USS MILLENIUM: meeting and assignment

"Sir... is this Deep Space 9?"

The question was brought up by the singular setting they materialized in; the architecture was definitely Cardassian and obviously dating to the mid twenty-fourth century, but the consoles were definitely Starfleet issued and of a design even more advanced than the already state of the art ones found on the flagship Horizon or the science explorer Phoenix. Some of them however were still old Cardassian ones and even a few an odd mix of the two.

But the answer came from one of the Starfleet officers welcoming them.

"Captain Kheren, gentlebeings, welcome to the Byrma secret drydock."

The gold-collared lieutenant who spoke was the exact mirror image of Norbert Baoule, the science chief, except for his completely shaven head.

"Chief Baoule; it's good to see you again after all this time," answered Kheren as he stepped down from the orange and gold Cardassian transporter pad.

As the other nodded with a wide smile to him and his twin brother, the Andorian went to the others flanking the bald black man; a Trill science lieutenant, a Human security chief, another caucasian man in a blue medical smock and a Bolian ops officer behind the console.

"Mister Devem, Chief Jackson, Doctor Aguila, Mister Brie; I'm glad you are looking well after all those years."

"All the refugees are here," whispered Tyvya with antennae curving in mirth.

"Meaning?" asked Luke Abraxius, the one who had asked the first question they had beamed in.

Lyrya answered him when she received an approving nod from her commanding officer.

"All of them and all of us originally from the Artemis were together when we woke from seventy years of cryogenic freeze in this very installation, after sending the original USS Artemis into a timeloop to resolve a Romulan temporal alteration."

This was a lot to take in for Luke. But he shoved it behind is original question.

"And what is this place, exactly, this... Byrma Drydock? I know all shipyards from sector 001 to the whole of the Beta quadrant and I never heard of it."

" No one has in almost a century," now Kheren answered. " This is a secret Cardassian installation dating back to the Federation-Cardassian war where was found the lost USS Artemis, half rebuilt as a booby trap that was never used by the Obsidian Order as the war ended. Now that the Demilitarized Zone is no more, following the reddition of Cardassia after the Dominion War, it has been taken over by Starfleet Intelligence for it's most classified projects. "

"Never heard of any Byrma system either," Abraxius added.

"It is the old Cardassian designation, now half forgotten even by them," explained Norbert Baoule after greeting warmly his brother. "The star in this system went nova millions of years ago, reducing it's entire planetary system to five asteroid belts and four gas rings. Sensors now can barely register the whole dead star system. This installation is deeply buried into one of the asteroids and shifted from asteroid field to asteroid field in a secret pattern so as to be even harder to locate, making it the most secret location in the entirety of Federation Space, if not beyond."

"And what all this shadow play has to do with us?" now asked Doctor Bains, his own antennae swirling in confusion but close to his skull, betraying his angry annoyance at all of this secrecy.

"That question will be answered in the briefing room," Robert Baoule said, indicating the door leading outside the transporter room. "Captain, your crew will be taken care of. Would you please follow me? Commander Rogers, Commander Aron'Son and Ensign Cross are also requested to attend."

The Andorian nodded and fell in step behind his former chief engineer.

Aron'Son followed behind the captain as close as he was able to. This whole mission still had an air of something that made him suspicious, and while these were clearly Starfleet personnel known to Captain Kheren the security officer still was not sure he trusted them. He wondered if he was the only crew member who had such feelings about the situation they were in. 

Cross hardly seemed to be paying attention, stopping to look at and occasionally touch furnishings and other surfaces, almost like he was he was walking through an old abandoned house. "Of course Mr. Baoule." and followed along.

Kheren noticed the alertness of the Jem"Hadar. At first, he was tempted to put him at ease then thought better of it. Knowing that his security chief was always on the watch for anything in all circumstances, even those seemingly most secured,  might prove useful one day, in a universe of shapshifting changelings, genetically modified undines and lifelike androids. It had happened before. And that's exactly why Aron'Son had been selected, among all the best of the best of Starfleet's security and even MACO officers alive today.

With the assignment they were about to get, such thoroughness would probably make the difference not only between success and failure or even life and death, but between saving reality and destroying it.

They were lead to a stone-grey circular room where an oval obsidian table surrounded by sturdy comfortable chairs in black metal and velvet. There were three other thick sliding doors leading to it and the two curving walls facing them from the access in front of the one opening to allow them in were obvious blast doors currently down. Starfleet replicators, sensors and comm systems dotted the place.

Their attention was immediately drawn to the two Humans standing at the far side of the curving table. One was dark-haired and eyed, tall and stocky. The other was slim, average height, sandy-haired and blue eyed. They both had the same nondescript dark green civilian business suit and the same dour, almost annoyed expression on their light-skinned face.

"Welcome, gentlemen, said the smaller man. "Call me Dulmer."

"Lucksly," simply added the other.

With his hand, Dulmer invited them to sit. Neither he nor his colleague wasted time with social pleasantries.

"Captain Kheren," announced Dulmer, "project Millennium is now active."

"And you and the rest of the selected crew that came with you are invited to to join," Lucksly said to Rogers, Aron'Son and Cross.

Although not really showing surprise, the Andorian nevertheless sharply straightened his antennae.

"Before we proceed any further," Dulmer now said," keep in mind that this meeting his classified to the highest level. You have noticed the unusual measures we took to bring you here. They are but the beginning. Would you choose not to pursue the commission we are about to offer you, you will swear on record never to reveal what you will be made aware of here and be taken to our medical facility to have your short-term memory altered before being sent back to your former assignment. "

Lucksly then took over.

"If you wish to desist right now, you will take the same oath and be immediately sent back on the Eclipse and a covert operation will be implemented to return you to Starbase Lotus and your former post as the survivor of a shuttle accident."

They waited to see if any of them would decline beforehand.

 Throughout the trip to this clandestine meeting, aboard the Eclipse, David Rogers had kept quiet. His status within Star Fleet, even within the Lotus Fleet itself, was on thin ice after the Diamond Star incident. His own complicity was only known at the highest levels of course, as per the subterfuge introduced to cover his theft and capture, but none the less, his place in the order of things was now always under scrutiny. Entering the drab, grayish room at the rear of the group, David once again studied the layout. As he had on the ship that had just deposited them upon this hidden, secret base.

Like the Eclipse, the equipment showed a high autonomous state, recognizable to any competent engineer. But to Rogers, who had personally over-written command authorization's on the USS Diamond Star with just a PADD, the Eclipse and this nondescript room showed the same subtle hints of automation. Patterns actually formed in the sensor and comm systems as their instruction flow ebbed and flowed among themselves and the equipment they communicated with. Patterns that only showed when self-guided, programmed instructions flowed in logical paths. The Eclipse, although manned with a small crew, actually had operated under a mostly automated guidance. David had seen the patterns, and watched the crew nonchalantly appear to operate their consoles, but the consoles had been milliseconds ahead of their manipulations. Like they were practicing for a play, performing rote functions as if in rehearsal. The same pattern seemed to ebb and flow within the equipment in the room they now occupied.

But Rogers had also been listening to the suited occupants as Dulmer laid out the ground rules. Taking his cue from Dulmer's pause, David purposefully walked past Captain Kheren, Commander Aron'Son and Ensign Cross to take the nearest of the  velvet clad chairs, muttering to the tall Andorian as he passed by.

The view was that of a space drydock obviously craved deep within the asteroid harboring this whole installation. It was about a kilometer long, half that in width and half again in height; more than large enough to accommodate the starship anchored with tractor beams and magnetic clamps to what was a typical Cardassian dockyard. But the whole installation was obviously not built to accommodate the fish-shaped, boxy Cardassian designs; and the vessel they were looking at was definitely  not Cardassian.

The saucer hull was quite clearly Starfleet in design. Although there was a pair of upsweeping nacelles directly connected behind it with a catamaran Akira-like structure instead of a secondary hull, they were strangely curved inward and sharply tapered at the end. There was also an unidentifiable small pod-like structure between their forward part by a transverse connection and not one but two deflector dishes underneath the curving Galaxy-styled saucer.

"Gentlemen, this is project Millennium," said Dulmer. "NX-88, the Federation's first transdimensional time-travelling starship."

Aron'Son could not believe what he had just heard. He looked at the odd looking vessel in the dock, then back at the two humans at the table, and finally settled his gaze on Captain Kheren.

"This is not a good idea." 

Dulmer nodded to the Jem'Hadar.

"I understand your reserve perfectly, Commander Aron'Son. We of Temporal Investigations are more aware of what this means than anyone, alive or dead. It is the very reason of our existence in the first place. Since the launch of the NX-01 Enterprise in the twenty-second century and all through the incidents involving individuals like James T Kirk, Jean-Luc Picard, Benjamin Sisko and especially Kathryn Janeway and Spock, we have been studying, monitoring and working as best we could to prevent tamperings with the timeline. It is always delicate and risky even to try and correct any. It is a balancing act that makes even the worst case scenario of the Prime Directive child's play in comparison."

Lucksly then took over.

"But consider this; until now, in almost each and every single incident involving time distorsion, we have been forced into reacting through sheer luck and fortuitous opportunities. An accidental slingshot effect, a chance timewarp opening, borrowed alien technology... Almost every time, we managed to save the day, no pun intended, at the eleventh hour and always dependent on circumstances more often than not outside of our control. 

He activated the holodisplay over the table and they saw images of what the temporal bureau agent spoke about, each one following the next like an animated slideshow of old.

"Archer could never have restored World War II from alien interference if not for an accidental time jump."

"Picard could never have saved the Federation from the Borg conquest of Earth in the twenty-first century if he had not disobeyed orders and be close enough to send the Enterprise E right into their time wake."

"Janeway could never have stopped the alterations of the twentieth century with marooned  twenty-ninth century tech if the Starfleet of that future had not helped unwillingly."

"Our very own Lotus Fleet could never have stopped time-travelling Klingons from destroying the Organians had not Q sent some of it's officers back to the twenty-third century."

He looked at each one of them in turn as he concluded.

"Sheer luck and outside forces saved us... but relying on the good will of others or luck alone is the best recipe for disaster. Wouldn't you agree, Commander?"

Dulmer spoke again, also using the holodisplay to illustrate what he was talking about from Starfleet records, some several centuries old.

" However, had James Kirk not being able to use the slingshot effect to bring back doomed whales from the past, we would not be here today."

"Had Sisko not being able to deliberately use the Orb of Time to follow a Klingon spy intent on killing Kirk on station K7, Kirk would not have been even alive to do it."

"Kheren could never have thwarted the Romulan paradox that would have destroyed the Federation if he had not used their own timeshifting station."

"And has it not again been for brave Lotus Fleet officers aboard the USS Spectre, the changes of the timeline caused by the Romulan renegade Nero and Ambassador Spock would have destroyed reality as we know it."

He straightened his uniform before finishing.

"When we do take things in our own hands and proceed carefully and properly, just like when we correct violations of the Prime Directive, we can make a positive difference."

His taller colleague continued.

"And consider this; we have determined that we are currently living in an alternate timeline, a timeline that has been in fact altered several times."

New images, some very old to the point of not even being in color, appeared as he listed what they were about.

The third world war of Earth should never have happened in the nineteen nineties; nor the rise of the Augments like Khan Noonien Singh or their spaceship and cryogenic tech way too advanced for this time period."

"The twenty-second century Xindi attack on Earth and the resulting war should not have happened at all. Romulans and Klingons ships of that era were not supposed to have twenty-third century cloaking technology."

"And the twenty-fourth century onward has been altered with the return of the USS Voyager twenty years before it should have. But there is worse."

He made a pause to let all this sink in. because he was not done yet.

"Aliens invaded our twentieth century to alter the outcome of world war II."

"Xindi infiltrated our twenty-first century to annihilate the human race with a bioweapon."

"Beings from an alternate universe build cosmic spheres to invade the twenty-second century. That same century was the theater of a thirty-first century cold war."

"In the twenty-third century, two conflicting dimension-travelling aliens from an antimatter universe almost destroyed ours."

"In the last century, there were encroachements from a Mirror Universe intent on exploiting and conquering our own, the Undine breached our universe from their own fluidic space and a Krenim genius of the Delta Quadrant played with time itself on a quest of personal vengeance. Even today, we are STILL passively facing the possibility of most of these threats to strike again. And can anyone see what could be coming next?"

Dulmer looked at them with a stern expression on his dour face as he let the question hang in the air.

"Only for some of these distorsions do we know who or what is responsible; most we don't yet. And we had no safe and sure mean of doing anything about it all... until now."

Behind him loomed the sleek, shiny form of the USS Millennium.

"I submit this question to you, Commander Aron'Son, and to all of you; do we stand back, wait and do nothing until another Kelvin catastrophy or Sphere Builder hits us... or do we try to get ready and do something about it?"

Cross let out a low whistle.

"Well, I for one suddenly feel lucky to exist at all now."

"And that exactly is the problem," Dulmer grumbled. "We've been way too lucky for our own good. And luck always inevitably run out at some point. it almost did with the barely averted kelvin catastrophy... and we are still feeling some of it's aftereffects still. So now, we need to become vigilant, active... and most of all responsible. For three hundred years we have prospered and help others prosper throughout space with the Prime Directive. Now we need to implement and enforce a new directive; a Temporal Prime Directive."

"And this USS MIllennium is our first, best mean to do just that," insisted Lucksly; "this ship... and you all, of course."