Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations - 01 - Watching the Clock

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “Excuse me, who is this man?” the bearded scientist inquired of the agents.

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” said Agent Borvala, striding forward. The younger agent, a lanky, fortyish human with curly dark hair and a saturnine expression, followed close behind.

  “I’ll tell you who I am, Manheim! I’m one of the thousands of Federation citizens whose lives you ruined by playing reckless games with time and space!” He looked at the agents who now loomed over him on both sides. “And I’m here to ask my government why they aren’t doing something to stop this guy from doing it again.”

  “The matter is under advisement,” the human agent said. Did Dulmur imagine it, or was that a warning glance he threw at Manheim? Could he have an ally here after all?

  “Believe me, young man, the immediate threat is past. I underestimated the power, the multidimensional nature, of the energy source we discovered within this planetoid.” Manheim shook his head. “And believe me, I paid dearly for that error. I am as dedicated as you to ensuring the accident does not repeat itself. Probably more so.”

  “Doctor,” Borvala warned.

  But Dulmur narrowed his eyes. “The people who died.”

  “Yes,” Manheim said. “Colleagues and friends, all of them. A weight I will carry the rest of my life. But the work must continue to ensure they did not perish in vain!”

  “Doctor, you’ve said enough,” Borvala barked. “Agent Lucsly, please escort this technician to the security office. He’s the one who should be answering questions.”

  20:52 UTC

  “Name?” Lucsly asked.

  “Dulmur.”

  “First name?”

  The blond man fidgeted—a sign of a guilty conscience? Then he said “Marion” in a small voice. Ah.

  Lucsly entered the name on his padd: DULMER. “No, with a U,” the man said.

  “There is a U.”

  “No, a second U.”

  Lucsly frowned. “Du-ulmer?”

  He sighed. “Never mind. Look, Agent Locksley—”

  “Lucsly.”

  The other man laughed. “I guess we have something in common, huh, pal?”

  “That remains to be seen. Date of birth?”

  “Stardate 15574.6.”

  Lucsly glanced up. “A Sunday.”

  The man blinked. “How’d you know that?”

  The padd finally coughed up the security file for Dulmur, Marion F., civilian contractor. “How did you get here, Mister Dulmur?”

  “By doing my job. I’m a real investigator. No offense.”

  Lucsly threw him a look. “Taken.”

  Dulmur winced. “Look, my clearance is in order . . . basically.”

  “But you came here with an agenda.”

  “Hell, yes. To find out who was messing around with time and not caring how many people’s lives it screwed up.”

  Dulmur went on to explain how the negative-delay incident—the time loop, in the vernacular—had ruined his career prospects. Lucsly felt that Dulmur’s sense of priorities was a little off; others had lost their lives, not merely their jobs. But there was something impressive about the man’s outrage at the very idea of disruption to the flow of time, and about the lengths he’d gone to in order to do something about it. “I want to bring that man to justice,” Dulmur concluded. “Nobody should have that kind of power over—over reality!”

  Lucsly pondered his words and came to a decision. “Rest assured, Mister Dulmur, holding Doctor Manheim accountable for the results of his research is a high priority for the Federation. The matter has been investigated thoroughly, and the widespread effects have been found to be the result of an accident that could not have been anticipated. Manheim himself was almost killed.”

  “But you’re letting him continue his work?”

  “He’s the only person who understands it well enough to help us make sure it causes no further disruptions.” Personally, Lucsly thought Manheim had been insanely reckless to tamper with the mysterious dynamic energy source at Vandor IV’s core—something that Doctors T’Viss and Naadri were theorizing was an interdimensional rift (natural, T’Viss said; perhaps artificial, Naadri said) around which the planetoid had accreted. But the Federation was largely populated and run by people who believed it was worth taking risks to expand pure knowledge, and so Manheim had been exonerated of criminal charges. At least the Science Council had had the good sense to place any further research under the direct supervision of the DTI, and to appoint his mentor Borvala, the best DTI agent Lucsly had ever known, to the task. “But you can be certain we’ll be keeping his work under the strictest supervision from now on. Every possible precaution will be taken, and he won’t be allowed to run a single experiment without clearing it with the finest temporal physicists in the Federation.”

  Dulmur looked him over. “So the DTI, you’re not just about making sure everyone’s clocks are in synch?”

  “That’s the Bureau of Standards. Our job is to keep time on course.”

  The blond man blinked. “Okay, you don’t think small. So where do I sign up?”

  Now Lucsly blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Well, if you’re the ones responsible for keeping mad scientists like Manheim from resetting the universe’s clock, I want in. It’s not like I have anything better to do, after he erased my future.”

  “This isn’t a job you take on casually,” Lucsly told him. “It’s a grave responsibility, the gravest one I know. It demands total commitment and its stakes are higher than you can imagine.”

  “You think you can scare me off with a challenge, pal, you don’t know how a Dulmur does things.”

  “You’re right. I probably don’t.” Lucsly had never given the question any thought.

  The door opened and Borvala came in. “Agent Lucsly, could I speak to you outside?”

  He followed his mentor into the corridor. “Your assessment?” the Zakdorn asked.

  Lucsly gave his report, then added, “I think he’s harmless. Impulsive, but his heart’s in the right place. He even wants to join the Department.”

  Borvala snorted. “He obviously doesn’t know much about it, then.”

  “The more I learned, the more I wanted in,” Lucsly said. “I think he might be the same way.”

  “You’re serious?” Borvala asked. Lucsly just looked at him. “Of course, I forgot who I was talking to.” The wizened DTI agent sighed. “Well, it’s not as if the Department couldn’t use a few more hands. I’d feel better about taking a desk job if I knew you had a partner you approved of.”

  “Hold on,” Lucsly said. “I only said he might be serious about wanting to join. I never said anything about a new partner.”

  “Of course you didn’t, Gariff. Change doesn’t come easily to you.”

  “I don’t want it to come at all.”

  “And perhaps I’ve indulged that too much and held you back. In any case, I’ve had about all I can stand of field work. Even a mind as formidable as mine can handle only so many paradoxes.” Borvala narrowed his small, bright eyes. “You really think he’d be willing to apply?”

  “He’s dedicated,” Lucsly granted with reluctance. “He came nearly a thousand light-years to confront a man for costing him his job.”

  “That’s not dedication,” Borvala said. “That’s obsessiveness bordering on monomania.” A sharp cackle shook his jowls. “You two are kindred spirits.”

  Lucsly remained skeptical. The man might be driven enough to apply, but his odds of surviving the rigors of training were slim. This was probably the last Lucsly would ever see of Marion Dulmur.

  PRESENT TIME

  STARDATE 58281.1 to 58365.9

  III

  Julian Day 2590805 A Monday

  DTI Headquarters

  Greenwich, European Alliance, Earth

  14:11 UTC

  “So how was the visit to your brother?” Clare Raymond asked.

  Teresa Garcia bit her lip, considering her reply. Clare waited
patiently, doing nothing to disrupt the sense of calm created by her office’s decor.

  “It was rough,” Teresa finally admitted. “Last time I saw him, he was eight years younger than me, just starting to notice girls. He was a brat sometimes—of course—but he was . . . innocent. Not a care in the world. It annoyed me sometimes, him going about his games and models and daydreams while I was trying to study hard and get into the Regulus Academy. I told him he’d never amount to anything with an attitude like that. But sometimes I envied him that freedom, that lack of anything weighing him down.”

  She shook her head. “Now, suddenly, he’s seven years older than me, and it’s like he’s lived lifetimes. Like he’s a whole other person. Hell, it’s hard enough to believe he ever got responsible enough to enlist when the Dominion invaded.”

  Clare shrugged. “Maybe thinking you were dead convinced him that life was shorter than he realized. Or maybe he’d been so carefree before because he had you around to be the responsible one.”

  “I don’t know, maybe. I wouldn’t have known how to ask . . . the man he is now. He’s so . . . hard. So angry. The things he saw, fighting the Dominion and now the Borg . . . I just can’t imagine. And it’s like he resents me for getting to skip over all that. Like suddenly I’m the one without a care in the world.” She looked down at her hands. “And I can’t say I blame him.”

  Clare nodded. She’d heard similar stories from other Verity passengers and crewpersons she’d counseled over the past month. A temporal refugee herself, she’d gone to work for the DTI’s Temporal Displacement Division in the hope that her experiences could benefit others displaced in time. She had been a middle-class homemaker in Secaucus, New Jersey, back in the late twentieth century, the mother of two young boys, when she’d died of an embolism during a business trip with her husband Donald. But Donald had invested in a company working with cryonics, the fashionable process of freezing the recently deceased in hopes that future medicine could revive them, and apparently she must have lingered long enough that he was able to make the arrangements to get her frozen promptly upon her death. She and nearly a dozen others had been launched in a solar-powered satellite as protection against power-grid brownouts, and that satellite had been thrown a vast distance across space through unknown means. Three hundred and seventy years later, the satellite had been found by the crew of the Starship Enterprise, who’d been too preoccupied with a mission involving the Romulan Star Empire to investigate that cosmic mystery. But they had found Clare and two others still viably preserved, and the ship’s medical staff had succeeded in reviving all three.

  It had been tough for the temporal refugees to adjust to a world so alien, a world that looked on their twentieth-century materialism and insularity the way Clare would have looked upon serfdom or foot-binding. A world filled with aliens of all shapes, some of them terrifying, with bizarre customs and attitudes of their own, yet living side-by-side with the humans of this era and looking on Clare and the other two as if they were the aliens. But in time, they had all adjusted. Ralph Offenhouse, a businessman who knew how to come out on top, had gone on to become the Federation’s Secretary of Commerce. Sonny Clemonds, a hard-living country musician, had become a minor celebrity, performing his exotically ancient music all over the known galaxy. Clare still collected all his albums, or downloads or whatever they called them these days; she’d never liked country music, but it was one of her few remaining connections to the world she knew.

  Like Teresa Garcia, Clare Raymond had turned to family at first but had found it challenging to fit in. Certainly there was much about this time that was wonderful—no war, no poverty, transporters, holosuites, flying cars, and medicine so miraculous that it not only brought her back from the dead but let her be healthier now at fifty-two (subjective) than she’d been before her demise at thirty-five. But aside from remote lineage, she and her descendants had turned out to have very little in common. They had been unsure how to fit her into their lives, and had often shown considerable embarrassment when she’d inadvertently expressed an attitude that had been shocking in this age. She’d always considered herself a tolerant sort, but living in the twenty-fourth century had forced her to recognize how parochial, shallow, and prejudiced she had been in ways she hadn’t ever imagined. (Her descendants had been mystified when she’d been more troubled by her great-great-great-grandson Jonathan marrying another man than by his sister marrying an alien.)

  Still, what Teresa was going through was perhaps harder in some ways. Everyone Clare had known was gone, but that meant she had few expectations about the new people she met here. But to come back to a world so close to your own, still populated by the same people one had known, yet to find them so different from how you were used to thinking of them—that would be a whole different set of challenges.

  “Do you really think your brother’s right?” Clare asked. “That your situation is so carefree and easy? I mean, maybe you didn’t have to live through it, but now you’re getting it all dumped on you at once. And it’s the reality you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life.”

  Teresa smirked. “Oh, very comforting, Counselor.”

  “I’m just saying that maybe if you helped your brother understand what you’re going through, instead of just accepting that he’s right to dismiss your point of view, it might help you relate to each other better. I mean, losing his ship and his crewmates—twice—must have felt very sudden and disorienting. You have that in common.” Clare paused. “And maybe a touch of survivor’s guilt too.”

  “I don’t know,” Teresa said. “You make a good point, but I’m not sure he’d be willing to listen. It’s not like we were ever that close anyway.” She smirked. “Does it make me a bad person that all the time I was visiting him, I couldn’t wait to get back here and get on with my DTI training?”

  Clare thought about Lucsly, Dulmur, Ranjea, Yol, and the other DTI agents she’d come to know over the years. Most of them lived alone and had few ties, few commitments beyond their work. At first, Clare had found that sad and disturbing. It certainly wasn’t the kind of life she would wish on a member of her own family. But those who did well at the Department’s work were those who found meaning and purpose in it. Sometimes that meaning was a substitute for the rest of their lives, and sometimes it came at the expense of the rest of their lives. But sometimes it was a refuge for people who didn’t quite fit anywhere else. People like Clare.

  So she smiled at Teresa. “What I think . . . is that there’s more than one kind of family.”

  Julian Days 2590812 to 2590823

  The first thing Teresa Garcia learned was to be punctual. If there was one thing nobody at the Department seemed to tolerate, it was tardiness.

  Everything about the DTI encouraged its recruits to concentrate on time. The organization’s headquarters were located in Greenwich, home of the Royal Observatory, the globally accepted reference point for universal time on Earth for just shy of five centuries now. The HQ building itself, or at least its public section, was in a trio of large, semidetached Victorian houses situated half a kilometer north of the Observatory and almost precisely atop the Prime Meridian. The houses had managed to survive the Blitz in WWII, the aerial nuclear detonation and subsequent fires and riots in WWIII, the panic following First Contact, and centuries of everyday use and entropy largely intact—with the occasional refurbishment and extension, befitting the headquarters of one of the Federation’s most important agencies. But the bulk of the DTI’s operation took place in the high-security underground levels stretching out beneath Park Vista and Feathers Place. As yet, Garcia had only the vaguest notion of what was down there. She had spent most of her time at the DTI training facility at the University of Greenwich, on the grounds of the Old Royal Naval College just northwest of HQ. It was a gorgeous place to study, the work of seventeenth-century architect Christopher Wren, and it was steeped in centuries of history and culture. Garcia could appreciate that as a student of archaeology; but mor
eover, the whole environment gave DTI recruits a sense of time and history as tangible, unshakeable things.

  Which was comforting, since what she and her fellow recruits were quickly learning was that nothing could be further from the truth. History as they knew it was merely one eigenstate within a much larger quantum wave equation, a single facet of reality coexisting alongside many others. Reality was regularly splitting into new branches, and sometimes those branches could merge together again, eradicating whole timelines from existence.

  Of course, the DTI’s job was to keep that from happening to this timeline. But the Department’s methods for doing so were more limited than the students had imagined. This came out in a lecture given by Agent Lucsly at the start of training. The gray-haired veteran agent and his partner Dulmur, legends in the Department, had both refused promotion to desk jobs, but apparently were entrusted with responsibility equivalent to a special agent-in-charge, and were often found at HQ reporting to Director Andos herself, participating in high-level decisions and the like. Yet they still made time to give orientations to new recruits.

  When an Andorian chan named Sanioth let it be known that he was here for the adventure of traveling through time, Lucsly skewered him with a look and said, “Here’s the first thing you need to know. The DTI isn’t an adventure; it’s a job. Adventure is what happens when things go wrong, and our responsibility is to make sure they don’t go wrong. That means preventing time travel, not participating in it. If a temporal anomaly is discovered, we secure and patrol it. If an ancient time machine is unearthed, we confiscate it. If a scientist is researching temporal displacement, we monitor and regulate the research.”

  “But what if you’re too late to prevent it?” Sanioth pressed. “What if you’re on the scene and have to follow someone into the past to protect the timeline?”

  “If you don’t stop them before they go back,” replied Lucsly, “then you haven’t done your job right.”

  “That’s easy to say in principle,” Garcia put in. “But even the best agents aren’t perfect. Is it ever allowed even as a last-ditch backup plan?”