Running Out the Clock: Part Two
Captain Zanh
71210.14
Sountrack: Black Balloon by the Goo Goo Dolls
--=On Aertok=--
(Following Part One)
Captain Zanh
71210.14
Sountrack: Black Balloon by the Goo Goo Dolls
--=On Aertok=--
(Following Part One)
(. . .continued)
Liis' soul was completely bankrupt.
She figured that she had nothing at all left to lose, but had one more question before she signed her life away.
“Wait. What’s the catch?”
Broun and Verin exchanged glances, and she raised a doubting eyebrow. “Come on. There has to be a catch.”
“Aside from the difficulty level of the duties you’ll be asked to perform and the inherent insanity of a life within Temporal?” Broun asked. “That’s catch enough.”
“That’s not what I meant. You both know I’m ready to march into Hell itself if it means that Jariel might live. But there has to be a catch to this as far as he’s concerned. So what is it?”
“Oh, yeah. That catch.” Verin tugged on his collar. “Okay, it’s like this. Your personal history in this timeline will be wiped when you make your first jump.”
“What?” she tilted her head in curious confusion. “How?”
”The temporal mechanics of the- oh hell, we don’t have time for this.”
“You don’t have time? Now that’s ironic.”
Broun was losing patience with this situation, just as she was.“Look, it’ll be as if you never existed here. You didn’t grow up in the orphanage on Bajor, you didn’t fly as a fighter pilot, none of it happened. Or, none of it will seem to have happened to the people who knew you.”
“Everyone I’ve ever known will forget me? I'll just be. . .erased from history?”
”That’s the short version. There is good news, though.”
“Oh?”
“You won’t remember them, either. Every agent has their memory reset after returning from a jump, in order to prevent them from polluting the current timeline with information from past missions.”
Liis pondered this latest information for a moment, and decided that forgetting her past might actually be the second best benefit they had to offer. “Jariel?”
The men exchanged worried looks once again. If there were going to be a deal breaker that prevented Zanh from signing on the dotted line, this would be it.
“He won’t remember you at all.” Broun replied. “In his experience, he will never have met you.”
Liis gulped hard. She glanced over at the letter again, and realized that it didn’t matter. What good was the fact that he had known her, if he was no longer alive? If there was any chance of saving him, there was no way she could let it go.
“And if I met him somehow later, in the future, at some point? What then?”
“He’d think he was meeting you for the first time. If the memory resequencing works properly, so would you.”
“But he’ll be alive. And I might have the chance to get to know him again?”
Broun hesitated for just an instant, before finally responding in the affirmative.
“Yes.”
She’d heard enough.
She took her things from the bed and threw them into a single, small leather suitcase. “Let’s go. I mean, I assume we are going somewhere, right?”
“Oh yes, Zanh Liis.” Just the slightest hint of a self-satisfied smile appeared on Broun’s lips. “We are going places you cannot begin to imagine yet.”
--=Flash=--
Her mind raced through years working outside the linear timeline for Temporal.
She had discovered early on that her mind was not fully responding to the resequencing procedures- but she knew well enough to hide it.
She retained fragments of each mission in her memory; and kept that to herself as she did her best to fool her superiors. She suceeded too, for a long time.
By the time they began to figure it out, it was too late to terminate her career with TI- or her life.
She was already too deep undercover working on correcting “The Big One” as it was referred to in TI circles; the Mudor Filament Field fracture.
She couldn’t believe it when they basically restored her original life’s history to the official record, saying she was a war orphan and had been a test pilot. But that was her ticket to getting assigned where she needed to be, and so they did.
Liis knew that in past arcs of history, she had met Jariel under several different sets of circumstances. Each time they had parted. She tried to figure it all out, but the memories were maddeningly sketchy.
She knew one thing for certain, though. She had always met him when she’d had reason to be on Bajor, never anywhere else.
Until 2379.
--=Flash=--
"First Officer's personal log...Stardate 90713.1600. How the hell did this happen? I thought as long as I stayed away from Bajor there would be no prayer of meeting him. Of having to look into his eyes again and know that he doesn't remember me."
Liis leaned against the wall, sliding down it slowly and sinking to the deck.
"Knowing that if I tell him anything, I could endanger everything I have worked so hard to build. Or jeopardize the future that we were supposed to have, independent of each other.
"Or could it be that we were supposed to meet like this all along, here on the Independence, and it would be wrong of me to pretend that I don't know everything there is to know about him and how I never stopped-"
Rage swelled within her. She seethed with uncontrollable anger at life, the universe at large, and mostly at Temporal Investigations for putting her in this position.
She instructed the computer to stop logging.
She stood up and moved to the panel beside the bed. She tapped the interface and music began to play. She turned the volume up to full, and listened to the words as she walked from object to object in her room.
She picked each item up, one by one. Each carried a memory of him that she didn't want to be having. Gifts he'd given her, in many different ways and places.
Her pasts were colliding in her head, and pushed her emotions to the point where she could no longer stand the strain. Something inside of her snapped.
Above the music, the sound of glass shattering and the dull thud of objects bouncing off the walls echoed beyond the confines of her quarters. She was out of her mind with despair and wanted to destroy the memories that now threatened to destroy her.
Was it really the memories that were angering and frightening her? Or was it the fear of facing a future she had no control over?
"COMMANDER ZANH!"
She jumped back a step, and looked up to see a security detail standing in her doorway.
She realized that the music had stopped and the only sound in the room was of their boots grinding the broken glass at their feet into the carpeting.
"When you didn't respond to your com signal we were afraid that you were in danger," the lead officer said, as he looked around and realized that she had trashed her own quarters. "Do you require assistance?"
“No.” Liis looked up at him with bloodshot eyes. “Get out.”
--=End Flashback=--
Liis was brought back from the past for the last time as she heard an insistent beeping sound, so loud that it hurt her ears.
Was it her compass going off? Where had it gotten to?
She felt so cold now. Numb.
“We don’t have any other choice,” The Ferengi doctor advised Speeg and Spilva. “She won’t make it. If we put her into stasis at least it won’t be a lie when we tell the Romulans that she is alive.”
“But how do we explain?” Speeg worried.
“We tell them that she was too difficult to contain.” Spilva grunted, knowing that this was more truth than fiction. “That she wouldn’t stop trying to escape. If they know her history as well as they say that they do, they will believe us. Put her in.”
The doctor nodded, and a moment later, Zanh Liis was hoisted from the operating table and placed into a stasis chamber.
The clear dome slid closed above her.
As the hum of the unit seemed to envelope her, all of her pain, her thoughts, and her memories came to a peaceful, quiet end.
Liis' soul was completely bankrupt.
She figured that she had nothing at all left to lose, but had one more question before she signed her life away.
“Wait. What’s the catch?”
Broun and Verin exchanged glances, and she raised a doubting eyebrow. “Come on. There has to be a catch.”
“Aside from the difficulty level of the duties you’ll be asked to perform and the inherent insanity of a life within Temporal?” Broun asked. “That’s catch enough.”
“That’s not what I meant. You both know I’m ready to march into Hell itself if it means that Jariel might live. But there has to be a catch to this as far as he’s concerned. So what is it?”
“Oh, yeah. That catch.” Verin tugged on his collar. “Okay, it’s like this. Your personal history in this timeline will be wiped when you make your first jump.”
“What?” she tilted her head in curious confusion. “How?”
”The temporal mechanics of the- oh hell, we don’t have time for this.”
“You don’t have time? Now that’s ironic.”
Broun was losing patience with this situation, just as she was.“Look, it’ll be as if you never existed here. You didn’t grow up in the orphanage on Bajor, you didn’t fly as a fighter pilot, none of it happened. Or, none of it will seem to have happened to the people who knew you.”
“Everyone I’ve ever known will forget me? I'll just be. . .erased from history?”
”That’s the short version. There is good news, though.”
“Oh?”
“You won’t remember them, either. Every agent has their memory reset after returning from a jump, in order to prevent them from polluting the current timeline with information from past missions.”
Liis pondered this latest information for a moment, and decided that forgetting her past might actually be the second best benefit they had to offer. “Jariel?”
The men exchanged worried looks once again. If there were going to be a deal breaker that prevented Zanh from signing on the dotted line, this would be it.
“He won’t remember you at all.” Broun replied. “In his experience, he will never have met you.”
Liis gulped hard. She glanced over at the letter again, and realized that it didn’t matter. What good was the fact that he had known her, if he was no longer alive? If there was any chance of saving him, there was no way she could let it go.
“And if I met him somehow later, in the future, at some point? What then?”
“He’d think he was meeting you for the first time. If the memory resequencing works properly, so would you.”
“But he’ll be alive. And I might have the chance to get to know him again?”
Broun hesitated for just an instant, before finally responding in the affirmative.
“Yes.”
She’d heard enough.
She took her things from the bed and threw them into a single, small leather suitcase. “Let’s go. I mean, I assume we are going somewhere, right?”
“Oh yes, Zanh Liis.” Just the slightest hint of a self-satisfied smile appeared on Broun’s lips. “We are going places you cannot begin to imagine yet.”
--=Flash=--
Her mind raced through years working outside the linear timeline for Temporal.
She had discovered early on that her mind was not fully responding to the resequencing procedures- but she knew well enough to hide it.
She retained fragments of each mission in her memory; and kept that to herself as she did her best to fool her superiors. She suceeded too, for a long time.
By the time they began to figure it out, it was too late to terminate her career with TI- or her life.
She was already too deep undercover working on correcting “The Big One” as it was referred to in TI circles; the Mudor Filament Field fracture.
She couldn’t believe it when they basically restored her original life’s history to the official record, saying she was a war orphan and had been a test pilot. But that was her ticket to getting assigned where she needed to be, and so they did.
Liis knew that in past arcs of history, she had met Jariel under several different sets of circumstances. Each time they had parted. She tried to figure it all out, but the memories were maddeningly sketchy.
She knew one thing for certain, though. She had always met him when she’d had reason to be on Bajor, never anywhere else.
Until 2379.
--=Flash=--
"First Officer's personal log...Stardate 90713.1600. How the hell did this happen? I thought as long as I stayed away from Bajor there would be no prayer of meeting him. Of having to look into his eyes again and know that he doesn't remember me."
Liis leaned against the wall, sliding down it slowly and sinking to the deck.
"Knowing that if I tell him anything, I could endanger everything I have worked so hard to build. Or jeopardize the future that we were supposed to have, independent of each other.
"Or could it be that we were supposed to meet like this all along, here on the Independence, and it would be wrong of me to pretend that I don't know everything there is to know about him and how I never stopped-"
Rage swelled within her. She seethed with uncontrollable anger at life, the universe at large, and mostly at Temporal Investigations for putting her in this position.
She instructed the computer to stop logging.
She stood up and moved to the panel beside the bed. She tapped the interface and music began to play. She turned the volume up to full, and listened to the words as she walked from object to object in her room.
She picked each item up, one by one. Each carried a memory of him that she didn't want to be having. Gifts he'd given her, in many different ways and places.
Her pasts were colliding in her head, and pushed her emotions to the point where she could no longer stand the strain. Something inside of her snapped.
Above the music, the sound of glass shattering and the dull thud of objects bouncing off the walls echoed beyond the confines of her quarters. She was out of her mind with despair and wanted to destroy the memories that now threatened to destroy her.
Was it really the memories that were angering and frightening her? Or was it the fear of facing a future she had no control over?
"COMMANDER ZANH!"
She jumped back a step, and looked up to see a security detail standing in her doorway.
She realized that the music had stopped and the only sound in the room was of their boots grinding the broken glass at their feet into the carpeting.
"When you didn't respond to your com signal we were afraid that you were in danger," the lead officer said, as he looked around and realized that she had trashed her own quarters. "Do you require assistance?"
“No.” Liis looked up at him with bloodshot eyes. “Get out.”
--=End Flashback=--
Liis was brought back from the past for the last time as she heard an insistent beeping sound, so loud that it hurt her ears.
Was it her compass going off? Where had it gotten to?
She felt so cold now. Numb.
“We don’t have any other choice,” The Ferengi doctor advised Speeg and Spilva. “She won’t make it. If we put her into stasis at least it won’t be a lie when we tell the Romulans that she is alive.”
“But how do we explain?” Speeg worried.
“We tell them that she was too difficult to contain.” Spilva grunted, knowing that this was more truth than fiction. “That she wouldn’t stop trying to escape. If they know her history as well as they say that they do, they will believe us. Put her in.”
The doctor nodded, and a moment later, Zanh Liis was hoisted from the operating table and placed into a stasis chamber.
The clear dome slid closed above her.
As the hum of the unit seemed to envelope her, all of her pain, her thoughts, and her memories came to a peaceful, quiet end.
Captain Zanh Liis
In suspended animation
Somewhere on Aertok
In suspended animation
Somewhere on Aertok