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Captain's log, stardate 47563.25. The USS Surveyor has been through a lot in the last few days. Our journey to our all-important diplomatic meeting on Zabius III has been beset by all sorts of incidents. Our run-in with a newly detected temporal anomaly, an invasion by a new kind of subspace energy parasitic alien species (according to Starfleet records, it's the twenty-seventh one observed of its kind) and finally a short and thankfully non-lethal brawl with a Klingon captain who had apparently been drunk driving have cost us most of our lead time, leaving us with barely a few hours to begin the meeting and hopefully avert a dramatic crisis. Just as we thought we could finally begin, a malfunction of unknown origin with our transporters meant that we couldn't move the delegates to the surface of the planet according to the terms of the truce, which forbids landing crafts. This cost us more precious time. Our resourceful chief engineer, Lieutenant Cavendish, managed to successfully repair them; I am now having a short post-mortem meeting on the issue with him, just as the Zabian Summit begins on the planet below...
Captain Yukawa conspicuously turned away from his log and towards his resourceful chief engineer, with a frown and a finger ready to initiate an emergency menacing tapping protocol on his desk. Lieutenant Cavendish, on his part, seemed unconcerned and satisfied with himself. He always was an odd one; flippant at times, distant at others, not a social outcast altogether but certainly a lone wolf. Still, his knowledge of virtually every single chip, nut and bolt of the ship was unparalleled, and it's not like the man wasn't a team player when the situation demanded it; he just kept it strictly professional, that was all. That, combined with the ability to operate under pressure as if he was made of neutronium, had earned him his current position, and his occasional lack of formality was only written as a side note on his file. This , though...
"Explain to me," said the Captain slowly, "what am I supposed to do with you."
"If you've run out of medals, Captain, it's no big deal," said the engineer, understanding. "I'll wait until we hit the next Starfleet base."
The menacing tapping protocol was engaged.
"When we hit the next Starfleet base, the most likely thing to happen to you is that you get dumped with a dishonourable discharge, and then possibly brought back to Earth for a court martial," replied the Captain. "What I'm giving you now is a chance to convince me to merely demote you to Jefferies Tube scrubber."
"Those clean themselves automatically, Captain."
"We can turn that functionality off," said Yukawa, grimly. "Now explain."
The other shrugged. "What's there to explain, Captain? I was just following orders."
"That has not been known to be a particularly successful excuse when you violate Starfleet Directives ."
"I'll concede you that," Cavendish nodded. "But they were your orders, Captain. Methinks that makes us partners in crime."
Captain Yukawa slammed his hands on the desk and got up. "I ordered no such thing!"
"Oh, but you did, Captain. It's all on the record. Let's go over it, shall we. Approximately one hour and a half ago you told me to get the transporter fixed. I told you that my own professional assessment was that it would take at least six hours of my own work to fix it. And you told me, word by word, that's not good enough, Cavendish! I have faith in your skills - I know you can get it done in one! Do absolutely anything necessary, I don't care what! "
He paused.
"Well," he concluded. "I did anything necessary. And got it done in one hour."
Yukawa sighed. Being a Starfleet Captain was hard enough without having to deal with smartasses acting like some kind of trickster genie. But now he did have to wonder whether of course I left implicit that it should be within the bounds of sanity would fly in the face of a court martial.
"I asked you to get it done in that frame because otherwise we couldn't have beamed our diplomats down to the meeting in time. A delay could have started a war!"
"If you ask me, Captain, anyone willing to start a war over a five hours delay just wants to have a war," said the engineer, with a shrug. "Good luck stopping them."
"I was not asking you."
"Well, then I helped stop a war, no? I didn't think we were above fudging the rules a bit if it's for a good cause. Why, from what I read about Captain James T. Kirk, you'd think we do nothing else."
"This is not the blasted USS Enterprise, and I am not bloody James T. Kirk," said Captain Yukawa, with the tone of someone who was very proud of that fact. "And you didn't just fudge the rules a bit . You violated the damn Temporal Prime-"
He choked on his words as he was trying to find the right ones to express the enormity of the situation, and found all of them lacking. So he just ended up waving his hands in the air, and tried to calm down. A Captain giving in to hysterics when faced with a crew member wasn't a good look, and odds were these logs would end up replayed in front of a jury, at this rate.
"How did you even do that?," he asked. "What the hell did you actually do ?"
"Simple enough, Captain. You see, turns out the transporter had been screwed up by the radiation emitted by that temporal anomaly we crossed a couple days ago. The one that turned you into a baby and Commander Kupak had to-"
"I remember ," said the Captain dryly. "Go on."
"Right, anyway, chronotic distortions messing with the transporter's rephasing circuits, completely screwed up its targeting, same old. We really ought to shield the resonant circuits in an atemporal field already, I told that to Starfleet a bunch of times. Easy fix, but it's tedious; you need to recalibrate all those circuits by hand, and no one on the ship but me had the experience to do it that fast without a good couple days training first, so had to do it alone. Thirty-six circuits, ten minutes a circuit; there's your six hours. Non-negotiable."
"This doesn't explain-"
"Getting there, captain. So you tell me to do it in one hour instead. Which really I couldn't do by myself, for the reasons I told you. But the transporter's fault has some weird features. See, what looked like the transporter not working actually was just a case of misplaced temporal alignment. Anything we tried to transport over a certain distance got displaced a proportional amount of time back in the past. Turns out if you tried it from the planet's surface to here that meant something like the age of the universe, so we just lost the test loads. But if you made the displacement really tiny, it could be a smaller interval. Like, one hour."
Captain Yukawa sighed. It was probably pointless to ask too much about how the whole thing worked; time travel always was confusing at best. Sometimes he suspected one of the main reasons for the Temporal Prime Directive was exactly to avoid the bureaucratic nightmare of having to document a jumble of potential interacting timelines instead of just one.
"Look," he said, slowly. Was that a tinge of guilt that was creeping through his steeled, extremely infuriated Captain's heart? "I know what my orders were. But I never would have imagined that you - I mean - this was still just one job, damn it! What were you planning to do afterwards? Didn't you consider your brilliant idea in a... wider frame? Just the existential implications are, I don't know. Kind of horrifying?"
"Existential consequences?" Cavendish laughed. "Captain, I specialised in Transporter Physics. Gonna guess you didn't take that course, huh? Back at Starfleet Academy, at least three students got a panic attack in class and had to shipped off by shuttle because they refused to be beamed down. Running joke among us was, we stared into the abyss until it got so uncomfortable it had to look away. This stuff is nothing. What's horrifying about it? They're a good team. They're buddies. I don't got any wife or children to split between us. Not a lot of close friends either. I'm a single child, and my parents always said they regretted not giving me a brother. Bet they're going to be thrilled."
"Thrilled isn't exactly what I'd-" snapped back the Captain, but something suddenly interrupted him. A blaring alarm ringing from the speakers, as the ship entered a Red Alert condition.
"Captain!," shouted someone from the comms. "The summit has failed! There's been a shootout, the diplomats have been beamed back to the infirmary in a hurry, and now three Zabian rebel ships are moving here at impulse, ETA three minutes!"
The Captain frowned. "The summit has failed? Didn't our diplomats arrive in time?"
"The rebel delegation said they were five minutes early !," replied the voice. "They said they could have used that time to conspire with the loyalists, and didn't trust their good faith."
Captain Yukawa felt like screaming. The feeling wasn't helped by Lieutenant Cavendish mouthing a silent told you so when he looked over.
"Very well," said the Captain, with his best calm-and-in-control voice. "Raise shields, arm phasers and photon torpedoes. Everyone at battle stations. I'm coming up to the bridge right away."
Disciplining his chief engineer would have to wait, if it was even going to matter. As it turns out, the Zabians seemed indeed in the mood for a war, and the USS Surveyor was set to be right at the heart of it. They'd need engineers, good engineers. Wars tended to blow up a lot of stuff.
As he approached the door, he looked back at Lieutenant Cavendish, still sitting in front of his desk. Then he looked at the other five Lieutenants Cavendish, huddled in a corner where they were occasionally chuckling among themselves and generally displaying an appalling lack of appreciation for the seriousness of the mess they'd made for him.
He sighed. "This doesn't answer my original question yet. What am I to do with you now, Lieutenant?"