Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [122]
Her next foray into the Trek universe will be Star Trek: S.C.E. #61: Progress. Outside of Trek, she is currently working on several original fiction projects, set in places as near as Dublin, Ireland, in 1940 and as far as the surface of Mars in the year 2035. Visit Terri’s official Web site at www.terriosborne.com.
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- Stardate 53501.3002296456
Subjective time: Day 7
Something’s wrong.
Voyager was supposed to have beamed me back four days ago.
I appear to be stranded here on Tahal-Meeroj. Cast adrift on an island of savages might be more like it. For how long is anyone’s guess. The planet’s tachyon core-as well as the resultant accelerated temporal displacement-is quite likely keeping them from being able to beam me back to the ship. For every minute that goes by on Voyager, fifty-eight days go by here on the planet. Even if it only takes Voyager five minutes to solve the problem and beam me out, that would be almost a year by the calendar on this world. It looks as though I’ll be here for a considerable amount of time.
As if spending the better part of three days tucked away in a corner of the library collecting data that might help us escape this planet’s orbit hadn’t been indignity enough, now I have command-level Prime Directive issues to concern myself with. My Emergency Command Hologram subroutine is ill-equipped to cope. The longer I’m here, the more difficult it’s going to be not to affect something in some manner. I must concentrate on keeping the contamination to an absolute minimum.
I was able to adjust my appearance parameters to pass as a native, so that shouldn’t be a problem. However, for the long term, I might be able to adjust my appearance parameters to pass as, say, a shrub in the garden. No. While they may be several centuries behind the Federation in terms of cultural development, they do have a modicum of intelligence. I’d be discovered as soon as the gardener came through. I can’t continue to spend nights in the library. The caretakers will get suspicious.
While I may not actually require food or shelter, having a place to “hide out”- as Mr. Paris might say-might prove beneficial to my blending into this society. I will need a place to at least say I live, if nothing else. Perish the thought one of these people should investigate any credentials I may need to present. Perhaps Mr. Tuvok’s rather prescient thought of adjusting my program to allow me to forge identification will come in handy after all. But what to do to locate that hiding place? How will I pay for it? Perhaps a job? Hmm. How to do that without violating the Prime Directive? I must spend more time considering these questions. Anything I do may be thought of as interfering in this culture’s development. However, considering the extent to which Voyager’s current situation has interfered in the last few centuries of Tahal-Isut development, have we not already violated the Prime Directive merely by being here?
There have been sufficient recorded instances of Prime Directive violations-both intentional and otherwise-that perhaps I can gain some insight into what I should do from the efforts taken in those instances.
In the interest of preserving both memory and energy consumption in my mobile emitter, I have procured a small, albeit primitive local version of a padd on which to keep my logs. Everything that will be required for the inevitable Starfleet inquest into this matter will then be archived as a compressed data stream.
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- Stardate 53501.3003280651
Subjective time: Day 10
I have attempted to spend the days