Concord {Star Trek Enterprise fan fiction}

Chapter 5

“Where the hell is he?” asked a bronze-skinned human man sitting at a control panel. There was a uniform patch on his arm that said M. Sinthasomphone. 

“Your guess is as good as mine,” replied a young woman standing behind him. A display behind her scrolled through the time – 11:31 AM – and the old-style date – November the twenty-eighth, 2285. 

“Do you think Lennox is dead, Padir?” asked Sinthasomphone. 

“I’d rather be optimistic about such things,” Monisha Padir replied. “After all, we have no evidence of that.” 

“And we don’t have any evidence that he’s still alive, either. He’s like Schrodinger’s Cat.” 

“Let’s go over what we were attempting to do again, all right?”  She asked. Her colleague rolled his eyes a little, so she added, “Really, I think it’s the only way we’re going to be able to figure this thing out – it’s by going over the facts again. So let’s talk.” 

“Okay,” Sinthasomphone said. He sighed. They had already been over it several times. “Yesterday, we placed Agent Lennox into the prototype pod and set the temporal displacement coordinates.” 

“And we set those coordinates for April six, 2153, the NX-01 Enterprise.” 

“We were aiming for the neighborhood of the ship, of course,” added her colleague, “I set the controls myself – you saw – and we pulled the trigger.” 

“Right, Makan. And instead of the pod going, it was just Lennox who departed. We tried to put a tracer on him, but couldn’t. So, what does that tell us?” 

“It tells me,” Makan said, “this experiment was premature. There’s no way we’re ready for time travel.” 

“Understood,” Monisha said, “but what else do you think we should be investigating?” 

“Actually,” he said, “maybe we can see if there’s anything in any logs.” 

“Logs?” 

“Yes, of the NX-01,” Makan said, “we don’t know if they saw anything.” 

“I wonder what they would have seen,” Monisha said. She shook her head. “I hope it wasn’t just poor Agent Lennox being jettisoned into deep space with neither a ship nor an EV suit.” There was a chime and she turned her attention to reading an incoming report. 

=/\= 

In 1775, Malcolm bided his time. Lennox had apparently become thoroughly exhausted and taxed by his and Charlotte’s questions. Now Lennox seemed to drift out of consciousness more frequently. It had been going on for nearly a month, and Charlotte became rather concerned. Malcolm left the other man alone as he continued to wonder and speculate about what was going on, and why he was there and where there really was. 

“I fear we overdid it with him, you and me, and he may die here, so far away from those who love him,” She had a misty look in her eyes, and Malcolm got the impression that she wasn’t necessarily talking about Lennox. 

“Have you been able to get him to speak much at all?” Malcolm asked. They were sitting in her parlor. He was untangling a skein of yarn while she knitted a sock. 

“Nothing much. I fear he is a bit damaged now. I do hope that we did not overly stress him! Perhaps this current damage cannot be repaired.” 

“Neither of us meant to harm him,” Malcolm assured her. “We just wanted some answers. Perhaps they are no longer forthcoming.”