Arado entered his quarters, took a long hard look at the tricorder and sighed deeply. He put it down on his console and disrobed. He stepped into the shower, sonic emitter set to medium and accompanied by a fine mist of hot water that enveloped his body, condensed around every follicle and started to drip down his skin. He let out a loud growl at his abject failure. Another man may have been worried at the loss of face before the crew that this would bring, but not him. Another man may even be worried about having to face Miki's wrath, or taste the cold steel of her sword, but not him. All he had on his mind was that, after fifteen years of research into time travel of developing the formulas and running preliminary tests that would one day form the basis of the Carolina's temporal capabilities and the technology used on ships such as the Aeon and the Relativity, all he had to show for his efforts was a few traces of ancient DNA.
After the shower, he replicated his first pot of Raktajino of the evening and downloaded the contents of his tricorder onto his console before beginning to analyse Seelowe's calculations and formulas and run projections. He slowly went over every step of the process with a fine tooth comb, and when he had finished, he went over everything again. He collated those figures and formulas with his own and made note of any differences that he found. These were few, but given the enormity of the error he had just committed, the significance of those differences did not escape him. Four hours and three pots of Raktajino later he had fully extrapolated Seelowe's formulas into his work, devised a calibration table and refined the jump sequence, and drank enough Raktajino to keep him going without sleep for a week.
At that point he knew that all he needed to do was to use the new calibration tables to create a new wormhole and he would finally see Mimps again. He paused. He recalled her image on the screen, and scrutinized every feature of her face as he had done so many times before in the fifteen years since he had last seen her. It was then that he realised that while she'd look the same and time would have barely passed for her, he would now be 15 years older. Suddenly he felt the weight of every day that had passed since he had been transported out of the Carolina back into his own past and was forced to live an alternative life. For a fleeting moment he thought of bringing out his bottle of real Andorian Ale, but knowing that he still had a few hours of calculations ahead of him and how crucial it was that he did not mess up again, he reluctantly decided against it. Instead, he uttered a tired "Computer, Raktajino. Extra sweet" and turned back to his work.
Many hours later Unadecal Arado walked on to the bridge of the Rorschach. He had a data chip in his hand, but this time there was no shouting and waving it around, no excited tapping of keys. He crossed to the central command chair and sank into it with a sigh of relief and weariness.
Arado looked down at the data chip and turned it over in his hand a few times before he carefully inserted it into a vacant slot in the control panel beside the chair. He tried to ignore the dark haired copper skinned woman glareing at him from the other side of the bridge, and concentrated on the numbers appearing on the screen in front of him.
“It has to work this time, it just has to,” he thought to himself. He’d spent all night checking and rechecking the data that Seelowe had entered into his tricorder, and now it was time to see where it would take them.
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