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

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Vikei was scuttling for the exit, but Lirahn strode forward, her eyes wide and gleaming. The Siri’s retreat slowed to a crawl. “No!” he cried, but it was feeble, strained. “No . . . no . . .”

  “No, of course not,” Lirahn said. “You don’t want to keep any secrets from me. You know how I cherish our openness. And you know how much I miss the stars of home. You wouldn’t want to keep me from them, would you?”

  “Nnnoo . . .”

  “Good little one. Now tell me where the device is and how to use it.” Her hands went to the sides of the Siri’s upper carapace, where its brain must be.

  Garcia wanted to scream at Lirahn to stop, but she seemed to be too busy screaming in pain. She was pretty sure Alenar had broken her arm. But a moment later, she felt a sense of euphoric detachment overcome her. The pain was still there, but it didn’t seem to matter. It was just in her body, and she was beyond her body, inhabiting the whole room. She realized Ranjea was clutching her hands, easing her pain in the Deltan way.

  “There,” Lirahn said after a time. “That’s a good Siri. You won’t defy me again, will you?”

  “No, mistress,” said Vikei. “Do you need my help undoing what I’ve done?”

  “No. I’ve taken everything I need from your mind. You just sleep now. Sleep as long as you want. No need to ever wake up again.” Vikei clattered to the floor. From her detached place, Garcia found it sad.

  “Lirahn.” It was Ranjea. He was no longer holding her hands, but had stood and was walking slowly toward the Selakar. Garcia started to become more aware of her body again, though she was still too euphoric to care about the pain. And she was very aware of Ranjea’s body. Distantly, she noticed Alenar starting to move forward to block Ranjea and Lirahn waving him off. But mainly she noticed Ranjea and how very enthralling he looked from this angle, below and to the rear. And she noticed that Lirahn’s eyes were just as fixed on him as hers were.

  “Lirahn,” he said, his voice low and sultry, making her skin tingle. “There’s no need for us to be at odds. Why don’t you come with me? We’ll go somewhere nice and private.”

  Pheromones, she realized. He’s pulling out all the stops, seducing her. She was grateful—though not without regret—that Ranjea was moving away from her, the potency of his allure diminishing slightly with distance. She just hoped it was hitting Lirahn commensurately harder.

  “Ohhh, you dear man,” Lirahn purred. Her hands went around his neck, stroking his smooth head and strong shoulders. “I’d be happy to take you with me when I reclaim my empire. You’d be a charming novelty—literally.”

  “Your empire is gone, Lirahn. A relic of history. Why live in the past? Let go of it. Use that great potential to build something new.”

  She chuckled. “You wish to stop me from altering your history. But my dear . . . how do you know what that history is? You’ve forgotten so much. You never even heard of the Selakar, though we ruled an arm of the galaxy for millennia.” She smiled. “So how do you know the restoration of the Selakar Empire under Lirahn the Magnificent isn’t already a part of your forgotten prehistory? You could be changing the past if you don’t let me go.”

  Ranjea froze. After a moment, Garcia began to think more clearly, realizing his seductive efforts were weakening. She saw uncertainty in his eyes.

  Lirahn laughed. “Got you,” she said. She gave Ranjea a deep kiss, then sauntered away with a girlish giggle. Ranjea started to move forward, but Alenar and the other, now-recovered guards interposed themselves, holding them at bay. As they retreated, Lirahn’s giggle intensified, moving dangerously toward “evil cackle” territory. Well, maybe that wasn’t a cliché yet in her time, Garcia thought through the returning pain.

  Ranjea closed his eyes for a moment, gathering himself. Then he hurried over to Garcia’s side. “Come on, we need to get you medical help.”

  “No,” she said. “Make sure Vikei’s all right.”

  “That’s next on the list,” he reminded her. She remembered her training: see to your own teammates first, since they can’t help others if they aren’t intact themselves.

  They checked Vikei, finding him alive but deeply comatose. “Could she be right?” Garcia asked. “Do we have to let her go to save history? Let her turn billions into her absolute slaves?”

  Ranjea met her eyes. But he had no answer for her.

  Vomnin Confederacy Outpost, Axis of Time

  Early Warp Age, Anthropocene

  With transporters not being an option, the wounded had to go to the nearest suitable medical facility by shuttle. The Colloquium-era outpost was suspect due to Lirahn’s influence, so Ranjea chose the Vomnin outpost where the Starfleet shuttles were docked. Luckily for Garcia, one of the stranded Asimov personnel was a medic, so she didn’t have to chance getting her arm patched up by someone who’d never treated a human before. While the medic worked, Garcia studied the historical database in her temporal tricorder, correlating it with the Axis’s own records from periods following Lirahn’s. Nearby, Ranjea sat with Vikei, trying to connect with his mind enough to coax him back to consciousness. Subdirector Sikran hovered nearby, trying to look important.

  Eventually, Ranjea came over to her. “How are you feeling?”

  “What? Oh, that. Good as new. How’s Vikei?”

  “Resting normally now. He’ll awaken when he’s ready.”

  She sighed. “Great.”

  “Found anything?”

  “Nothing useful,” she said, shaking her head. “Yeah, there’s evidence of great swaths of the galaxy being dominated by powerful empires half a million years ago. We already knew about some of them—Sargon’s people, the Talosians, Ma-aira Thenn . . . but there’s no way to know for sure if one of the other empires was Lirahn’s.”

  “No indication that one empire arose from the ashes of the others?”

  “Sure, more than once. Vikei talked about a Great Psionic War, but the one he knows is probably just one of several over a couple of millennia. But was it the final one? Hard to say.”

  “Hm.” Ranjea pondered it silently.

  “So what’s the procedure in a case like this, boss? How do we decide what to do when we don’t know which action will change history?”

  “Normal procedure is to err on the side of inaction. The fewer entities who intervene in the past, the less risk of disrupting it. If history is changed, then hopefully the DTI in that new timeline will discover the change in its shielded files and be able to do something about it.”

  “If there is a DTI. I don’t know about Delta, but half a million years ago was kind of an important time for hominid life on Earth. If Lirahn did change things, with the kind of power that amplifier would give her, I wouldn’t be too sure our own past would go unaffected.”

  “That’s a good point.” He pondered. “It could be argued that, since all times are simultaneous within the Axis, whatever Lirahn would do upon leaving it hasn’t happened yet. From our perspective, it’s still the future. So whatever we choose to do would be part of the original, natural course of history rather than a retroactive alteration.”

  Garcia thought it over. “If Lirahn does reopen the Axis,” she said solemnly, “maybe we find a way to re-blockade our part of it. Keep anyone from returning to our own time. Then the two timelines won’t be entangled and the original won’t collapse. Whatever Lirahn does, at worst it’d just create a stable parallel history.”

  “Good thought,” Ranjea said, “but it won’t work. There’s already been two-way exchange between the Axis and our time. The entanglement already exists.”

  “Damn it!”

  “You needn’t worry about it,” Sikran said, having just received a report on his wrist-mounted padd. “Council security has blockaded the downtime end of the Axis. There’s no way Lirahn can get past them.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Garcia said. “She’s got a lot of friends on the Council.”

  “Not anymore. Oydia has been discredited and Damyz has renounced Lirahn. Shiiem
’s side is making the choices now. And I’ve sent our own ships to join in the blockade,” he added. “Along with numerous others, true, but the Vomnin are . . . highly motivated to stop her.” On his broad face, anger vied with embarrassment over how he’d allowed Lirahn to use him.

  His padd pinged with an update. “They’ve spotted her! Here, hold on.” A keystroke on his padd sent the sensor feed to the medical bay’s wall screen. The occupants watched as a small, ornate ship, which the display called out in Vomnin script as Lirahn’s, drew toward the vast, universe-straddling construct of the hub station. While there were broad gaps in its lattice to allow even large ships to pass through, those gaps were all occupied by ships of various configurations, including several Vomnin craft. Lirahn’s shuttle veered away, trying to find an opening, but none presented itself. She opened fire on the blockading ships, knocking two of them out of formation, though fortunately it was a short limp to a safe dock for both pilots. And more ships simply flew in to take their place. Then someone in the blockade signaled the others, instructing them in how to expand and link their shields. Soon there was an impenetrable barrier facing Lirahn. She flew laterally across the pocket spacetime, searching for a weak spot, but all she did was repeatedly cross back over her own path. After firing a few more futile shots, Lirahn turned and flew back in the uptime direction.

  “Yes! We beat her!” Sikran crowed.

  “But she’s not slowing down,” Garcia said, noting that she was thrusting uptime even faster. The image feed switched to follow her; a few ships tried to apprehend her as she flew near, a few stations tried to use their low-powered docking tractors, but she simply veered laterally and spiraled around them, taking advantage of the closed but borderless geometry of the Axis’s lateral dimensions. In essence, she had infinite space to either side but was still following essentially a straight-line path uptime. “There aren’t enough ships up here to catch her! Everyone’s clustered at the hub!”

  “What does it matter?” Sikran said. “She can’t get to the downtime terminus, so she can’t reopen the Axis. We can apprehend her at our leisure.”

  “No!” The cry came from Vikei, now awake and agitated. “You must stop her! You cannot let her reach the terminus!”

  Garcia ran to his side. “It’s all right, Vikei. The only terminus she’s heading for is the uptime one, where the supernova destroys it a million and a half years from now. She can’t change the Axis’s beginning from its ending.”

  “You don’t understand. All external times are simultaneous within the Axis. Its creation, its destruction—they are the same moment relative to an internal observer. So there is no preferred direction of causality here. Time is completely symmetrical. As far as the fabric of Axis timespace is concerned, its destruction is functionally interchangeable with its creation!”

  Ranjea’s jaw dropped. “You mean Lirahn could use your device to modify the timespace parameters from either terminus?”

  “Exactly!”

  Garcia gazed up at her partner. “Boss, we’re close enough to intercept her. Should we even try?”

  “You must!” Vikei said.

  Garcia winced. “Look . . . I sympathize about your people and all, but we don’t know . . .”

  “The threat is more immediate than that. The two termini are symmetrical in effect, but not in energy. The supernova that destroys the Axis is vastly more powerful than the forces that created it. But our device is calibrated for the energy levels at the creation point.”

  “So what happens,” Ranjea asked, “if that device taps into the energies at the destruction point?”

  “Its effects would be greatly amplified. The dimensional interface at the uptime terminus was delicately balanced by the Axis’s creators to allow in just enough of the supernova’s energies to provide a power source for its occupants. If Lirahn taps into that energy and uses the device to increase the permeability of the interface, it could create a feedback loop. A runaway release of energy.”

  Garcia swallowed. “You mean . . . a nuclear blowtorch, clear down the Axis. Vaporizing everyone.”

  “Worse,” Vikei said. “The supernova’s energies would blow open the interspatial portals, spreading them out across parsecs. Every neighboring world in every era the Axis connects to would be engulfed in lethal radiation pouring out of subspace.”

  Ranjea straightened. “No choice,” he said. “We have to stop her now.”

  Garcia stood and put her hand on her phaser. “Can’t say I’m unhappy about that.”

  XIX

  Final Orbit-day of Ninthmoon, Fesoan Lor’veln

  Year 709, Andorian Calendar

  Sunday through Thursday Inclusive

  Third Moon of Rakon IV

  Exact Time Undefinable

  Albert Einstein once reportedly said that “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” Unfortunately, that was no longer true in Professor Vard’s lunar facility. Something had turned the timeline into a multidimensional knot. Past, present, and future had become interchangeable, completely nonlinear. Lucsly deeply hated that. It left him feeling adrift, unsure of himself.

  Dulmur, conversely, was toughing it out surprisingly well, considering he’d seen himself vaporized mere subjective minutes before. He didn’t even flinch when the agents and the Enterprise away team turned a corner to find themselves in a darkened, chilled corridor, too cold to be in the same time frame as the one they’d just left. Indeed, Lucsly looked back to see that while the corridor they’d just left was still there—for quantum entanglement kept them anchored to the facility as it moved through space—it was now just as dark and lifeless. The scientists, who’d been right behind them, had disappeared.

  “Lieutenant,” Commander Worf said as soon as he noticed. Lucsly wondered which lieutenant he was speaking to, but somehow the security chief, Choudhury, understood his intent and raised her tricorder.

  “This way,” she said, conveying urgency without losing her serene manner. The DTI agents ran after the Starfleet team, catching up with them at a closed door that Worf pulled open with pure muscle. A charnel stench assaulted them, and they entered the room, a lab of some sort, to find the bodies of Vard and the other physicists, all dead and terribly burned.

  “Oh, no,” said Elfiki—the one with the Enterprise team, for the disguised one was nowhere to be seen. “Did we jump forward? Are these . . .”

  Dulmur checked his temporal tricorder. “We’re in the future, all right. About ten hours.”

  “Then it can’t be the people we just left,” Choudhury said. “These bodies have been dead at least a day.”

  “An alternate timeline?” Worf asked, prompting Lucsly to remember the commander’s prior experience with the concept.

  “Mm-hm,” Dulmur said, continuing his scan. “The quantum signature’s subtly different.”

  “Look here,” Choudhury said, indicating a Romulan corpse. “I thought this was Doctor Ronarek . . . but it’s someone else.” She ran her tricorder over the body. “Odd . . . this Romulan had genetic augmentations.”

  Lucsly stared. “Let me see.” They synched tricorders, transferring the data. Lucsly checked the readings against a particular pattern of augmentation that DTI tricorders were routinely programmed to recognize. The readout confirmed it, and Lucsly nodded at Dulmur to confirm what they both suspected: that the augmentations in this Romulan showed many of the same genetic signatures as those of the Suliban Cabal.

  “That explains the who,” Dulmur said.

  “Mm-hm. And the how. Ronarek isn’t here.”

  “So he must be a ringer. Impostor?”

  “Or a deep-cover spy.” With time travel, you could easily enough create an authentic, decades-long cover for a sleeper operative.

  Worf looked irritated—well, more than usual. “A spy for whom? The Typhon Pact?”

  “It’s a long story,” Dulmur said. “Suffice to say, we’ve gotta get back to our own scientists before Ronarek turns on them.”

  “
I’m reading a temporal fluctuation through that door,” Elfiki said, pointing to the far end of the lab. “No way to tell where it leads.”

  “But we cannot stay here,” the Klingon said. “Proceed with caution.”

  They moved through in a tight formation, maintaining physical contact to ensure no one was left behind. Lucsly brought up the rear, gingerly holding on to the material of Dulmur’s sleeve. Once they were through, they found themselves back in a warm, lighted corridor. Lucsly tried in vain to detect the actual process of transition, but his confused brain insisted on perceiving the doorway itself as the interface between time frames. He hated how contrived that felt.

  The sounds of a firefight echoed down the corridor. Typically, perversely, the Starfleeters ran toward it, leaving the agents little choice but to follow. Soon they spotted Vard, Naadri, Korath, Nart, and all three grad students crouching behind an overturned storage cabinet. Beyond, a two-way firefight raged, but Lucsly had to keep his head low and couldn’t make out the combatants. “There you are!” Vard hissed. “Where have you been for the past twenty minutes?”

  Obviously more time had passed for the scientists than for the others, but there was no time to explain that now. “We have to warn you,” Dulmur said. “Doctor Ronarek is—”

  “We know,” Korath interrupted. “The traitor smuggled in a team of assassins in some kind of dimensional pocket.”

  “Like the Shanial Cabochons, or the containment device for the Koa homeworld,” Naadri added. “It let him carry them in, hidden in a clothing decoration!”

  “So much for your precious chroniton field,” Korath sneered.

  “The field should have disrupted its dimensional metric,” Naadri countered. “Whatever exotics it uses to counter stress-energy divergence must be incredibly robust.”