Smoke and Mirrors

Posted on Sun Jul 8th, 2018 @ 10:47pm by Commander Rita Paris

Mission: Holographic Horrors
Location: USS Hera, Deck 8, Lieutenant Paris' Quarters
Timeline: 2395

The alarm on her communicator awakened the lost navigator from her deep and dreamless slumber, and she fumbled with the device, opening it and stopping the alarm without completely waking up. Which was sufficient to bring her consciousness to the surface to dream. Which, for Rita Paris, was seldom a good thing.

Hugging the couch cushion that she had taken to sleeping with in lieu of her lost lover, the lonely woman sniffled in her sleep as her mind turned over the conundrum in which she was trapped. The experimental transporter that had reassembled her in this era had somehow pinpointed her origin coordinates in time, space and dimension. But it lacked the power to send her back. While she had a theory about how to use the current storm to channel the energy of the dark matter ion storm into the transporter to accomplish that feat, what she hadn’t figured out was how to do it without having the bolt of dark energy tear through the Hera like tissue paper.

While she wanted nothing more than to go home, she couldn’t do it at the cost of any lives on the Hera.

Thus in her sleep she tossed and turned, her mind wrestling with a problem that she lacked the scientific background to solve. There was the possibility that she could bring it to Captain Telvan, but bringing a problem with no solution would likely not go particularly well with the starship commander. If they could dream up a solution, she had confidence that Thex could bring it to life, but she still needed more details to make it work.

There was no greater drive within her than to return to her own time and dimension, to return to the starship on which she belonged, to the arms of the man to whom her heart belonged.

Of course, there was also the pesky matter of the Temporal Prime Directive to consider, of which Captain Telvan seemed dismissive. While she had learned quite a bit in the past few weeks, to Rita’s mind none of it could unbalance history. She knew the replicators could make nearly anything, but she couldn’t build one. She knew isolinear chips were now the standard for systems, but she couldn’t create one. She was just a pilot, and while the weapons of starship warfare had advanced and the strategies changed, none of the information she had learned would change the face of the galaxy.

Were she a scientist or engineer who had studied the systems that might be so. But Rita Paris was a pilot, and that was what she knew. A pilot who had piloted a future craft was still just a pilot were she back in her own chair on her own bridge in her own timeline. Besides, it was not even her own future in which she was currently trapped, but one where time and history had flowed radically differently. So any foreknowledge she might bring back with her were useless, even were she of a mind to exploit her future knowledge.

Somewhere far in the past and dimensions away, Sonak was still working to find her- this she knew with a certainty of faith borne of countless rescues and missions together. But she knew that he simply lacked sufficient data to find her- while he would be able to deduce that she had shifted dimensions, there was no way for him to locate the one into which she had been introduced. Even were he able to locate the correct dimension, there was no way for him to know that his lover had been displaced in time as well.

Brilliant and determined he was, but there were limits to what even Sonak could do, given the circumstances.

There was a possibility that she might try sending him a message- after all, a message in a bottle with chronal and dimensional coordinates might just enable him to work out a way to retrieve her. Or it might just illustrate the futility of the task for him, but she had never known Sonak to give up just because what he was attempting had never been done before. Hell, fully half of her plans tended to involve activities or experiments that had never been attempted or were theoretically impossible, yet Sonak always found a way.

As she turned this over in her exhausted half-asleep mind, Paris became aware of a presence in the room- mostly because said presence cleared his throat. Prying one eye open, the leggy lieutenant took in the shape of a man in an archaic blue uniform not unlike her own, but the masculine version in science blue. Standing at the foot of her bed with his hands clasped behind him was none other than Sonak of Vulcan.

While her heart leapt at the sight, Paris merely rolled over, mumbling, “Piss off. M’not in the mood.”

“I do not understand why you would address me thusly,” the somber scientist intoned. “Are you not pleased to see me?”

With a heavy sigh, Paris sat up, blearily eying the intruder in her quarters. While she was sleeping nude, she made no attempt to cover herself. “Look, whatever game you are playing with us, whatever or whoever you are, this is a shitty tactic and it isn’t working, so just go away, huh? Rita’s tired and she doesn’t want to play whatever game you have in mind.” With that said, she dropped back onto the bed in irritation.

The Vulcan raised an eyebrow at that, and cocked his head slightly in curiosity. “Why would you not believe the evidence before your eyes? I have traversed significant distance to…”

“Because you aren’t real,” she interrupted. Her hand rose from the bed on a slender arm as she waved it about to emphasize her point. “It’s cute you think to pull up the love of my life from old records and project him here to see how I’ll react, but we were bonded. If he were anywhere on this ship, I would know. He knew where I was, always. I was his t’hy’la, his one. If we were in any sort of proximity, I would feel him. So no matter how accurately you might mimic his form and features, you aren’t him.”

“And given my situation? If this is your ‘attempting to understand material beings’ or whatever rationale you have for playing these little games? This is particularly cruel. Because I miss him and I'd give anything to be reunited with him, and you projecting this image of my heart’s desire is just mean-spirited smoke and mirrors.” With that said, Paris curled up on the bed in a tight protective ball, hoping her speech would do the trick.

A moment later when she cracked her eye open, the ersatz figure of her lover was gone. That did not staunch the flow of tears that followed. For all the encounter had accomplished was to remind her, just how much she still missed her hero.