star trek au but harder sci fi

An interstellar starship crew has to deal with temporal paradoxes on a daily basis.

Not the hard kind, not like the grandfather paradox or the bootstrap paradox--those all rely on backwards time travel. Really, such crews only have to deal with the lesser sorts of paradoxes, of the sort as "Ant on a Rubber Rope," or "Birthday" paradoxes. Simple problems with simple solutions, which are nevertheless unexpected and unintuitive.

It was the third New Year's Eve this month, and the U.S.S. Enterprise was booking it at 99.9925--and as far as the crew of the Enterprise knew, Earth was experiencing time going 82 times faster than normal.

Captain Kirk was waiting in his quarters. He was perfectly content to celebrate Christmas alone, which he did two hours ago with a toast to his christmas tree--the New Year's "party" was going on in the recreation room two decks down. He was not keen on parties, and he hadn't been for decades. Hell, he hadn't enjoyed a party in a century by now, if it was Earth that counted. Still, he figured he'd show up for next week's New Year's party.

Commander Spock always found the New Year's party fascinating, though he didn't always attend. There are few better ways to observe human behavior than to watch them celebrate. The New Year's Celebration is a well known tradition for members of the United Earth Space Probe Administration. No matter where you are in the galaxy, no matter how fast you're going, you could always keep track of just how much time passes if you always celebrate the New Year with the rest of the Earth. The U.S.S. Enterprise was one of the fastest-accelerating starships in the star fleet, and it could really chew through the years. Historically, New Years celebrations happened no more than once every few local months, but as faster and faster ships were built, the parties didn't stop!

Over time, the new years celebrations went from full fledged parties, with everyone on the ship celebrating like tomorrow wouldn't come--to the current roughly weekly celebrations which few crewmembers regularly attended and for which there would be only a modest consumption of synthahol.

Spock usually found the time to attend, and despite his insistence that it was purely for anthropological research, Dr. McCoy was sure that Spock really did enjoy the events.

Chief Engineer Scott, a rather fittingly Scottish man, couldn't enjoy the celebrations. Something had gone horrifyingly wrong with the Enterprise' rocket engine.

"Captain, we've got a problem down here, you had better come and take a look at this," Scott said over the intercom. Kirk promptly paused his book and walked down to the engineering room, to find a very disgruntled group of engineers standing over very disgruntled consoles.

"The rocket engine dampers system has a several problem Captain. For some reason that we cannae pin down, the dampers are beginning to lose their effectiveness. Within three hours we will either have to stop accelerating entirely or we will have to get used ta being crushed down at four hundred gees."

"We can't stop accelerating, without the rockets on we won't be able to slow down at Earth again. We'll skip right off and it'll add local decades to the return trip," Kirk said.

"We also can't accelerate without the accelerational damper, or we'll be a lovely shade of red on the floors," Scotty reminded.

"Well fix the dampers then!" Kirk said.

"A'm not a miracle worker captain," Scotty said, "I dunnee knae what's gone wrong sir."

"You're better than a miracle worker, Scotty," said Kirk, "you're an engineer."

Kirk went back to his quarters to work out an alternative. If they have to call for a rescue, the Solar System would only get the SOS a few seconds before the Enterprise comes blazing past. If they had to bail out and call for a rescue, they'd have to send out a message to a star base much further away than the Earth, certainly that wouldn't be enough time to send a starship out to rescue them. He spent some time plotting trajectories before his lack of tridimensional reasoning skills failed him, and he called in the navigator, Sulu. In the meantime, Kirk ordered full decelerational thrust for as long as the dampers would hold out. Later that afternoon, the dampers failed, and the Enterprise still couldn't send a message slower than an hour's worth of lag time. A significant improvement for sure.

At 1 Gee of acceleration, it would take thirty-five local years to slow down to a stop, putting them 15 years beyond their 15 year mission, and another 17 years to crawl back to the Earth--and that's just local time. For the Earth, 15,000 years would have passed, nearly as long as modern humans had existed on the Earth up to that point. Nevermind seeing family and friends again, there may not even be humans on Earth in 15,000 years. They'd need a high-gee rescue plan, and they'd need it fast, or they'd be in real trouble.

Sulu came up with a solution. The Andorians have scout vessels which regularly break 1,000 gees of acceleration, and they usually have them ready for launch at a moment's notice. Andorians use the same design for acceleration dampers that human starships do, and if they could be fitted with an extra one, they could bring one out. Currently, there would only be a day between the message reaching Andor, and the scout vessel launching, and there's just one shot--only enough time to align the course with Andoria to meet in interstellar space. The Federation Council will have to deal with the payment for this rescue trip later.

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A dramatically blue-shifted radio communication, shining deep indigo pulses like a dim star visible to all those on Andoria's night side, falls to the multispectral communication towers of a species of blue centipedes, the Andorians. By comparing the wavelength of the recieved light to Federation standard wavelength, the proper playback speed of the message can be determined.

"Arath, line me in to the scout division," said a short centipedal bluish creature named Shraab. Arath, a somewhat longer centipede, pulled some wires out of a terminal on the wall and plugged them into electronic ports on Shraab's head. Arath then dialed a number on a touchpad.

"Shraab, how wonderful to think you," multithought the centipede at the other line.

"Yes, yes," said Shraab, "nice to think you too Otyssihr. We have urgent need of a high-acceleration scout ship. The Earth ship Enterprise--"

"You forget Shraab, I already know what you're thinking," thought Otyssihr.

"Just being thorough," thought Shraab, "besides, you know, this Aenar tech stuff is--"

"You don't want it in your backyard. You wish the aenar kept telepathy to themselves. I can't say I disagree. But perhaps that's just because we're sharing a mind at the moment. Anyway, I have sent a message to Friokol, he's getting the Kumaru outfitted with an old accelerational damper as we speak."

"Thank you, Otyssihr, good bye." Before Otyssihr could think 'good bye,' Shraab yanked the cords out of his antennae. "Damn telepathy," he said out loud to no one in particular. Shraab, a veteran of the Andorian Imperial Guard, was granted the rank of Admiral after just three years of service on the first lighthugger ship--nearly a century at home. He returned to find a vastly different homeworld. Andorpogenic climate change was thawing Andoria out of a Snowball phase for the first time in over a million years. The Andorians which had inhabited the majority of the planet's frigid surface were now migrating north and south, into the habitats of the telepathic Aenar, a subspecies closely related to the Andorians. After some initial conflicts, the Andorians and Aenar society have finally integrated--and the latent telepathic abilities of the Andorians are just now beginning to be exploited with technology based upon Aenar biology. Personally, Shraab would rather go back to a pre-telepathic world, but without using the ever more present telepathy technology, he could never effectively operate in a modern society.

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