More Time Travel Fun!

Well, after much character-building stuff, I decided to actually focus an adventure around the ship's stated mission - temporal search-and-rescue. The USS H.Beam Piper, a Thucydides class Timeship (from the ICON supplement All Our Yesterdays) receives a mission to retrieve a Danube class Runabout which has fallen into a temporal rift in Earth orbit.Sensors have indicated the destination of the rift to be somewhen between 1870 and 1920. The crew decides to split the difference and transit to 1895. At that point, they are able to use the ship's chronal sensor suite to fine-tune their calculations to mid-1908 - June 30 to be precise. Transit yet once again, this time to June 29, 1908, they detect the temporal anomaly beginning to form over central Siberia and realise that the Tunguska Event will be happening in the target area at dawn the next day. Their plan had been to get a tractor beam on the Runabout as it exited the rift. As historical records indicate a suspected nuclear-level blast of some 10-20 megatons about 6 miles over the Stony Tunguska River they posit that something caused the Runabout's MARA to go critical. The crew also detect a strange energy field surrounding the planet, emanating from the other side of the planet, in New York State. The energy field had a signature of artificially generated Dark Energy and is generating a chroniton flux.

Beaming down to Shoreham, New York, using holo-disguise emitters to make them look like Humans (the characters were a Caitian, a Tellarite and a Klingon, along with a Bajoran who simply need a simple nosejob, and a Human DTI historian) they they discovered an odd-looking 175-foot tall metal tower with a bulbous sturcture at the top. This was, of course the famous Wardenclyffe Tower used by Nikola Tesla in his experiments with broadcast power. There is a resiual flickering of blue lightning about the tower. The characters approach the Tower an encounter two workmen, who inform them that this is, indeed, the workplace of the famous Dr. Tesla. They speak for a time with Dr. Tesla, deucing that although he is reputed to have ceased his experiments with broadcast power in 1906, he is still tinkering with it. Knowing that the 24th century broadcast power system is based on Tesla's experiments, theyrealise they can't materially interfere due to the risk on affecting the timeline adversely, they leave, resolving to simply try to rescue the Runabout. As they return to their beam-down point in a copse to trees, a police car (very primitive by their standards) approaches having been summoned by Tesla via the new-fangled telephone. Tesla, it seems, has become suspicious that his visitors were spies sent by Edison, with whom he has for many years had a bitter rivalry. Two of the characters who had Stealthy Movement crept back towards the tower through the tall grass and eavesdropped via tricorder on the conversation. This confirmed that Tesla was suspicious about a possible connection to Edison, so the police proceeded slowly back up the road. The characters called the ship for adecoy transporter beam a few hundred metres in the other direction. The cops were drawn off by the sparkling blue light and the musical hum, and thus did not find the characters. They left an officer with Tesla for the night, and the other two cops left. The captain and the two NPCs waited a bit and beamed back up to the ship. At dawn the two PCs left in the area eavesdroped when the cops arrived in the morining to pick up the officer who'd been left behind and confirmed that everything had been written off as a case of suspected industrial espionage and also returned to the ship.

The ship was still monitoring the temporal anomaly at 7AM Siberian time the next moning when they noticed Tesla's energy field had been reactivated and the rift was growing. As they had ascertained that there was no meteor or comet activity in Earth's vicinity (those being two suspected scientific reason for the 1908 explosion, they drew the conclusion that Tesla's field combined with the Runabout's temporal transit were to blame, they engaged the Chronal Jammer (see All Our Yesterdays) to temporarily jam Tesla's operations, and locked a tractor beam onto the Runabout when it came through. Contacting the crew of the Runabout USS Montego, they were preparing to beam them out when the Montego reported a warp core breach in progress. The Piper extended its shields around the Montego, but it exploded before they could initiate transfer.. Sensors and shields were knocked ou by the blast a mere 100km away, but inside their shields, along with the usual micro-fractures in the hull but no other damage. Once sensors were restored, they determinmed that the crew of the Montego had transported off the Runabout a split-second before the explosion. As the Montego had exploded 10km above Tunguska with 15 megatons leaking through the shields as they went down, it accuratey matched the historical records. The problem left was that two Starfleet officers and a Vargr scientist (Vargr being a wolf-like humanoid species borrowed from Traveller) were somewhere down in Tsarist Russia. Unfortunately, supper was ready, so we flew the ...TO BE CONTINUED... banner.