They felt the impact as the shuttle touched down, and then the shuttle touched down. They heard the engines spool down, once, twice, and then a third time, right before Dr. Hall issued the command to spool them down.

“That’s a quite unusual experience,” Lieutenant Commander Taylor exhaled half a breath, uncertain how exactly to feel. The approach had been rough, the intervals of discontinuity tightening, as they drew closer. It was good to finally be on steady ground, and away from atmospheric disturbances that moved without agreement. But then again, how steady was it really down here?

“What?” Dr. Brooks chuckled, sensing the nerves and trying to lighten the mood. “You’re not used to experiencing effect before cause?”

“But what if Dr. Hall had not spooled them down?” Lieutenant Commander Taylor posited. “Couldn’t she have heard the sound and made a choice to cause a contradiction in causality?”

“And that, my friend, is something you’re going to have to get past if you’re going to keep your mind,” Dr. Brooks shrugged. “Cause and effect aren’t partners down here.” That much should have been evident from their bumpy approach. “At best, they are actors that may or may not be reading from the same script.”

Lieutenant Commander Taylor looked confused.

“What matters isn’t that she spooled them down,” Dr. Brooks pointed out as he undid his safety harness and began to get up. “It’s simply that our reality decided to remember it that way.”

The xenoarchaeologist still wasn’t following, and his face said as much.

“Welcome to temporal mechanics, Sebastian,” Dr. Hall quipped dryly as she rose from the conn and holstered her phaser, preparing to head for the ramp. “Don’t worry about understanding it. It’s easier to just focus on surviving it.”

And that didn’t help either. Not one bit. For a moment, as the others hustled down the ramp, he just sat there staring out the forward viewer at a lunar landscape bathed in an uncertainty he didn’t understand. What awaited them out there?

“You coming?” Dr. Hall asked impatiently from the bottom of the ramp.

What other choice did he have? And so he rose from his chair and followed.

At the base of the ramp, they were greeted by their first look at the mining colony. Chorad IXa sprawled across the lunar plain like a rusting organism. Prefabricated modules sat low to the ground, their angular plating a dull gray of recycled alloys, habitation blocks and processing facilities sat wedged wherever the landscape allowed, with exposed utility conduits running freely between them. This was a place built of necessity, not beauty, patches over patches and welds over welds.

It looked almost like dozens of other utilitarian mining colonies that littered the frontier. Except, of course, it wasn’t. This was a place unstuck in its moments, a spaghetti bowl of chronometric field lines carving it into temporal fragments completely discontinuous from each other.

The first sign they saw was the light, some surfaces alight under the midday sun, and others completely darkened save for the ambient illumination from bulbs that didn’t even appear on. The wind, too, was odd, as if it knew not where to blow. They could hear the howl from their left and from their right, blowing towards them and away at the same time. It kicked up dust, but just meters away, that dust sat calm and settled on the lunar floor.

Lieutenant Commander Sena raised her wrist, studying the telemetry coming off the little device that held her constant in the turbulent sea. “Field is holding. Chronometric variance inside the envelope remains constant.” Dr. Brooks’ curious creations were serving their purpose, offering protection from the elements, not of weather and heat, but of time itself.

“Our master blacksmith delivers again,” Voragh smiled, flexing his gloved hand as if testing the steadiness of his anchor.

Dr. Brooks said nothing. Of course they were working. They relied on the same mechanics as had borne them through the fractured atmosphere, just on a smaller, more personal scale. What worried him was not if the science would hold, but what awaited them as they made their way deeper into the colony.

As they rounded a corner, boots crunching on dust that didn’t seem to know whether it was settled or stirred, and there, they saw the first sight of life… or whatever it was that passed for life in this place between moments, a note scrawled across a rusted bulkhead in heavy paint:

STOP THE CLOCK.

The letters were uneven, layered atop one another as if written again and again, looking both fresh and a decade old, all at once. The pigment shimmered faintly in the fractured light, caught between drying and fading.

“A warning?” Lieutenant Commander Taylor wondered aloud.

“A plea,” Dr. Brooks inferred, studying the wall as if it were a theorem. “Someone begging to hold onto a moment as it slipped away.”

“Gives us a sense for the mindset of the people we will encounter down here,” Dr. Hall noted. The psychological toll such a place would hold was bound to be extraordinary.

“If there are any left,” Lieutenant Commander Sena pointed out. She had seen societies collapse over far less, and she was frankly surprised there were still any lights left on.

A gust of wind blew over them, not with direction, but more like the pressure change left behind, and then came voices. Their words were distant and frantic, syllables tumbling over each other, words clipping and restarting as if the speakers were repeating themselves and talking over one another, completely incomprehensible.

Dr. Hall, at the head of the group, slowed and let her hand settle on her holster as she edged around the next corner. But there was no one there.

Another wisp of wind swept past them, colder this time, like a frigid nocturnal gust, even as their moment was bathed in daylight. Up ahead, half hidden by shadow as a fracture split a wide wall, fresh strokes of paint gleamed wetly in the night and sat dried in the day, all at once:

DON’T SLEEP BE//TWEEN HOURS.

“Six months is a long time to live like this,” Lieutenant Commander Taylor shivered, thinking back to Hall and Sena’s words. “I can’t even imagine.” How could you adapt to a world that acted for you even when you did not act?

“You adapt by abandoning sequence in favor of accumulation,” Dr. Brooks replied cryptically. “You accept reality as outcomes, even absent causes.” It wasn’t that hard to understand, really. The galaxy was full of outcomes they could not explain.

“I don’t think they’ve made it that far,” Dr. Hall pointed out as she stared at the graffiti. “The word ‘between’ suggests they still hunger for linearity.”

“If that’s where they are, then they’ve surely gone mad,” Dr. Brooks answered flatly. He knew better than anyone what that was like. He knew that madness, and he’d moved past it.

“Then any survivor is going to make Line Chief Jax’s state of mind look pristine,” Lieutenant Commander Sena conjectured. “Curious that anything’s left running here at all.”

“Resilience is the discipline to keep breathing when time itself forgets,” Voragh offered. “There may be a warrior spirit still among them.”

A klaxon erupted somewhere in the distance. Harsh and metallic. The team spun, searching for the source, but as abruptly as it had begun, it cut off mid-note, supplanted by a hollow echo that lingered long in the ears, half arriving before the rest across a medium that no longer followed a single metronome.

“Time has lost its own rhythm,” Voragh remarked with fascination. This was unlike anything he’d ever seen, and he was here for it. “Each moment strikes its own drum.”

Standing beside the Klingon, the Romulan manipulated her tricorder. “Gradient of fragmentation grows heavier this way.” She gestured towards the north.

“Unless you plan to paint your philosophies on the wall,” Dr. Hall shot a look towards the Klingon. “Then we really should get moving. The anchors won’t hold forever.” Not that she knew what forever meant down here.

And so the team began to move again in the direction indicated by the Romulan.

Not even a minute later, a shimmer crossed before them, a shape, almost human, the size of a boy, flickering in and out of phase. It stepped forward once, and then again, but then it vanished, leaving a faint afterimage.

“Did anyone else see…” Lieutenant Commander Taylor began to say.

“A memory of the past,” Voragh suggested.

“Or a moment yet to come,” Dr. Brooks added. “Really, it’s impossible to know.”

“Oh no, I think we know,” Dr. Hall said as she gestured towards a lump on the ground. “A memory of the past.” There lay a boy, his corpse decaying. “He’s at least a week gone.”

There was nothing they could do for the child, and so they continued on, eventually coming to the entrance of a mine carved into the side of a jagged ridge, its mouth lined with scaffolding and old cable lifts sat nearby. Standing in front of the mine stood a pair of haggard miners locked in a heated argument.

“I told you it would overload…” one said.

“Because you already broke it…” the other replied.

“No, I fixed it yesterday…” the first countered.

“But then you broke it tomorrow…” the second pointed out.

“Yeah, but that was before yesterday…” the first concluded.

Their words overlapped, one man’s gestures outpacing his speech, the other’s coming only after his lips stopped moving, their argument looping over itself, the sequence broken and recursive.

“They fight the same battle, over and over again,” Voragh surmised.

“Temporal loops,” Lieutenant Commander Sena added. “A self-sustaining conflict.”

“To them, maybe…” Dr. Brooks mused. “Or maybe not. There’s not really any way to know.” From their frame of reference, that’s how it appeared, but to the pair, their argument may have unfolded smoothly. Or not. Down here, everything was relative, and nothing was determined.

The men began to move, still in the midst of their animated conversation.

But then they simply vanished.

“Not so self-sustaining, it appears,” Dr. Hall stated dryly as she began to advance again.

“It never was,” Dr. Brooks surmised as he followed the Romulan. “Just for a moment, their moment cohered with ours, but now, that fragment has moved on.”

Lieutenant Commander Taylor just stood there dumbfounded as the others all moved towards the mine’s entrance as if what they had just witnessed was inconsequential. “So are they still there… somewhere?” A haunted look washing over his face.

“In their own second, yes,” Dr. Brooks offered as he turned back. “But in ours, anchored to the external reference frame, there’s no way to know.”

“Their moment just drifted past ours, momentarily,” Voragh elaborated as he and the Romulan followed the psychologist deeper into the tunnel.

Lieutenant Commander Taylor just stood there. How could they just carry on so nonchalantly?

“Sebastian, you really gotta get over it,” Dr. Hall prompted, ushering for him to hurry.

And into the mine they went. It was both cooler and warmer than it had been outside, and the air was heavy with the smell of burning oils and metallic dust. Ahead, the corridor sloped downward as it began to descend through strata of the lunar crust. Whatever they were seeking, the source of the distortion, it lay down there somewhere.

Before they’d even rounded the third descending switchback, they came across a desperate scene, a woman knelt over a man, her hands working in frantic repetition as she alternated between compressions and breathing as if trying to resuscitate him. But looking at him, his body was severely burned, and the light had already left his eyes.

Dr. Hall stepped forward, but stopped when a shout echoed from deeper in the tunnel.

“Melani… Melani, I was… I was just looking… was just looking for you!”

The team turned, and froze. The man calling out was the same one lying motionless on the ground. They glanced back and forth, all except for Dr. Brooks, who just leaned back against the tunnel well, waiting for the inevitable. He already had a sense for the next progression.

The woman looked up from the body, her expression bright with relief. “Tevon!”

The man took a single step towards her, but then an exposed conduit above his head ruptured in a burst of steam and light. The team instinctively dove away to avoid the explosion that followed.

As the dust cleared, the man was lying on the ground, right where he’d been before.

The woman rushed over. “No!!!!!!” 

Her scream was heartwrenching as she fell to her knees beside him. She sat there for a moment, tears welling in her eyes. 

“Tevon, stay with me! Please, stay with me!” 

Her hands moved to a familiar place, that same place as earlier, the hopeless cadence of compressions and breathing beginning again.

“Trapped in a moment that keeps restarting,” Lieutenant Commander Sena observed.

“To fight death, again and again,” Voragh shook his head. “That is not life.”

“There’s nothing we can do for them,” Dr. Brooks posited. “Not now, at least.”

“Are you certain?” Lieutenant Commander Taylor asked. He hated being a passerby in this nightmare. He wanted to do something to fix it.

“Nothing is certain besides that these anchors draw a tremendous amount of power,” Dr. Hall reminded them as she looked at the device strapped to her forearm. “Best we get a hustle on before their power reserves deplete.” She paused and looked back at the xenoarchaeologist, noting that once again, he looked torn. “Unless you’d like to join them in their reality?”

And so downward they went, deeper and deeper into the nightmare of Chorad IXa.