A solid sheet of achingly bright whiteness wrapped around Captain Matthew Cross' entire field of vision. There was no up or down, no horizon. He felt as if he was floating, as though he'd left his physical body and was drifting through a vault of metaphysical nothingness. Above all, a strange sense of deja vu permeated his perceptions. Visions coalesced out of the white backdrop and danced before his eyes. Or were they more than visions? Were they memories? Premonitions? In his present state, he couldn't remember.
He saw Jem'Hadar battlebugs and Cardassian Galors screaming across a blazing sky leaving death and destruction in their wake. The horrors of past wars.
Faces swam in and out of focus, a collage of familiar eyes and hair above the distinctive black-and-white uniforms of Starfleet pilots, and finally settled on one pair of lovely, confident, almond eyes beneath short, tousled, brown hair. The present, the Banshees, Lee Carter.
A horrific conflagration. Bodies were falling to their deaths while others burned, unable to escape. Cross tried to turn away from the nightmarish vision but couldn't force his eyes away. Was this the future? He instinctively knew it was, but dreaded it.
A woman with lovely almond eyes and short brown hair dressed in clouds of white, floaty veils, and himself in a black tuxedo standing beside her. He watched himself put a ring on her finger and say the words...
And then he was awake! He shook off the torpor weighing down his limbs and thoughts and straightened himself in his chair. He placed his hands on the hard, cold console before him, letting its undeniable solidity reel him back to reality. The future visions had left him somewhat shaken, but he wasn't sure which he found more distressing: the image of the deadly conflagration and burning bodies, or the vision of himself at the altar with...
No! That had to be just an ordinary idle daydream!
He craned his neck around to check on his crew. At the station to his right, Ensign Dexter Gray was shaking his head vigorously and frowning. In the back, Ensign Alex Dalton was looking rather pale and frightened, while Lieutenant Jo Schmidt had her head back on her chair's headrest and was groaning disconsolately.
"Everybody okay?" asked Cross.
"No!" was the unanimous, grumpy reply.
"Good. Let's find out what happened to us--" The view of a deep indigo sky instead of starry black outside the forward windows caught his eye for the first time. "--and where we are," he finished.
Dexter, Alex and Jo forgot their aches and any distress that may have been caused by their own personal visions and concentrated on fact gathering. The Crockett's sophisticated sensor suite and computer core were put to full use. A scant two minutes later, Jo was compiling the information when something alarming showed up in the data.
"Captain! I'm picking up trilithium readings! Weapons grade!"
"Where? Is it the Suliban cell-ship?"
Jo's face was bathed in electric blue light from the sensor displays on her console. "About fifty miles bearing 47 mark 350," she replied. She adjusted the scanners to give her more detailed information. "I'm not picking the cell-ship, but there is a large, slow-moving dirigible airship at those coordinates. The trilithium is a component in a small device situated just forward of the upper air fin at the rear."
"Let me see it," ordered Cross. He swiveled his chair to face the small screen on the bulkhead beside his console. The picture wavered a few times, but steadied to reveal a gargantuan, stately dirigible cruising above a pastoral landscape. Sullen storm clouds turned early evening to night obscuring any details, but intermittent lightening flashes illuminated the insignia emblazoned on the aircraft's tailfins.
"No... It can't be!" muttered Cross, disbelieving. He turned to Jo. "I need to know where and when we are, down to the second!" he barked. What had the time distortion done to them? He was afraid he already knew the answer.
Jo had the answer quickly enough. "We are at Earth, sir. Five miles above sea level over the North Atlantic Ocean about fifty miles from the New Jersey coast of North America. The exact time and date are 1923 hours local time on May 6, 1937."
"Dammit," muttered Cross. "I knew that time distortion was going to be trouble. Ensign, set an intercept course, full impulse!"
"Aye, sir!" snapped Dexter Gray and began punching in commands. He had no idea what was going on, but he trusted his commanding officer.
"What is it, Captain?" asked Alex.
Cross turned briefly from his controls and said, "Replay the visual image and freeze the frame during a lightening strike." He waited while Alex did so and watched her astonished reaction when she saw what he had noticed, and was gratified that he wasn't the only one among them who remembered his history courses from the Academy.
Standing out in bold contrast to the silvery covering on the dirigible's tailfin was the designation 'LZ-129' and an enormous red, white, and black swastika!
"It's the Hindenburg!" exclaimed Alex.
back to TOC