Department of Temporal Investigations

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “Shaiyu!” The word came out of him unbidden. He didn’t even know what it meant.

  But it made Daiyar freeze, her eyes widening. “What did you call me?”

  “I—I’m not sure.”

  “Only one Dhei’ten has ever called me that. Or . . . ever will.”

  Ranjea understood. “Riroa. You knew Riroa Nadamé. You are from uptime!”

  “How could you know about Riroa?”

  “I communed with her . . . when she died. Her passions live on in me.”

  Daiyar was struck silent. Tears glinted against the black.

  “Ranjea!” Teresa burst through the gate. Ranjea and Daiyar both turned their heads to see her running toward them, raising her phaser.

  Daiyar turned back to him. “I’m sorry,” she said—then shoved the servo before his face and activated it.

  Distantly, he was aware of Daiyar pulling him in front of her and retreating toward the ship—of Teresa calling his name and pleading with him to fight back. But he was very calm and content to follow the instructions Daiyar whispered in his ear, to follow her inside the ship and stand in the door and fire at Teresa’s feet until the door slid shut and they took off. And then he was content to follow her instructions to hand him his phaser, then go lie down on the rear cot and take a nice, long nap. He trusted her to know what was best for him.

  “I am sorry, my old friend,” he heard her say as he lay down and closed his eyes. “But I have missed you. And I need you to understand what I must do.”

  DTI Branch Office, Denobula

  Mere hours after Teresa Garcia’s report of Ranjea’s abduction reached the branch office, the Aegis finally deigned to make contact. Assistant Director Dulmur received a report from the transporter station that the platform had been remotely activated by a powerful external beam. By the time he and Lucsly arrived, someone was already beaming in, and the flickering, flowing interference patterns on the field generator matrix panels left no doubt that an Aegis transporter was sending the beam. At least they had the courtesy to use the pad and not just beam into my office closet, Dulmur thought. The Aegis liked locking their transporters onto doorways for some obscure reason.

  The figure on the pad solidified into a lean, dignified Cardassian male in a neat, fairly bland suit. Draped over his shoulders was an even leaner, long-headed felinoid with dark green fur. Dulmur greeted the Cardassian as he stepped forward. “Supervisor 341.” He nodded to the Simperian civet. “Meneth.” Dulmur had once seen the civet transform into a humanoid female, apparently a common ability of the companion animals that Aegis supervisors rarely traveled without. Dulmur often suspected the “pets” were the real supervisors, so it was probably wise to be polite to them.

  The supervisor, who was otherwise known as Rodal Eight, nodded back. “Assistant Director Dulmur. Congratulations on your promotion.” He turned to the other human in the room. “And Agent Lucsly. Changeless as ever.” Lucsly merely nodded.

  “Rodal,” said Dulmur, “I appreciate you coming here, but we’ve been trying to reach you for days. Your office on Cardassia seems to have closed several years ago.”

  “Yes—we phased out operations there once the Union joined the Khitomer Accords. That technically makes them parties to the Temporal Accords as well, and we prefer not to interfere in the affairs of other signatories.”

  Good to know there’s someone they won’t interfere with, Dulmur thought. “It would’ve been nice to know that before now,” he said. “And if you’d been more communicative before, we might not have had one of our agents abducted today.”

  Rodal appeared unfazed by his accusation, though Meneth folded her ears back and gave a faint growl. “You were advised to leave this matter to the Aegis, Director. We are the ones best qualified to deal with our own.”

  “As I recall, the last time some Aegis members went rogue, you needed help from James Kirk and the Enterprise crew to deal with them. Your man Gary Seven solicited their help more than once, in fact. And that was Kirk, for God’s sake. We’re actual temporal professionals, same as you.”

  “And yet you allowed a single Aegis-trained renegade to steal a dangerous temporal device from your impenetrable Vault. Now your people have further allowed her to obtain the component she needs to render it operational.”

  “Neither of which would have occurred,” Lucsly pointed out sternly, “if you had been able to keep Aegis technology out of that renegade’s hands.” Meneth growled more loudly, though Dulmur imagined he heard overtones of embarrassment this time.

  “All right,” Dulmur said before this could escalate further. “We’ve both screwed up. Doesn’t that tell you, Rodal, that we’d both be better off working together instead of wasting our energies butting heads?”

  Rodal traded a look with Meneth. “She did take one of their own. They have a stake in this as much as we do now.” The civet trilled unhappily, but then fell silent.

  “Meneth agrees,” Rodal said to the DTI men. “You are entitled to participate. With that in mind, gentlemen, I invite you to come with us to the Aegis outpost we are using as a staging area in our hunt for Daiyar. I can beam you there right now, if you wish.”

  Dulmur exchanged a look with Lucsly. The chance to see an Aegis operation from the inside was a rare thing even for temporal agents. It could answer many questions about the mysterious organization. But right now, that paled next to the urgency of rescuing Ranjea and retrieving the time drive. Dulmur could see in Lucsly’s eyes that he felt the same way.

  “Agreed,” Dulmur said. “Just let me issue a few instructions to the staff . . . and tell my fiancée I won’t be home for dinner.”

  Aegis observation post, undisclosed star system

  When the cloudy blue field of the Aegis transporter faded, Dulmur found that he, Lucsly, Rodal, and Meneth had materialized in a small alcove with crystalline walls. Rodal was already striding out of it into the larger chamber beyond, in which Dulmur could see several individuals of various species operating sophisticated equipment, including glowing cubic computer interfaces and wall consoles with circular display screens. He and Lucsly exchanged a sidelong glance and started to follow Rodal, only to be stopped by an unexpected voice. “Boss? Where the hell am I?”

  The two men turned to see Teresa Garcia standing behind them, her wide, dark eyes darting around in confusion. “Ah, yes,” came Rodal’s voice from outside the alcove. “I thought it would save time if I had Agent Garcia beamed here directly, so she could brief us personally on her encounter with Daiyar.”

  “Agent Garcia,” Dulmur explained, “this is Rodal Eight, Supervisor 341 of the Aegis.”

  “Oh, really?” Garcia strode forward to confront Rodal, undaunted even though he was a head and a half taller than she was and had a sharp-fanged Simperian civet perched on his shoulders. “So my partner getting kidnapped finally got you to come down off your high . . . cats . . . and talk to us, huh? Fine. I’ll tell you anything you want to know—just get my damn partner back.”

  Meneth purred, evoking a chuckle from Rodal. “She likes you,” he said. “Such aggression, but in the service of compassion and fellowship. The very qualities that made our employers see such potential in humanity so long ago.”

  “Did they also notice we aren’t known for our patience?”

  “We have mastery of time, Agent Garcia. Urgency is not required. And you have had something of a recent ordeal. An opportunity to cool down and refresh yourself would only benefit your partner.”

  Garcia’s shoulders slumped after a moment. “Fine. So just where are we, anyway?” she asked.

  “Looks like an Aegis facility,” Lucsly observed. “But not camouflaged with native architecture or technology, and with multiple species operating openly. This isn’t the Aegis homeworld, is it?”

  “No,” Rodal said. “It’s my new assignment now that Cardassian operations have closed down. Com
e, I’ll show you.”

  He led them outside the structure, and Dulmur was struck by a gust of hot, dry air. They were in an arid environment heated by a large orange sun overhead and a dim blue pinpoint of a more distant companion star. At Dulmur’s glance, Lucsly gave a slight shake of his head; he didn’t recognize the system configuration either.

  The outpost was near the edge of a fair-sized canyon. As Rodal led them toward the brink, the far wall of the canyon was revealed to be a vertical town. Dozens of dwellings, plazas, pools, and other structures were carved into the living sandstone, with chasms in the rock face spanned by elaborate rope bridges and hanging gardens. The occupants of the village were bipedal, as much avian as humanoid, with orange and gold feathers and compact winglike membranes extending from their arms. After watching them for some moments, Dulmur realized the winglets merely let them glide rather than fly, hence the need for the various rope ladders and bridges. “Don’t worry,” Rodal said, “we’re holographically cloaked from their view.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Dulmur said.

  “The inhabitants call it Tanka Misata,” the Aegis supervisor replied. “It means ‘The Dream of Yesterday.’ They once lived throughout this portion of the continent, but it has since been invaded by an empire from across the sea. Their people were driven from their traditional lands by conquest and disease, leaving only a minority.”

  Garcia looked intrigued, but Lucsly was unmoved. “This hardly seems the sort of situation the Aegis would intervene in,” he said. “You tend to focus on civilizations at the cusp of maturity, developing technologies that threaten species survival. This world is . . . thousands of years from reaching that level.”

  Dulmur realized what had given Lucsly pause. “You’re recruiting,” he accused Rodal. “You’re going to abduct these people from their homes and breed them like livestock into future Aegis assets. Just like you did to Gary Seven’s ancestors on Earth.”

  “And my own ancestors on Hebitian-Age Cardassia,” Rodal reminded him. “This is the way it has been done for untold millennia.”

  “All that time, all that wisdom, and you haven’t found a better way than enslaving primitive peoples?”

  Meneth gave a low, warning growl. “You do not know the whole story,” Rodal said, “because you cannot see the whole shape of time. The Aegis can. And that is why we are at Tanka Misata.

  “In recent generations, this minority has been allowed to live in peace within the empire in traditional communities like this, so long as they pay regular tribute to the imperial tax collectors. But a new emperor has used them as scapegoats for economic hardships resulting from his own incompetent leadership. He encourages his subjects to hate the indigenes so that they will be diverted from hating him. In recent months, that hate has erupted into open violence, and the leadership has failed to condemn it, implicitly encouraging its spread.

  “In a few days, a mob of the colonizing ethnic group will glide down from the clifftop and set this whole village afire. A few dozen Tankans will escape in the chaos, but the rest will be burned alive—as far as this world’s history will record.”

  “A Varley extraction,” Lucsly realized. “You’re selecting people who would be doomed otherwise, beaming them out immediately before their death. That way you can collect assets with no impact on the timeline.”

  “And rescue hundreds who would have died. This ethnic group is a persecuted minority now, but millennia hence, their descendants will be the ones who achieve this world’s industrial revolution and become its dominant culture. When this world’s existential crisis arrives, Aegis operatives of their ethnicity and cultural background will be in the best position to influence events clandestinely.”

  “Nice twist on the Prime Directive you’ve got there,” Dulmur said. “Interfere all you like in a planet’s development, just don’t let them know you’re interfering.”

  “Director Dulmur, the entire reason that the Aegis recruits indigenous peoples to become agents is so that the decisions affecting a species’ fate will still be made by members of that species—just with certain extra assets and information to aid in their endeavors.”

  “Except,” Garcia put in, “that they’ve been raised for hundreds of generations in your culture, not their own. So how can they really qualify as members of the civilizations they’re intervening in?”

  “Our purpose is to bridge the gap between Aegis civilization and our own,” Rodal replied. “To be able to comprehend and connect both points of view.”

  “The Ottoman Empire on Earth called it devshirme,” she said. “Kidnapping children, raising them as slaves, grooming them to be administrators over their own peoples.”

  “Would you rather we let the Tankans die when we have the means to save them?”

  “For a price.”

  “Those hundreds of generations that you mentioned will live free and healthy lives under Aegis protection. Some of them, if they wish, may enroll for the augmentation and training program so their descendants may pay that boon forward to others. What you see of Aegis operations merely scratches the surface of our civilization. Would you expect outsiders to have a clear picture of the Federation based purely upon Starfleet? If that were all they saw of it, might they not mistake the Federation for a military dictatorship?”

  Garcia and Dulmur traded a sheepish look, aware that Rodal had a point. It was a common attitude among DTI agents, along with many other civilian employees of the Federation government, to resent the excessive attention that Starfleet attracted with its dramatic discoveries and adventures. Sometimes it seemed that the rest of the galaxy—and even some Federation citizens—mistook Starfleet for the whole thing.

  Lucsly, though, was not about to concede the argument. “What concerns me more is that you’re casually acting on information received from the future. Knowing in advance when this planet will reach its ultimate survival crisis is a contamination of the timeline.”

  Rodal shook his head. “Oh, Lucsly, your view of time has always been excessively linear. Time travel is simply part of the universe. Once it exists, it has always existed and always will. There has never been such a thing as a timeline unaffected by time travel. Even without technological intervention, there have always been natural phenomena that allow the transmission of matter and information back in time—wormholes, cosmic strings, retrocausal waves, and the like. The reversibility and mutability of time are fundamental parts of its nature. The Aegis simply embraces that fact and uses it. We work to protect the timeline from destructive manipulation, as all Accordist groups do, but we also use our insight into time constructively, to give civilizations a judicious amount of extra help in making their own choices and avoiding the most destructive mistakes.

  “You Federation types are so self-righteous about intervention in other worlds or in the past. But intervention, like time travel, is a neutral tool. The good or evil that it does is a function of how it’s used. The Federation is so afraid of abusing its power,” Rodal went on, “that it never gives itself the chance to learn how to use that power constructively. If you ask me, that goes beyond taking responsibility for your actions and becomes an abnegation of responsibility.”

  “We’re here now, aren’t we?” Dulmur said. “We’re taking responsibility for getting that time drive back from Daiyar. If you’re so all-fired responsible yourselves, then let’s get on with finding Daiyar and saving Ranjea.”

  “Very well,” Rodal said. “Let’s return to the compound and pool what we know.” He headed back, Garcia right on his heels.

  But Dulmur paused for a moment, gazing out across the canyon at Tanka Misata. A moment later, he noted Lucsly by his side, doing the same. “Could you really leave them to die, knowing what was going to happen?” Dulmur asked.

  Lucsly glanced back. “That’s just it. I’m not supposed to know.” He paused. “A history of race hatred . . . a self-serving demagogue stirring
up new resentments for his own ends . . . you don’t need time travel to predict where that’s heading. It’s up to their own people to recognize the danger and head it off before it’s too late.”

  “And what about the times when they don’t?”

  Lucsly had no answer.

  III

  * * *

  Lakina II

  Somewhere in the Gum Nebula

  Ranjea emerged from the scout ship to find Daiyar seated at a folding table covered in various equipment, including the stolen time drive and path integrator. Judging from the faint, high-pitched tone his sensitive ears could detect and the fact that the local insects seemed to be giving the table a wide berth, one of the instruments must be generating a sterile field to let her work in a clean environment. Ranjea assumed at first that this was simply due to lack of working space within the ship.

  But then he noticed the view. The ship was parked in a clearing on a large hilltop covered in rich blue-green vegetation. The ground was level here, but it dropped off precipitously not far from where Daiyar worked. Beyond the edge, Ranjea could see a wide river valley surrounded by hills matching the height of this one—a feature most likely carved out by a glacier in some ancient time. The river’s banks were pristine and unoccupied by any sign of civilization, but Daiyar had positioned her workspace before a gap in the trees, allowing a clear view of the valley below, and had seated herself to face that vista. Ranjea doubted this was accidental.

  “I wouldn’t recommend trying to attack me,” Daiyar told Ranjea as he approached, though she did not turn away from her work. “I implanted a posthypnotic suggestion with my servo. It inhibits you from touching me or interfering with my work.”

  “That’s a shame,” he said. “I have a vivid sense memory of your touch from Riroa. I know that it carried great meaning to her—although you kept her at a greater distance than she desired as well.”