Moments of Transition

[Foster]

OOC: This is a side plot I wanted to run but didn't know how to fit it into a plot line... I'll put it here and if I can post it somewhere as an actual side plot, I'll do so. I do have a sequel in mind for it.


Location: USS Malinche, Corridor, En Route to Maintenance Bay

ON:

"I wanted to thank you Ma'am for requesting that I be assigned to your team", Mikel said as he and Raven walked through the halls of the Malinche back to the Maintenance bay.

The former Marine chuckled to herself. "First of all, you know better; call me Raven. 'Ma'am' is WAY too formal. Secondly, I was more than happy to have you with me. Your record is spotless and your attitude is even better," she said with a smile. "In fact --"

Her words were cut off by a sudden feeling of dizziness that swept over her, sending the CoB to her knees with momentary vertigo and nausea. Through the fog of dizziness Raven mused that the sensation was similar to the discomfort she felt for the first few weeks after leaving her homeworld and trying to acclimate to 'one gee'. It had taken nearly three weeks of acclimation therapy before she could function normally in gravity less than half her world's.

Finally feeling as if the room had stopped spinning, Raven opened her eyes and rose slowly. "Wow Mikel did you feel that...?" she started, but her voice trailed off immediately as it became very obvious that she was no longer on the Malinche, nor was there any sign of Garson. Her surroundings were not strange however. They were familiar. So familiar that her eyes began to well with tears as she looked around.

This was Gueraan II. Raven Foster was home.

She stared at her surroundings, trying to understand how she could be here, now. The Malinche had been no where near her homeworld, so it was no transporter, she mused. Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a child, squealing with delight as she ran through the tall grass, chased by a playful creature not unlike a Terran dog. As the child grew closer, she stopped at the sight of Raven, but did not cower. Instead, she walked right up to the woman and smiled.

"Hi there, I was wondering when you would come," she said pleasantly. She was about ten standard years old, with long straight black hair and pale grey eyes. Raven stared into those eyes and suddenly had the oddest sensation. Not quite 'deja vu' but something very similar, like she knew this girl from somewhere.

"Hello," the Mechanic said with a smile, somehow knowing that kneeling down to her level would be viewed as patronizing. "My name's Raven."

The little girl giggled. "I know," she said cryptically, and turned away to start skipping toward a large wooden building. Raven could feel her knees getting weak as she gazed on the structure, as her mind finally worked out the situation, as impossible as it was. She was on her Papa's farm just outside the capitol, and the wooden structure she was approaching was her clubhouse, built for her by her father when she about the age of the little girl. At that exact moment, the final piece of the puzzle clicked into place, and Raven stopped dead, staring dumbfounded at the young girl, who, as if sensing what was happening, turned slowly to face the marine, raising an eyebrow as she did so.

"Y-your name... is Ravennik isn't it?," Raven breathed softly, using the traditional family form of her name. "You're me." Somehow the ridiculous statement made a kind of twisted sense.

The young girl giggled again, and Raven could not help but smile at her. "No silly, I'm me. I won't be 'you' for a long time," she said, placing an almost comic emphasis on the word 'long'.

Raven laughed at that. "Very true. Since you seem to have been expecting me, can you tell me why I'm here? Or how I got here?"

The young girl sat down on a nearby log and screwed up her face in thought as Raven joined her. "Well the lady told me, but it was a lot of sciencey stuff with big words, and I don't remember them anymore," she said, a little dejectedly.

"That's ok," Raven said softly with a smile. "You mentioned a lady. Is she still around here?" Whoever this woman was, she might hold some answers, the woman thought to herself.

The younger version of Raven shook her head sadly. "No she's not here anymore. She just told me you were coming. She seemed very nice," she added, nodding for emphasis.

"I'm sure she was," Raven said with a smile. She was about to speak again when a low rumble, more powerful than anything heard on earth, rolled across the sky from the dark towering clouds now forming to the west. Almost instinctively, the older Raven knew what was coming. She looked down to see tears welling up in the little girl's eyes.

"It's a thunderstorm," she whispered, and her older companion could feel the fear radiating from her. "Thunder scares me," she added, and looked as if she were about to cry as another rumble made its way across the evening sky.

Raven watched her young doppelganger and then took her hand. "You know I used to be afraid of the thunder too, and my Papa taught me that it's ok to be afraid. He told me that if you faced your fear, with someone you could trust, then it wouldn't be quite so scary anymore."

"I wish my Papa were here," the young girl said softly. "He died last year." Her voice was barely above a whisper, and the pain even overshadowed her fear for a moment.

Raven felt as if her stomach was doing cartwheels as the truth of the little girl's words hit home. What was this place? An alternate timeline? One in which her father died when she was young? The thought of living her life without her Papa made the CoB sick to her stomach. He had been her mentor growing up, always encouraging her to work harder, to reach a little farther. She knew she would not be where she was today if not for her Papa. She felt a wave of sympathy for this little girl, this younger version of herself, who would not have that wisdom, that strength to draw from. She drew the girl in closer to her. This young girl may not have her father to draw from, but she had Raven for this short time. "You know, I think I might have the perfect place to hide from the thunder," Raven whispered conspiratorially.

"Really? Where?" the girl asked brightening, but still keeping a wary eye on the gathering clouds.

"Have you got a bed in there?" Raven asked, pointing to the clubhouse and already knowing the answer.

A small head bobbed up and down emphatically.

Raven smiled. "Then I think we may be in luck, come on!" she said, hurrying to the clubhouse door, the young girl close behind. A few minutes later, the pair were beneath the sheets of the bed, waiting for the approaching thunder. Raven suddenly felt a tiny hand take hers and she smiled.

"Did your Papa do this with you?" Ravennik asked after a lengthy silence.

The woman looked at her younger self with undisguised sympathy and smiled at the memory. "Yes he did. Sometimes when we were here he would tell me stories of times when he was a boy. He was afraid of the dark," she added.

The young Raven looked shocked. "Really? My Papa wasn't afraid of anything!" she said, with only the slightest hint of defensiveness. After another long moment she looked to her older companion. "Would you tell me a story about your Papa?"

Raven's heart rose into her throat for a moment, but she nodded. After she had told a couple of funny stories, the two girls lay beneath the sheets, laughing until they both had tears in their eyes. At one point Raven made reference to her mother, which elicited a sigh from her younger self.

"Mama's gonna have a baby soon," she said, and didn't seem very happy about the prospect. The older Raven couldn't help but smile. She had felt the same way before the birth of her sister Rain. When she finally saw the infant however, Raven had immediately fallen in love with the tiny, fragile life bundled protectively in her mother's arms.

Suddenly the older woman was racked with a feeling of nausea; like before, but not quite as strong. She could see the young girl giving her a curious look.

"You have to go don't you?" she said. It was less a question than a statement of fact. The young version of Raven Foster hugged her older self and smiled. "Thank you," she whispered.

Raven fought through the nausea and the dizziness and tried to focus on her companion. Tears welled in her eyes at the prospect of leaving so soon. There was so much she wanted to tell this girl, so much she could do to help her as she got older. She reached out a hand to her young doppelganger, but everything around her was becoming insubstantial, hazy, ghostlike. I wish I could stay and help her, she thought to herself through the increasing disorientation.

Suddenly the young Raven's face focused for just a moment and she spoke, her words sounding very far away. "You already have," she said, the statement underpinned with one last peal of thunder before everything went black.

:: End of Part 1 ::
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:: Part 2 ::

[Location: Unknown]

When the nausea cleared, Raven found herself in the familiar confines of a Federation starship. While she was relieved, a small part of her yearned to go back and see her younger self, to see how the girl would fare without her beloved Papa.

Raven was about report to the CO (her absence had no doubt been noted) when she turned a corner and realized that something was very wrong.

Federation starship interiors looked more or less similar, at least the newer ones, but each ship had a certain 'feel' to it; something that came from spending a long time living on them. Each ship had this unique 'sense' to it, and veteran spacers could usually pick it up immediately after boarding. The mechanic couldn't quite place it, but there was something about this ship. It definitely was not the Malinche, of that she was sure. However it still felt strangely familiar, and that fact gave her an inexplicable chill.

Making her way to a nearby computer terminal, she was about to call the bridge and 'report in' when a man came racing around the corner, the strips of the Red Alert lights casting an eerie pallor over the intent expression on his face. A face, Raven realized with a chill, she recognized all too well.

"Rave!" the man called with a look of faint surprise. He was half dressed in a Marine uniform, his brown hair tousled as if he had been roused from bed.

Which is exactly what had happened, if she was right about this place and time. This was her friend Staff Sergeant Giancarlo "GC" Sarratt. When the man spoke again, Foster realized that she knew exactly what he was going to say.

"How the hell--?" he began, but then thought better of it. "Whatever, come on! We've gotta get to the armory!" he called, grabbing her arm he did so. She didn't ask where they were going -- Raven already knew where she was, 'when' she was, and where they had to go.

They were aboard the USS Agamemnon, it was nine years ago, they were going to the armory... and this man was about to die.

Foster ran, a numbness settling over her at the horror of having to relive this all over again. They reached the armory, finding other members of the crew who had made it here as well. The rag-tag group grabbed what they could and started moving out to their respective stations. Raven moved out of habit, acting on instinct, not knowing why she was being forced to do this again, to watch her friend die again, when something tickled the back of her consciousness. A 'feeling', much like the one that told her that this was not the Malinche. Something was wrong here, different.

A sudden (and unexpected) explosion to their right broke her from her thoughts. Disruptor beams lanced out from the billowing cloud where a bulkhead had been blown through, striking people who had not taken cover in time. Foster threw herself against the wall, turning back to see if GC had reached cover, but she couldn't see him in the thickening smoke. When she turned back to the blown out bulkhead, Raven Foster knew immediately what was different in this timeline. She stared down the barrel of a Jem'Hadar disruptor rifle. In her universe, at the height of the Dominion war, she and her team, the 3rd Mechanized Support Company "Grease Monkeys" helped retake Engineering after a boarding attempt. In that battle, one of her team was killed. She suddenly realized with a strange mixture of sadness and relief, that in this universe, it was not Giancarlo Sarratt who would make the ultimate sacrifice.

In this universe, it was Raven Foster.

:: End of Part 2 ::
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:: Part 3 ::

[Location: (Alternate Universe) USS Agamemnon, Armoury]

Raven stared hard into the eyes of the Jem'Hadar soldier holding the rifle just inches from her face. Inside she made a silent goodbye to her family and friends, and clamped down on the wave of sadness that welled up at the thought of her sister.

"On your knees human," he growled.

"Bite me," she spat, determined that if she was going to die, it would be on her feet. Something in the back of her mind wondered why he didn't just shoot her. This wasn't typical behaviour for a Jem'Hadar.

"On your knees! NOW!" he roared, moving the barrel a little closer to her face. She was about to argue again when two very odd things came to her attention. First was a movement out of the corner of her eye to the left, one that she had to work hard not to turn toward when she realized what it was. The second was the fact that this soldier was missing the small tube delivering it's supply of ketracel-white. Without even realizing fully why she was doing it, Raven lowered herself to her knees before the soldier.

The Jem'Hadar sneered and stood over the Marine, apparently gloating over his superiority. Once again she wondered at this atypical behaviour. "That's where your kind belongs," he snarled at her with undisguised contempt. "We will never fall!"

Raven raised an eyebrow and smiled slightly. "Sure about that?"

At that moment the soldier was tackled from the left by something that seemed like a purple-haired freight train. The pair slammed into the bulkhead with a sickening crunch of breaking bones. Foster watched as her rescuer leapt up off the Jem'Hadar and grabbed his head, twisting it until a loud snap could be heard. The figure rose slowly and turned, obviously disgusted with having to use such violence.

Raven Foster stared into her own eyes.

The other Raven didn't seem to find this odd at all. "You alright?" she asked, gathering up the soldier's now discarded rifle.

Foster stared for a moment before answering. "Yeah I'm ok... You don't seem suprised to see me... uhh... another 'you'," she said.

The doppleganger shrugged. "It's weird I admit, but we've passed through some kind of anomaly, and stuff like this has been happening for a day or so. Just our luck a Jem'Hadar patrol happened by while we were stuck here." She gestured to the now abandoned armoury, and the two began to gather equipment and weapons. The sound of weapons fire could be heard reverberating through the decks, and every now and then, a scream. Raven shuddered.

The alternate Raven seemed to notice her double's discomfort. "We knew this would happen sooner or later. We've been on the run for the last year now. It's a wonder we've managed this long. The Jem'Hadar are gonna rule the Alpha Quadrant if we don't find a miracle, and soon."

Foster turned to her doppleganger, now genuinely curious. "I don't understand. In my universe, the Jem'Hadar are a brutal enemy, but they're nothing more than puppets of the Founders."

The alternate Raven Foster adjusted her blood-stained shirt and pushed her disheveled hair out of her face. For the first time an angry scar could be seen running down the left side of her face. When she spoke, it was with a coldness that made her counterpart shudder. "They were -- at first. About a year ago the Dominion decided to 'improve' the Jem'Hadar, to make an even more intelligent, even stronger version. Well they succeeded, but far beyond what they had anticipated -- or wanted. We only got this information after the fact, but apparently their first test was a Jem'Hadar named Alrok'dal. He turned out to be far more than they could handle. He staged a coup, and (though we still don't know how) managed to get control of a ketracel-white facility. With that in hand, he could control the Jem'Hadar. The Founders never stood a chance." She sighed and leaned against the bulkhead, obviously drained. "When Alrok'dal found a way to remove the ketracel-white dependency from his troops, he used it on his Elite Forces, like tall and ugly over there. When they finished off their masters, they turned to us. It was an invasion, pure and simple. We never even knew what hit us," she said, her chilling words hanging in the air between them.

"How bad is it?"

"Bajor was the first to fall after DS9 was destroyed, and from there they spread. Only a handful of planets have managed to hold off the advance, but we all know it's only a matter of time." The alternate Raven gave her double a significant look. "We're losing. Starfleet has become a resistance movement, banded together with what's left of the Klingon and Romulan fleets."

A question had been burning in the young woman's mind, and finally she could wait no longer. "What about our home? Our family?"

A deep sadness passed over the alternate Raven before she spoke. "Our world's gone, destroyed in the first assault. Only a handful survived. Rain and I made it, but Mama and Papa..." she trailed off, her voice cracking.

Foster settled back against the bulkhead as the weight of it sank in. So many dead... "I don't understand," she muttered. "How...?"

"How could we be beaten so easily?" the doppelganger asked. "It's a question of numbers. The Jem'Hadar are genetically engineered; they mature in days. We kill a hundred, a thousand more take their place. We're gonna keep fighting with the few ships we have left," she said defiantly, but Raven could see the sense of impending doom in her double.

Raven grabbed a rifle and looked at her alternate universe self. "Then come on. I don't know why I'm here, but I can do some good while I am. Ready to kick some Jem'Hadar butt?" she asked.

The alternate Raven seemed to drop her melancholy mood and slung her rifle over her shoulder. "Hell yeah," she said with a grim smile, and the two left the armoury for the nearest jefferies tube to Engineering.

As they moved through the ship, Raven told her alternate about her universe, about the Federation's victory in the Dominion war, and about her family. It seemed to bouy the other woman to know that things were better somewhere. All conversation stopped however as they exited the jefferies tube into Hell.

The hallway to Engineering was alive with weapons fire, and bodies were strewn about the deck wherever they landed. Raven set up some cover fire for her double, who moved along behind a blown out piece of bulkhead. As the two made it to their makeshift cover, they traded shots with soldiers father up the hall, soldiers that were blocking the entrance to Engineering. It was obvious that the Starfleet crew were losing, but still they would not give up, even as one by one they fell. When the alternate Raven stood slightly to get a clearer shot, a disruptor beam caught her in the chest, sending her flying backward down the corridor. Raven ran to her counterpart, still safely behind their cover, and checked the wound. It had passed through her chest and exited the other side, and the alternate Raven spasmed as her body went in and out of shock.

"Hang on! Hang on! Don't you die on me!" Foster screamed at her double, the pain of so much death becoming almost too much to bear. The wounded woman seemed to gain some strength for a moment as she weakly grabbed her double's hand. "You-- You have to get... out of here!" she croaked, blood already forming at the corner of her mouth.

"No! I can't just leave you here to die dammit! I'm a Marine! We don't leave people behind!"

The woman stared hard into Raven's eyes, and her voice sounded almost normal as she growled. "Yes you are a Marine, and that means you have a DUTY to get back to your ship and your crew!"

Frustration knawed at the woman as she stared helplessly down at her double. Beyond the two, a shimmering area began to form on the wall, but in the chaos, niether took much notice. "I have to do something!!"

The alternate Raven smiled for a moment. "You... can do something for me. You have a life, Ravennik. LIVE it for me. Make it as... full as you can. Hold on to the people.... close to you. Promise me!" she barked, now coughing up blood.

Tears formed in Raven's eyes as she nodded. "I promise," she said softly.

The wounded woman gestured weakly to the strange shimmering area that seemed to have expanded on the wall. "Looks... looks like it could... be you're ticket home kid," she said, her voice getting weaker. "Thanks."

Raven looked back at her double. "For what?"

"For... showing me that... somewhere... we did good." As she spoke, her voice trailed away and the light in Raven Foster's eyes faded to nothingness.

Amidst the chaos of battle; the smoke, the weapons fire, the screams, one woman wept silently. After a few moments, she gave her counterpart on last look, gently closed her eyes, and ran headlong into the shimmering area on the wall, being grazed by a disrptor beam as she did so.

[USS Malinche, Mess Hall, Current time]

Mikel Garson had rarely been so worried. With all the stories of people disappearing and strange things happening all over the ship, he had passed it off as rumour, until Raven had vanished right in front of him in mid-sentence. He had reported the incident, and was told that everything that could be done was being done. To Garson, it sounded like Grade A bull. He had come here to the now empty mess hall to think, though he wasn't sure exactly what he could do. A tought struck him then. What would Raven do? He had to admit he looked up to her, and if he were to be perfectly honest there was more to it than that, but the young technician clamped down on that line of thought immediately. "Well she wouldn't be sitting here like a fool that's for sure," he muttered to himself. Standing to leave, he determined that he would do everything he could to find Raven, starting with the place where she disappeared.

The thought had barely entered his mind when a sizzling sound from behind made him spin around. He expected to see a broken conduit or other short circuit. What he DIDN'T expect was to see a large shimmering area appear in mid air. It seemed to have no distinct shape. though it did vaguely form an ellipsoid. Suddenly a voice came from the shimmering... whatever-it-was. A very familar voice.

Raven Foster flew out of the anomaly as if shot from a cannon, plowing through tables and chairs as she skidded to a rough halt. As the anomaly began to close, a disruptor beam lanced out from it, hitting a nearby chair and making Garson jump back. A small object began to exit through the rapidly shrinking disk, only to fall to the ground when the disk winked out of existence. Raven got up a little dazed but none the worse for wear, and looked around at her surroundings. When she saw Garson, fresh tears began to form on her face and she grabbed him in a massive bear hug. "I'm home! I'm home!" she said happily, only noticing after a moment Mikel's flailing arms. She released her grip with an embarrassed laugh and smiled at her assistant.

"Do you always make it a habit of crushing people when you're happy?" Mikel asked, flexing his rather stiff muscles, but smiling as he did so.

Raven blushed and looked to her friend. "Sorry about that. Come on, I've gotta report in. I'll explain what happened on the way," she said. Pausing for a moment, Foster walked over to the spot where the anomaly had been and picked up the small object that had dropped there. It was the end of a Jem'Hadar disruptor barrel. Raven held it for a moment and said a silent goodbye to her alternate self, before pocketing it and leaving the room... through a door this time.

:: End of Part 3 ::