Vadia Part IV - Doing the Time Warp, Again

Posted on Thu Mar 12th, 2026 @ 10:20pm by Captain Rhenora Kaylen & Commander Jennifer Baldric & Commander Jenna Ramthorne & Commander Dean House & Lieutenant Commander Thriss Kla'ren & Lieutenant JG Jacob Rosen & Lieutenant JG Rowan Hale & Lieutenant JG Olivia Voight & Lieutenant JG T'Lar & Lieutenant Commander Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell & Lieutenant Commander Rynn Upland

2,449 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Beholder
Location: Vadia IX / Skygowen
Timeline: Current

USS Sunfire Hangar Bay

The Order was given.

From the outside the USS Sunfire looked wounded. Ionized gas spilled from the dorsal vents in ragged clouds, glowing blue against the darkness while the great Akira-class carrier drifted with the slow, awkward roll of a ship that had lost helm control. The smuggler vessel took the bait exactly the way Jacob had predicted. Long range sensors painted the silhouette closing fast, a predatory wedge of reinforced hull plating and oversized weapon emitters pushing straight through with the confidence of a ship that believed the kill had already been made.

Inside the hangar bay Rosa watched the tactical repeater fill with targeting telemetry from the bridge. Her fingers moved with practiced ease across the launch console while the squadron network synchronized with the carrier’s fire control grid.

“Red Squadron,” she said across the channel, voice calm and steady. “You’re with me on the spear point. Tight formation on launch. Keep your eyes open and trust your instruments.”

Five Peregrine interceptors answered in overlapping confirmations. The launch timer hit zero. “Red Squadron,” Rosa said softly, “launch!”

Magnetic clamps released with a heavy metallic thump and the first interceptor shot down the launch rail in a burst of white engine fire. Rosa’s fighter followed half a heartbeat later, the hangar mouth flashing past her canopy as the stars exploded into view. Her Peregrine rolled cleanly into open space, impulse engines climbing toward combat output as the rest of Red Squadron snapped into formation around her.

The smuggler ship loomed ahead, larger than expected and bristling with weapon mounts that rotated toward the approaching fighters.

“Contacts hot,” Red Two reported. “We've been spotted.”

“They always do eventually,” Rosa replied. “Stay loose and keep moving.”

Blue Squadron launched behind them, their engines flaring bright as they curved outward toward the port side intercept net.

The smuggler vessel opened fire first. A heavy disruptor beam lashed across space, missing Red Three by meters as the fighter rolled hard and dove beneath the attack vector.

“Easy there,” Rosa said, guiding her Peregrine through a climbing spiral. “They’re trying to pin you with the main battery. Don’t give them a straight line.”

Inside her mind the symbiont stirred. Their weapons cycle slowly Coy observed with quiet patience. They rely on intimidation as much as precision.

Handzon’s voice followed with amused approval. Big guns and bad manners. I knew smugglers like this. They scare merchants into surrender and call it victory.

Rosa angled her fighter toward the enemy vessel’s forward arc while the targeting reticle locked onto one of the external turret mounts. “Red Squadron break left and right,” she ordered. “Make them chase you.”

The formation scattered instantly. Five interceptors split into diverging attack paths that forced the smuggler’s gunners to choose targets. Disruptor fire streaked wildly as the larger ship attempted to track the agile fighters weaving around its hull.

Rosa dove straight through the confusion. Her pulse phasers opened up in controlled bursts that stitched across the enemy turret housing. The armored mount shattered under the concentrated fire, spinning away from the hull in a cloud of sparks and debris.

“Red One scoring hits,” Red Four called. “Nice shot, Commander.”

“Keep the compliments for after we’re done,” Rosa replied. “Red Three swing high and harass their dorsal guns.”

Behind her the Sunfire came to bear and finally joined the fight.

USS Sunfire Bridge

Jacob watched the tactical display for the briefest of moments before looking back to the bridge crew. "Cut off the venting if you please Ensign Gonzalez, thank you. Helm break off on heading 190 mark 2, let's get some distance. Weps, ready phasers with targeting data sent to all fighters. No green on greens today."

He returned to the Command chair, settling in with a slight hesitation. Jacob had been walking around the bridge, preferring to stand, realizing now that he felt uncomfortable in the chair. He felt that he didn't deserve it but realized now that wasn't the point. Someone needed to sit there, and at least for now he was that someone. He learned that this wasn't a matter of deserving, and maybe that's why he froze back against the Dominion.

Turning to T'Lar he found himself envying, ever so slightly, how effortless she made an outward calm look. You could learn so much from the crew around you just by paying attention.

The Sunfire rolled and shot away before coming about, its phaser banks bearing down as shards of fiery light upon its now outnumbered prey. The hunter had become the hunted.

T'Lar for her part gripped the arms of the chair in an almost imperceptible death grip. The ship's inertial dampeners did an excellent job of not throwing her out of her perch, but did nothing to assuage the visual cues of the massively tilting horizon as the Sunfire juked this way and that in it's firey recompense of the enemy ship's affront to their dignity. She fought down nausea, swallowing bitter bile all while maintaining an outwardly stoic affect. She would not allow herself to vomit, even if it meant choking to death on it.


ET1

Jenna’s hand slammed down on the control. The inverter roared to life with a metallic howl as the tachyon canisters discharged into the heart of the conduit. A ring of pale blue light burst outward from the injector assembly, spiraling into the ley line’s rushing current. For a heartbeat the two forces collided like opposing tides, then the tachyons threaded themselves through the torrent, twisting the rushing stream back upon itself. The Möbius inversion caught the wave mid-charge, the energy folding with a violent snap that rippled outward across the valley.

The ground convulsed beneath their boots. A thunderous crack rolled across Skygowen as the inverted current surged. Equipment frames rattled violently and one of the portable monitor housings toppled, its glass display shattering against the rock with a sharp burst of glittering fragments. The sky itself seemed to pulse as the immense ribbon of energy along the ley channel warped, bent, and then violently recoiled. What had been an onrushing tidal surge suddenly reversed direction, the enormous wave of power whipping backward along the line like a snapped whipcord, racing now back toward the distant world of Vadia IX.

For a moment there was only the fading rumble of the earth settling and the soft whine of instruments stabilizing. Leo lifted his tricorder slowly, scanning the newly inverted stream as the readings normalized into a clean, accelerating return flow. One thick brow lifted with a crooked, satisfied grin. “Well now,” he said, glancing toward the blazing ribbon retreating into the horizon. “Do you think they know what’s coming at them?”

Jenna watched the receding energy surge tear across the distant hills, the glow reflecting in the lenses of her tricorder. She exhaled once, tension easing from her shoulders. “I don’t know,” she admitted quietly. Then she closed the tricorder with a decisive snap and allowed herself the smallest, knowing smile. “But I suspect they’re about to find out.”


ET2

The ERI unit gave a soft harmonic thrum as its field regulators settled into the steady rhythm of the ley line current. Bonnie watched the readouts with the careful satisfaction of someone who had spent too many sleepless hours persuading math and metal to cooperate.

Her tricorder chirped again. Bonnie tilted her head and leaned closer to the screen. The incoming wave signature from Skygowen had appeared along the subspace layer exactly on schedule. For a moment she simply watched it travel the line, a bright ribbon of energy racing through folded space toward Vadia IX. Then the numbers refreshed. Her stomach tightened.

"That’s odd,” she murmured, thumb tapping the sensor sweep again. The amplitude climbed higher with each update. “Shit,” she whispered, voice thinning as the math clarified. “That’s... more than we asked for.”

"We must’ve built it too well,” she said weakly, the thought escaping before she could stop it. The display refreshed once more, the energy spike sharpening into a clean line that pointed directly at their location. Her pulse jumped to match it, her palms had gone slick with sweat.

Her heart skipped, “Oh,” she breathed. “That’s... a lot of energy.” No sooner had she said it when the first indication, a low tremor rippled across the ground.

"Why does that not sound good?" Jennifer asked cautiously, moving over to where the rest of the team were as though she had half an idea of what was actually going on.

"Well, it's not bad... I mean it's not really good, but it's not bad." Bonnie rambled, her brain already in motion. She started mumbling to herself as the ground rumbling grew ever more slightly in intensity.

" Plain English it for me Bonnie, is this going to screw the plan we had?" Jennifer replied back, feeling quite unnerved by the vibrations.

Bonnie looked away from the tricorder long enough to look at Commander Baldric, the explanation spilling out quickly as the numbers kept climbing. “The wave coming back from Skygowen is carrying a lot more energy than we planned for,” she said, pointing at the display. “When it hits the Chronoton bubble it wont just pass through cleanly. That bubble is pushing time backward by about three percent, so the energy is going to pile up along the boundary.” She traced a small loop in the air with her finger.

“If I inject one more burst of tachyons right as the wave hits, the Chronoton field should twist that energy back along the ley line it came from. The energy will fold over itself and close the Möbius loop.”

“And because the Chronoton bubble bends time, that surge will push the interior backward in time a few moments, give or take, when the loop snaps into place. Just enough for everything inside to rewind along the path it already took.” Bonnie swallowed, eyes returning to the rising wave on her screen. “So we're going to give the system a second tachyon kick right before the wave arrives... and cross our fingers."

She grabbed the second canister filled with Tachyon energy and connected it to the ERI with a soft hiss of energy release. She then tapped her badge, =^= "Bonnie to Prison team. You'd better hold on, it might get a little... well, weird, in there." =^=

The rumbling began to increase, small pebbles on the ground were now vibrating visibly. She monitored the tricorder display, watching as the wave approached. At the very last second, she activated the control panel and injected the tachyons into the wave.

The tachyon stream surged from the injector and met the oncoming wave in a violent flare of cobalt light that flooded the clearing and wrapped itself around the prison like a living ribbon. The Chronoton bubble answered immediately, its faint lattice blazing into sharp visibility as the colliding energies twisted together along the boundary.

A deep, resonant pulse rolled outward through the ground, lifting dust and pebbles into brief trembling arcs while the air itself seemed to ripple in slow, overlapping layers. For a heartbeat the prison existed in several moments at once, its walls shimmering as the wave folded back along the ley line and snapped into a perfect loop.


Vadia IX - Prison - Inside the Bubble

Time froze, stopped entirely, leaving those within the bubble unaffected. They watched the Vezda freeze, suspended in mid air, then slowly they seemed to start moving in reverse.

Rowan watched the nearest Vezda carefully as it drifted backward through the air, its luminous form unwinding along the same path it had taken moments before. His tricorder chirped again, the display flickering as the chronoton readings struggled to stabilize.

“The temporal field has inverted,” he said quietly. “They are not merely frozen. They are retracing their movements.”

His eyes moved to Dean.

“Whatever you did… it’s forcing the entire event to run in reverse.”

"Now I get it" Rhenora mused, weapon trained on the now retreating Vezda. "This loop will mean they relive this period of time over and over without actually accomplishing their goal of escape." She knelt by their fallen security officer. "It doesn't look like it will reverse anything in here though, time seems to be progressing normally"

Dean shook his head. "Wasn't me. Nothing I proposed was even close to this..." motioning a hand out. "Unless they interpreted something a different way." He looked over to the Security Officer. "What if we put him outside of the bubble though."

Rowan glanced down at the fallen officer, tricorder already scanning. “That may not produce the result you’re hoping for,” he said quietly.

He looked up at Dean. “If the Vezda inside him is trapped in the loop, moving him outside the field may simply let it loose.”

"Not only that, you'll be condemning him to die over and over when the loop moves forward then reverses." Rhenora said sagely. "But what do we do? When the Vezda go back in the well then move forward again, we can probably leave, but we can't take him with us." She looked at the poor dead officer.

"I was more thinking it might give him time to...not get dead, however, I suppose you're right." Looking back to Rhenora a moment and started using the shield to dig a grave. "We've got time."

Rowan studied the tricorder readings for another moment before answering. "No,” he said quietly. “We cannot.” His gaze lingered on the fallen officer.

“If the entity remains active, removing him from the loop may release it into normal time. At that point… we lose both the host and containment.”

"So he stays... and stays dead." Something twisted in Rhenora's gut, a harsh reminder that she was ultimately responsible for this as the dead man's CO. There was nothing they could do for him, and they still needed to get off this rock themselves.

The Vezda continued to move backward, their shrieks distorted with the reversal of time. They swirled, funneling back towards the well. The relief on Batel's face was absolute as she realized soon she wouldn't have to do this anymore.

"We'll get you home...soon" Rhenora encouraged, giving the exhausted woman a squeeze on the arm. Personally she still felt like crap, little black whisps emerging when she coughed. That stuff hadn't killed Pike though, so she was hoping it wouldn't take her out either.

TBC

 

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