Time is on my side, yes it is.
Triggering the chroniton burst had been an act of pure impulse and desperation. One that, many times over the next twenty years or so, Corallel would come to regret.
Time is on my side, yes it is.
Oh, it had been a relief at first, as the warp core breached in front of her. It had saved her life, saved her ship, given her time to solve the problem. At the beginning it was relaxing, just standing there, working on the issue in her own time. She'd gotten so little chance for that in her time on the Darwin. But, over the following hours and days, the magnitude of the problem unfolded before her, the sheer amount of work she had to do became clear. Freezing the ship made it almost impossible to do anything. Almost. She had to shape the chroniton fields to run key systems faster, and she had to find ways of doing that. She couldn't access half the computers and systems, so she had to adapt others, and she had to visualise whole programs and protocols in her head. The work was painfully slow. Days stretched to weeks, then to months. The full scale of the task creeped upon her, a gradual and unwanted realisation. This would take years of her subjective time.
Now you all were saying that you want to be free.
She was trapped in her body, trapped in this time bubble, barely able to move, denied any escape or freedom or rest. She had no sense of time or progression herself, only the microscopically slow but relentless advance of the frozen antimatter wave, the one that would inevitably annihilate her. She had nothing else to look at or think about.
She didn't know how much time she lost to screaming.
You'll come runnin' back (like I told you so many times before),
In time, always in time, that passed. Achieving sanity again became just another problem to solve. As with many Orions, she remembered her heritage, their slow and patient struggle for freedom from the Old Masters, a struggle that had taken millennia. In her initiation as one of the Grey class, she'd memorised a suppressed tome of the secret history, and had recited it, word-perfect, over and over. She had to preserve it, lest it be lost with her. Tales of heroes old and new had inspired her, and taught her patience. Reciting the book had measured her life in sentences and chapters and re-reads, over and over and over.
You'll come runnin' back to me.
She focused on the great work, she had nothing else. Focusing on it kept her sane, kept her going. It was slow but she was meticulous, she planned many steps ahead, she found workarounds and short-cuts, any thing to save precious time.
Time is on my side, yes it is.
Out of the past, her mind became a world of technology, of circuits and systems, of physics and codes, of plasmas and protocols. She constructed a whole model of the USS Darwin in her mind, alongside the Book, a memory palace for her method of loci. It helped her get her work done. But it was a ship without any people.
Time is on my side, yes it is.
Orions were a tribal people, close-knit, bound to kith and kin, communicating always through voice and subtler senses of touch and smell. They needed people, needed each other, and everyone needs love. And she was all alone. She hadn't spoken to another person in many many books.
You're searching for good times but just wait and see,
She didn't know how much time she lost to crying.
You'll come runnin' back (I said you would darling),
You'll come runnin back (Spent the rest of life with ya baby),
You'll come runnin' back to me.
She populated the memory palace of the Darwin with people: family, strangers, crewmembers. They'd thought her a coward and a failure before, she knew it. They'd never know now. She lost herself in dreams: adventures in space she'd never get to have, fantasies in which she took out her rage and frustration, or erased her loneliness in love and sex.
Go ahead baby, go ahead, go ahead and light up the town!
And baby, do anything your heart desires.
Remember, I'll always be around.
She didn't know how much time she lost to the dreaming.
And I know, I know like I told you so many times before.
You're gonna come back,
Yeah you're going to come back baby.
Knockin', knockin' right on my door.
But in time, always in time, she grew bored of all that, as she had to. She got back to work, though she'd return to her fantasies sometimes to relieve the stress and pain of her endless existence.
Time is on my side, yes it is.
Time is on my side, yes it is.
After simply shaping and modulating the chroniton fields, she'd made many preparations, back-ups, and contingencies. She had the time. It took real, physical time for things to happen, and she couldn't simply wait a few months. In time, she got the whole ship wired the way she wanted it.
'Cause I got the real love, the kind that you need.
You'll come runnin' back (I knew you would one day),
Finally, finally, she could get to the original goal of flushing the plasma and ejecting the warp core. Funny how the original problem was always the last one you could fix.
You'll come runnin' back (Baby I told you before),
You'll come runnin' back to me.
She was so close, she could smell it. She'd eject the core, she'd save the ship and the crew who'd doubted her. Then she'd have her freedom, and then she would die, at last.
In just a few very long years.
Time, time, time is on my side, yes it is.
Time, time, time is on my side, yes it is.
She just wished she hadn't had that damn song stuck in her head.
Time, time, time is on my side.