"The hull wasn’t hit, but we just lost shields! Repairs to the starboard nacelle complete, re-deploying primary hull nanites!"

"Displacement in ten seconds!"

"Get ready for a ride!" Jean-Luc stated. Suddenly the deck lurched from under Sarah as she saw the Dragon come about a full one-eighty in just a few seconds. Hull stress rose tremendously, but settled back down as Jean-Luc set a collision course with the Paris.

No doubt confused by the maneuver, Riker hesitated in his opportunity to fire. Your mistake, Admiral.

"Five! Four! Three! Two! One!"

 

 

Vendar suddenly froze as she noticed something odd on her sensors. She did a full sensor sweep of the readings and frowned in confusion. "Captain, I’m reading a temporal disturbance off our starboard bow."

"Source?" Chris asked above the drone of the device powering up.

"Unknown," she replied. "But it doesn’t seem to be interfering with the device at all."

After a pause, Chris ordered, "Keep an eye on it, and let me know the moment you think it might let something out, or the moment it might hinder us."

Vendar keyed in a command and replied, "Aye, sir."

"Activation in ten minutes," Kalia reported. "Power output of the warp core is increasing exponentially!"

An alarm went off on Vendar’s board and she quickly brought her attention to the temporal anomaly again. "Sir, it’s a temporal displacement field! Something’s emerging!"

 

 

Sarah’s senses returned to her as she shook her head to clear her vision. She looked at her board to find her old ship right where it was supposed to be, moving at half impulse power.

"It worked!" Kristine reported.

"I’m reading the Dragon directly ahead," Sarah added. "Power output of the primary core is off the scale!"

"Hail them!" Jean-Luc ordered.

 

 

"We’re being hailed," Vendar stated.

Chris stared in confusion at the Excalibur class starship that he saw on the main view screen. "On screen."

Immediately, the screen changed to show a standard Excalibur class starship’s bridge. In the back of the bridge, he noticed an unfamiliar Admiral staring at him. He then looked at the other two people on the bridge...and froze in his seat.

He was surprised to see Captain Picard...but what he wasn’t prepared at all to find...was his own wife sitting at the Ops station!

"What the hell is going on?!" he asked in an alarmed voice as he and his Sarah stood up.

"No time to explain!" Captain Picard stated. "How much time left in your countdown?"

He looked back at Kalia, who reported, "Six minutes twelve seconds."

Chris looked back at the view screen and asked, "Did you hear that?"

"It shouldn’t be too late, then!" Captain Picard stated in an alarmed voice. "Power down the device and beam it off of your ship now, to anywhere!"

Chris never knew of any reason not to trust Captain Picard, and so he quickly turned around and ordered, "Do it!"

Kalia worked frantically at her console, but to Chris’ dismay, he kept hearing a negative tone from the computer.

"I can’t!" she replied. "It’s too far into its cycle!"

"Then eject your core, NOW!"

"Do it!" he ordered again.

Again, Kalia began to work frantically at her console. This time, however, he only heard one confirmation tone. Suddenly, the ship stopped its shuddering. He spun around to confront Captain Picard. "Why did I do that? Was it going to destroy us?"

"You could say that," he said. "You might want to raise shields."

"I’ve got shields back online at forty percent!" the admiral in the back of the other Dragon’s bridge stated. "It should be enough to protect us from the blast!"

"Shields up!" Chris ordered as he backed to the command chair and sat down, Dragging Sarah into her seat. "Why is it going to detonate?!"

"Because there isn’t any coolant now, and it’s running at extreme power output," the other Sarah stated. "And if you hadn’t, the Dragon would have been destroyed for other reasons."

Suddenly both ships lurched tremendously as the blast from the unusually powerful warp core breach reached them. Chris was thrown from his seat and felt pain sear through his chest as no doubt several ribs shattered on impact with the ground. Power conduits, light fixtures, and consoles overloaded, sending sparks all across the bridge and engulfed the bridge in darkness. He looked over to his left to see Vendar unconscious on the ground, and to his horror, her uniform was on fire!

Ignoring the pain, he stood up, only to find the ship was still lurching. He ran to an emergency panel and pushed it open, revealing a fire extinguisher. He tore it out of the panel and stumbled over to Vendar’s burning body. He immediately turned the extinguisher on and quickly blew out the flames licking across her uniform.

"Several medical emergencies on the main bridge!" someone shouted across a comm system.

Chris passed the extinguisher to someone else to put out the multiple fires on the bridge and then eased himself into the now empty Ops station. He tenderly poked at his injured ribs, finding the resulting pain a reassurance that he’d broken ribs.

Across a near-broken comm channel, he heard the other Sarah state, "The Kiklar ship just appeared! It’s firing on the Dragon!"

Again, Chris was thrown from his seat as the ship lurched hard once again. His head slammed against something hard, and his last memory was seeing a hull breach burst open. His last thought was please let the force fields still work...

 

 

His eyes burned for a moment, but they quickly cleared as he finally regained full consciousness. Though he still couldn’t see all that clear, he could tell that he was in sick bay, and that it was overflowing with injured patients.

He sat up, finding the process to be difficult. His chest didn’t hurt any more, but almost every muscle in his body did. Including my brain muscle he thought to himself sarcastically as he rubbed his temples.

"Captain, are you all right?" the familiar voice of Kara's nurse, Lisa Ogowa, asked. I still remember being friends with her cousin on the Enterprise.

"Yes, I’m fine, doctor," he said as he slowly swung his legs off to the side.

"We’re lucky Kalia thought of putting in emergency transporters," she said as she administered a hypospray to his neck.

"That’s right, I nearly forgot about them," he said quietly as the headache cleared a bit. In the event of a hull breach on the bridge, transporters immediately transported all crew on deck one to sickbay.

"You’re clear for duty," she said as she set the hypospray down and helped him off of the bio bed. "But if you don’t get plenty of rest, Kara and I will have to relieve you of command and sedate you."

Chris smiled as he got his balance back. "Yes ma’am!"

 

 

Captain’s Log, Supplemental

Unfortunately, we lost all information on the technology the Kiklar gave us. It appears that they were insulted by our history somehow and believed that we needed to be destroyed. Thanks to some fast diplomatic talk from Jean-Luc Picard of the future, they ceased their attack and left us alone. They did leave the Federation with one threat, however.

In this log entry, I would like to note that I gave the Kiklar our database against the wishes of my senior staff, and that I should take the full blunt of the charges for breaching protocol.

 

 

Exhilaration and happiness poured into Sarah’s heart as she saw the entire senior staff on the main view screen...and in one piece, more or less. "It’s good to see you all again," she barely managed to say. Tears began to well up in her eyes. "I thought I had lost you all for good!"

"Not a chance," Chris replied quietly. "We had you watching over us."

She let out a light laugh. Though she knew what was about to happen to herself, she didn’t care. She had saved her crew.

"We’re all that is left of a bad future," Jean-Luc stated. "And it’s time to wipe the slate clean. We’re going to lower our temporal shielding so that the changed history will erase us."

"We’ll still remember you, won’t we?" Chris asked, hopeful.

"You should," Kristine replied. "And though Jean-Luc and I will never know what we did, you will always remember."

"Good luck, my friends," Jean-Luc said. "I hope to see you all again soon."

"Good bye, Chris," Sarah said just before the channel was closed. She stared a moment at the UFP symbol on the view screen, then hung her head and slouched in her chair. "I love you..."

 

 

Chris sat with his arm around his love and savior while watching the future Excalibur class USS Dragon. The completely transparent ready room made for a beautiful view, and he found that, despite its size, he could see every smooth line of beauty on the kilometer-long starship.

"It’s hard to believe that you are all supposed to be dead..." Sarah whispered.

"I know," Chris replied in a quiet voice. "It’s...unnerving, to say the least."

She looked into his eyes as he did the same, and asked, "Do you think we’ll ever get home, and together?"

Chris hesitated for a moment as he stared into her beautiful eyes. "I’m not sure," he finally replied. "All I know is, you saved the crew from complete destruction. You went against both the Prime Directive and the Temporal Prime Directive simply to save your crew...and to save me..."

"I would go to the ends of the universe to do the same," she commented. "You are my one true love, Chris. That one fact will always keep us together."

Suddenly, a bright flash engulfed Chris’ sight as he quickly covered his eyes with his hand. A moment later, the flash receded, and he quickly looked out the window. To his dismay, the ship that had saved over one thousand five hundred people...had finally committed itself to the unknown future. Whether the Excalibur class USS Dragon would be built or not, Chris didn’t know. All he knew was that he was alive, here and now. He was alive to share this moment...with his true love.

"I love you," he said quietly, committing his love once again to her, knowing he would do so many times again...and each time, he would mean it just as much as he always had. As his own mother had once said...True love is eternal...



Star Trek Dragon graphics and written material copyright Jon Wasik. Star Trek is a registered trademark
of Paramount Pictures, a Viacom company. No copyright infringement intended