127 Years Of Catching Up

Posted on Sat Sep 8th, 2018 @ 3:29am by Commander Rita Paris & Lieutenant Commander Sonak

Mission: Holographic Horrors
Location: USS Hera, various locales
Timeline: 2395

Clinging to the athletic Vulcan she'd tackled on the flight deck, Lieutenant Commander Rita Paris was officially the happiest girl in space.

Running her fingers through his hair, then placing her palms alongside the face of her Vulcan lover, the long-lost lieutenant cupped Sonak's cheeks in her hands. There were so many things she wanted to say in that moment, but all of them jammed up at once in a spectacular cerebral pile-up in her brain.

Instead, ever a creature of instinct, Rita Paris leaned in and kissed her one true love right there on the flight deck.

With her body literally wrapped about his form like a great blonde serpent, that deep and passionate kiss went on for a good thirteen seconds, and the footage from various angles would make the rounds aboard the Hera. When she pulled away from him, those runner's thighs reluctantly released him, and the statuesque starship siren lowered her feet back onto the deck. Patting him on the chest, she looked around the flight deck at the personnel who had either volunteered to stay on duty or were being penalized during shore leave, all of whom were gawking.

"We're old shipmates," she explained loudly. There were a few chuckles at that as their cheerful chief turned back around, took a few steps then squatted smoothly to pick up the dropped PaDD. Rising back up just as quickly, she half-turned to regard the Hera's newest transfer.

"Shall we, Co- ah, Lieutenant Sonak?" Paris gestured to the hatch leading into the Hera with a smile that she simply could not stop.

Inclining his head, he let her take the lead and plot the course. After all, she was the senior officer now, in more ways than one. Although he had studied intensely and without pause for months since his arrival in this new universe, and his actual length of service in space far exceeded hers, he had had also a century of progress to catch up on, and the gold-clad commander had a good headstart on him on that front.

It was also a most effective way to fill his senses with her intoxicating presence.

Overall, he was quite gratified to realize that their deep connection had not been severed by the alterations of his psionic abilities. He could feel her, just as easily and as deeply as before. Apparently, the Vulcan spiritual connection was just as real here as it has been back where they came from.

Touching but not touched... apart and never parted... as went the old ritual.

It was... deeply satisfactory.

Realizing that Sonak was lagging behind, which meant that he was doing so intentionally, Rita changed course to circle around behind him and come up on his starboard side to keep pace with him. She didn't plan to talk over her shoulder while they walked, and Sonak had always preferred to let her chart their course, in so many ways. A thought struck her, and before she started an actual conversation, she acted upon it.

"Lieutenant, would you be so kind as to remove your jacket?"

He stopped, raising an eyebrow at her.

"Is there something wrong with my uniform, Lieutenant-Commander?"

"I am of that opinion, Lieutenant," the pretty pilot pivoted as he stopped. She had managed to bring her smile down to a more close-lipped affair, but the antique Starfleet officer in near mint condition was still quite clearly possessed of a delightfully cheerful mood. "Indulge me, if you will? Please?"

The lieutenant commander had addressed the lieutenant precisely as she would have had he been her superior. Of course, she afforded the same respect to everyone, even the ship's computer. Rita Paris had been raised to be polite, and in military service she had always found that bad manners were seldom rewarded. Besides, 'We come in peace' was easier to believe if you weren't a jackass. Beaming a wide-eyed smile at the kolinahr, now no longer the last, Rita nodded at his outerwear.

Without another word, Sonak removed his grey and black vest and folded it neatly on his duffel bag to stand at parade rest, arms behind his back. He was now showing the bright blue long sleeved shirt underneath which was fused to his tight black pants. It occurred to him that, thus attired, he looked much more like he was wearing his former century old science officer uniform; blue top, black pants with soft boots.





There was definitely a high probability, he calculated, that this was precisely what Rita Paris had planned when formulating her peculiar request. No empathic link was needed to conclude this; after all, he knew her preferences quite well.

Leaning down, the Vulcan scientist unclipped his commbadge, then affixed to it to magnetically adhere to the blue shirt.

Those bright blue eyes fairly gleamed as she snatched up his seabag and began to move down the corridor again, tossing it to him as she explained herself. "I don't know the precise regulation, but it's in the dress code. The jacket is optional. Your body temperature is higher than ours, and you aren't going to get cold on a starship. That's my logic and I'm sticking to it."

"These clothes are excellent insulators. And I for one prefer clothing to be as simple and practical as possible. I will follow your recommendation."

The satisfaction that fairly radiated off the first officer was practically palpable.

"You're here. I can't believe you're here. You hurled me across space and time and dimension, yet you found me. I thought I'd lost you forever," Rita whispered the last few words as they strode through the ship's corridors at a martial pace. Both were fast walkers by nature, and they fell back to old habits easily. His sharp ears could hear her easily enough, even if he had to speak aloud for her.

"There was a ninety-five point three percent probability of you being killed through signal deterioration because of the ion storm interference. Fortunately, I was aware of the quantum fluctuation caused by the crossing of ions and subatomic transporter particles. And I noticed your peculiar subatomic signature; the remnant trace of your former transporter accident. Since your death was a high probability, I estimated the only chance left to you was through quantum displacement. That is why I disconnected the Heisenberg compensator as I completed the beam out. There was a four point seven percent chance the uncertainty principle would materialize you somewhere within any number of quantum realities. It was definitely low, but anything was better than the alternative."

"Well, you pulled it off as usual, and you saved me. It was still luck that the Hera hit me, but you did the impossible, like you always do. Okay, I have to know, how? How are you here and commissioned? How- " The brows rose and the human woman did an impression of a goldfish for a second as she pointed at him. "You DID get it! My message in a bottle! It worked?!?"

"Obviously," he replied after a moment with an arched eyebrow and a blank expression. "Without it, I likely would never have discovered this reality's exact quantum signature and your spatiotemporal coordinates. Once your ingenious mayday reached me, I could then use them as a reference to implement my own transdimensional transference."

He touched the two pips on his collar.

"As for my commission; in order to find you, I required the resources of Starfleet; therefore, I needed to become a Starfleet officer here as well. I calculated my emergence in this reality one year and eleven months before your own arrival, in order to study and acclimate while qualifying for security clearances on Vulcan. Sufficiently acclimated and up to date with this universe, re-application to Starfleet Academy under Vulcan sponsorship enabled me to complete an accelerated course review. At least, sufficiently well enough to be assigned to a cadet cruise. As military organizations tend to be highly conservative, I estimated there would be little fundamental differences between our native era and this one." Arriving at the turbolift, he tabbed the button and continued.

"Thus I only needed technical and historical updates to succeed. My plan fulfilled my requirements far better than I had initially estimated, as there were more similarities between our universes than I had anticipated. I thought I would need further research to find a way to just contact you. But as I graduated with high honors, combined with my recognized and tested four decades of command experience, I was promoted to Lieutenant and allowed to choose my assignment. Then it was just a matter of your exact location... which you provided as navigational coordinates, along with the precise date."

The turbolift arrived, and once they'd stepped inside, the buxom blonde bombardier called out, "Deck 8." Tapping away at the PaDD in her hand, she sent a message and reorganized a duty roster. Then she created a room assignment, as Sonak took her elbow to lead the distracted damsel out of the lift. Looking up from her work, the lost navigator smiled at his consideration, then frowned slightly, the first time the smile had actually left her face.

"Two years?” she asked with a note of disbelief in her voice. “You arrived two years ago to make sure you got here and had time to come find me and you spent two years… alone? Wait, how long did it take you to figure out how to get here? For that matter, how DID you get here?"

"That was actually the most difficult portion of this endeavor," he admitted with a nod. "This ship is formally registered as a science vessel on special assignment; yet, details about her mission and location are remarkably... obscure, when not outright classified. Her engineering refit and report logs are not even accessible below the rank of Commodore, and only within Starfleet Intelligence. So I had to be... creative."

He knew without looking at her face that his explanation was just as obscure as he claimed of the Hera's data. Thus he strove to explain further.

"Basically, I used the same methodology and reasoning as those ancient astronomers who worked to find the first black hole, with primitive optical and radio-emitting instruments. How do you find a hole in space? You cannot observe it directly; ergo, what you can search for are effects of its presence on the surrounding visible universe. Anything that physically exists in reality will leave a physical imprint upon reality; by looking for those indirect clues and correlating them together, you can eventually find what you seek; even an invisible object in utter darkness, or a classified starship in covert operation... or a woman lost in space and time."

Of course, the answer made perfect sense to Rita as for how Sonak had found the Hera, and even how he had managed to secure assignment aboard her. Approaching it in a linear fashion as he had, in a calmly logical progression, even knowing her nav coordinates at a specific date in time would not have enabled him to find the classified Starfleet Intelligence starship. Thus, he had searched for what was not there. But that wasn't the answer to the question she had intended.

"I am, as always, suitably impressed," the hard-luck heroine beamed that cheerful smile in Sonak's direction as they made their way forward. "My question is to more to the physical transition. You physically traveled in time and dimension to get here, to leave our timeline for this one. I got here because a desperate genius tried to find a way to save me in a crisis, and a curious genius reassembled me here when I was the crisis. I was a warp ghost again briefly, but the warp fields here are, as you've noticed, considerably stronger than they were in my- our day, so they could see me this time. So they figured out I was here rather quickly and pulled me together. But you? How did you arrive in this reality?"

As she often did, Rita walked through Sonak's logic from the outside, piecing together with many words what he could encapsulate with only a few. But as she was still working at processing it all, she did so aloud, sharing her thoughts so that the Vulcan scientist would know her mind and grasp her understanding of the situation.

There was a brief pause before she added, "It's just you- no Michael or the Exeter, is there? We aren't going home, because you couldn't find a way to open a breach in time and space and dimension without destroying us. You just hurled yourself after me, because you... oh."

The leggy lieutenant slowed her martial pace, watching his seemingly impassive face as realization washed across her own. "Because I called you. I let you know where and when I was, and you... you had nothing left. No Vulcan, no people and with me gone.... oh.” The realization struck her, as his words made more sense to her now. “It was the only logical thing left to do."

Again, old habits and patterns returned easily, and were the neurotic navigator not already overjoyed by his presence, simply returning to familiar behaviors would have soothed her considerably.

"You have deduced the facts correctly. Michael is not here," answered the Vulcan. "I did consider using the Exeter to come here when I was still her commanding officer; but Starfleet wisely denied me the opportunity. Denying me to risk ship and crew in such a hazardous project as transdimensional time travel, and for the sole sake of but one human woman, was of course quite logical.”

“I therefore followed that same logic and resolved to do it on my own, without risking anyone else nor anyone else's property... or polluting further our already artificially-created reality... and this one. To this end, I estimated that the best course of action was to bring back the scoutship that had transported Ambassador Spock from this reality, using the quantum resonance hypothesis with what Spock's katra revealed to me as a ‘slingshot’ effect. I could thus attempt to begin the process of restoring that which he left altered... and to reach you."

He lifted his head and looked squarely at her.

"It is always fascinating to see your mind come to the correct conclusion, even without relying solely upon logic," he admitted with sincere humility. "You are a unique entity, Rita Paris. This endeavor was indubitably worthwhile... at least to me."

For her part, the unconventionally uniformed officer said nothing, as they arrived at the edge of the outer ring of Deck 8, and within a brief yet brisk walk, they approached quarters whose touchscreen backlit nameplate outside read LTCDR R. PARIS, CHIEF FLIGHT CONTROL. As the automatic doors slid open with her approach, Paris strode inside a few long paces then paused in what passed for her living room in the outrageously spacious quarters.

The effect of the change from the earthtones of the starship Hera’s Galaxy Class corridors was considerable. The walls inside her quarters were painted Duranium grey with a hint of blue, while the metal mesh movable room dividers were reminiscent of the room dividers from a Constitution class starship. In fact, her quarters, subdivided with a rather well-furnished kitchen, a dining area, a living room with comfortable furniture and a bedroom beyond, in furnishings and tone closely resembled a Starfleet VIP quarters from the 2260’s, save for the immense size, and the viewports built into the upper deck that showed the twinkling stars of space beyond them.

Wordlessly, he followed her as she expected. Once he was safely inside and the doors were closed she turned to him, bright blue eyes shining with pending tears. The curvaceous chrononaut stepped slowly and deliberately into the lean kolinahr’s personal space. Her gold-clad arms moved gently and deliberately, almost as if in a pattern of ritual, across the bright blue of his uniform.

Gingerly, carefully, the Vulcan’s human lover wrapped her arms around him, then pressed herself to his form. As she closed her eyes and clung to him, he felt weeks of tension physically and psychically shudder out of her. All of the pent-up frustration and longing, all of the insecurity, all of her fear that he had been lost to her forever she released, wrapped in his strong arms.

For a change, she spoke no words… instead, she simply needed to hold him and be held, to be reassured that he was here and that she was whole once more.

It might have been the years of separation, thought to be definitive; but for the first time in memory, a feeling stirred within Sonak. It was more, he knew, than just his katra resonating to her presence. Their relationship had made him cognizant of and at ease with the emotional and physical needs of this human woman. In their time together she had learned to express her emotions so clearly in so many ways to him, even if he did not feel any of it. But this time, it was different. There was something beyond the mere duty of reacting to her needs; it seemed responding to her needs was now becoming a need for him as well.

He enfolded her tall, sensuous body into his arms, and her physical contact alone vibrated beyond his mind and right into his very soul.

Simply put, she needed him; and he, in turn, needed her.