Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock

by Christopher L. Bennet

  Ahead of them, Worf held up a fist, signaling that they should stop. Lucsly checked his tricorder—the source of the time distortion was just ahead, as were a number of anachronistic biosigns. Worf gestured to the agents to stay behind while he advanced slowly.

  But then a series of subspace fractures began to open around them. Lucsly almost fell through into a fierce thunderstorm on a raging sea, but Noi grabbed onto his arms, her surprising strength pulling him away from it. They clutched one another until it closed, and then Lucsly pulled away, clearing his throat and brushing down his suit. Noi smiled and winked at him.

  The next rift opened onto the surface of an icy planetoid lit by the dim light of a distant red dwarf. Air was sucked through, but this time everyone was a safe distance away, and it soon closed. Elfiki was again studying her tricorder. “That was Wolf 1246. Seven light-years from here. Why are they always connecting to planet surfaces? Something about the gravitational potential . . . or quantum resonance of physically similar bodies?”

  Just be glad they do, Lieutenant, Lucsly thought, having a strong feeling he knew what was coming next. He stepped gingerly away from Elfiki, touching Dulmur’s shoulder. He sensed his fellow agent tensing, ready to move, to say something. But at Lucsly’s glare, he relaxed.

  As Elfiki took a step forward, another fracture opened up beside her. Startled, she jerked away and fell back, but the rift expanded and swallowed her up. Lucsly saw her tumble onto the bright, arid surface of Pyrellia’s dayside on the other end. The circle is complete, he thought.

  But not quite. Other fractures were opening up all around the party. One almost took Noi, but Ducane-2 threw her aside and was taken himself to who knew where.

  “Somebody do something,” Ducane-3 cried as the rifts surrounded them. “I’m running out of lives here!”

  Suddenly, a new sound pervaded the chamber, a low drone that set Lucsly’s teeth on edge, and a wash of warm energy followed. The rifts began to close, normality restoring itself.

  “That sounds like an entrance cue if ever I heard one,” said Dina Elfiki, still in civilian attire but no longer disguised as a Bolian. She carried a largish, hand-held device, just the right size to fit in the duffel bag she’d brought with her from Greenwich. It was the source of the droning hum.

  “Lieutenant!” Worf said, staring in shock. Then he gathered himself. “You are out of uniform.”

  “I apologize, sir. It’s a long story.” She glanced at the DTI agents. “Four months long.” Her face lit up in a smile of profound relief. “But it’s over now.”

  XX

  Time Out of Joint A Doomsday

  Third Moon of Rakon IV

  Nowish

  With the subspace fractures healed locally by Elfiki’s field device, the next step was to take down the Na’kuhl and Shirna before they set off the temporal disruptor. But as the team carefully advanced, they saw that the battle had already been joined—not only by the Vorgons, but by themselves. Well, mostly. The duplicate group, battling amid a field of subspace fractures, included one Ducane and the civilian-outfitted Elfiki but not her younger counterpart. However, that group’s Choudhury and Lucsly were missing, and Dulmur saw himself lying crumpled and motionless on the ground, and the duplicate Noi was struck and vaporized as he watched. One Vorgon took out a Shirna sniper, allowing a furious duplicate Worf to fire a blast that struck the temporal disruptor and caused it to blow up in the Na’kuhl’s pale, batlike faces. A ripple of distortion swept out from the detonation site, and then the battle was joined again, the same group but with the other Dulmur still standing, the other Choudhury firing on the Shirna until a rift opened up and engulfed her in an outpouring of superheated gases from some Jovian’s inner atmosphere, leaving little recognizable behind. Dulmur retched and turned away, and was comforted when the real Choudhury—it helped to think of her that way, though the other was no less real—took his arm and led him away after the rest of the team.

  Once they had reunited with the physicists, making sure they were all safe within the stabilizing field, Noi threw a look at the surviving Ducane. “I guess you aren’t out of duplicates after all.”

  “Hey, that wasn’t the TIC’s doing. I’ve already reached my limit. That must’ve been a spontaneous quantum divergence.”

  “Fully intercausal?” Noi shook her head. “Ohh, the spacetime breakdown is getting worse. Even without the disruptor being activated, we’re still in serious danger of quantum collapse.”

  “We should go back,” Ducane said. “Take the scientists somewhere safe, plant a stasis device here before the other combatants arrive. Trap them all in temporal limbo.”

  Noi stared. “Are you crazy?”

  “Look, we have to accept that keeping this conference unaltered is a loss! The important thing is to keep the scientists alive!”

  “Agreed, but not that way! You go back earlier and they’ll just go back earlier to get ahead of you, and so on! That’s how we got into this mess in the first place!”

  Ducane sneered. “You civilians. You’ve gotten soft and timid. I can’t believe my Federation degenerates into the likes of you.”

  “We’re careful,” she fired back. “We aren’t fascists who think we can force reality and people’s identities into the shape we want!”

  “We get the job done!”

  “You just make things worse! Why do you think they dissoved the TIC and put civilians in charge of temporal enforcement?”

  “Noi, remember your protocols,” Rodal cautioned.

  “Ohh, that’s a future I hope to avert one way or another,” Ducane fired back.

  “And you, Ducane!” Rodal said. “Remember, she is your chronological superior!”

  “Who are you to talk about superiors?” the human commander snarled. “You can’t make a move without clearing it with your shapechanging masters. Who don’t even have the courage to show themselves.” Meneth extended her claws and snarled. “That’s right, kitty, keep up the act. It’s all you’re good for. Remember, the Federation isn’t under your jurisdiction anymore!”

  “Perhaps we were premature in making that decision!” Rodal shot back.

  “HEY!”

  Everyone turned to look at Dulmur, who took a deep breath or two before going on in a more normal, but still angry, tone. “Listen to yourselves. You’re supposed to be partners in the Accords? No wonder this situation’s such a mess.”

  “He’s right,” Lucsly said, coming up beside him. “We’re all equally in danger here. Continuing the fighting won’t do any good for anyone.”

  “The Vorgons had the right idea,” Dulmur went on. “What we need is a cease-fire. We need to get everyone, and I mean everyone, sitting down together to work out a truce before we all go out in a puff of quantum smoke.”

  The time agents exchanged a series of sullen, chastened looks. Rodal’s civet made a small mewling sound. “Meneth’s right,” Noi said, surprising Dulmur. “It’s the only way . . . but it can only work if we can find a neutral mediator. Someone everyone can trust to be objective.”

  “Someone nobody would consider a threat,” Ducane added.

  “Someone,” Rodal finished, “who’s well known for having no agenda save the integrity of time itself.”

  Dulmur grinned when he realized that all the time agents, himself included, were looking at Gariff Lucsly. He grinned wider when his partner took it entirely in stride, as if he’d been expecting it all along. “Fine,” Lucsly said. “But if Dulmur and I are to mediate a settlement . . .”

  “Why him too?” Ducane challenged.

  Lucsly stared at him. “Because he’s my partner.” Dulmur smiled, but Lucsly gave no response to it. He didn’t need to.

  Ducane saw that no one else questioned Lucsly’s terms, so he subsided. Lucsly went on: “If we’re to negotiate a settlement, then the need-to-know clause comes into effect. We’ll need to be briefed on just what it is all the factions are fighting over. Why this event is so important to the future.”

>   Noi exchanged a look with the others. “Agreed,” she said. “But only the two of you.” She looked around, taking in the Enterprise team and the physicists. “I can’t allow anyone else to know. I’m sorry, Doctors, Commander Worf, but you all understand the Temporal Prime Directive.”

  “Agreed,” Worf said, looking unhappy but stoically accepting. “Just find a way to end this.”

  Noi was quickly able to replicate Elfiki’s stabilizing effect using the circuitry integrated into her jumpsuit’s intricate fabric, allowing her to lead the DTI agents away into a separate group. Ducane was able to do the same with his temporal tricorder and Rodal with his stylus-shaped servo device, so they and Meneth went off to make the cease-fire offer to the anti-Accord factions. Soon, Dulmur and Lucsly were alone with Jena Noi, and she began to talk.

  “By now you know this is a focal point of the Temporal Cold War,” she said, “though this is one of the points where it’s become hotter. What you don’t know is why we fight a cold war—why we engage each other through proxies in the past rather than attacking each other directly.”

  Lucsly and Dulmur traded a look. Dulmur had never thought about it, but Noi’s words made the answer self-evident. “You have some kind of defense against temporal incursion,” Dulmur said.

  “One that hasn’t been invented yet,” Lucsly added. “So you’re free to strike in the past, before it existed, but not in your own respective centuries.”

  Noi nodded. “Exactly.”

  “Is this the place where it gets invented?” Dulmur asked.

  Lucsly shook his head, peering at Noi. “No . . . you’re just guessing it might be. Best way to keep a secret from time travelers—keep it out of the history books.”

  “That’s right,” the exotic Temporal Agent said. “Sometime in the twenty-fifth century, someone invents what we call the temporal defense grid. It’s a network of detector satellites tuned to register the subspace, quantum, and other signatures of every known type of temporal incursion. Upon detection, a subspace pulse or other appropriate countermeasure is focused on the point of the incursion—an advanced wave focused back in time to the moment it begins, to correct for the detection and processing lag. It collapses the temporal connection before it forms and bounces the time traveler back to the point of origin. Any place within its field of influence is protected against invasion from other times, other dimensions.”

  “And you don’t know who invented it,” Dulmur said.

  She shook her head. “The temporal security behind the operation was staggering, far better than what Vard attempted here. The grid went online in every major power in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants at once—the Federation and its Khitomer Accords partners, the Typhon Pact . . . or whatever it evolves into,” she added with a wink, “the First Federation, the Sheliak Corporate, the Vomnin Confederacy, the Carnelian Regnancy, some you’ve never heard of. It must’ve taken decades to develop and deploy in secret. And once it was active, they didn’t even tell anyone at first. It took a while for the civilizations to figure out they were protected. So we don’t even know exactly when the grid went up, except by trial and error, finding the latest point we can travel to. And even that’s not definitive, because once the main network was in place, other powers copied it, and by twenty-five hundred it had spread to most of the known galaxy. The grid allows communication between times—phase-shielded to protect against timeline collapse—and you can arrange for clearance through it for consensual time travel. But any uninvited incursion to any point after the late twenty-fifth century is blocked.

  “But even though we know how to control the grid, we don’t know where it came from. The systems are a mix of many species’ technologies, some of which are probably red herrings. The developers not only worked in secrecy and wiped all records of their work, they planted extensive false leads in the historical record, so that whatever evidence they couldn’t destroy was lost in the noise. We think they must have even wiped their own memories after it was done, because nobody ever boasted or let anything slip about it afterward.” She shook her head. “We have the power to go back to any place and time we want, but it’s a big galaxy and a lot of decades to cover. We can’t find out who built the grid if we don’t know where to look.”

  Lucsly shook his head. “So all the anti-Accordists had to work with was conjecture. Best guesses. Historians’ theories and reconstructions.”

  “Exactly. Some of the leading theories focus on the Carnelians, a civilization as advanced as your own, more than capable of pulling it off. But since the changes in their history didn’t unmake the defense grid, their role must not have been the pivotal one. The Sheliak have been under attack too, but they’d never deign to tell you, and their own temporal agency is . . . highly efficient, so they’ve escaped significant change. And the Typhon Pact . . . well, you can try getting those stories out of Revad if we get out of here alive.

  “As for the Vomnin, they’re more scavengers than innovators. The First Federation is cautious enough and advanced enough, but too timid and isolationist to mastermind such a thing. So the bulk of the remaining theories focus on the Federation and its allies. On the temporal physicists of this generation, who made pivotal breakthroughs in our civilization’s understanding of time. The Shirna went after President Bacco because many believe that only she would’ve had the boldness, the vision, and the deviousness to mastermind something like this. But many have focused more on the physicists, people like Vard, Korath, and Naadri. The timing is right—depending on how long it took to organize the project, they could have been its initiators, or maybe the mentors of those who were.”

  “But what’s the point?” Lucsly challenged. “Even if they create a new timeline where the defense grid doesn’t exist, they must know better than to think they can erase the timelines where it does. It’s one thing to try to erase the past—you can collapse the timeline, end its existence once and for all. But even if they create an alternate past or present for themselves, the fact that you’re here proves that your timeline, defense grid and all, still survives centuries beyond them. So how can they threaten the existence of that future?”

  Noi shook her head. “It’s so much more complicated than that, Gariff. I guess it’s our own fault, constantly crossing into each other’s eras and timestreams to wage our cold war, play our games. We’ve entangled our histories together so intimately, bound them in such a Gordian knot of multidimensional time, that there’s no way we can coexist separately anymore. For all I know, my thirty-first century is part of a Manheim loop with no future. It could all reset to an earlier point and play out differently. I’ve been to my own future, seen possibilities where my Federation survives, but the Cold War rages there too, and it’s just as entangled, just as vulnerable, as the rest.

  “All I know is that eventually, hundreds or thousands of years from my time, only one history will survive after all the others involved in the war have collapsed into it. We’re all fighting to make sure that that final history will be as close to our own realities as possible. Trying to turn each other’s timestreams into close parallels of our own, trying to duplicate and reinforce our own histories, because a larger sheaf of closely related histories will have more collective probability and will win out in the eventual merger.” She went on with growing intensity. “If we’d just left well enough alone, then maybe we could all have created our own separate, parallel streams and coexisted indefinitely. But in fighting to promote our own preferred histories at each other’s expense, we’ve trapped ourselves in a situation where only one can survive. We all should know better, but the whole thing was already happening before we were even born, and so we had no choice but to play our part in the self-fulfilling prophecy.”

  Dulmur and Lucsly looked at each other, processing these revelations. Noi took the time to catch her breath. “God, I hate this war,” she muttered. “You two are lucky to have been out of it until now.”

  Lucsly furrowed his brow, realizing why they’d been ou
t of it until now. “The Borg. You said before, every future faction is from a timeline where the Borg threat has been ended.”

  Noi nodded. “Nobody could risk attacking the Federation prior to February 2381. We all depended on that sequence of events that would eliminate the Borg from the galaxy. So everyone, even the anti-Accordists, had to focus their attacks either now, after the Borg had been absorbed by the Caeliar, or before the UFP was founded in 2161.”

  “Not everyone,” Lucsly said. “The Vorgons on Risa in ’66. You told them they were taking an irrational risk striking when they did, interfering in the life of Jean-Luc Picard.”

  “Now you know why I was so angry at them.”

  “And the Na’kuhl stealing the Deltan time perceptor in ’72.”

  “They always were reckless,” she said. “They took the perceptor in hopes it would give them an edge in finding where the defense grid was invented. Oh, the tales I could tell you about our struggles to get it back from them. That was my first death.”

  Dulmur tried to avoid thinking about that one. “Were they the ones who gave the Borg a time machine and sicced them on Zefram Cochrane?”

  “That was the Sphere Builders,” she said.

  The DTI agents nodded. “You mean the transdimensional species that engaged in the large-scale reconstruction of the spacetime of the Delphic Expanse as a prelude to its colonization,” Lucsly said, “and pitted the Xindi against Earth in an attempt to prevent the formation of the Federation that would otherwise defeat their invasion in the mid–twenty-sixth century?”

  “Mm-hm,” Noi confirmed. “Well, the Borg attack was their third try. They figured if Cochrane never invented warp drive, Jonathan Archer could never have been a threat to their plans. And they didn’t care if the Borg survived or not, since Borg drones couldn’t survive the altered physics of the realm the Sphere Builders were trying to create.” She winced. “We let that one get past us, I’m afraid. Luckily the laws of probability arranged for Picard’s Enterprise to be in the right place and time. And we put the Builders in their place afterward.”