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

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “Let Meneth and me try,” Rodal suggested.

  “Good idea,” Noi said, then threw Ducane a look. “I assume the TIC recognizes Aegis neutrality.”

  Ducane nodded. “In theory. If their combat conditioning is still in a low enough mode.”

  The Cardassian Aegis agent exchanged an uneasy look with his familiar, but Meneth made a low noise and headed back toward the TIC forces. Rodal nodded to the other agents before heading off after her. When Dulmur’s eyes shifted back, he saw that the civet was no longer there, replaced by a stunning woman with golden skin and dark green hair. She winked at him before vanishing around the corner, Rodal close behind.

  Dulmur turned to Noi and Ducane. “Okay, the shapechanging pets. Are they really the aliens running the Aegis? Do you know who they are, where they’re from?”

  The two uptime agents traded an uneasy look. “Sorry, Dulmur,” Noi said. “There are rules we have to follow if we want to keep the Aegis’s cooperation.”

  Soon, Rodal and Meneth (in her civet form again) returned in some haste. “No success. There was a phase shift between us. I don’t think they could see or hear us clearly.” He grimaced. “The deterioration of spacetime is worsening, and even Meneth can’t see a way out of it. I think our best hope at this point is to rely on our successors to find a way to reverse these events, or at least to obtain justice for our deaths.”

  Worf gave a fatalistic smirk. “I would say it was a good day to die, if I had any idea what day it was.”

  “What hope is there of getting justice?” Noi demanded. “We still have no idea who the Sponsor is. Damn it! If only Shelan had had a few more seconds!”

  Rodal threw her a look. “You mean that the timeline convergence occurred just before she sent you the Sponsor’s coordinates?”

  “At the exact moment she started to send them.”

  Meneth mewed. “Yes,” Rodal agreed. “A startling coincidence. The kind that crops up with surprising frequency in cases of temporal alteration. Doctor Naadri would say that her negative-probability ‘anti-time’ force was acting to cancel the excess probabilities by creating a circumstance with the potential to restore the original history.”

  “Maybe,” Noi said. “Or maybe the Sponsor specifically timed it that way to thumb his nose at us.”

  “Either way, we may have an opportunity,” Ducane said. “If Shelan sent her ansible transmission during the timeline collapse, there should have been enough quantum uncertainty around that moment that some of the information may have survived.”

  Noi shook her head. “That was the first thing we tried. There’s some information there, but not enough to let us extrapolate the rest.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Damn it, we’re two centuries more advanced than you! It was nothing but noise! This is the best we got!” She worked a hidden control on her sleeve. The burst of static seemed to come from the air around them: a high-pitched squeal that quickly faded out to white noise, albeit with tantalizing hints of a pattern underneath.

  “Wait,” Lucsly said. “Play that again.”

  Noi repeated the playback, and this time Dulmur caught what Lucsly had. It sounded familiar, almost . . . like a dying scream.

  “When exactly was that sent?”

  “In your terms . . . Stardate 59085.1678.”

  “Two weeks ago Monday,” Lucsly interpreted.

  “Don’t tell me,” Dulmur said. “Oh-two-oh-four UTC.”

  “And twelve seconds.”

  Noi looked between them. “What is it?”

  “I’ve listened to that same sound approximately a thousand times,” Lucsly said, pulling out his tricorder. “The final transmission on Shelan’s frequency in our shielded records was transmitted at that exact moment.” He played the file. It was the same shriek of static, only less detailed.

  “Good girl,” Dulmur whispered, almost imagining he could remember training her. At more normal volume, he said, “She must’ve sent a backup transmission to us, just in case something happened to her. She wanted to make sure a record was preserved.”

  Lucsly handed his tricorder to Noi. “Can you do anything with the signal?”

  The Temporal Agent traded a look with her counterparts from TIC and Aegis. “It’s static, but it’s different static. Sent through subspace instead of ansible. It would enlarge our sample of the quantum information.”

  “It’s worth a try,” Ducane agreed.

  As the three of them went to work with their various equipment, Worf turned to Elfiki. “What are they doing? Can they recover information from an erased timeline?”

  The science officer shrugged and turned to the DTI duo. Lucsly replied to the Klingon. “The perception that our timestream has a single, unified history is an illusion resulting from the fact that we can’t measure all of it. One set of information dominates and is agreed on by all observers, and that’s what we call reality. But the rest of the information is there too. Every infinitesimal quantum state that lost the Darwinian competition, every fully realized parallel history that eventually merged into our own, it all remains, a palimpsest in the vacuum fluctuations. But the only way you could recover that information is to measure all the data in the entire universe at once.”

  “Normally, yes,” Ducane replied, looking up from his future version of a temporal tricorder. “But we don’t have to reconstruct the entire timeline—just one specific signal from it. We know exactly where and when to look for the lost data . . . we just need to know what to look for.”

  “And if we can reconstruct that timeline’s quantum signature from the fragments of Shelan’s signal,” Noi added, “it’ll be like a cryptographic key, a way to tease the right bits of information out of the quantum noise.”

  “If the reconstruction is good enough,” Rodal said. “And if we can get that information to our respective agencies so they can scan the area from enough different perspectives to reconstruct the information more fully.”

  “Rrrrrah,” Meneth said.

  Noi and Ducane exchanged a look, as if reacting to the civet’s contribution to the discussion. “Well?” Ducane asked. “Do we risk it?”

  “Risk what?” said Dulmur.

  “We can communicate with our own times through phase shielding, like the Augments can with the Sponsor. But to do what has to be done, our agencies may have to break that shielding, entangle with the larger universe. It would bind our home timeframes to the outcome of these events, one way or the other. It could change things in unpredictable ways.”

  “Could,” Lucsly echoed. “If we don’t stop this, we know the future will be changed. For the worse.”

  “He’s right,” Noi said. “We have to.”

  Ducane’s tricorder beeped. He read it, looking both gratified and worried. “We have a legible signature,” he said.

  Noi studied a readout Dulmur could see projected onto her cornea. “And enough of a signal template. That should do it.”

  “Then shall we?” Rodal asked.

  Noi nodded readily, Ducane more reluctantly. But before they began, Noi turned to the DTI agents. “Lucsly, Dulmur, if this works . . . we all have the DTI to thank.”

  “We have Shelan to thank,” Dulmur said.

  “Mm-hm,” Lucsly said.

  “If it’s at all possible, I’ll see that you can thank her personally.” Trading one more look with Ducane and Rodal, she hit a wrist control and sent the signal. The other two agents did the same.

  “Now what?” Worf said after a silent moment.

  “We wait,” Rodal said.

  “For how long?”

  Ducane’s tricorder beeped. He read it and smiled. “Not long. Time travel, remember? Come on, they’re this way.”

  From the perspective of Juel Ducane’s predecessors in the Temporal Integrity Commission of the 2770s, the manhunt for the Sponsor had taken years. The reconstruction of Shelan’s signal, sent to them via temporal communication from their uptime counterparts and the timeless Aegis, had given t
hem enough information to identify his time and place of origin, but he’d fled before his TIC contemporaries could arrive there. Subsequent investigation had revealed his identity and affiliations, and the hunt had been on. Over time, his other facilities had been raided and shut down, depriving him of places to retreat to. Eventually he had fled into the past, before the defense grid’s erection, but he had been pursued. He had been apprehended after an attempt to intervene in the Earth-Romulan War, on the Romulans’ side, had been thwarted with some local assistance. He must have grown truly desperate to have been willing to risk the Federation’s existence like that.

  But finally he stood before them, in the very conference room where his hologram had mocked them before, hours ago for them, years for him. Now his haughtiness was subdued; he stood with his head bowed, covered in a worn, hooded cloak of twenty-second-century Romulan design. He had been brought in by none other than Agent Daniels himself, who was visibly delighted to have his longtime nemesis in his clutches at last. “His name is Jamran Harnoth,” the nondescript human told the assembled agents; the Starfleet crew were back with the scientists, defending them from the ongoing struggle. “He’s a founding member of the Order of Omega.”

  “Of course,” Ducane said. “I should’ve known. They were on our suspect list, but there was never anything actionable.”

  “Who are they?” Lucsly asked.

  Jena Noi answered. “A latter-day eugenics movement, multispecies Augments.”

  “Of course,” Dulmur said, remembering Cyral Nine’s words. “Know the artist by his tools.”

  “But it wasn’t enough for them to enhance their genomes; they thought their superiority gave them the right to augment societies as well. To take them over, by politics or by force, and subject them to ruthless social engineering in hopes of ‘improving’ them. The death and suffering they caused were monumental.”

  “Survival of the fittest, my dear,” Harnoth murmured from under his hood. “Surmounting challenges is what makes us strong.”

  “And apparently,” Daniels added, “Harnoth here decided it wasn’t enough to engineer the future. He wanted to reshape the past as well.”

  “And why not?” Harnoth raised his head, giving Dulmur a tantalizing glimpse of the face beneath. “History is a chaotic mess, filled with pointless suffering. Why shouldn’t the superior mind strive to refine and improve it?”

  “Improve it?” Daniels snarled. “One of your experiments in the twenty-fifth century led to a cataclysm that tore the Federation in half and left much of the quadrant impassable to warp travel! It sparked a new Romulan war that lasted for decades! If we hadn’t been able to isolate that timeline . . .”

  Harnoth shrugged. “What can I say? Using Omega particles seemed poetically appropriate. Matters got out of my control, but the long-term results could have been impressive nonetheless. As I said, improvement comes from surmounting obstacles.”

  “Is that why you gave genetic augmentation to groups in the past and stirred them up to conflict?” Lucsly asked. “To get a head start on their ‘improvement’?”

  “Of course!” Harnoth cried, throwing back his hood. “See the results for yourself!”

  The Sponsor of the Suliban Cabal and the Romulan Augments was a lanky, lean-faced man with blue-gray eyes, craggy features, and dark hair swept back from a high, pronounced forehead. He had the pointed ears and heavy brow of a Romulan, yet his skin had a subtle mottling that was distinctly Suliban. And between his upswept eyebrows was the characteristic chevron-shaped ridge of a Tandaran.

  Harnoth laughed at his reaction. “Why so surprised, Agent? Do you really think my Cabal could have battled the Tandarans for ten years without ever knowing they were aware of my intervention from the future? Did you really believe Tandaran temporal security could be good enough to keep that secret from posterity when Vard couldn’t even succeed at keeping this conference a secret? The fools. I wanted the Tandarans to know of the threat from the future. I needed it to inspire them to an aggressive pursuit of temporal research—for that research would eventually produce the means for my mastery of time. Just as the augmented genes I gave the Suliban, the Romulans, and others planted the seeds from which the Order of Omega would one day grow.” He laughed again. “Do you see? All I have done was necessary to secure my own creation! Merely by existing, I have already won! I am my own beginning and ending. I am the Alpha and Omega!”

  Dulmur was just about to lunge forward and wipe that grin off his motley face. But to his surprise, Lucsly beat him to it, grabbing Harnoth by the collar and slamming him back against the table. “And what about Agent Shelan?” Lucsly demanded. “How was her eradication necessary to bring you about?”

  “It wasn’t,” Harnoth said. “But defiance must be punished. She tried to use the gifts I gave her to strike against me. That could not be tolerated.”

  “So you had to erase all memory that she’d ever existed?”

  “Her existence was a mistake. I corrected it.”

  Lucsly loomed over Harnoth a moment longer, staring at him. Then he relaxed and stepped back, and Dulmur saw what his partner saw. “You’re sweating,” Dulmur said. “Bluster all you want, but you know you’re right here in the soup along with the rest of us. You can’t just sit back and watch from the shadows anymore. We die, you die. How’s that for leverage?”

  “Call off your troops,” Agent Daniels told his prisoner. “Work with the other factions to stabilize local spacetime. It’s the only way your superior mind will live on.”

  Harnoth seethed, but he knew he was beaten. He glared at Daniels. “I’m just glad I got to kill you at least once.”

  “Didn’t take,” Daniels said. “Now give the order.”

  Grudgingly, Harnoth accepted the comlink Daniels handed him. “This is your benefactor,” he said to his Romulan troops beyond. “Stand down immediately. I repeat, stand down immediately. We will coordinate with the enemy forces for an orderly withdrawal.” He couldn’t resist adding, “Any defiance of my orders will be swiftly punished.”

  “Great management style you’ve got there, pal,” Dulmur said. “Very evolved.”

  Harnoth bristled. “To think that a being as superior as myself was brought down by primitives like you! You aren’t even proper time travelers!”

  “Time travel is overrated,” said Lucsly. “And more trouble than it’s worth.”

  “It wasn’t just the DTI who brought you down,” Dulmur said. “It was DTI Agent Shelan.” He stepped closer, getting right up in Harnoth’s face. “Remember her name.”

  XXIII

  1 Zhēngyué (Chinese New Year), Year of the Water Tiger, Cycle 84, Xia Calendar A Sunday

  Vomnin Space Station Bezorek

  03:26 UTC

  Restoring the Axis of Time to normal had been an easy matter once Lirahn’s influence was broken—in more ways than one. Vikei had used the Siri device to restore Axis timespace to its normal configuration, and Lirahn and her Selakar followers had been promptly exiled from it. The Siri had been granted their freedom to go wherever they wished, and while Vikei and many others had opted to stay within the Axis, perhaps someday to migrate to other times, more than half the Siri, even while separated from Lirahn’s direct mental influence, had chosen to remain in her service. “They have been servants for so long they can imagine nothing else, even now,” Vikei had said sadly. “Still, it would not be a truly free choice if that option were denied them.”

  There had been some questions of jurisdiction, but the Axis Council had decided to remand the Selakar into the custody (and era) of the Zcham, more than a million and a third years after their own time. Not only were the Zcham the only Axis participants advanced and powerful enough to hold their own against the Selakar, but their time was farther forward than anyone else’s currently in the Axis, so anything Lirahn might potentially do there would have no effect on any earlier era of history, even if she did escape Zcham control. “Do you really think there’s a chance she might get away from y
ou?” Garcia had asked uneasily.

  “We will do our best,” Shiiem had replied, “but I can make no absolute guarantees.” He had stepped closer and given her a conspiratorial smile. “After all,” he had finished, giving her a great deal to think about, “we are only human.”

  Just before the agents left, the Axis Council, now with Vikei sworn in to fill its recent vacancy, had voted to reaffirm their cautious policies for intertemporal trade, and had imposed trade sanctions on the Vomnin Confederacy for the role their reckless enthusiasm for relics had played in bringing about the near-disaster. Once they returned to normal space and time (two subjective days but two objective weeks after they’d left, since the Siri’s lockdown device had apparently induced a significant time dilation), Ranjea and the chastened Sikran had spent the next two days negotiating with the Vomnin Bureau for Historical Resource Development, persuading them to pursue a more responsible policy for temporal resource management—and to establish closer ties with the DTI and other temporal agencies in the quadrant so that a more consistent policy for timeline protection could be developed.

  With all of that going on, it was a while before Garcia and Ranjea were finally able to sit down in private quarters and talk about what had happened. “Teresa,” Ranjea said, clasping her hands, “I have so much to thank you for. You’ve forced me to reconsider some . . . perhaps rather arrogant assumptions I’d made about Deltans and humans. When it came down to it, you had more mastery of your emotions than I did.”

  She laughed it off, pulling her hands free and stepping away. “You were under Lirahn’s power.”

  “And you were under mine. It’s amazing that you could resist at that point.” He paused. “I’ve been thinking about why that must be. Maybe it’s your DTI training to hold on to your sense of identity no matter how much our work calls it into question. Or maybe it’s what you said when we were together . . . that we’re already bound as partners, so that the bond of lovemaking is just an extension of that.”