered Klingon Empire which is
still reeling from the loss of
its entire fleet to Nero's ship in order to discuss a treaty of non
aggression.
En route, the Enterprise detects a strange signal from the vicinity of
the Vulcan system and upon investigating encounters a Romulan ship,
which is experiencing engine failure as a result of narrowly escaping
the black hole while observing the attack on and destruction of the
Vulcan home world.
Kirk makes contact with them, and talks them out of self destructing
their ship to avoid capture by the Enterprise.
As expected the Romulans are unhappy that they are being accused of
aiding Nero when in fact they had nothing to do with the attack in the
current time line.
They are however willing to allow Scotty and an engineering crew
aboard to help them repair their ship's warp reactor which is based on
similar technologies to the Vulcan ships.
During the repair efforts Scotty discovers something strange about the
ship suggesting that not only are the Romulans far more advanced than
generally believed in both weapons, shields and warp technology but
they may in fact have acquired these advances from a possible third
time travelling ship.
This obviously rattles Kirk and Spock, because it implies that the
Romulans may have had foreknowledge of the attack and might have
prevented much of the loss of life.
As it turns out his hunch was right.
The Romulan captain invites Kirk, Spock and Bones to a meeting where
the doors are sealed and all parties agree to "never speak of this to
anyone as long as they live" in accordance with what the Romulan
captain calls the "Temporal Prime Directive".
He then reveals to the Captain and officers that in fact the time
travelling ship was not only from the future but the 24th century.
It turns out that the Romulan ship was one of those which assisted in
the attempt to destroy the Scimitar but in the process was knocked off
course by the Scimitar's destruction.
The Romulan ship had in fact locked onto Data in order to exploit his
apparent destruction to steal Data's positronic technology, but only
managed to get a partial lock and save his head.
Some of the energy fed back into the transporter system and caused a
power surge which coupled with the damage sustained in battle nearly
caused a core breach.
In order to save the ship the Romulan captain ordered the core ejected
but when this occurred the residual thalaron shock wave from the
Scimitar combined with the core detonation caused the formation of a
temporal rift which hurled the ship back in time to just before the
destruction of Vulcan but half a light year away.
With the core destroyed and no warp drive the Romulans had no choice
but to observe cloaked from a safe distance, helpless to save Vulcan
from destruction and stuck in this time line.
Due to the resultant icy relations between the Federation and Romulan
Empire the Romulan captain was forced to send out a coded distress
signal which he hoped would be detected by another race neutral to
both parties, the Breen.
As the Romulans had achieved their covert mission of stealing Data's
brain for study, they concentrated on reverse engineering this
technology while awaiting contact with the Breen.
They constructed a body to house Data's brain and managed to activate
it.
Data then realised what had happened and was able to adapt to the
situation in order to aid the Romulans in their return to their
future.
In order to do so Data suggested the use of the small black hole left
by the destruction of Vulcan as a wormhole by bombarding it with
controlled disruptor bursts tuned to the black hole's rotational
velocity to simulate the required exotic matter to stabilise it enough
for time travel, and using Data's unique neural architecture to
directly control the disruptors to form the required subspace field
geometry.
The plan was going well but due to an unfortunate flaw in the
constructed body Data went offline at the crucial stage resulting in a
unstable wormhole with an inadequate aperture insufficient for travel
and yet more damage to the Romulan ship which included long range
communications.
At this point the Enterprise arrived to investigate the strange
signals.
The Romulans, being friendly to the Federation agreed that the best
strategy was to return to their own time line and stop the destruction
of Romulus before it happened thereby preventing Nero and the Narada
travelling through time and annihilating Vulcan in retribution.
However without Data's help and with their ship damaged they needed to
fix both before being able to stabilise the wormhole.
Spock, Scotty and Bones having never encountered a positronic brain
before had to learn 24th century technology from scratch in order to
help repair Data well enough to continue their mission.
As the body was too badly damaged to repair in any sensible time frame
they needed to do something quickly before the wormhole collapsed
completely.
After further discussion with the Romulan captain they were led to a
hidden chamber which was equipped with clearly Federation technology
and had parts of previous attempts at sentient androids by the
Romulans themselves who unknown to the Federation had salvaged
fragments of Dr Soong's work from the abandoned laboratory nearly
destroyed by the Crystalline Entity.
Their attempts had met with no success and they were about to abandon
the project until they received intelligence suggesting that another
nearly sentient android had been created by Data named Lal but lasted
only a few days before suffering fatal cascade failure.
After careful negotiations with Section 31, Lal was handed over to the
Romulans in exchange for their own positronic research which included
some undiscovered notes on matrix transfer technology that did not
cause stability problems.
Lacking a stable positronic brain to test this on they had to attempt
a risky transfer of Data's intact but unusable brain to Lal's body
while transferring Lal's intact low level control system programming
to allow Data to control Lal's body but it was a success. Lal was
"functioning within optimal parameters" and thanks to Data's brain was
able to temporarily repair the extra unstable positronic brain but the
repair was not likely to last long.
Lal and Data were able to resequence the disruptor program to
compensate for the instability which Scotty assisted with, and began
to stabilise the wormhole which would take a matter of hours but...
Unfortunately at this point the Klingons entered the system, and a
fleet of Warbirds opened fire on both the Enterprise and Romulan ship
which nearly destroyed both vessels.
Kirk managed to "buy some time" by negotiating a ceasefire but the
damage to his ship was severe.
Despite Scotty's efforts there was no way to prevent a dilithium
chamber breach as the Enterprise had no way to eject damaged chambers
only intact ones, and they were minutes away from total destruction.
Because there was no way to save the Enterprise Kirk reluctantly gave
the order to abandon ship and transfer everyone still alive to the
Klingon ships to let the Romulan captain return to his timeline and
stop the destruction of both Vulcan and Romulus.
The Klingons reluctantly agreed as they had lost too many ships to
maintain the Empire and it was close to collapse, and returning the
crew of the Enterprise to the Federation might be a way to ensure
lasting peace and stability.
Due to the damage sustained in battle the Klingon ships were unable to
enter Warp so the explosion of the Enterprise was likely to destroy
them too, so they had minutes to decide how to save them and the
Enterprise crew.
Lal decided that given that her "child" was unlikely to survive long
anyway and needing a way to move the Enterprise away from the Klingon
and Romulan ships decided to connect her original positronic brain to
the Enterprise's helm and allow her child to sacrifice itself to save
the day.
The connection was completed just in time, with the Enterprise at a
safe distance the wounded ship's dilithium chambers imploded and she
was no more.
Lal sadly said "Farewell" to her lost child and the three crews shared
a moment of silence for her sacrifice as she may have saved not only
their lives but the future of Romulus and Vulcan as well.
As the Romulan ship with Lal onboard entered the wormhole the
Enterprise crew contemplated that the time travel might set things
back to normal and prevent not only the destruction of Vulcan and
Romulus but the USS Kelvin and Klingon ships lost in their timeline.
This would result in their lives having been very different indeed,
but the continuity of time would then be restored.
Emerging from the wormhole the Romulan ship found itself in the very
fires of Hell itself, directly in the path of the gamma ray burst from
the supernova on course to destroy Romulus.
With minimal shields and no Warp drive they were contacted on long
range radio by Spock who had detected their emergence from the
wormhole and posited that they were attempting to stop the burst as
well because he had failed.
Pushing the Warp engines on the Jellyfish well beyond their design
limits and burning them out in the process he arrived just in time to
lock onto the Romulan's crippled ship and ejected all of the red
matter directly in the path of the supernova.
Beaming over to the Romulan ship with the Jellyfish's antimatter tanks
and its impulse drive module he and Lal risked all to retrofit the
ship with the improved impulse drive and at the last possible second
dumped the entire antimatter chamber into the drive in one burst to
force a five second Warp 9 jump to get out of range before the red
matter consumed the gamma ray burst.
With Romulus and Vulcan saved the observing ships decloaked and
congratulated Spock and Lal on "a mission well done".
Upon returning to Vulcan, Spock and Lal (formerly Data) were awarded
the Federation, Vulcan and Romulan Empire's highest honours.
Lal returned to Starfleet and rejoined the Enterprise crew as Chief
Engineer, taking over from La Forge who could then take up his post as
Picard's First Officer to
replace Riker who, along with his wife Deanna had been offered his own
command of the Federation's latest prototype ship, the USS Hawking.
Equipped with an experimental coaxial warp drive and able to travel
across the Galaxy in a matter of days this ship represented the finest
minds in three quadrants.
Not wanting to leave without saying goodbye, Lal and Spock beamed over
to the Hawking and decided to observe the ship's maiden voyage.
The jump to Coaxial Warp was relatively simple and not as rough as
predicted so Captain Riker decided to test the CWD on a short trip to
the edge of the Galaxy.
Upon passing the Galactic Barrier which was not a problem due to
Coaxial Space displacement Riker ordered them to drop out of Coaxial
Warp and return home.
At this point the ship was rocked by a series of explosions. Lal and
Spock used the internal transporters to beam to the Engineering levels
where the Chief Engineer was dead and there was clearly something
terribly wrong with the CWD as not only was the drive locked at its
maximum speed but the primary containment for the CWD core was
weakening and would result in destruction within minutes if it was not
ejected.
The problem was that due to the speed increase Captain Riker had no
idea exactly how far they had travelled so if they ejected the core
now then they could be marooned between galaxies.
Riker delayed giving the order until the last possible moment so that
they were near a large mass which might have been the Andromeda
Galaxy, before ejecting the core.
This meant that they would be marooned without the Coaxial Warp Drive
to return them to Federation space but this was preferable to being
marooned in the void between Galaxies.
Dropping out of coaxial Warp Riker ordered the viewscreen enabled.
They were shocked to see that they were indeed inside the Andromeda
Galaxy, which their replacement Chief Engineer Lal informed them
predictably was "Several million light Years from home"...
With no way to replace the lost coaxial core they were limited to Warp
13.5 which was their "normal" top speed of only thirty-five times that
of Voyager.
Riker sadly ordered maximum Warp and set a course for home knowing
that in all likelihood only Lal and the crew's great-grandchildren
would survive the trip even if they found new technologies, wormholes
or other intergalactic travel capable races such as the Caretakers, Q,
Prophets or some others yet to be encountered.
The story continues with the USS Hawking warping away with the centre
of Andromeda in the background.
Suggested names for new Star Trek series:-
Star Trek: Andromeda ??!
Plot synopsis
Leaked 06 June 2011 by "Anonymous"
Kirk, Spock and the rest of the new crew of the USS Enterprise
(NCC-1701) begin their five year mission on schedule having defeated
the Narada in battle.
Their first task, to contact the battered Klingon Empire which is
still reeling from the loss of
its entire fleet to Nero's ship in order to discuss a treaty of non
aggression.
En route, the Enterprise detects a strange signal from the vicinity of
the Vulcan system and upon investigating encounters a Romulan ship,
which is experiencing engine failure as a result of narrowly escaping
the black hole while observing the attack on and destruction of the
Vulcan home world.
Kirk makes contact with them, and talks them out of self destructing
their ship to avoid capture by the Enterprise.
As expected the Romulans are unhappy that they are being accused of
aiding Nero when in fact they had nothing to do with the attack in the
current time line.
They are however willing to allow Scotty and an engineering crew
aboard to help them repair their ship's warp reactor which is based on
similar technologies to the Vulcan ships.
During the repair efforts Scotty discovers something strange about the
ship suggesting that not only are the Romulans far more advanced than
generally believed in both weapons, shields and warp technology but
they may in fact have acquired these advances from a possible third
time travelling ship.
This obviously rattles Kirk and Spock, because it implies that the
Romulans may have had foreknowledge of the attack and might have
prevented much of the loss of life.
As it turns out his hunch was right.
The Romulan captain invites Kirk, Spock and Bones to a meeting where
the doors are sealed and all parties agree to "never speak of this to
anyone as long as they live" in accordance with what the Romulan
captain calls the "Temporal Prime Directive".
He then reveals to the Captain and officers that in fact the time
travelling ship was not only from the future but the 24th century.
It turns out that the Romulan ship was one of those which assisted in
the attempt to destroy the Scimitar but in the process was knocked off
course by the Scimitar's destruction.
The Romulan ship had in fact locked onto Data in order to exploit his
apparent destruction to steal Data's positronic technology, but only
managed to get a partial lock and save his head.
Some of the energy fed back into the transporter system and caused a
power surge which coupled with the damage sustained in battle nearly
caused a core breach.
In order to save the ship the Romulan captain ordered the core ejected
but when this occurred the residual thalaron shock wave from the
Scimitar combined with the core detonation caused the formation of a
temporal rift which hurled the ship back in time to just before the
destruction of Vulcan but half a light year away.
With the core destroyed and no warp drive the Romulans had no choice
but to observe cloaked from a safe distance, helpless to save Vulcan
from destruction and stuck in this time line.
Due to the resultant icy relations between the Federation and Romulan
Empire the Romulan captain was forced to send out a coded distress
signal which he hoped would be detected by another race neutral to
both parties, the Breen.
As the Romulans had achieved their covert mission of stealing Data's
brain for study, they concentrated on reverse engineering this
technology while awaiting contact with the Breen.
They constructed a body to house Data's brain and managed to activate
it.
Data then realised what had happened and was able to adapt to the
situation in order to aid the Romulans in their return to their
future.
In order to do so Data suggested the use of the small black hole left
by the destruction of Vulcan as a wormhole by bombarding it with
controlled disruptor bursts tuned to the black hole's rotational
velocity to simulate the required exotic matter to stabilise it enough
for time travel, and using Data's unique neural architecture to
directly control the disruptors to form the required subspace field
geometry.
The plan was going well but due to an unfortunate flaw in the
constructed body Data went offline at the crucial stage resulting in a
unstable wormhole with an inadequate aperture insufficient for travel
and yet more damage to the Romulan ship which included long range
communications.
At this point the Enterprise arrived to investigate the strange
signals.
The Romulans, being friendly to the Federation agreed that the best
strategy was to return to their own time line and stop the destruction
of Romulus before it happened thereby preventing Nero and the Narada
travelling through time and annihilating Vulcan in retribution.
However without Data's help and with their ship damaged they needed to
fix both before being able to stabilise the wormhole.
Spock, Scotty and Bones having never encountered a positronic brain
before had to learn 24th century technology from scratch in order to
help repair Data well enough to continue their mission.
As the body was too badly damaged to repair in any sensible time frame
they needed to do something quickly before the wormhole collapsed
completely.
After further discussion with the Romulan captain they were led to a
hidden chamber which was equipped with clearly Federation technology
and had parts of previous attempts at sentient androids by the
Romulans themselves who unknown to the Federation had salvaged
fragments of Dr Soong's work from the abandoned laboratory nearly
destroyed by the Crystalline Entity.
Their attempts had met with no success and they were about to abandon
the project until they received intelligence suggesting that another
nearly sentient android had been created by Data named Lal but lasted
only a few days before suffering fatal cascade failure.
After careful negotiations with Section 31, Lal was handed over to the
Romulans in exchange for their own positronic research which included
some undiscovered notes on matrix transfer technology that did not
cause stability problems.
Lacking a stable positronic brain to test this on they had to attempt
a risky transfer of Data's intact but unusable brain to Lal's body
while transferring Lal's intact low level control system programming
to allow Data to control Lal's body but it was a success. Lal was
"functioning within optimal parameters" and thanks to Data's brain was
able to temporarily repair the extra unstable positronic brain but the
repair was not likely to last long.
Lal and Data were able to resequence the disruptor program to
compensate for the instability which Scotty assisted with, and began
to stabilise the wormhole which would take a matter of hours but...
Unfortunately at this point the Klingons entered the system, and a
fleet of Warbirds opened fire on both the Enterprise and Romulan ship
which nearly destroyed both vessels.
Kirk managed to "buy some time" by negotiating a ceasefire but the
damage to his ship was severe.
Despite Scotty's efforts there was no way to prevent a dilithium
chamber breach as the Enterprise had no way to eject damaged chambers
only intact ones, and they were minutes away from total destruction.
Because there was no way to save the Enterprise Kirk reluctantly gave
the order to abandon ship and transfer everyone still alive to the
Klingon ships to let the Romulan captain return to his timeline and
stop the destruction of both Vulcan and Romulus.
The Klingons reluctantly agreed as they had lost too many ships to
maintain the Empire and it was close to collapse, and returning the
crew of the Enterprise to the Federation might be a way to ensure
lasting peace and stability.
Due to the damage sustained in battle the Klingon ships were unable to
enter Warp so the explosion of the Enterprise was likely to destroy
them too, so they had minutes to decide how to save them and the
Enterprise crew.
Lal decided that given that her "child" was unlikely to survive long
anyway and needing a way to move the Enterprise away from the Klingon
and Romulan ships decided to connect her original positronic brain to
the Enterprise's helm and allow her child to sacrifice itself to save
the day.
The connection was completed just in time, with the Enterprise at a
safe distance the wounded ship's dilithium chambers imploded and she
was no more.
Lal sadly said "Farewell" to her lost child and the three crews shared
a moment of silence for her sacrifice as she may have saved not only
their lives but the future of Romulus and Vulcan as well.
As the Romulan ship with Lal onboard entered the wormhole the
Enterprise crew contemplated that the time travel might set things
back to normal and prevent not only the destruction of Vulcan and
Romulus but the USS Kelvin and Klingon ships lost in their timeline.
This would result in their lives having been very different indeed,
but the continuity of time would then be restored.
Emerging from the wormhole the Romulan ship found itself in the very
fires of Hell itself, directly in the path of the gamma ray burst from
the supernova on course to destroy Romulus.
With minimal shields and no Warp drive they were contacted on long
range radio by Spock who had detected their emergence from the
wormhole and posited that they were attempting to stop the burst as
well because he had failed.
Pushing the Warp engines on the Jellyfish well beyond their design
limits and burning them out in the process he arrived just in time to
lock onto the Romulan's crippled ship and ejected all of the red
matter directly in the path of the supernova.
Beaming over to the Romulan ship with the Jellyfish's antimatter tanks
and its impulse drive module he and Lal risked all to retrofit the
ship with the improved impulse drive and at the last possible second
dumped the entire antimatter chamber into the drive in one burst to
force a five second Warp 9 jump to get out of range before the red
matter consumed the gamma ray burst.
With Romulus and Vulcan saved the observing ships decloaked and
congratulated Spock and Lal on "a mission well done".
Upon returning to Vulcan, Spock and Lal (formerly Data) were awarded
the Federation, Vulcan and Romulan Empire's highest honours.
Lal returned to Starfleet and rejoined the Enterprise crew as Chief
Engineer, taking over from La Forge who could then take up his post as
Picard's First Officer to
replace Riker who, along with his wife Deanna had been offered his own
command of the Federation's latest prototype ship, the USS Hawking.
Equipped with an experimental coaxial warp drive and able to travel
across the Galaxy in a matter of days this ship represented the finest
minds in three quadrants.
Not wanting to leave without saying goodbye, Lal and Spock beamed over
to the Hawking and decided to observe the ship's maiden voyage.
The jump to Coaxial Warp was relatively simple and not as rough as
predicted so Captain Riker decided to test the CWD on a short trip to
the edge of the Galaxy.
Upon passing the Galactic Barrier which was not a problem due to
Coaxial Space displacement Riker ordered them to drop out of Coaxial
Warp and return home.
At this point the ship was rocked by a series of explosions. Lal and
Spock used the internal transporters to beam to the Engineering levels
where the Chief Engineer was dead and there was clearly something
terribly wrong with the CWD as not only was the drive locked at its
maximum speed but the primary containment for the CWD core was
weakening and would result in destruction within minutes if it was not
ejected.
The problem was that due to the speed increase Captain Riker had no
idea exactly how far they had travelled so if they ejected the core
now then they could be marooned between galaxies.
Riker delayed giving the order until the last possible moment so that
they were near a large mass which might have been the Andromeda
Galaxy, before ejecting the core.
This meant that they would be marooned without the Coaxial Warp Drive
to return them to Federation space but this was preferable to being
marooned in the void between Galaxies.
Dropping out of coaxial Warp Riker ordered the viewscreen enabled.
They were shocked to see that they were indeed inside the Andromeda
Galaxy, which their replacement Chief Engineer Lal informed them
predictably was "Several million light Years from home"...
With no way to replace the lost coaxial core they were limited to Warp
13.5 which was their "normal" top speed of only thirty-five times that
of Voyager.
Riker sadly ordered maximum Warp and set a course for home knowing
that in all likelihood only Lal and the crew's great-grandchildren
would survive the trip even if they found new technologies, wormholes
or other intergalactic travel capable races such as the Caretakers, Q,
Prophets or some others yet to be encountered.
The story continues with the USS Hawking warping away with the centre
of Andromeda in the background.
Suggested names for new Star Trek series:-
Star Trek: Andromeda ??!