fateandfortune | Transporter Beam Accidents Do Happen

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Transporter Beam Accidents Do Happen

An anomaly.

Space was full of them, but all of the points of instability no matter how small in the Sol system had been exhaustively catalogued. Grade school children took field trips to collect redundant data on them to analyse over apple juice and animal crackers. Or kelp wafers, or whatever they fed people now. Khan had encountered a few undocumented anomalies in his longer-range scans and tended to avoid them whenever possible in his transporter experiments, but he hadn't even bothered scanning first this time. Why would he? The coordinates he was using were in the path of Earth's orbit, no region of space had been better studied than that one.

There were several distant anomalies in the known galaxy which could warp local space-time into crumpled aluminum foil, but this one didn't have the right energy signature. It wasn't a false reading, even though by all rational standards it should have been. These subspace energy patterns never occurred naturally, not in the vacuum of space. It looked almost like a life-form signature that had been abandoned mid-transport, no stabilizing beam either from point of origin or destination, and somehow hadn't disintegrated in the process.

Well, no sense in ignoring the interesting finding. Ultimately, Khan intended to use transwarp teleportation with living subjects anyway. While he wasn't prepared to start sacrificing lives at this stage, this wasn't his doing. Whatever this creature was, or had been, it essentially didn't exist right now. Its matter was no longer part of any known or theorized parallel universe. It wasn't alive, so rematerializing it in his test chamber wasn't going to kill it no matter what went wrong. He might as well bring the thing in and have a look at it before blasting it back out into the vacuum of space.

After recalibrating his instruments to lock onto life signs, Khan locked onto the signal with far more precision than the instruments currently in wide use could have done. Khan was alone in his workshop with no weapons and he really should have considered calling in a xenobiologist first, but he had no interest whatsoever in expanding the frontiers of shared knowledge for the rabid warhounds of Starfleet. A few more buttons punched and the golden swirls began forming on the platform inside the spherical force field. Khan would have to shut the field off in order for sound waves to cross the distance between them, but right now he should be able to see what was inside well enough to determine if it should be jettisoned immediately. That would definitely be necessary if it turned out to be too large for the containment field, no sense in triggering an explosion of guts all over the sensitive instruments.

Of course, if the life form reassembled correctly and actually possessed senses corresponding the the human visible light range, it would also be able to see him. It would appear at roughly his chest-height on a warm white disc three metres in diameter, the force field bubble completely transparent but hard as glass to the touch. The room was a small deserted hangar built of dark metal, well-lit but almost empty, with nothing else in it but a large desk sized console, a chair, and a dark-haired man with a quiet curiosity. Khan stood up from his console and took a step closer, watching the form take shape out of the whirling photon-emitting spirals.

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She should have known something would go wrong. It was simply too much to hope that, after everything she'd done, all the blood on her hands, that it would be as easy as this. Help send Logan back, change the timeline, wake up and remember absolutely none of it. A second chance at life, hopefully in a world more tolerant of mutants where they could actually have lives and not be hunted like animals.

Rogue had felt the timeline shifting, had seen the Sentinels disappear as Logan's connection to the past broke and the universe shifted to catch up. But then there had been a light and the last remnants of Kitty's power had done... something. Perhaps her own survival instinct had kicked in, the various borrowed powers combining to save her because suddenly she was everywhere and nowhere, between time and then next, and then she wasn't. The light faded and she could see her bare hands pressed against a white surface where she crouched, huddled in on herself. She was still wearing the grey jumpsuit they'd called her 'uniform', the unzipped sleeves draping over her hands to cover all but her fingers.

Looking up slowly, she took in the sight of the hangar, the metal that was dark against the light that filled the space, and her eyes finally stumbled across the man. A man she didn't recognize who was staring at her. It was pure instinct that had her scrambling back, hoping to climb down off the strange white disc and get somewhere she could regroup and figure out what was going on.

But she didn't get far, of course. Even though she couldn't see it, there was something blocking her way. Rogue pressed her hands against it, pushing, even slamming a fist against it, but it did nothing. She was trapped, back in some sort of cell that she didn't understand and there was nothing she could do to stop the panic that rose in her chest. "No, no please," she whispered, her expression crumpling as she shook her head and glanced back at the man she could only assume was her captor.

The creature was humanoid, moreso than some of Khan's current "colleagues," and female. She was dressed like a member of a starship crew, probably a civilian mining or merchant ship, but maybe the formal dress of her planet's militia, governmental body, or academic community. She was also hysterical. That was quite a problem, considering she might be able to spit corrosive acid or telekinetically light things on fire indiscriminately. He wasn't going to turn the force field off until he was satisfied that she would at least be able to aim her attacks rationally so he could counter them.

Khan did his best to put on an innocent, concerned expression as he approached the edge of the platform and pressed both his empty hands against the force field. He couldn't touch her, had no tools to use, and as long as he kept his hands in place she would know he wasn't doing anything frightening. If she was some kind of specimen to him, he would be recording data or mucking about at the console instead of wasting time trying to make eye contact. He was no xenobiologist or prison guard, he was just a prisoner here like herself. She didn't realize it, but he had far fewer options for escape than she did.

It didn't matter how innocent or concerned the man might appear to be, Rogue wouldn't trust any of it until he undid whatever it was that was keeping her locked in her invisible cell. The scientists had tried that trick in the early days, one of them acting concerned, pretending she was on Rogue's side, and then she'd turned out to be one of the more sadistic of the lot. All it taken was one accidental brush of skin and Rogue had known the horrible truth of the matter.

His actions were having their intended effect, though. She could see that he didn't have anything in his hands, that he didn't seem about to attack or slice her open to see what made her tick. And this certainly wasn't a lab, not like the one she'd been kept in anyway. Closing her eyes, she took a few deep, steadying breaths, then let her hands drop away from the invisible barrier. She met his gaze when she had calmed a little, her pulse almost resembling something normal, and said with careful enunciation, "Please let me out." There had been no sound when he'd approached and she couldn't make out anything coming from the room around them, so she had to assume that he likely couldn't hear her either, but perhaps he'd be able to tell what she was saying - if he spoke English, anyway. One problem at a time.

Khan had no expectation that this gesture, or any other, could possibly earn her trust. That would be absurd, and if she did start to show signs of being comfortable in his presence then she was either hopelessly naive or trying to manipulate him. Something told him that she wasn't naive.

He nodded, once, slowly, then turned around to approach the console and flip a few switches. A low powering-down noise filled the room. Though nothing visible had happened, the silence was gone now and everything from the chill air currents to the clacking of the last few buttons shutting off the entire system could be heard clearly in the resonant echoes of the odd room. Still leaning over the controls, Khan kept his eyes on his guest in case she went immediately on the offensive.

Naïve was something she'd left behind a long time ago, back when her mutation had first manifested and people had started wanting both to kill her and use her for her abilities. It had been a pretty good way to get her to shake off any lingering naïveté that might have made it past her rocky childhood.

It was a relief to have that stark silence gone, even as the chilled air wrapped around her. Anything was better than being caged. Rogue watched the man watching her for a long moment before slowly, carefully sliding to the edge of the white disk and dropping down to the floor. She stumbled a little, her body still weak from captivity, but straightened to address him, staying right where she was and keeping her hands at her sides.

"My name is Rogue," she said in as steady a voice as she could manage, her smooth southern drawl warming the words more than she really felt. "Would you mind telling me where I am, please?" Politeness was her default when she wasn't flirting or being pissed off at someone; it came as naturally as breathing to her after having grown up in the deep south.

Edited 2016-03-20 02:18 (UTC)

He made no attempt to help her make it to the floor safely, wouldn't have attempted to approach even if she seemed to be having real trouble. Khan wasn't keen on putting himself within her reach and he was quite sure she would not appreciate his approach. She seemed in decent enough condition for having been without her molecules for some unspecified duration. There was no indication that she was any more or less dangerous based on any of her behavior so far.

That was an interesting accent. It reminded Khan of a regional American twang from back when it was still called the United States, back when regional dialects still existed there. "You're in a Starfleet facility in orbit around Jupiter, specifically in the area I use to conduct experiments in warp theory." He stepped clear of the console, slowly and casually, and stood in full view in a position which mirrored her own. "Commander John Harrison, at your service." Southern politeness, meet English manners. The two were a bit more closely related than many realized. Khan's own accent was a bit of a throwback, and his speech mannerisms could be positively anachronistic if he didn't make a conscious effort to avoid colloquialisms, such as the one he had just used.

The psyches in her mind were suddenly buzzing at the mountain of information he'd given her in those few words. An analysis of the accent, the phrasing he had used, the terms. Starfleet, Jupiter. Space, clearly something organized, probably militaristic or exploratory. And he was a scientist, but 'warp theory' sounded like a far cry from anything she'd encountered through Hank or Charles, at least with that particularly name. It was like something out of science-fiction.

Beyond all of that though, was the knowledge that she wasn't on Earth, and this very likely was not her time. As for her world, well... "Commander Harrison, what year is it?" It was the easier question to start with, the one that made her sound a little less crazy. But only a little.

In return, her very simple question spoke volumes to him. "The year is twenty-two fifty eight by the Gregorian calendar." It was sometimes called the Old Earth Calendar, but Khan personally found that grating. So she actually was from the United States, sometime after the colonial period and before First Contact. Her clothing suggested something during or after the twentieth century, which would mean she was from a later period than Khan.

The next questions she would be asking were obvious, and so Khan took it upon himself to answer them first. "You were suspended in a micro-reality outside of any stable time-space continuum. I detected your quantum signature and recreated your physical form, molecule by molecule. For some reason you had ceased to exist."

It took a great deal of effort for Rogue to pay attention to everything he said after answering her question. 2258. Over two hundred years in her future. Everyone she'd ever known and loved would be dead now, even if this were her dimension and they'd succeeded in their plan and saved the world. A sense of hopelessness fills her at the thought and it was a struggle not to let it show on her face.

Again there was a flurry of whispers in her mind and she had to plead with everyone to be quiet, it was hard enough to deal with this without their distraction. "We were resetting the timeline," she explained, providing the answer to the not yet defined question. "Changing the past to stop a war before it started. The population had been decimated, the Earth dying, it was the only way..."

She looked away from him then, turning slightly to the side and wrapping her arms around herself. "Are there mutants in this dimension?" she asked quickly, the words tumbling out before she lost her nerve. "On Earth, were there, are there people born with a genetic difference that gives them special, extraordinary abilities?" If this was her timeline, she needed to know if the plan had worked, if all that loss had been undone and her family saved.

Was she referring to the so-called Eugenics Wars? When humanity rewrote history they turned Khan's people into harbingers of the apocalypse. He was still unclear about what had happened in the few years following his departure from the planet. If so, she was fervently hoping for him to answer with a "no," that the Augments had all been hunted down and exterminated ushering in a new era of peace and harmony.

"Yes," he answered, trying not to be too bitterly cold about it. Even if she was a genocidal fanatic committed to altering time and space to destroy his kind, she was lost, alone, and very far from home. She was a mere human, and posed no threat. Khan was, however, not above saying things she would find threatening, even if he would be in serious danger if word actually got around.

"You are currently speaking with one."

Yes was what she'd been hoping for, the single word that could change her whole outlook on life, but the rest of it was entirely unexpected. He was a mutant? It was possible, of course, she certainly didn't look like the stereotypical mutant that had been plastered all over the news and propaganda pieces before the war.

She looked over at him with an almost blank expression, staring for seconds that stretched between them in silence before she finally informed him, "So are you."

There wasn't any point in hiding it, after all. If he was as different as she was, then it might be better that he knew. He might be able to tell her what had happened, help her figure out... everything. Anything.

That was so completely unexpected that Khan couldn't help the stunned widening of his eyes. Which laboratory... no, which parents had made her? Khan's people hadn't done any investigation into their reproductive viability, they had chosen to hold off until there was enough geopolitical stability to allow the world to be safe for any children. Was she a natural-born second generation Augment? Even if she had simply been conjured up in a later batch, that implied his kind hadn't actually been swiftly annihilated the way they had in Khan's continuum.

"I might be able to get you back home." He could triangulate her physical location at the exact moment the Earth had passed through that section of space, along with the date and time, down to the millisecond. He wouldn't be able to beam her directly there, but it just might be possible to create a stable relay to do so. Why not? If it actually worked, Khan would have everything he needed and more to save his entire race.

He was as shocked as she was, it was there in his eyes and the way he looked at her. Neither of them had seen this coming, and, for Rogue at least, it felt like the room was spinning. Especially when he said that.

"What?" she whispered, suddenly very close to tears as the words threatened to catch in her throat. She must have imagined it. He couldn't possibly have said what she thought he'd said. "You might... Home?" The idea hadn't even crossed her mind. Ending up in this time was one thing, but making it back - was he serious? Could it actually be possible? Was there really a chance she might be able to see everyone again?

On further analysis, the chance that Khan was looking at someone of his own genetic strain was rather low. Augments may have their share of possible defects, but overly-maudlin behaviour wasn't one of them. Neither was being vulnerable to panicking in unusual circumstances, or having messy emotional breakdowns when discussing logistical possibilities for achieving practical goals. If anything, the genetic engineers were overly thorough in their attempts to eliminate these tendencies. The nature of the human evolutionary processes in Rogue's continuity was likely very different, but the two of them still seemed to have some substantial common ground.

"It won't be simple. I'll have to identify and map out all of the relevant space-time anomalies, including those you have never personally occupied. At least your presence here is unlikely to complicate matters, as I have reason to believe that you're much further from home than I first thought."

On a better day, Rogue wouldn't have been anywhere near as emotional as she was at present, and in retrospect she would be a little appalled at the way she'd behaved. She'd spent so many years learning how to be strong, both physically and mentally, but the war had broken all of that down and left her with nothing but a crumbled foundation upon which to build upon again.

It took a few tries for her to piece together his meaning, and when it finally hit her, she could barely breathe. "This isn't my timeline," she concluded in a hushed voice. She took a shuddering breath and hung her head. "I knew that seemed too easy." That should have been her first clue, really. After what she'd done, she didn't deserve for anything to ever be easy.

What? This sniveling creature was complaining about her miraculous luck? It wasn't as if Khan were being offered a chance to turn back time, choose better circumstances for his own people, and then have the opportunity to go back and join them. Khan's hands stayed down at his sides but curled into fists.

"So you don't actually care about going back? If you'd prefer to be disintegrated now I will be more than happy to oblige."

Part of her wanted to shrink back from his words, to follow the instinct to run when things got tough, but that wasn't an option now. She'd been through too much.

"That's not what I meant," she snapped back, raising her head to glare at him as her stronger instinct to fight won out over running. "Of course I care about going back. I have to know if it worked, if my family is still alive." Some of the steel leaked out of her voice as she continued, "I apologize, things have been... I'm not usually like this."

Seeing her life flash before her eyes as the Sentinels had barged into the temple hadn't exactly done her mental state any favors.

At least partly mollified, Khan gave her a quick visual once-over. "You'll have to stay hidden. Security is rather tight around here. If--"

Abruptly, Khan's gaze snapped towards the door. "Quickly. You need to hide." Without bothering to ask, he suddenly lunged for one of her hands so he could grab it and tug her over to the console. She could fit underneath it without much trouble, which was quite fortunate. There weren't a lot of options otherwise.

If he was worried about her being discovered, then she had to assume it was for a damn good reason and act accordingly. But she didn't expect him to lunge at her like that, grabbing for her bare hand. She only just barely managed to keep herself out of that grasp, dodging to the side and around him on pure reflex - she'd spent over a decade avoiding the touch of others, it wasn't something that went away very easily.

Rogue concluded on her own and quite quickly that the only viable option was under the console and she hurried to fold herself beneath it. She'd gotten pretty good at hiding over the years, too.

As much as Khan found it inconvenient for other people to refuse to follow his lead, he couldn't exactly fault her it. That she was fast enough to dodge his grasp in the first place was rather impressive. Even more impressive was how quickly she had assessed the situation on her own and acted in such a decisive and agile way. Khan might have been satisfied to be able to claim her as one of his own after all.

During the five seconds before his door chime went off, Khan moved his chair back into position and flicked a few switches on the console to boot it back up. He ignored the door for the next ten seconds, after which it chimed again in a longer, more insistent way. Khan finally made his way to the door and it opened with a swoosh, followed by a perky female voice with a British accent that sounded part South African and part fake. "Just thought I'd drop by! It's been awhile. Are you making any progress?"

Khan's voice was flat. "Doctor Marcus, you know that my data are automatically uploaded to the central computer every twenty-four hours. I don't need personal visits from the tax collector." With a smacking sound, Khan pressed his palm to the wall and the door swished shut in her face just as she had started to mount a protest. The room fell silent.

Rogue's pulse was racing as she waited under the console, her heart beating so loudly in her ears that she almost didn't hear the chime of the door. It took all of her years of meditative practice to keep her breathing calm and quiet so she could hear what was finally said after the door opened.

It didn't sound like a soldier, the voice too upbeat for someone to have noticed her presence and already be on the hunt for her, but she still didn't trust it. Even in the silence that followed the short exchange, she stayed right where she was, body tensed and ready to lash out if a threat appeared. It could be a trap, after all. Years of hiding from the soldiers and running from the sentinels had turned her into a soldier herself, and even after three years of being held prisoner in her own home, those instincts hadn't faded.

Khan backed away from the door, quite slowly and casually, letting his boots fall heavily enough on the floor that his fugitive might be able to hear that he wasn't approaching the console area. Instead, with an easy jump, he sat on the edge of his floating white disc.

He could hear her heartbeat, thudding so much louder than the prim little footsteps that had been approaching in the hallway on the other side of the bulkhead. He could smell her fear, permeating the room. He was already tired of her panicking, there was no sense in making it worse by going anywhere near her. "It's safe for you to come out."

It was only one set of footsteps that she heard crossing the room, going in a different direction rather than toward her hiding spot. Someone could still have been waiting inside the door, there could be a whole lot of someones, but she wouldn't know unless she listened to his all-clear and checked.

Her movements were slow and cautious as she peeked out, scanning the area she could see before just as slowly standing. It wasn't until she saw for herself that there was no one else in the room that she visibly relaxed.

"Thank you for not letting them find me," she said to him, lifting her hands to run them through her hair, smoothing down the striped locks. The unzipped lower sleeves of her shirt fell back to expose most of her forearms; if he looked, he'd see a tattoo there, M4827, the number they'd used to catalog her. "I don't exactly relish the idea of being locked up as a lab rat again."

Khan narrowed his eyes, giving her a rather sharp look from across the room. A lab rat? Khan may have been created as some military genius's science fair project, but their creations had staged a very effective coup before Khan had turned ten years old. Even before then, the use of coercion and physical restraints had proven fatally counterproductive with their hyperagressive retaliatory little supersoldiers. Even with the relatively wide berth given to him, Khan detested being someone's specimen. Rogue must have had it infinitely worse.

"Then you'd best be very careful around here."

The first step would be an interrogation, of course, as she would be suspected primarily of espionage. Any hint that she had unique abilities which could be exploited for the war effort would send her straight into a xenobiologist's cage. She wouldn't even have to be shipped out of the facility, their specimens and workspaces were housed one floor up. She would need weapons and an effective escape plan. Fortunately Khan could provide both.

Between the look Harrison gave her and the words he used, Rogue had a sick, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach that she would bet good money wouldn't go away anytime soon. He'd confirmed her fear that she would end up exactly that if she were caught by whoever ran this place, and she was completely out of her depth in this time and place.

Best not to worry too much about it, though. She was stressed and exhausted enough without adding to it by overthinking a situation that she really couldn't do much about. Unless he managed to do whatever it was to get her back to her time, she was stuck here, and she'd have to keep her wits about her to make it out alive and in one piece.

"I'm sorry about before," she said, lowering her gaze to the floor as she seemingly changed the subject. But it was important that he knew so he didn't try anything again. "When you told me to hide and you... My mutation is in my skin. More than a few seconds of contact would kill you."

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