TIMELESS
Episode 100
|
IN THE FUTURE.
Chakotay and Kim beam inside Voyager. Chakotay goes to the Bridge where he finds the dead and frozen bodies of Janeway and Seven. He contacts Tessa Omond in the Delta Flyer and orders her to transport Seven's body there. Meanwhile Kim reaches Sickbay and activates the Doctor, who is bewildered by the state of the ship. Kim wants his mobile emitter so that they can remove the Doctor from Voyager. As Chakotay arrives, the Doctor demands an explanation, and Chakotay gives him one: "We're here to change history." FLASHBACK TO THE PAST.
When Paris finds a phase variance in the threshold that causes the slipstream to become unstable, Kim says it is probably just a sensor glitch, but to try and reassure Paris he suggests they carry out some tests on the Holodeck simulations. After 23 holodeck simulations and 23 disasters they report the phase variance problem. A meeting of senior staff is held in Engineering. Kim proposes that he flies the Delta Flyer a few seconds ahead of Voyager in the slipstream, to "ride the rapids" i.e. calculate the phase corrections and transmit them to Voyager. Janeway tells him to give her details within an hour and she will decide.
When Chakotay arrives in Janeway's quarters for dinner (she has cooked her mother's recipe, vegetable biriyani), she informs him that she has decided to adopt Kim's plan. Chakotay warns her of the risks but she says they have been in the Delta Quadrant too long. Chakotay buries his reservations and supports her, and she assigns Chakotay to the Delta Flyer with Kim. IN THE FUTURE.
IN THE FUTURE.
IN THE PAST, NOW THE NEW PRESENT.
In the Messhall, Janeway informs Kim that they have a guardian angel: his name is Harry Kim. She tells him that a log entry emanating from the future was found encoded in the transmission to Seven: a message "from Harry Kim...to Harry Kim." She leaves and Kim reads the video message: it is himself, telling him that he made a mistake which cost the lives of the crew, but that if he is reading this, "it means that all of that has changed. You owe me one."
|
It is fifteen years in the future. Chakotay and Kim beam onto an ice planet and locate the site of USS Voyager, which crashed here fifteen years ago killing all on board. The entire ship is entombed in a glacier.
In Engineering, the crew celebrate the completed installation of Voyager's quantum slipstream drive, adapted from Arturis's ship [#94 Hope and Fear] and with benemite crystals at the heart of the system. Torres breaks a bottle of champagne on the railing to great applause. The next day they will set course and arrive home in the Alpha Quadrant. Janeway invites Chakotay to dinner. In practising her social skills, Seven has imbibed too much (one glass of champagne) and the Doctor leads her to Sickbay.
Aboard the Delta Flyer, Chakotay and Kim explain these past events to the Doctor. Completing the story, they tell him that Kim transmitted the wrong phase variance. This knocked Voyager out of the slipstream and forced Janeway to make an emergency landing on the ice planet which killed the crew on impact. Kim bitterly explains that he and Chakotay reached Earth, were celebrated and given medals, and Admiral McIntyre even wanted Kim to marry his daughter, but Starfleet gave up searching for Voyager after 4 years despite their pleas, saying there was a "low probability of success". As soon as they heard about the Borg temporal transmitter salvaged by Starfleet from the wreckage of a Borg cube in the Beta Quadrant, they realised they could change history: by transmitting the correct phase variance they could bring all the Voyager crew home to the Alpha Quadrant safely. Chakotay and Kim stole the Borg temporal transmitter, and stole the Delta Flyer "right out of a Federation shipyard", and with the Doctor's help they can use the Borg interplexing beacon inside Seven's head to send a new set of phase corrections back in time to Voyager: the temporal transmitter is to send the signal back through time, the interlink frequency from the interplexing beacon will facilitate the transmission, and Seven's chronometric node will pinpoint the exact time of death so that they can send the signal to arrive shortly before it.
Tessa Omond arrives to say that she has put the Delta Flyer in a low orbit and remodulated the shields but they have only six hours "if we're lucky" before Starfleet find them: Kim and Chakotay are "the galaxy's most wanted... Two counts of high treason, and conspiracy to violate the temporal prime directive". Kim tells the Doctor that Tessa and Chakotay are lovers. Tessa and Chakotay beam back to Voyager to download Voyager's sensor logs, in order for their transmission back in time to be sent to the correct place. They find that the logs contain Janeway's last entry in which she commends the crew for their valour and Chakotay is moved. When Tessa asks for a tour of the ship Chakotay says there is no time, adding jocularly "Besides, I left my quarters a mess." Chakotay feels last minute jitters - he is in love with Tessa and can think only that he will lose her, but she helps him to firm his resolve. At that moment a Galaxy-class starship arrives, searching for them. They now have very little time in which to put their plan into effect.
The captain of the starship, the USS Challenger, is Geordi La Forge. He hails Chakotay, who decides to accept the transmission as it could buy the conspirators some time. Captain La Forge tries to persuade Chakotay to surrender: if they hand over the transmitter and stand down their vessel, the charges of conspiracy will be dropped, but Tessa responds that that is not much of an offer, for if they succeed this timeline will not have existed. When Chakotay says that he wants to save the lives of 150 people, La Forge says he might be doing the same in Chakotay's place, but he has his own crew to think of, "not to mention fifteen years of history". They wish each other luck, and La Forge opens fire on the Delta Flyer. The Delta Flyer is no match for the Galaxy-class starship. Meanwhile Kim completes a video message to a friend. He and the Doctor work: the Doctor on Seven's Borg implants, Kim on the Borg temporal transmitter. As soon as the Doctor pinpoints Seven's time of death, they use the temporal transmitter to send the phase corrections four minutes prior to Voyager's crash.
Kim realises his phase corrections did not work, because they are still there and nothing has changed. USS Challenger locks onto the Delta Flyer with a tractor beam but Chakotay tells Tessa to send a plasma surge up the tractor beam, which disengages them, but overloads the EPS conduits - now the Delta Flyer's warp-core will breach within moments. Kim panics because he the phase corrections he sent should have worked and he cannot recalculate the phase corrections in the few moments they have left. 
Chakotay declines La Forge's offer to beam them out of the Delta Flyer. The Doctor has to shout at Kim to make him pull himself together. The Doctor suggests that if Kim cannot bring Voyager's crew safely home, he could at least send them a warning. Kim realises he can send a phase correction which will disperse the slipstream entirely - Voyager will not make it home but the crew's lives will be saved. Then the power starts to fail and Kim uses the Doctor's mobile emitter as an emergency power supply. He manages to transmit the phase correction, just as the Delta Flyer explodes.
Seven receives the transmitted phase corrections via her cranial implant. Janeway tells her to input them, and both Voyager and the Delta Flyer are thrown out of the slipstream, erasing the future we have seen. Bewildered, Kim reports that he never sent any phase corrections to Seven.
In her captain's log, Janeway reports that she has ordered the slipstream drive to be dismantled. Their ride was short but knocked nearly ten years off the journey home.
T H E E N D
|
