2412

Posted on Thu Nov 9th, 2023 @ 10:57am by Curtis Vaan & Delaney O'Callaghan & Leiddem Kea (*) & Ka'see 'Cassie' Anderson (*) & Liha t'Ehhelih & Lyndon Zahn

Mission: Fractures
Location: SS Mary Rose - Future 2412
2036 words - 4.1 OF Standard Post Measure

Cassie slowly came too and struggled to sit up as she tried to work out what was going on. One moment she had been thrown around the Jeffries tube on deck 4 as she tried to find where the sudden jolt of power was coming from and then the next she was… where was she? As her eyes adjusted from the bright white light which was the last thing she remembered to the semi darkness she could make out familiar things of the SS Mary’s Rose medical bay. She slowly got off the bed and looked at other figures unconscious on the beds but no one was awake.

Questions flooded her mind: What happened? Where was the medical personnel? The beeping monitor that finally realised she was no longer connected to the bio bed became a metronome, counting the seconds of uncertainty as she tried to make sense of why the ship felt so dark. Yet, amidst the fear and confusion, there was a glimmer of hope – she was home on her ship just unsure why the sickbay felt so foreign. “Hello?” She finally ventured.

"Take it easy, you were knocked around a bit." The voice was familiar enough. Oliver stepped out of the darkness with a biomonitor in his hand. "I don't know what you were doing crawling around that part of the ship, though. It's been running dark for the last six months..."

Cassie shook her head and shook a few inches higher as she maintained that she was taking things very easy. Nothing had been dark let along dark for six months. "My friends?" She demanded pointing back to the other unconscious figures rather than answering what she was doing crawling around.

"They seem all right," he said gently. "Although we don't have the supplies left to cover too many more, so if you could keep things reasonably safe this time, that'd be helpful."

Not enough supplies? When had that happened? “We just picked up supplies from Hysperia?” She answered as a grunt from Leiddem meant he was waking up.

“What? Where?” He demanded instantly awake if unsteady in sitting up. "Who?"

"Relax. You might have hit your head on something..." Oliver began reaching for a scanner. "You must be confused - we've not been to Hysperia in years."

"I am not confused," Cassie commented firmly getting annoyed now as she moved to help Leiddem as he staggered off the bio bed and nearly toppled. "We left Hysperia in September and it is now January. We took on at least a year's worth of provisions." Cassie knew that as she had spent a lot of time counting and allocating them to storage space.

"Ow."

The single utterance from the biobed beside Leiddem wasn't met with an immediate flurry of activity, which was unusual for Delaney at the best of times. The squint open of a single eye was followed by a grimace as the overhead light proved too intrusive and, never one to linger in bed, the redhead rolled onto her side and buried her face beneath her arm as best she could.

Liha appeared in the doorway, clad in leathers and considerably more openly visible weapons than she'd worn a decade ago. She crossed her arms, eyes scouring over them, and scowled. "Would someone explain what's going on and how these people got here?"

Cassie did a double take as she took in Liha's appearance. She could instantly see this was not the woman she had, had breakfast with that very morning. "You knew we did not belong here but were biding time?" Cassie accused the doctor stepping a bit more back grabbing Leiddem who was clumsily trying to assist and be the security personnel he was normally but failing badly.

"You can argue outside, you know." The muffled protest from the biobed was reassurance that Delaney had not awoken enough to realise what was going on.

"You're not our enemies," Oliver responded lightly, aiming his explanation at Cassie. He glanced at Liha. "They're awake, as you can see. No significant injuries among them, though there's naturally some confusion."

"Liha you... you well... why do you have a weapon?" Liddem asked hitting a wall as he tried to survey the scene properly. Cassie was acting protective and Delaney was barely awake but he had no idea what was going on other than his head hurt.

A slanted eyebrow ascended. "Why wouldn't I have weapons? It's my ship. I carry what I please."

“No, it’s Gregnol’s ship, has been for five years.” Leiddem argued as Cassie glanced at him, just as confused and unsure as he was with the situation. “Did you create a mutiny or something?” He added for good measure.

"Fine, I guess I'll get up." The grumble from the bed was promptly followed by a rather bedraggled flurry of red hair and the bleary confusion of a half-squinted grimace. Delaney recognised everyone complicit in her ruined sleep but at least a couple of them looked, for lack of better coherency, weird. As it happened, that was very similar to how she felt. For the first time, she seemed to register that she was in Sickbay and scowled despite still appearing to struggle with the brightness of the lights. "Whatever's going on, it had better be one heck of a party or this headache is entirely unwarranted."

Liha cast a gaze at Oliver. "Get them sobered up or whatever the right term is for whatever's happened with them," she ordered curtly. "We'll talk when they can understand sense. Until then, they do not leave medbay." And with that she spun on a heel and left, hoping to leave every disturbing memory that came with seeing them behind in medbay as well.

Cassie shoved Leiddem aside and quickly moved to the door but the door she not respond to her at all. She stopped dead and just stared at the door confused. A door had never not responded to her before and it had thrown her more than anything else so far. She whirled around and looked at Oliver expectantly before something twigged in her brain as she took in the shabbiness of the compartment. "What year is it?" She demanded taking in the slight greying around the mans temple.

"2412," Oliver answered, stowing the medical equipment. He frowned and looked them over, the slight wrinkles at the edge of his eyes a little more obvious. "The confusion is to be expected, though I'm not a scientist and have no idea how or why you are here."

“You are still crap at this type of thing.”
Leiddem finally snapped holding his head in his head as he finally connected the dots enough to understand eveything that was wrong with everything that had happened in the last couple of moments. “Fourteen in the future and Liha is the Captain. How did that happen?”

"Long story. Isn't there some sort of rule about future knowledge or something?" Oliver wondered out loud. "Captain says you stay put, well I'm not going to argue with her."

"What is actually going on?"

Having finally wrangled herself into an upright position, Delaney had moved to fix Leiddem with a quizzical scowl, her features scrunched as if still navigating a headache. A dubious scrutiny of the doctor on duty finally led to a moment of clarity as she realised the familiar wasn't quite as precise in the details. Oliver was Oliver, except he wasn't, at least not the Oliver she'd had breakfast with that morning. "I think I've missed something."

"Liha is Captain," Cassie said simply as she sat back on the bio bed and stared at Oliver. "That is more than enough future knowledge for us to know that we want to know more so as you can see we are all calm now so we would like answers."

Though the pair had always had an unspoken agreement about which aspects of their relationship existed within their workspace, Delaney found adequate excuse to slip her hand into Leiddem's as the exchange unfolded and her understanding of what they were at least suggesting was the problem improved. Rarely one to get struck down by anything, she wasn't fond of the fact that she felt shaky, being far too reminiscent of her unexpected collapse after the whole system failure debacle. Extremes of space travel, Reynolds had warned. Time travel probably counted.

Leiddem looked down at the hand in his and offered a smile to the woman and squeezed her hand back. Something timey whimey was going on as Jeassaho would have put it which meant that something had happened to lead them there when moments before he had been stood on the bridge no where near Cassie.

Oliver sighed. These people, he remembered, were more energetic and brighter than he remembered. In some ways that was far less encouraging as it could be. He snapped his tricorder shut. "You're all in relatively good condition. Barely any bumps and scrapes." He glanced over at Delaney. "You should get your heart readings double-checked when you get a moment." It was an off-hand comment, but one that was foreboding. Like he was letting slip some sort of future information that he could get away with sharing.

Leiddem turned and glanced at Delaney and raised an eyebrow before looking at Oliver again. “She will.” Leiddem said firmly. He knew when someone was giving him a warning.

The deep furrow that creased the redhead's forehead came close to being a precursor for protest, but Leiddem's response curbed Laney's retort at least in the outspoken sense. Inwardly, she grumbled, having already committed to 'being monitored' or whatever Reynolds had tried to dress up an inordinate amount of fussing as.

Cassie stayed quiet now that things were calmer as she looked at Oliver as Leiddem looked at Delaney intently as if he could understand her with his basic medical training for a moment. “You look exhausted.” She finally said looking at Oliver wondering for the first time in a long time who helped the doctors when they were tired.

The ex-Borg medic looked blankly at her for a moment, then gave the faintest of weary shrugs. "Life isn't as straightforward these days. Making do with the supplies we have means sometimes we're walking a line. Not all of us get the luxury of rest." He kept it cryptic enough as he started carefully putting away his equipment.

Cassie narrowed her eyes but said nothing. Rest was a luxury for some she knew that but she did not like that someone she called a friend was so defeated and blank about his life. “So what happens now then?” She asked quietly.

"We're not supposed to find out anything, are we?" It had taken a long time for the penny to drop but, now that she'd caught up with speculation, Delaney was staring at Oliver with furrowed brow and a very familiar look of pragmatic resignation in her eyes. "If anything, we already know too much. Liha's Captain, which means..." She stopped herself a little too late, squeezing Leiddem's hand in apology for nearly voicing what was painfully, brutally obvious. "But that doesn't mean it happens in our time," she continued stubbornly. "And the less we know about it, the better." It was horrendously hard to take that line, her own curiosity was off the charts, but Oliver's personal warning had been less than comforting; Delaney couldn't see how finding out specifics was going to make things easier.

"It means a lot of people are dead." Cassie finished so Leiddem did not need to. He was going through the list of people his brother-in-law would leave the ship to and the top ten did not feature Liha in his opinion but who knew his opinion might be well off but he could not see it after a decade of knowing the man.

"You're best not thinking about it too hard," Oliver counselled. "Causation paradox and such; just by being here you've irrevocably changed something. It may not even turn out the way you think." Seeing their expressions, he shrugged. "Some of that old Borg knowledge comes in useful on occasion..."