“That’s not good,” he said after a time.
“No,” she said. “I’m worried about it too. If it blows…”
He nodded. These words, the simple clinical assessment, were the best he had right now.
Titan. This was Titan.
He had lost friends before, fighting the Cardassians, on away missions for Starfleet, even a few since joining this most recent crew. But he had never lost so many so quickly and never ever in this horrible way.
Bralik. Ree. Melora. Dakal. All of them. Dead. Dead. Dead. And, of course, he had survived it. His blessing from the Prophets had protected him again, though, just now, it felt a little bit more like a curse.
He fell silent again as the enormity of it all went through him.
Modan let him stare at the scene for another full minute before urging him on.
They came upon the shuttle as the sun dipped low behind them and, had he not known exactly what to look for, he would have missed it, which was the point.
The providence that had protected him and Modan thus far had also left the Ellington’s stealth field projector mercifully intact. It too had smacked into the surface of this unknown world but had found a better resting place than Titan.
The slight ripple in the air, like a breeze drifting along an invisible curtain between what looked like a closely clustered stand of the viney trees and a massive crystal formation, was the only sign that the shuttle was present at all.
It wasn’t a cloak really, as it only bent visible light around the ship and couldn’t block even cursory sensor scans, but for missions like this one was meant to be, where secret observation of the new culture was part of the brief, the stealth field was ideal.
As long as it lasted, they would be safe from premature discovery here.
“Come on,” she said, helping him over the natural ditch that ran between them and it.
Modan had done a good job getting the primary systems back online, though her success was due less to her engineering skills than to the fact that the bulk of the damage was cosmetic. The shuttle’s guts had exploded all over the interior, making it look well past ready for the scrap heap, but very little of it had sustained any truly catastrophic damage.
The systems that had been most compromised were those that had shorted during the first hit from the Orishan warp cannon.
By simply swapping a few isolinear chips from less important components to those they needed, and reattaching or sealing a few wires here and there, he was able to get the Ellingtonback up to nearly eighty percent of full functionality. The remaining problem, now that the ship was actually running, was to get it flying again.
Not being an engineer, it would take him hours, perhaps days, to figure out precisely what was wrong with the propulsion system and then determine if that thing could be fixed.
As she lowered him into the rehabilitation bed and he felt the beams of healing energy course through his body, he told her how to use the computer to fix their location so that they would have some idea at least of where they were.
“I will, Najem,” she said as the sedation beams sent him into the dark. “And maybe I can find a spare uniform now that some of this junk as been cleared away.”
“Uniform,” he asked as he drifted off. “What…?”
“Mine got shredded when I transformed,” she said, moving out of his field of vision. He could hear her rummaging. “Why did you think I didn’t shift back? I’m naked.”
His dreams were dark flitty things, full of ugly portents, which he was pleased not to retain once he came back to himself. The pain in his abdomen was little more than an ache by then. His skull no longer throbbed, and she had cleaned the blood off his face. He felt like himself.
“Modan?”
“Here, Najem,” she said, and she was. Clad in the white and gray undermesh of an EVA suit, she looked like the old Y’lira Modan, and he was glad. “You look much better now.”
“I feel better,” he said and even his voice had more strength in it than before.
He tried to sit up, but the rush of blood to his brain made him dizzy.
“Wait,” she said soothingly. “Try again in a moment.”
“That’s a good plan, I think,” he said and relaxed again. He might be healed, but it was wise to let his body realize it before he forced it to do too much.
He tried again more slowly, and was rewarded with a smile from his golden companion. It was hard to picture her the other way now, and he was glad of that as well.
“All right,” he said, swiveling his legs off the recovery table and facing her. “Did you fix our location?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I must have done something wrong.”
He got up under his own steam this time and made his way to the science station, still lit up from Modan’s recent use. She hadn’t made any mistakes. The sensors were online and had fixed points for the local sun, using it as a central reference from which to generate star maps and, from them, generate a location mark relative to the Federation. Travel through the strange vortex could have deposited them anywhere.
“What in the-?” he said, checking and rechecking the sensor data.
“Yes,” she said. “According to this, the stars are in the wrong places. It must be a malfunction, yes?”
“No,” he said as the realization of what had happened washed over him. “No, it’s not a malfunction.”
“But this says we are on Orisha, Najem,” she said. “This can’t be Orisha. There are no cities, no high-level technology. These warriors are killing each other with crude projectile weapons and fuel bombs.”
“It’s not a malfunction, Modan.”
“And the stars?” Her confusion was quickly devolving into the fear she’d displayed during their bumpy flight. How odd to see her so fierce in combat and yet cowed by these more abstract concepts. “It has all the stars in the wrong positions. Fractionally so, but still.”
“They’re not in the wrong positions,” he said. “I think-I think weare.”
His fingers tapped in a few frantic commands and requests, asking the computer to verify his deepening apprehension.
“Verification,”said the computer. “Analysis is confirmed.”
He sat there for a moment, letting the words sink in. He hadn’t really needed the computer to verify the charts and extrapolations. Just looking at the data had told him all he needed to know.
He sat there, feeling his limbs, still weak despite their healing, sensing Modan’s increasing agitation. He wondered if her Pod Mothers had designed her this way or if it was something unaccounted for. Then a thought came to him that made him smile first and then laugh.
“Najem,” she said, visibly shaken by his outburst. “Are you well?”
“Fine, Modan,” he said when the last fit was done. “I’m just laughing at the joke the Prophets have played on me. On us, I suppose.”
“The Prophets?” she said. “The beings your people revere as gods? What have they to do with this?”
“They made me a promise a long time ago,” he said, swiveling to face her. “And this is how they keep it.”
“Najem, I don’t understand you.”
“This is Orisha, Modan,” he said. “This is the planet Orisha. That energy mass we discovered was obviously some kind of temporal aperture.”
“We have traveled through time?” she said slowly, feeling the weight of it and its truth as well.