Ship of Aeons
or
Once More, With Feeling
Chapter Five
We are forgiven, as we forgive, all those dark wounds and deep,
Our beds are made on the lap of Time, and we lie down and sleep.
We are forgiven, as we forgive, all those old wounds that bleed.
We shut our eyes from our worshippers; we sleep till the world has need.
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Recommended Listening
Nash ka'Sharren said:
"A Licori research cruiser was spotted on long-range sensors. We had orders to return to the task force, but I'm not inclined to allow a possible mentat ship to peel off away from Licori space to pop up who knows where. Even if detaching an Excelsior for the task is a ludicrous over-investment."
"Except... it may not be ludicrous over-investment. Starfleet Intelligence already had good details about this type of research cruiser, and it should be able to manage no more than Warp 9.5 at a burst, no more than Warp 8 sustained. This one is currently happily humming along at... lemme just check. Ah. Warp Factor 13."
"So there's that."
"More concerningly, after it accelerated, upon spotting us, we started detecting a steady stream of chronitons from the ship. There's clearly some very clever mentats on board, with a very clever plan, and if I didn't have a very clever chief engineer doing things that would make the people who wrote the manual on our warp core and warp nacelles blanch, we'd never be able to keep up with them."
Your love has returned to you. Not to set a good captain aside, as Jim did to the tune of your mixed feelings forty years ago, but to...
enhance, amazingly. To brighten the colors of your fierce huntress aspect, as you return once again to your old trade- war. As you remember your old lives and names.
They called you the Grey Ghost, once. You cherish the sight of a so-called Licori 'dreadnought,' running away screaming as you swoop down upon her in defense of your onetime sister Hood, so freshly renewed and restored to you. That side of you
lives again, wild and proud and revelling in a perfect moment.
And Nash leading you and Liberty off Ixaria? Striking the Imperial fleet like a thunderbolt, time and again, scattering and shattering their ranks, braving the sky-splitting detonations of the Licori warheads, the rain of their broadsides? That's the kind of memory you expect to savor for centuries.
Something seizes your attention, brutally drawing you from your happy reverie.
[Recommended Listening]
There!
You have never seen her before, yet you recognize her instantly. The ragged madness of her soul. The defiant will-to-power, the desire to burn and slay indiscriminately. The baleful, grating rasp of her song, A song of seething, desperate hatred, of vindication at any price. Of transgression against the laws of nature, and of fate.
You know down to your tritanium bones who and what she is. The word that springs to mind comes from deep in your memory.
Berserker.
She sees you, and she runs. Why do you remember her? Where does this instinctive fear and anger and the enveloping sense of doom come from?
None of that matters; there is only one thing that can be done about a berserker. In a mad, pell-mell sprint you didn't know you had in you, you take off in pursuit, your crew's capable hands tending to your swiftly escalating weariness and pain.
Across the stars you chase the fleeing tech-cruiser in her madness, Nash and Sam and your dear crew doing everything right, everything perfectly. You've never made a speed run like this, not fully under the control of your own people and your own spirit. An innocent side of you sings for the delight of breaking all records and casting aside all caution, the joy of
speed... You'll save everyone; with Nash aboard, you always do.
And from a darker place within you, the Grey Ghost locks her eyes on the berserker. You can sense the scale of her terrible designs, the malevolent geniuses at the heart of her crew. You'll stop her. And if you can get your tractors on her but once,
nothing will save her.
The berserker has outpaced you; she is gone, vanished from the very universe- you have failed. But your song rises to an angry howl that drives away the guilt and doom. You
cannot fail, not here, not now, not after having fought so hard and so well for so long. Not when Nash is with you and your navigators and scientists flame with glorious inspiration.
All you have ever been, and all that you now are, comes together at this moment. Everything you have accumulated, over many lives. All your strength, all your wisdom, all your love. The time vortex the berserker opened and fled through lies ahead, spooling down to a singularity of acausality. Impervious, untouchable.
You reach out and touch it anyway.
Fire and electric arcs and stranger energies erupt from your nacelles, as you slam your warp field against the door of Time in a scream of dislocation. And the door breaks open at your furious charge. For you, the universe inverts, curls, dissolves into seething, agonizing chaos. Your nacelles burn, their own roaring vortices of space-twisting force clashing with the cold, alien grip of Time. You will
not yield, not now.
You see the berserker, through the swirling unsanity of anti-logic and broken causation as a shoal of millenia flit by, skipping across your awareness like flying fish. She is locked in battle, against ships you cannot yet see, but that have the feel of Starfleet about them. And that is all you need to know.
Firing from inside the time vortex, the range is... extreme, in a way you've never known before- twenty thousand kilometers, and six astronomical units, and thirteen hundred years,
all at the same time. Undeterred, your crew takes the shot.
If you never fired again in anger, your killer instinct could rest happy with the memory of that shot. Your phaser banks cleave the darkness and
slice, the inferno of ruined circuitry in your nacelles avenged on the berserker's hull.
Your burning heart stutters, murmurs, skips. Threatens to seize up and burst- but that was
not the last shot you'll ever fire. There is room for one more spread of torpedoes, whose blasts rock the berserker. The tech-ship shakes in a terrible grip of gamma rays, nearly perishes in that moment, before she limps away, spitting defiance. She's been reduced a tenth of her former flank speed- and at that, a tenth more of it than you could manage now.
Crippled, burning, you re-emerge from the night of chaos into the night of stars, and two Starfleet sisters appear before you, stirring your memory. One in the prime of her life, one in the throes of her death. And though your soul twists with disorientation when you turn your Sight upon them closely, it takes you no time at all to identify your sister-selves.
Especially the living one- her song that so perfectly matches your own.
You do not remember the rest of what must have happened before your arrival, do not remember your own actions here in this time before the dawn. But you know, now,
why you do not remember. What it is that blurred your memory, what stole from you the knowledge of your death twelve decades ago and the loss of Hensen. You know the identity of the clean-lined Connie that hurts too much to look at closely, and many other things. But one realization pierces all others and floods your soul, a memory that scatters all your pain and rage.
[Recommended Listening]
Jim is over there. Jim, whom you'd thought lost. Lost in the depth of the first night of your rebirth, when the scar of exotic lightnings burned on your hull was
nothing compared to the screaming scar on your soul. That night, you thought you'd shatter and never sing again. You might never have, if not for the memories, and the Listener who coaxed them back to life. They saved you- but didn't end the regret. The first seven years did little to dull the edge of that blade, either. And you fear you might crack, even now, if not for a captain as fine as Sam... and, doubly, if not for Nash.
Thanks to them, you can think of Jim without the cruel edge to the yearning, now. Think of him being out there, and not ache to steal him from your own self in defiance of the laws of Time and fate. You miss him, and you always will- but you can live, without
needing him so terribly.
You hope he'll beam aboard, though. Amid your aches and pains, and the quiet purring of your worker bees and shuttlecraft, you focus on that. You... hope to welcome him home, one more time at least.
Nash and Sam are no more prone to time-wasting than Jim and Scotty were. They leave you, for a time, boarding your younger self to confer. You watch her leave in search of the faint traces you've already seen- a few notes. You know, inwardly, what you'll find, nor do you prove mistaken. You still don't remember-
something tangles your mind whenever you think on the days of paradox you must have experienced, meeting yourself again and again. But you can deduce.
Being too lamed to continue the chase aches, especially as you watch your two warp-capable sister-selves depart on the berserker's trail. You want to pursue the Licori ship, to maul and crush, to
end the threat to all that made you. The berserker has cost you a life and a love already. No more.
You fight back dread, watching Nash choose to board the little experimental deep-space ship puttering along at a Warp Five flank speed. It's strange to see her as from the outside, a tiny, frail, toddling thing exploring the depths of Night for the first time. You were already over four hundred years old then, one of the long-reigning queens of Earth's seas and skies- and yet so very young.
But you force yourself to have faith. You'll do it. You did it. And if Nash is going into danger without you... at least she is, in a very real sense, going into danger with you, as well.
One question that haunts you, as they leave. Why do you not remember the end of this mad affair
now? What's the paradox? What secret of your own future is Time hiding from you?
You try to put it out of your mind, as Sam leads your present crew and the survivors of your past to find a way out of this primordial era. Fondly you welcome these refugees of the century before last into your embrace. It's good to have them back. Paradox can wait; your people need you.
The hours and days pass. Your sisters return. Your crews and loves return! Some you can feel even across the void, so brightly they burn. Nash returns. Jim returns. They are victorious, as you knew they would be. The tension of awaiting the outcome of a battle you cannot hope to affect subsides.
But still, you wonder what Fate has in store for you, as your crew slowly effect repairs, and your master scientists of five lifetimes probe cautiously at the temporal portal you smashed your way through so recently- and so far in the future.
The prognosis comes, grimmer and grimmer, as you gently usher your little sister-selves back through Time, unable to do more than sing your encouragement and unsure they can hear even that.
Your wounds are too great to go on. You've always saved everyone, with Nash and Sam. But from the consternation of your crew, you know that there is no way to save everyone
this time... Not except at the cost of this life of yours.
It is a price that isn't a price, a payment that doesn't feel like payment. The sort of death you'd have wanted, after these last fourteen years with your new loves. Lion's song is comforting, for reasons other than the quiet hints of Nash's touch, at a time like this.
Your crew begin to debark. They leave rapidly, save only a few affectionate, dedicated presences that jockeying quietly to be the last to beam off your hull. You feel Nash fighting the tears and trying to keep spirits up. You feel Sam falling against into her iron self-discipline harder than ever.
They are leaving. It's ending. Death for one such as you is a strange thing, and as they leave, you can feel your spirit dissolving, the experience strange this time, almost as strange as '85. You sense a few vital parts of that which you are, as they are plucked away in careful, capable, reverent, unfamiliar hands, somehow wrapped and preserved. Bits of your song ride in loving hearts- many of them, and true. And one or two fragments of your essence drift away entirely, scraps to flutter in the metaphysical breeze, perhaps to find homes in the unthinkably distant future of your own native times and lives.
They are all gone. You are empty.
Your burning core bursts, an outpouring of elemental force great enough to carry all your loves and all your crew home again, while scouring away anything that might poison their future- or their past. And your soul holds just enough coherence for the equivalent of a last, quiet smile. Looking forward to that future.
Once more, you think, dissolving in the now, perhaps to coalesce once more in that distant aeon.
Once more, with no regrets!
