Prologue
Junk.
That was the only description Erin Keller
had for the numerous boxes of trinkets and baubles that sat before her on the
floor in Alan Christopher’s quarters.
Slowly, Erin approached the box nearest her position, and peeled the lid
away. As she dropped the lid on the
floor, Erin carefully pulled out a lush green potted plant. And she frowned.
“Alan!”
Seconds later, Alan Christopher popped in
from an adjacent room. “What?”
Erin held up the plant. “You’re not supposed to pack plants in
boxes!”
He shrugged indolently.
“What was I supposed to do with them?”
“I have a few suggestions,” Erin bitterly blurted out before
realizing what she had said.
Immediately crestfallen, Erin’s hands quickly covered her mouth as she
apologized for the slip of the tongue.
“I am so sorry, Alan!”
Though if he had been offended remained to be seen, for the look
on Alan’s face was relatively stoic.
Then, after a moment, a faint smile cracked his face. “Don’t worry about it, Erin,” he said
softly. “It’s the hormones talking, not
you.”
Still looking glum, Erin nodded, and with the plant in her hands,
started heading for a seemingly empty corner of their quarters. She set the plant down on the floor and took
a few steps back. “How does that look?”
she inquired.
Alan came up alongside Erin and considered it for a moment. In all reality, he hated it, but considering
Erin and her pregnancy-related mood swings, he decided it would be in his best
interest if he did not mention that. “I
think it looks fine,” he said.
Erin smiled. “So do I,”
she chirped before returning to the stacks of boxes. Alan quickly followed, but stopped a few meters shy of Erin. “What is it?” she asked.
He grasped his shoulder and began rubbing it to ease out the spike
of pain that had suddenly manifested itself therein. “I don’t know,” he said softly.
“I must have pulled something while we were unpacking your plethora of
interesting goodies.”
“Probably,” Erin agreed.
“Why don’t we take a break?”
That was the best idea Alan had heard from her all afternoon. He smiled and started heading for the sofa
along the windows in the back of the room—but his attention was summarily
diverted from the couch, to the vast starscape before them, where a small—yet
incredibly noticeable burst of light briefly flashed in the distance.
“Did you see that?” Erin inquired, standing a meter or so behind
Alan.
He nodded. “Sure
did.” He sighed, and turned to face
her. “That was no twinkling star.”
“I don’t know what it was,” admitted Erin. “I guess we could go to the bridge and find
out…”
Five seconds later, they were on their way.
As the turbolift doors parted, Alan Christopher briskly strolled
onto the bridge and assumed a calm, yet concerned demeanor as he approached
Lieutenant Bator at tactical station to his right. Bator was a large Phobian, with a rough, tan skin and menacing
brown eyes; even so, his demeanor was incredibly pleasant. “Bator,” said Christopher evenly, “have our
friends, the sensors, detected anything strange in the past few minutes?”
Given the befuddled look on Bator’s face, Christopher assumed not;
still, he waited patiently while the Phobian carefully reviewed the sensor
logs. “Nothing,” he said.
Had Christopher been the only one to see the strange flash of
light, he would have—at that point—attributed the incident to his overactive
imagination. But Erin Keller had been
standing right beside him, and had clearly seen the same burst of light. He turned to Erin at ops and shrugged. “Maybe we’re both going off the deep end,”
he conjectured before making his way down to the forward section of the bridge,
where he seated himself in the command chair beside Matthew Harrison.
“Might I inquire what is going on?” asked Harrison in his
customary hushed tone.
Christopher nodded. “Erin
and I saw a burst of light out the window in my… our quarters.”
“And sensors did not detect it?” asked Harrison with a curious
frown. “This is most odd.”
Again, Christopher nodded.
His mind was wandering around numerous possibilities as to the origins
of the mysterious light; consequently, it was not the best time to try and hold
an intelligent conversation with him.
Unfortunately, none of his ideas proved very enlightening, and the
Captain was left with more questions than answers. Thus, he resorted to the only thing in his mind that did
make sense.
“Neelar,” he called out to the young Bolian at the helm, “set
course heading zero-one-nine, mark six.”
Briefly, Neelar Drayge’s hands tapped at the controls while he
input the necessary commands. “Course
set,” he announced a moment later.
Christopher nodded.
“Engage at full impulse.”
The Captain didn’t know exactly what he would find by heading for
the mysterious flash of light. His mind
told him to expect nothing; after all, the sensors rarely made such blatant
errors. Still, Christopher could not
deny that strange feeling in his gut, nor could he ignore the strange voices
whispering in the back of his mind…
Something was out there.
The tactical station bleeped, and Christopher was immediately on
his feet, staring down the Phobian for a report.
“I am detecting trace amounts of chronoton particles,” said Bator
evenly, though as he spoke, his face gradually betrayed that calm voice. “Chronoton levels are dramatically
increasing.”
Alarms started to go off in Christopher’s mind. Something certainly was not right. “Source?” he prompted.
Bator shrugged. “Unknown.”
Slowly, Christopher turned to Commander Harrison for his take on
the situation. To his credit, Harrison
still seemed relatively unconcerned—then again, he had not seen the odd
explosion of light that seemingly prompted this situation. “Perhaps we should launch a temporal probe,”
he suggested after a moment’s thought.
Christopher liked the idea; if anything could shed some answers on
this seemingly temporal situation, the hallmark of temporal technology would be
the right tool for the job. “Do it,” he
said to Erin Keller a moment later.
Seconds later, the viewscreen a sleek, steely gray probe surging
through the void of space in search of answers—which, to Christopher’s relief,
it readily provided.
“I’m picking up another ship,” said Keller as the first bit of
data arrived in the Starlight’s databanks. “It looks like it’s out of temporal alignment.”
“Tachyon beam,” were the first two words out of Christopher’s
mouth, and the order was swiftly executed.
Within moments, a solid beam of white light surged out from the Starlight’s
deflector with such fury that Christopher was almost tempted to shield his
eyes. The only thing preventing him
from taking such an action was the swirling vortex that was slowly being drawn
into existence by the tachyon beam’s interaction with the chronoton
particles.
Virtually frozen in place by the chronometric distortion,
Christopher simply watched in awe as the faint outlines of the second ship
started to make themselves known amidst the swirling nether. At first, the sight didn’t exactly register
in the Captain’s mind; it was just another ship. Its pocked hull was blackened by numerous scorch marks, and
almost all of its lights were dim.
Christopher blinked, coercing his eyes to focus on the emerging ship,
but the action had the unintended affect of blinking away his trance, too.
Two seconds later, Alan Christopher realized he was staring at an
Akira-class starship; two seconds after that, his gaze happened upon the ship’s
registry—NCC-72080: U.S.S. Starlight.