Humanity (Banshee Squadron episode)

Teaser

 * The Temporal Cold War heats up and the Banshees are pulled into the conflagration. Now they must fight to save their future and that of all of Humanity!

Blast from the Past
The USS Crockett is on a charting mission. Matthew Cross, Dexter Gray, Josephine Schmidt, and Alexandra Dalton are on board. They detect a time distortion and a Suliban cell-ship comes through and attacks. The distortion surges, and both ships are pulled in.

The Humanity
The Crockett emerges from the time distortion and Jo determines that they are at Earth in the year 1935. Below them is the Hindenburg, and they detect a Suliban bomb in the tailfin. The Suliban are interfering in Earth history, but the Banshees are forbidden to alter history themselves, so they instead beam up the people that supposedly died in the explosion and replace them with replicated simulations of dead, burned people. One dog is also rescued.

Wrinkle in Time
The Suliban cell-ship attacks again. While Cross and Dexter fight the cell-ship, Jo and Alex try to figure out what is going on. The Suliban plan to blow up the Hindenburg succeeded, but that's the way history has always recorded the event. The Suliban must be after something more. It turns out to be the dog.

Back to the Future
The dog is returned to Earth, happy to be reunited with his master. Seeing their plot has been foiled, the Suliban ship opens another time distortion. Both ships go through. The timeship Relativity is waiting for them on the other side. Captain Braxton captures the Suliban, and takes the rescued people for reintegration into society. Afterwards, Jo does research and discoveres that the dog went on to save the life of an ancestor of the midwife who delivered Lilly Sloane, without whom Cochrane's first warp flight would never have been possible.

Memorable quotes

 * "I hate time travel," Cross muttered.
 * "If you can explain this crazy story, I'll give you a medal," said Cross.
 * "I hate time travel," said Cross for the n-th time.
 * "Ugh," groaned Cross. "Temporal Investigations is never going to believe this."

Background

 * In Humanity, I continue to advance the idea that Carter and Matthew Cross will someday fall in love and get married that I started in The Black Gate.


 * I wanted to do a time travel story, but with a twist I didn't think anyone had done before. Normally, the crew goes back to prevent time from being altered, or to set it right if it had already been messed up. In Humanity, the crew discovers that time has indeed been altered, and as a result, their entire history is an altered timeline already. They are fighting to preserve an altered timeline from getting further altered. The punchline is that the entire Trek canon timeline is an alternate reality created by the Suliban during the Temporal Cold War.