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

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Clare struggled to find something to say. She was still new at this; she wasn’t even sure why Whitcomb had asked to switch therapy assignments and start meeting with her instead of a more experienced TDD counselor. But she tried to make the best of it. “Look, I understand how you feel, Parvana. It’s been . . . rough for me to adjust to being in this time. To have to accept that my husband and my little boys have been . . . dead for centuries, that everyone I ever knew is gone and forgotten. There have been times when I’d give anything for a chance to go back. But—”

  “Then you do understand,” Whitcomb said. “Clare, you’re the only one here who could. That’s why I came to you.” The lieutenant’s dark eyes probed hers. “This is in the strictest confidence, right?”

  “Of, of course.”

  “Some of us have been talking, Clare. People who feel the same way I do, that it’s time to stop being complacent and do something to solve our problem. And it would go a lot smoother if we had the . . . understanding of a like-minded person within the DTI. Someone who might be in a position to get us certain information or access. Someone who could benefit from the same opportunity we’re looking for. Do you understand what I’m saying, Clare?”

  The idea was just starting to sink in. Whitcomb was talking about going back in time, back to her life—and she was offering to help Clare do the same. For four years, Clare had assumed that was impossible. There’d been no weird time effects involved in bringing her to this era; she’d been preserved the same way as a chicken breast in her freezer back home in Secaucus. Clare Raymond, the Cryonic Woman. Since she’d come to work at DTI, she’d learned that there were ways for people to move through time, but it all seemed so remote and bizarre, too far beyond her comprehension for her to consider that it might be accessible to her.

  But now, Parvana Whitcomb was offering her something miraculous—the chance to see her Donald and Tommy and Eddie again, to go home to her friends and family, her house, her neighborhood. To subscribe to all her magazines again and catch up on her soaps, so many of which had been lost to the ravages of time. Could it be?

  If it were possible, there’d be so much she’d be giving up—Thomas and Louise and Mary and Darrell, the wondrous machines and health care of the twenty-fourth century, the clean air and water, the cities where a woman could go anywhere unescorted and never be afraid. Now that she considered the possibility seriously for the first time, America in the nineteen-nineties seemed like a Third World country by contrast.

  But it was home. It was where her family was. How could she not want to live there?

  “I don’t know how I could help you,” Clare said. “I’m new here myself, and I’m only a counselor. I mean, I had to go through all sorts of security checks and grillings and sign the Official Secrets Act or whatever they call it now just to get this job, but I don’t have any kind of access to . . . anything that would get you where you want to go.”

  “Still, you can find things out for us,” Whitcomb said. “Maybe provide a distraction at a key moment. Maybe,” she stressed when she saw Clare was balking. “I don’t want to put any pressure on you, Clare. I’m offering this because I think you deserve the same chance we do. Whether you participate actively or not is entirely your choice. You leave the details to us.” She smiled ominously. “The Federation today . . . they call this a high-security operation, but they’ve gotten so complacent. Oh, they’ve had their border skirmishes here and there, the Cardassians, the Tzenkethi, but they were totally flatfooted when those Borg came and they’re still struggling to recover. Now, us, we lived under the constant threat of attack by the Klingons, the Romulans, the Tholians . . . spies and saboteurs everywhere . . .” She pursed her lips. “Let’s just say ch’Riin and a couple of others have some skills that should take these modern softies by surprise. When the time is right.”

  “And . . . and when will that be?”

  Whitcomb rose. “Not yet. But an opportunity is bound to come. Take your time deciding whether you’re willing to take it.” She ambled over to the door. “Thanks for the session, Counselor. I feel much better now.”

  The doors slid shut behind Whitcomb, leaving Clare alone with her thoughts. What do I do? If a patient confessed the intent to commit a crime, was a therapist’s obligation to respect the confidence or to break it and warn the authorities? She wasn’t sure. And either way, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to stop the conspirators. Whitcomb seemed so positive it would be safe. Even if she didn’t go with them, how could she deprive them of the chance to regain the lives they’d lost?

  For that matter, how could she deprive herself?

  Pungenday, Chaos 3, 3535 YOLD (A Friday)

  18:09 UTC

  Gariff Lucsly was running late.

  This intolerable situation was the consequence of the pressure the Department was under lately. It wasn’t just the usual New Year rush, in which the Department was inundated by walk-ins making crackpot claims that nonetheless had to be heard and evaluated lest there was some genuine intelligence buried in the chaff. (Many claims this time around were prompted by the fact that both the current stardate year, 46000, and the current Gregorian year, 2369, were divisible by the number 23, which allegedly had some arcane numerological significance.) The monitoring station was now up and running at the temporal distortion in the Typhon Expanse—a multidimensional temporal field similar to the Manheim Effect but having no evident connection to the professor’s 2364 experiments—but still had calibrations to run and warning buoys to erect, and the Department’s physicists were still coordinating with Starfleet’s and the Secretary of Transportation’s cartographers to determine safe routes through the area. T’Viss was away on Tandar Prime attending a symposium on multidimensional time. Agent Chall and her new partner Faunt were engaged in a delicate negotiation with Agent Revad of the Romulan TAG, attempting to persuade him to share information about a rumored deathbed claim by a Romulan scientist named Telek R’Mor, deceased approximately one year, three months, that he had received transmissions in 2351 from a Federation starship two decades uptime. The transmissions had reportedly been destroyed by individuals whose description suggested operatives of the Temporal Integrity Commission, but attempts to signal that uptime agency for verification had, predictably, gotten no response.

  The rest of the department had been busy with cleanup after the recent Devidian incident, in which the Enterprise had discovered that the extraphasic aliens were preying on the biological energy of plague victims in 1893 San Francisco. Some agents had to debrief the workers who’d found the time-displaced head of the Enterprise’s android operations officer in the caverns beneath the city, swearing them to secrecy. Others had needed to interrogate the Enterprise crew to ensure that history had not been altered. If anything, the incident seemed to have generated a self-consistent causal loop, a so-called “predestination paradox” involving the Enterprise’s extremely long-lived El-Aurian bartender, Guinan: since Captain Picard of the Enterprise had saved her life in 1893, she had worked in recent years to nudge him in the direction of becoming captain of the Enterprise to ensure her own past. It was the kind of temporal impurity that made Lucsly very uncomfortable; in his view, there was one true, correct timeline, the most probable quantum state of the universe as it would exist without temporal intervention, and the idea that time travelers had helped shape his reality made him very uneasy. True, quantum physics said that retrocausation was an allowed phenomenon, and that spontaneous loops could even be part of that natural, most probable state. But the sheer nonlinearity of it stuck in Lucsly’s craw.

  Meanwhile, the DTI historians were kept busy investigating the Enterprise crew’s reports of encountering Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, in San Francisco at a time when history recorded he was traveling in Europe. It could not be a temporal alteration created by the Devidians, or else recorded history would reflect the change. But it wouldn’t be the first time the TIC, the Aegis, or some other temporal agency had covered up an anachron
istic event by altering contemporary records—or memories. Clemens had actually been brought briefly into the present, allegedly by accident (though Lucsly blamed Starfleet recklessness), and reportedly had come away with a renewed sense of optimism about the future. Yet history showed that Clemens’s life post-1893 was marked by increasing cynicism and depression. The Department’s analysts were locked in fierce debate on this issue. Had his memories of the twenty-fourth century been erased, leaving only despair? Or had his glimpses of a better future only made his present seem more bleak and hopeless by contrast, as he struggled with bankruptcy, career difficulties, social injustice, and deaths in his family? Some of the researchers argued that his increasing commitment to equal rights, anti-imperialism, anti-vivisectionism, and other activist causes may have been a manifestation of his exposure to Federation values, while others insisted that gave too little credit to the innate values of the man himself, whose writings had been condemning racism and social foibles long before his anachronistic encounter. A definitive answer was probably unattainable, but the work had to be done nonetheless.

  Beyond that, the Department had been gearing up to investigate the Devidian system to confirm that there were no more temporal-displacement chambers like the cavern the Enterprise had destroyed. But Director Sornek had just been contacted by Cyral Nine, a Cardassian agent of the Aegis, who advised them to leave well enough alone. It seemed that, despite their predatory ways, the Devidians took great care to preserve the timeline, only preying on those who were about to die anyway, and thus the various agencies that enforced the Temporal Accords considered them a lesser evil, tolerating their actions lest they be driven to more drastic and disruptive measures. Or so Sornek had read between the lines, much to his distaste. The elderly Vulcan would no doubt be relieved to take his retirement next month—another situation that had the Department in an uproar as the process of choosing his successor and adjusting to the transition got under way. Lucsly was hoping that Assistant Director Andos would get the job; over the years, she had proven herself more than capable.

  On top of everything else, Lucsly no longer had a partner to share the workload. Even though this had been the case for three months, two weeks, and three days, Lucsly was still adjusting to that absence, and thus had found himself in the unfamiliar and unnerving position of having too much work to fit into his time budget. He was sure he would adjust eventually, but under the current circumstances, events weren’t stabilizing enough to let him devise a satisfactory schedule.

  So it was that Lucsly arrived at headquarters fully seventeen minutes late for a high-level meeting on the current Aegis-Devidian situation. He left the transporter suite at a brisk pace, hoping to make up a half-minute or so. He was thus not pleased when he was intercepted by a blond woman whom he recognized as Clare Raymond, one of the cryonic refugees restored to life on Stardate 41986. “Agent Lucsly, is it? I need to talk to you, sir.”

  He strode past without slowing. “I’m sorry, I don’t have time.”

  “It’s really urgent,” she called, jogging after him. He stiffened as she touched his arm, bringing him to a stop. “Please. I’ve been wrestling with this for weeks and now it’s happening and I had to make my choice and I’m still not sure this is the right one, but I just couldn’t, I couldn’t bring myself to do this and still be a good example for my kids—”

  “Wait. Slow down,” Lucsly said. “Or no, don’t. Tell me, as quickly as you can without losing clarity, what the problem is.”

  Raymond spelled it out far more slowly than Lucsly hoped; she could use extensive training in the efficient presentation of information. But once it became clear what she was discussing, Lucsly set aside his concern about being late for a meeting. “I was afraid of something like this,” he said. “The Bozeman has just been taken to the Kuiper Belt for a shakedown to test its refits. Captain Bateson was unavailable due to a mild illness. Lieutenant Whitcomb took command for the duration.”

  “I know. They’ve been waiting for their shot, and with this now, and with you all so busy—”

  “Time is of the essence, Ms. Raymond. What do you know of their specific plans?”

  “They’ve been talking about something called the Vault, in a place called Eris. I didn’t even know there was an Eris, I thought it ended with Pluto.”

  Eris. The remote dwarf planet where the Department stored confiscated temporal technologies. And a Starfleet ship of the line, newly refitted with modern weapons and systems, was on its way to raid it right now.

  “Thank you for your honesty, Ms. Raymond,” Lucsly said.

  “Is there anything more I can do to help? I feel so guilty about—”

  “You need to go to the Director and tell him what you’ve told me,” Lucsly said. “And tell him that I’m on it.”

  “On it?” But Lucsly was already turning back toward the transporters. “You’re going out there? By yourself?”

  Her question made him think, though he didn’t slow down. Being partnerless was enough of a hassle as it was. Now, he needed assistance more than ever. And there was only one person he trusted to have his back.

  If only he could be persuaded to come.

  Paris, European Alliance, Earth

  18:14 UTC

  Megumi crossed her arms sternly as Dulmur arrived outside the restaurant. “You’re on time,” she said. “Perfectly, precisely on time.”

  “I know,” he replied, kissing her cheek in apology. “I’m working on it.”

  She smiled. “One day at a time. Or . . . maybe that’s not the best way to put it.”

  “Either way, honey, I am completely off the clock.” It had taken three months, two—no, three months or so, but he’d finally convinced Meg to start seeing him again. The same dogged streak that had kept him so monomaniacally fixated on time for the past four years had served him well once he’d redirected it, and he was close to convincing her that from now on, his only obsessions would be her and the family they would start together.

  But then his comm signaled. “Aw, nuts.”

  “Want me to go in and get a table?”

  “No, I’ll just—” He was about to reject the call when he happened to glimpse at the screen. The signal was on a Department channel, with Lucsly’s code. It was flashing Priority One.

  Meg was looking over his shoulder now. “Oh, no.”

  Dulmur’s hand tightened around the padd in anger. “No. Forget it. I’m not taking it.” He hit the reject button and slipped the padd back in his pocket. “I’m done with that life, Meg. I swear it.”

  She studied him. “I want to believe that, Mare. You know I do.”

  But then the padd signaled again. Dulmur winced as he saw the realization in her eyes: he’d left the padd on. She knew Dulmur was not a man to do things by half-measures. If he’d really been determined to stay with her no matter what, he would’ve shut it off. Hell, he wouldn’t have even brought it.

  He saw the evening, his wife, his future slipping away from him in that moment. “Meg, I swear, I’ll throw the padd away, I’ll—”

  She put her hand on his. Behind the tears was understanding. “He’s left you alone for three months. He’s respected your wishes. If he’s calling now, it must be urgent.”

  Her words forgave him, but didn’t change the fact that if he took that call, he would lose her forever. “Forget it. They have other people to handle that stuff.”

  “And still he called you.”

  He gazed into her gorgeous eyes, knowing that this was one of those moments where the probabilities were evenly balanced and history split in two. No, he thought. I won’t accept that. He couldn’t tolerate going back to DTI and knowing that another half of himself was living happily with Meg. Nor could he tolerate making a life with Meg and knowing in the back of his mind that half of him had rejected that same commitment. Whatever choice he made, it had to be wholehearted, certain, something that couldn’t be changed by the flip of a coin, the flip of an electron’s spin in a cortical neuron.
It had to be the only choice Marion Dulmur could possibly make at this moment in his life.

  His partner needed him.

  But which partner?

  Dwarf planet 136199 Eris

  10.7 billion kilometers from Sol

  23:38 UTC

  Lucsly had commandeered one of Starfleet’s fastest in-system courier ships to get to Eris in time. The couriers were bare-bones vessels, capable of high warp factors at the expense of extremely short range, for times when it was necessary to make interplanetary journeys faster than impulse speeds would allow. Due to the hazards of in-system warp travel, they were mostly reserved for emergencies, although their precise calibration to the gravitational parameters of their home system ameliorated the risks, at least to the couriers themselves.

  Even so, the Department had chosen to site its top-secret containment facility on Eris for a reason, and not just because a worldlet named for the goddess of discord was poetically fitting. The massive dwarf planet, one of the first to be discovered, was nonetheless one of the most remote large bodies in the Sol System due to its wide, highly inclined orbit. Ever since the DTI had begun storing confiscated time technologies there in 2291, the pale gray planetoid had been moving farther and farther from the Sun and civilization, and now followed its own lonely path some seven light-hours south of the ecliptic plane. In short, it was a long trip.

  On arrival, sensors confirmed the Bozeman’s presence in orbit. At Lucsly’s instruction, the courier had slipped out of warp behind Dysnomia, using Eris’s sole moon to shield it from detection by the Soyuz-class anachronism. Attempts to hail the Eridian Vault’s guardians on a secure channel proved fruitless; apparently Whitcomb’s people had neutralized them. Lucsly automatically began formulating a report in his head on how to improve Vault security, hoping that his final report would include testimony from the Vault personnel rather than their postmortems.