Into the Past

Chief Engineer’s Personal Log
Stardate 993.1

Of all the possibilities that I had considered for the alien structures on Silik 6, finding them to be of Gwuanian origin was not one of them. There’s too much damage to the structure to determine its purpose, damage most likely caused by the recent subspace wave, but I suspect it may have been a communications relay.

We know, from the co-ordinates found in the device on Ego that they either had an outpost or were in communications with another race deep into Nausicaan-held space. The Silik system is directly on the line between Ego and that location, and 43% of the distance, making it an ideal location for a subspace communications relay.

The Cabal’s temporal device is harder to understand. It appeared to be based on the kind of communications device which we’ve seen before, but altered. They were using it to speed time within the algae pools and within the reactor. I wonder if they were also using it to slow time in a larger area. The age of some of the Suliban which the Dehli rescued, as well as the age of the reactor, suggests they were. If that is the case, it was not functioning any longer, perhaps also as a result of the subspace wave.

Is that what the visions were? Side effects of a malfunctioning temporal device. Again, our knowledge in that field is not sufficient to be certain of anything.

As for the device itself, if I could have figured out how to turn it back into a temporal communicator and use it I would have. To send a message 14 days into the past to warn a ship about a hazard that we didn’t know existed at the time. It’s wrong, I know that. I knew it was wrong at the time and yet in that moment it didn’t seem to matter.