<SNIP>

Temporal mechanics was never a subject that Captain Glen had been especially proficient in, he had learned what he knew now about it by experience, ‘on the job’, but if M’Mera and Rana were both correct, then this multi-phasic anchor lock did not appear to be an act of aggression, but more like assistance to prevent the Merrimack from shifting through time involuntarily. The Sharian Dominium were certainly difficult to read or comprehend; they seemed very severe and intense, but that could merely be the result of the Universal Translator rather than their demeanor. Holding the Merrimack within this “everywhere anytime, all at once” state might just be their way of trying to help them. The instruction to observe and remain still, and words such as “incursion” or “removal”, those might be some friendly advice rather than the dire warning threat that it had appeared to be. The “lock” didn’t appear to be doing the Merrimack any harm, although Glen was less sure about the fractured space-time continuum that surrounded them within The Caradthian Expanse. Despite what the Sharian had said, he thought that such gravitic distortions within the weft and warp of the fabric of the universe could not be good, whether it was deliberate or beyond his comprehension. They had created subspace rifts and areas of instability throughout these Sectors that Glen would compare to the three-dimensional rubble and scars left after an exchange of weapons.

“The normal four dimensions of vectored space-time within the Caradthian Expanse have been rendered impassable as a result of your activity here,” Glen explained to the Sharian. “You are correct when you point out that we do not comprehend how this is an advantage. To our way of thinking, and to most beings that we have encountered, no longer having any vectored space would be considered an act of malicious destruction or a scorched planet tactic. So, excuse our ignorance, but could you clarify what you hope to achieve here?”

Even though time on the bridge seemed to stretch out and slow down, nothing of the sort was truly happening. It was a psychological trick that happened from fear and trauma. While the Shiarians controlled the room and the Starfleet officers tried to comprehend their situation, Zavey continued to run scans at her station. So far, the intruders hadn’t honed in on her actions, so she continued to unobtrusively order tests that she hoped would help explain what was happening to the Merrimack. The first scan was a Chroniton Phase Differential, done in hopes of learning if the ship was ahead, behind, or split across time. The second, a Multi-Phase Sensor Sweep. It would tell her if they were in multiple phase states or positions simultaneously. The last one of the batch was an Aperture Harmonic Resonance Scan, which analysed repeating energy patterns to determine if the anomaly was structured or controlled. Was it the Caradthian Expanse keeping them out or was it the Shiarians?

The answer did not arrive as a single revelation—but as a convergence. At the auxiliary station, M’Mera’s console shifted once more. The alert did not clear. It refined itself.

MULTI-PHASIC ANCHOR — LOCK STABLE
ANCHOR FUNCTION: CONTAINMENT / SYNCHRONIZATION
DRIFT PREVENTION: ACTIVE

A new line resolved beneath it—quiet, clinical, and far more urgent:
TEMPORAL DIVERGENCE (UNANCHORED PROJECTION): CRITICAL — 42 SECONDS

At Science, Zavey’s scans completed—and, for the first time, they held steady long enough to
mean something. The Merrimack was not in one moment. It was in several. Layered fractions a second apart—held together only by the anchor now gripping them from outside their own control. The multi-phase sweep confirmed it—crew, consoles, even the air itself were beginning to register across overlapping states. And the harmonic resonance—that was the key. The Aperture pulsed with a precise, repeating frequency. The same frequency threaded through Shiarian armor. And now faint, but unmistakably through the Merrimack.

Across the bridge, systems no longer simply conflicted. They began to pair. At Ops, dual inputs—Federation and Shiarian—stopped opposing each other and instead resolved into similar outcomes.

At Engineering, M’Mera’s console opened something new. A shared interface. It did not accept commands in the traditional sense—but responded to modulation. The anchor, tethering the Merrimack could not be disengaged but it could be adjusted.
At Helm, velocity was zero. Vector was absent. Instead, multiple possible states flickered into view. The ship could not move as it was anchored. But it could still become.

Taruun observed the crew reading their consoles and said, “You are diverging.”

M’Mera’s display rendered a projection which she put up on the main viewer: The Merrimack—fractured. And beside it—
The Merrimack—held together. The difference was coherence. The anchor was not holding them back. It was holding them together.
Taruun’s voice continued “You may resist or you may adapt.” He looked around the bridge then straight at the Captain again, “Or you may fail to remain.”
And for the first time—
the crew could choose what happens next.

At the mention of harmonics Stella’s ears perked up. Now they were talking about something she knew about. If they were being held or threatened by harmonics, she could put an end to that pretty quick if she were given enough power to her external speakers. Or perhaps to set up enough power for a large explosion close to or in the center of the waves. At this point she had lost interest in what sort of magic stunts these overgrown crayfish had. So, typing at her keyboard quickly as she could she sent the idea to Zavey asking her what she thought about the idea and sent it to her station.

This dichotomy was totally alien and most confusing to Captain Glen. In one reality he was speaking with the Sharian, asking him a direct question. In another he was ignored, the way one might ignore an annoying insect. The display that M’Mera had projected now showed two outcomes only; and such a duality was improvement at least. A divergent fractured Merrimack sat alongside a complete ship, one in step with the Sharian vessel. The Sharians were clearly asking them to make some choice between the only two options left available. Glen thought that the choice was easy; only one choice was aligned with their mission objectives, but he knew so little about the physics here, or the long-term implications of making that choice that he really needed the input of his CSO and COS on this one. Yet, they had no time to make impact assessments of the choices, nor did they know if the choice made would be irreversible. Meanwhile, it seemed that Lt. Gagnon might be independently making that choice for them all - well so be it!

Elyss received the inquiry from Stella and thought about it quickly. Her fingers raced across the keyboard. /\We’re out of time. Go for it./\ She wasn’t sure it would work but their window of decision making had run out and they needed to do something. If they did nothing? They probably wouldn’t exist long enough to regret it.

“I have nothing further to add, sir. This is outside my primary discipline. I recommend we proceed with the assessments of the Chief Science Officer and Chief Engineer—current conditions suggest we have limited options.”

“For all of their abruptness and lack of communication, my gut still tells me that the Sharians are trying to help us?” mused Captain Glen. “However, I trust the advice of my crew and Gagnon was totally correct in her earlier reasoning.”

Even so, the Captain would think that the idea of sending out an explosive noise waveform (however that was enabled) would sound like something that the Sharians might take to be a threat, and he had only just managed them to turn down those threats a notch or two. And whether it was also a threat, or simply good advice, the idea of “not remaining.” well, that didn’t seem a very wise option to follow either. So, he would continued to have some strong personal reservations had he known what Gagnon was instructed by Zavey to go ahead with. M’Mera and Singh were clearly still thinking the whole thing over.

Stella reading the message from Zavey nodded and began to tap her keyboard. She began to set up what she thought would be an end to their problems. A nice, really cute little ELF waveform. An extra low frequency wave sent out with a bit of a kick behind it should interrupt any other waves causing the harmonic and hopefully her fingers and tapped the send command. cause the whole thing to collapse which would just leave super gravity to worry about. Now if the computer would accept her send commands, she would be alright. She crossed her fingers then and pressed the send button.

The moment the command was sent, the universe reacted.

At Communications, Stella’s console did not immediately confirm transmission. Instead, the command echoed—once, then again—before pairing with something else in the system. Her ELF waveform did not simply broadcast outward; it split, mirrored, and reformed within the dual-command pathways already threading through the ship. What left the Merrimack was not a single signal, but a perfectly synchronized harmonic pair—her original wave and an inverted counterpart generated by the Shiarian influence.

At Science, Zavey’s displays surged with data. The Aperture did not collapse under the interference—it responded. The harmonic resonance she had been tracking expanded suddenly, revealing itself not as a single frequency but as a layered structure of nested harmonics. Complex. Ordered. Intentional. Stella’s signal had not disrupted the system—it had been absorbed into it.

Across the ship, the effect was immediate and deeply disorienting. There was no tremor, no physical jolt—only a subtle but profound shift. For a fraction of a second, every member of the crew experienced a duality of existence: two positions, two moments, slightly out of sync with one another. A step taken twice. A breath begun and completed before it had fully started.

At Helm, the display transformed. Where once there had been a cascade of possible states, now there was collapse—order emerging from chaos. Hundreds of potential trajectories reduced to dozens, then to only a few, each one distinct and mutually exclusive.

At the auxiliary station, M’Mera’s projection shifted rapidly. The fractured Merrimack stabilized—then destabilized again. The two outcomes she had displayed moments earlier no longer remained separate. They began to overlap, their boundaries blurring as if both realities were attempting to assert themselves at once.

At Ops, the system struggled to reconcile the growing complexity. Federation commands, Shiarian inputs, and now the Merrimack’s own harmonic signal fed into a single operational layer. Control no longer belonged to one source or another—it had become a negotiation, a dynamic resolution of competing influences.

In Sickbay, bio-monitors spiked. Neural activity across the crew fluctuated wildly, slipping out of sync and snapping back again. The human mind strained against the pressure of perceiving more than one temporal state at once, held together only by the narrowing band of coherence the anchor still maintained.

On the bridge, the Shiarians reacted.

For the first time, their control faltered.

The third officer’s form flickered violently, splitting across multiple positions before collapsing back into a single, unstable presence. What had once been precise and controlled now showed signs of disruption. Weapons Master T’korr Hakis moved again, but this time Tactical registered it—not perfectly, but enough. For a brief instant, his position aligned with the sensors’ prediction, as though the advantage he held was slipping.

At the center of it all, Over-Captain Vreth’kan Taruun changed. The bioluminescent patterns across his armor flared brightly, then wavered as Stella’s waveform interfered with their precise rhythm. His voice, when it came, faltered—not in translation, but in phase.

“You introduce dissonance.”

At Science, Zavey understood immediately. The ELF burst had not broken the harmonic structure—it had forced interaction between two systems that were never meant to compete. The Shiarian-controlled field and the Merrimack’s interference were now locked in dynamic opposition, their harmonics clashing and reinforcing in equal measure.

At Engineering, M’Mera’s console blared a new alert: MULTI-PHASIC ANCHOR — STABILITY FLUCTUATING. COHERENCE BAND: NARROWING. The projection on the main viewer updated again, the two versions of the Merrimack no longer separate possibilities but overlapping states, each threatening to overwrite the other.

“Ssirr! We arre lossing the anchorrr! At leasst I think we arrre… I am not a sscientisst!” She growled as she looked up at the Shiarian’s again. This was all their fault!

Taruun stepped forward, and this time his movement resolved cleanly to every eye on the bridge. His gaze locked onto Glen, sharper now, carrying a weight that had not been present before.

“You do not understand the threshold you disturb.”

The Aperture pulsed in response, brighter and closer than before, its structured energy now visibly interacting with the ship. At Helm, the remaining trajectories collapsed further—two final outcomes stabilizing on the display. At Science, the harmonic scan simplified into opposing forces: Shiarian control and Merrimack interference.

At Ops, systems began to resolve again, but not cleanly—each command now carrying consequences that extended beyond a single outcome. At Engineering, the shared interface surged under M’Mera’s touch, no longer passive. For the first time, she was not simply observing the anchor—she was influencing it.

Taruun’s voice steadied, though the strain beneath it remained. “You force convergence.”

The projection on the main viewer sharpened into two clear states.

In one, the Merrimack aligned fully with the Shiarian harmonic structure—stable, coherent, preserved, but no longer entirely within its original frame of reality.

In the other, the interference escalated beyond control. The anchor collapsed. The ship did not explode—it fractured, its existence unraveling across time until nothing remained that could be called whole.

The weight of the moment settled across the bridge. Every system, every reading, every breath aligned into a single point of decision.

For the first time, the Shiarians were no longer fully in control.

And for the first time, the Merrimack’s fate rested entirely with her crew.

The Aperture pulsed again—waiting.

It was then that Rana had had enough. He could be wrong. He probably would be. They might not all live another hour longer. And even if they did, he might be thrown into a brig somewhere for insubordination. But he had stood mute for too long. Even though he only understood about one quarter of what was going on he stepped toward the leader of the Shiarians and spoke in a calm, clear and determined voice.

See here sir.” He began. ” I don’t know nor understand what your game is here, but I don’t see any reason for it. our captain has explained our mission to you. And when we entered the aperture, we were right behind you. You didn’t know we were back there. If we had had any intention of attacking you, we would have then. We told our comms office to try to contact you per our first contact procedures. We endeavored to make contact with you and proceed in a civilized and friendly fashion. For all our attempts to be peaceful toward you all we get is to have our ship boarded and our systems scanned. And now you are threatening us in ways that we don’t understand. Speak clear and to the point sir. Let us not have any misunderstanding about anything here at all. For to your surprise the ending of any such misunderstanding could wind up poorly for both of us.”

Rana Singh Number One

Though Thalos understood the XO’s intent, he could not fully reconcile it with his own assessment of the situation. There was a fine line between strength and provocation—and they were walking it.

His eyes flicked briefly to the tactical display.

Unknown adversary.
Superior technology.
Incomplete intelligence.

Not ideal conditions.

His antennae shifted forward slightly as the thought settled.

Antagonising a force they did not yet understand—particularly one that appeared technologically superior—carried risks he would not normally accept without clearer advantage. In the Imperial Guard, such a move would have required overwhelming readiness… or absolute necessity.

Here, they had neither.

Still, he said nothing.

The Captain and XO had the broader picture, and it was not his place to undermine that on the bridge without decisive cause. Discipline held firm, even as caution lingered beneath the surface.

For now, he would observe… and prepare.

If the situation escalated, Thalos intended to ensure the USS Merrimack was not caught unready.

Lieutenant Thalos ch’Ravik
Chief Of Security
USS Merrimack

“I’m a pilot not a physicist!” exclaimed the Captain.

While he had the utmost trust in the decisions and actions of his staff and crew, he had little idea at all what was going on here. He would have agreed with the unspoken thoughts of Thalos; that Rana’s antagonism to the Sharians without a full and complete intelligence of the situation was dangerous. In fact, it sparked as an overconfidence of the kind about which Rana himself had just a few minutes earlier warned the Captain. Nor did this feeling of disorientation help with the old thought processing. All the while, what drove the Captain most was his wish just to not to screw up this mission as they had with the Bolay First Contact. If the Sharians were railed into anger then the Merrimack itself could probably escape the Caradthian Expanse, but the mission wouldn’t escape failure.

Captain Glen needed an expert opinion on the Bridge.

=/\= Lieutenant Astrid Murdock. Please come to the Bridge. ASAP. =/\= Glen called for the officer he knew was familiar with all things concerning Astronavigation and Warp Field Dynamics.

• Glen, CO

While Rana’s final reaction seemed not totally thought through it was mostly the end result of careful observation. There was nothing he had said to these beings that >>wasn’t true. They had indeed been behind them. They could have opened fire but instead they had tried to contact them. And for their efforts they had been boarded and >>had their ship taken over by force. But then he saw that these creatures were not God-like. The suite they wore looked more like environmental suits than they were >>armor. What civilization at their level would wear armor anyway? Then there was the aperture itself. Was it living? Were these creatures aligned with it or was it something >>else altogether? Then there was the fact that they had stood about on the bridge so long as if they didn’t really know what they should do. Were they confused? Or indeed >>were they not even here and were instead some three-dimensional constructs. And not a very good one at that considering the way they kept shifting and moving. And of >>course he was angry. He didn’t to see anything bad to happen to the Merrimack at the hands of creatures with poor verbal skills and bad at making decisions. They had their weaknesses as everything did.

Rana Singh Number One

This mission might be the strangest Glen had ever taken on, and he felt out of his depth. He was used to making decisions based upon science and verified facts, and all he had to go on here were beliefs, emotions and gut wrenching feelings.

The lift doors opened and Astrid appeared on the Bridge as requested. While she had enjoyed the mapping of the Expanse, the exercise had become rather repetitive and tedious while it had lasted and she was glad that it had been paused now (or was it finished?) She acknowledged the presence of the Chief Engineer and her Department Head, and then went to the Captain. “Sir?”

“Lt. Murdock!” replied the Captain. “You and Lt. M’Mera are the ship’s best experts on astronavigation, spatial geometry and Warp field dynamics. It is clear that to make any good decision here, I… we need more information.. a full intelligence of the situation at hand. Can you give me any insights into this situation we are experiencing here? M’Mera, your own insights are very welcome too.”

Glen continued, “Explain to me in simple terms that an Academy student could understand. How many dimensions of space and time are we being spread across here? I vaguely remember something in the academy about Calabi-Yau manifolds, Kähler manifolds, K2 surfaces, mirror symmetry, vanishing first Churn classes and Ricci-flats, but it was all a very long time ago. Are those things relevant here?”

Glen continued, “In your assessment, is the ‘aperture’ a physical effect, or is it a living thing itself? Is it a result of the manipulation and unfurling of the dimensions of time and space by the Sharians, or is it what the Sharians are harnessing somehow to actually cause the unfurling? If it is living is being coerced?”

Glen concluded, “We seem to have been given only two options here from a multiverse of paths, but it is is still only their way, or the highway! Do we want to follow them into wherever, whenever and however they exist? Or, do we want to get the hell out of here as quick as possible… to ‘diverge’ from their path as we appear to be doing now with Lt. Gagnon’s harmonics? If we did follow them, I really need to know whether we can ever get back out home again. If we remain where we are now, ‘unanchored’ can the Merrimack stand the gravimetric forces now encroaching upon us from the ‘aperture’?”

OOC: GM?

• Glen, CO