[ussbansheec] Lost and Found
- From: Debra Mosqueda <mightymidgie@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: ussbansheec@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2007 12:18:49 -0800 (PST)
Gabriel Coyne adjusted the harmonic resonance and checked the
readouts. Nothing. Again. Nothing yet. And again. Still nothing. And so
it continued for hours without end. Adjust. Recheck. Adjust. Recheck.
Shifts changed. Other fleeters came and went, though more than a few
were just as determined as he was and, like him, simply refused to
go.It was going to work. It had to work. And so it went. Adjust.
Recheck. Adjust. Recheck. Adjust. And check again... And again...could
he really be seeing what he thought he was seeing? A swig of coffee, a
blink of tired eyes, a look one more time before tapping the combadge.
"Coyne to Hale. Heads up. Temporal singularity forming off
the port bow..."
Miranda's heart all but stopped in her chest at the sound of the young man's
voice.
"Acknowledged," She replied as she sat up a little more in her chair
on the bridge. "On screen."
Gabriel watched in awe as the singularity expanded before he
remembered to warn her. "You..um...you might...want to increase the tachyon
shielding that..um..that we installed. Sir. So we don't corrupt our
timeline this close to it."
Boy was as shaky as a new born colt. She'd thought he'd get over it the
longer they were out there, but he hadn't. For his sake as well as
Banshee's, she hoped they found them soon.
"Do it," She ordered her tac officer. "What are we picking up on sensors?"
Gabriel leaned heavily against the work table, rubbing his eyes
and stifling another yawn as he listened closely for the tactical
officers answer.
After listening to the report Miranda got up and went over to her
tactical station. "So we have no way of knowing if this is gonna open
up to the right place? Is that what your saying?"
"Yes Sir." The young man replied.
"Red alert," Miranda called out. "Mr. Coyne report."
Gabriel adjusted the harmonics slightly following the tac officers
report then watched carefully as the vortex opened, slightly altering
both tone and frequency to halt it's expansion. He answered almost
absently, his mind too engrossed in the amazing science before him for his
nerves
to take over again.
"Temporal singularity open and relatively stable approximately 120
parsecs to port, Captain. Scanning now."
Miranda lifted a brow. When the boy was talking technobable his was a
different creature all together. Returning to her chair she sat back
and closed her eyes, silently preying this was what they'd come here
for. Please, she begged, please let this be Evvy.
"Tethered remote ready to deploy on your mark, Captain," Gabriel said
quietly as he monitored his controls.
"Do it." Miranda ordered and opened her eyes to watch the view screen.
Gabriel deployed the remote and began transmitting. He returned to
monitoring the anomoly itself, almost choking on his coffee moments
later. "Captain, we're picking up something inside the anomoly. Small
craft. One life sigh, very weak."
Her disappointment was nearly overwhelming, she felt as if she were
drowning in it. Evvy. "Prepare to deploy tractor beam. Hail the craft."
"Channel open, Captain."
"This is Captain Miranda Hale of the USS Tempest. Please respond." She
said as she filed away her pain for later.
Gabriel continued to monitor the remote's transmissions, hoping against
hope for a response from the Banshee. He stubbornly refused to
speculate about the smaller craft, or at least, refused to admit to
such speculation. There's no way it could be him, after all. Could it?
Inside the craft, a weak and shaky hand reached for the com button,
only to fall short as the single occupant fell unconscious upon the
deck.
"Small craft please respond..." Miranda repeated as she gave her bridge
crew hand signals that told them to tractor the ship to the cargo bay
and for security to met it there.
"Captain, we're having some problems tractoring the craft," Lieutenant
Caziel informed her on her com. "The hull isn't stable and we're
having difficulty getting a firm lock on it."
"Environmental controls in the craft appear to have failed." a voice
behind the lietenant called out.
"Get that ship out of there!" someone else demanded. "Life signs
weakening. We're losing them!"
"Oh my God...look at this..." a final voice whispered in awe. "It's the
Galileo!"
Miranda hit a button her chair, "Chief, beam that life sign to sickbay.
Doctor, incoming. Security report to sickbay." The Galileo. How many
times in her life had she heard the name of that ship from her father,
her mother, her godfather. It was as ingrained as the Fleet it's self
had been. "Mr. Coyne meet me in sickbay. Commander you have the bridge,
keep an eye on that hole and for any other anomalies."
"Aye Captain."
Gabriel's eyes went wide. His heart sank down into his stomach. The Galileo?
It can't be. The voice in his mind insisted. It's just not possible. Though he
was typically hyperfocussed, it was all he could do to keep his mind on the
readouts the remote was sending him. Somehow, it kept drifting off to the
sickbay and the craft that they'd just found.
Miranda walked slowly and with commanding stride. For some odd reason she found
herself thinking of old home movies and her father's voice as he filmed her
learning to walk. Look at her Linds. She's got that captain's walk. She focused
on that exchange between her parents rather then what loomed behind the doors
of sickbay. The Galilieo. It should have been the Banshee. It should have been
her baby sister, it should have been Evvy and the Macs, not a dead man.
The doctor injected the hypospray full of tri-ox, then scanned his new
patient again. If he was really the person they suspected he was, and he did
indeed fit the description, there were a lot of tests Doctor Lindt wanted to
run.
Gabriel felt light headed. The room started to go dark around the edges. He
struggled against the impending blackness.
You're hyperventillating, Gabriel. His mother's voice said, as it had so many
times before. Slow your breathing. Focus on your work. Calm down.
He drew two slow, deep breaths, and focused on the readouts from the remote.
He retransmitted their message on the newer band, knowing that nobody forty
years ago monitored it, and waited.
Nothing. Why weren't they there?
The patient drew a ragged breath, coughing weakly. His eyelids fluttered,
then slowly opened.
"Lieutenant Garrity, I presume?" Doctor Lindt smiled. Crystal blue eyes
turned in his direction. The young man nodded slightly in reply, erasing any
further doubt.This was really him. The crystal blue eyes blinked heavily once,
twice, then slowly closed again.
"Lieutenant, I need you to open your eyes. Keep them open. Try to stay with
me." The doctor called, smiling when the young man struggled to comply.
"Nurse Torath, I prepare a hypospray with twenty cc's anacrese, and a full
spectrum nutritional suppliment." Doctor Lindt directed the petite Lorellian to
his right. He looked up at the Captain as she entered. "Captain Miranda Hale,
may I present Lieutenant Joshua Garrity."
There were several framed 2D pictures on her father's large desk in his den at
the ranch as well as in his office at HQ. The latest family photo, taken every
year during the Earth holiday season, the very first family picture just after
she was born, one of her mother, and one with him and two young very thin boys,
the taller of which was in a cadet uniform. That same thin form was now laid
out on a biobed in her sickbay. "My father's not going to believe this." She
muttered as she took a step closer. She looked at the man on the bed then up at
her CMO. "Are you 100% sure this is Joshua Garrity?"
"All scans are conclusive, Captain. Lieutenant 2nd class Joshua Garrity,
Chief Engineer, USS Avalon. Reported MIA on Startdate 230508.7. This is him,"
The doctor confirmed.
The young man in question blinked heavy lidded eyes and moved to sit up.
Where the hell was he? He wasn't sure, but where ever it was, it wasn't where
he was supposed to be. He needed to get back to his shuttle. He had a job to
do.
Didn't he?
Miranda rubbed her forehead just above her eye brow with her middle finger and
sighed. She looked the man over a little more and realized he didn't look much
older then his last picture. In fact, she looked older then he did and she'd
been really small when he disappeared. "I want a full report on his condition
and what the hell happened to him."
The doctor laid a hand on the young man's shoulder to prevent him from rising.
"Please stay where you are, Lieutenant." he said gently before nodding to the
captain. "Scans put his age at approximately 23 years of age. Looks like he got
a little banged up when his ship got tossed around, and damned near suffocated
when the environmental controls gave out. That's all we're sure of for now.
He'll have to tell us the rest. We haven't got a word from him yet,though,
Captain. I'm not sure how much he's going to be able to tell us."
"He doesn't talk much," She replied as she eased closer. "Doesn't like Standard
much from what I've been told." 23, he hadn't aged at all. "Lieutenant," She
greeted as she stopped just short of the biobed. "What's the stardate?"
His eyes remained on the floor as he answered quietly, "Startdate 230508.7,
sir."
Miranda blinked. That was the date of his disappearance. Oh boy, she thought as
she once again mimicked her mother's all to familiar gesture. "What's the last
thing you remember?
"I...I detonated...the charges," Josh answered after a long moment of
thought. "Blast...was amplified...within the anomoly. Lost power. Hull was
compromised. Environmental controls failed." His eyes flitted toward her for
the briefest of moments. He shrugged slightly, "I'm...I'm not sure ...after
that."
She simply nodded. "Alright, no rush. We can't take you back to DS9 until the
Fernchruch returns anyway. You'll have time to adjust." Yeah, sure. He'd have
time to adjust to life going on without him. The man had children older then
him now.
"Captain Hale," An ensign said as she entered sick bay with a padd. "Here's the
latest update from Commander Coyne. There's no sign of Banshee yet."
Miranda sighed, "Thank you."
"Captain...Hale?" Josh asked quietly, his eyes widening as the truth began to
dawn on him."Wait...when? When are we?"
Crap, she thought as she looked at her officers. "Mind giving us a few moments
alone?" It wasn't a request, more a polite order. Once they were alone she
looked at the frail looking man and decided to jump right into it. "You've been
MIA and presumed dead for about forty years."
Josh went dead white, his expression looking as if all the wind had just been
knocked out of him. "Forty... wait...so...I'm ...I'm...supposed to be dead?"
"After the explosion the wormhole closed with you still inside." Miranda
explained. "They looked for the anomaly again, but couldn't find it."
Josh nodded. That made sense. The charges would have closed it, but how, then
did he survive? A million questions raced through his head, none of which he
could figure out how to voice. Finally, he looked at her, curious and
bewildered. "How ...how did you ...." he swallowed hard, taking in a ragged
breath and drawing a shaking hand through dark curls, still trying to make
sense of it all. "How did you find it now?"
"Honestly?" She said as she leaned against the wall and folded her arms over
her chest. "By mistake. We've been out here for weeks looking for a missing
ship that got pulled through a wormhole."
Josh nodded. That actually made a lot more sense to him than the wasting of
resources just to find him. "Not through there," he told her honestly, though.
"At least...not according to my instruments." Intending to confirm that with
the data logs on his shutte - assuming he could access them - he stood
quickly,only to teeter precariously, as the deck seemed to shift beneath him.
Reaching out to steady himself against the biobed, he took a tentative step
toward the exit.
"I don't know where you think you're going on my ship," Miranda said as she
went over to steady him and aim him back towards the bed. "Cause it ain't outta
this room. I remember hearing you don't like sick bays, tough shit. You just
spent forty years dead, you don't get to jump right back into work, not on my
goddamn ship, boy."
Josh jumped at her outburst, unconsciously cringing away from her touch and
looking over his shoulder as if expecting to find Captain John Hale standing
behind him. "Hale....as in...?" he asked at last. "You..um...I'm sorry...you
just....you sounded like...someone else." He leaned against the biobed and
shrugged. "I ...I need to..um...to get to my shuttle. To....to try to...to
access the data ...to help...if I can..."
To breathe, he added silently... and stop shaking... and maybe get out of
this cold sickbay to someplace warm...and could someone please make it stop
moving?
That made her smile. It was her mama's smile, but her eyes lit up like her
daddy's did. "Hale, as in Miranda Ariel Hale, eldest child of Admiral Johnathan
and Lindsey Hale of Austin Texas. And no you don't have to get no where. I have
people who will check things out. We've made some advances in the last forty
years you wouldn't be familiar with anyway. So park your ass back on that bed
and lay down before you fall down."
"Admiral, huh?" he couldn't help but smile at that.
Good for him, he thought.
Josh considered the rest of what she said, then shook his head, not liking
to, but knowing he had to warn her. "Advances on your ship. Not mine... doesn't
like to be touched..."
He remained leaning against the biobed as he pulled his PADD from his hip and
began typing in codes quickly, examining page after page of data as it flitted
across the screen. He frowned then and shook his head again. His shuttle had
definitely seen better days.
"my shutte..." he began, then noticed the set look in her eyes. She was no
more likely to give in on her order than John would have been. Resignedly, he
parked his PADD back on his hip. "When can I get to her?"
"When I say and not a moment sooner." She replied. "You got a lot more stuff to
deal with then an old beat to hell shuttle."
Maybe so, he thought, but the shuttle was the only thing he felt prepared to
face just yet. He'd just been told that the entire world had moved on without
him. The life he knew was gone.
His shuttle was all he had left.
Still, he realized, it would do no good to argue. What difference could any
of that possibly make to her?
"Yes sir," he answered quietly, his eyes on the floor once again and
bewildered resignation in his voice.
Miranda nodded then sighed. "There's going to be a lot of people happy as hell
to see you. Uncle Darius, Aunt Joanna, Momma and Daddy. Uncle Mac and Aunt
Anna." Then her eyes went wide. Holy hell, she thought, Belle and N'Ellie.
Josh looked at her, mildly surprised. "N'Ellie and Belle?" he asked before he
could stop hiimself.
"I didn't say that out loud." She glared at him then remembered her father
saying him and Zack were telepathic. "Yeah, they'll be glad to see you too."
She was careful to cover her thoughts this time. If they don't kill each other
over it. "You've missed out on a lot."
Josh nodded slightly as he drew a breath. No doubt he had.
Silently he chided himself for his slip. He really was more off than he
thought. He usually knew better than to respond to the nonverbal comments made
by others.
"Do you have...tech journals...manuals....something..." he needed to know how
far he'd been left behind. Tech first. That was still managable. He could
handle that. People...well, that was a whole other matter entirely.
"Sure," She replied with a bit of a smile. "I'll have the current civilian
issues sent down. Anything else?"
Josh hesitated a moment, then quickly shook his head, eyes still glued to the
floor.
No, there wasn't anything else he needed that she could give him.
How odd that he'd accepted the possibility of death in this mission. He knew
it was even likely, for all his insistence to the contrary. But the idea of
life so far removed from his own - away from his world, his job, his life.
That, he was having difficulty accepting. If he was no longer useful, why was
he here? He had no answer for that. He wasn't sure there was one.
Actually, he realized suddenly, there was.
It was, as Captain Hale had said earlier, a mistake.
"Alright," She replied. "if you think of something let me know. I'll be back
later to check in. Coy...er.. my specialist is still working his way through
his whatevers, I need to check in with him. Do what you need to be comfortable,
but don't leave sick bay and say off my computers."
"Yes, sir," he answered again. What else could he say? His ship was down, and
he was, apparently, out of options.
Gabriel sighed, defeated. Wherever the Banshee was, she definitely wasn't
here. But where else could she be? They knew she'd been caught up in the
wormhole. They'd presumed it was the same one his father had been lost in.
Hadn't it?
He pulled up information on all other past temporal anomolies he could find.
The answer was here. He knew it was. It had to be. But where?
One thing was plain. It wasn't here.
After giving her CMO his orders Miranda headed to the lab she'd set the kid up
in. How the hell was she going to explain this? Forget telling command, she'd
file a report give her recount when she returned, end of that. But her family?
The families of the Banshee crew? They were who she was worried about. "I
shoulda stuck to basketball." She muttered as she stepped off the turbo lift.
Making her way to Gabe's lab she walked right in. "What the hell went wrong
Coyne?"
"Nothing." he answered quietly without looking up.
He was reasonably certain he'd figured it out. Now he just had to prove it.
They would be found.
He moved to study the remote data stream yet again, still not looking up, too
engrossed in his work to focus on much else.
"It worked exactly as it was meant to." he said as much to himself as to
her. "They just weren't where and when we expected them to be, meaning one of
two things. Either their ship was somehow destroyed, or they fundamentally
altered something in the timeline creating a divergence which we now have to
account for. Since I refuse to accept posit A, I am now researching the
harmonic possibilities for posit B."
Only when he straightened and finally faced her did his nerves return.
"Sir." he added belatedly, realizing in that moment who exactly he'd been
talking to.
"Keep looking, their temporal singnature has to be out there and it would match
out own." She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. Still comin' Evvy, she
thought, I'll find ya yet. Looking up she added, "You're father's in my sick
bay. Keep him from messing with my computers."
He's really here, Gabriel thought. My father is still alive.
"Do you...um..do you realize...how much of our technical upgrades...for the
last forty years ..was ..were...are... based on his work?" Gabriel shook his
head.
Sure, he thought. And why don't I part the Red Sea for you while I'm at it?
"I'll do my best...sir.." he assured her, though he doubted even his best
would be enough. "Maybe...put him...let him ...work on his shuttle...or
something. Maybe then he'll ...you know...leave yours alone." Then he couldn't
resist asking any longer. "How is he?"
"As stubborn as a jackass in heat just like my father said he was." Miranda
replied and then smiled. "Daddy's gonna be thrilled to see him again. I wasn't
sure how to go about telling him about you or anything else, he seemed stunned
enough when he realized who the hell I was. You should go see him."
Gabriel smiled in spite of himself. "yes, sir." He responded, heading for the
door.
Halfway there, he stopped, looking back at his work. As much as he wanted to
meet his father, he still had work to do. The Banshee was still out there
somewhere. How could he stop before they were found?
Besides, suppose his dad didn't want to meet him? As Annabelle so was fond of
pointing out, he wasn't even supposed to exist. Was he?
"Go on," Miranda said softly. "We're watching things from the bridge, a few
minutes won't harm anything. I know it must be scary as hell, meeting him for
the first time and all, but he's your father Gabriel. Ain't a damned thing in
this galaxy going to keep me from Evvy when we find Banshee, don't let fear
keep you from him."
Gabriel nodded slightly. "You're right...of course. Thank you." he said
quietly. Gathering all of his courage then, he headed off to meet his father.
---------------------------------
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