Star Trek: DTI: Watching the Clock

by Christopher L. Bennett

  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.

  The lieutenant in command of the courier offered to bring his small crew down to support Lucsly, but the agent declined; the Vault’s contents were far beyond their clearance level, and Lucsly didn’t trust anyone without DTI training near some of the sensitive items stored there. The timeline was at enough risk with just the Bozeman mutineers down there. Also, the Vault was buried deep within the planetoid’s icy mantle; the more who beamed down, the more powerful the transporter beam and the greater the risk of detection.

  But that meant Lucsly was alone against a team of highly motivated Starfleet officers trained in a more violent era of history. So be it. He’d resigned himself to the fact as soon as Dulmur had failed to reply to his priority message. He’d had no time to wait for his erstwhile partner to make his choice, so if Dulmur wasn’t going to join him on the courier, that meant Dulmur would be left behind, plain and simple. Lucsly would have to do this on his own.

  Once he materialized, Lucsly waited and listened, but there was no indication that his transport had been detected. The containment fields that secured the temporal apparatus within the Vault would tend to obscure the transporter signal, at least from a tricorder scan. That was an issue Lucsly would have to address in his report, though at the moment it was an asset.

  Lucsly made his way gingerly past the rows of containment bays where the smaller temporal artifacts were stored. Reaching the end of a tier, he peeked around the corner and spotted the intruders: all Bozeman personnel, though now attired in modern two-color Starfleet gear. Parvana Whitcomb led them, accompanied by Shelithan ch’Riin, Lloyd Boen, and three enlisted personnel in security gold. Apparently Whitcomb followed the twenty-third-century tradition of a commanding officer leading her own away teams, given that Captain Bateson was still back on Earth. (According to his medical officer, his mild bout of Cygnian flu had been induced deliberately, no doubt to take him out of play so Whitcomb could make her move.)

  The mutineers were standing around a security panel. Boen did something that caused sparks to fly, and the containment fields went down throughout the section. That meant their tricorders would pick up Lucsly’s biosigns now. He had no choice but to try to take them off guard. “Freeze, DTI!” he cried, stepping out into the corridor with his phaser drawn. “Weapons down, hands above your heads, now!”

  They didn’t take his advice. And ch’Riin and his guards were faster draws than Lucsly. He ducked for cover as the phaser bolts flew, taking refuge behind a large, blue boxlike artifact which emitted a low trilling hum. He could only hope the phaser energies wouldn’t activate it somehow. “Listen to me!” he called. “You have to stop what you’re doing! The risk to the timeline is too great!”

  “Lucsly!” Whitcomb cried. “Of course it’s you.”

  “You’re wrong, Lucsly,” Boen cried. “We know what we’re doing. It’ll be strictly one-way travel, no risk to your precious timeline.”

  “You don’t know that! You’re guessing, and if your guess is wrong, you’ll eradicate countless lives!”

  “And bring countless others into existence!” Whitcomb fired back. “Who’s to say they have any less right to exist?”

  Lucsly rolled his eyes. Every single time. They say that every single time.

  “I’ve found what we want,” Boen said. “Bay K44, the Ky’rha Artifacts. Two are functional. They just need the power packs restored, and those are in Bay K42.”

  “Let’s go. Zane, Cohen, Siemaszko, you keep Lucsly covered.”

  “You’ve just doomed us all,” Lucsly called. “Using the Ky’rha Artifacts won’t be a one-way transfer. They create a quantum entanglement with the past! A two-way exchange of information! That’s how they lock onto a time and place! You use those, you guarantee this timeline ends!”

  A pause.

  “What if he’s right?” Boen said.

  “He’s lying,” Whitcomb snapped.

  “No, what he’s saying makes sense.”

  “If the theory is right. There’s no proof yet.”

  “But we’re basing this whole thing on that theory. What if—”

  “Listen to me!” Whitcomb hissed. “Either way, we get back home and live the lives we were supposed to. Either way, we get to save the people we love. And we’ll never know whether this timeline survived or not anyway. It won’t make any difference.”

  “To us, maybe, but what about them?”

  “It’s too late to back out now, Lloyd! In this timeline, we’re all guilty of treason. It’s either spend the rest of your life in prison or get a new life back home.”

  “You help me, Boen,” Lucsly called, “and it’ll be taken into account in your trial!”

  But Whitcomb had offered the greater enticement. “Come on,” he heard Boen say. “They’re this way.”

  Lucsly had to make his move. He leapt out firing, his aim a best guess from the positions of the voices. One of the guards fell stunned and Boen took a grazing blow to the leg, crumpling him. But fire from the four others’ phasers chased Lucsly and forced him to duck behind an ornate ancient time carriage, using the large disk at its rear as a shield. The device started to heat alarmingly under the phaser barrage, and Lucsly hoped it was merely a sign of an imminent fatal explosion rather than an imminent time jump.

  “Hey, you!” came a new voice from the end of the corridor—an impossibly familiar voice. The two remaining guards shifted their fire toward the figure, forcing him to leap out of sight before Lucsly could get a clear look.

  But then a phaser beam picked off the guards from the other end of the corridor. “No, over here!” came the same voice as before, though no one could move that fast. Lucsly leapt from cover, aiming at Whitcomb, but she broke and ran, abandoning Boen.

  Lucsly stared as his rescuer jogged over into view. “Hey, partner,” Dulmur said. “Miss me?”

  He shook himself. “Your timing is impeccable,” he said, the highest praise he knew. “But . . . who’s with you?”

  Dulmur smirked. “Nobody. You and I are the only ones here.”

  Lucsly looked back toward the other end of the corridor. He knew there were devices in here that could send a person into the recent past. “Dulmur, if you’ve broken regulations—”

  “You want to talk regulations or you want to save reality as we know it? Come on, she’s got a headstart.”

  Lucsly paused to look at Boen, but the science officer merely lay there with his head lowered, resigned to his fate. The agent took off after his partner and soon caught up. “How did you even get here?”

  “Called in a few favors,” Dulmur said. “Made the trip inside a Starfleet Class-eight probe.” He twisted his neck, working out a kink. “Makes warp nine, but I’d have more room in a coffin.”

  They found Whitcomb at Bay K42. She’d already donned one of the Ky’rha Artifacts, a silvery headdress and gauntlet connected by a metallic half-sleev
e that draped over the left arm and shoulder, and had just finished attaching the power pack to its gauntlet. It was too large for her frame, but the fit was irrelevant. She worked the controls with her left hand, the changing readouts visible on the translucent visor, as she aimed the phaser with her right. “It’s set to kill!” she cried.

  But Lucsly didn’t even slow down. “You think that’ll stop me?” After all, Dulmur could take her out while she was killing Lucsly. That was the advantage of having a partner.

  At the critical second, though, Whitcomb hesitated. Lucsly didn’t. She went down, stunned hard. Her hand spasmed on the Artifact’s controls. Lights began to glow on the gauntlet. Oh, no. She could end up anywhen.

  He raised the level on his phaser, reluctantly making the choice to vaporize Whitcomb and the Artifact rather than jeopardize history. He raised the emitter, ready to fire.

  But Dulmur darted forward and threw himself atop Whitcomb. A second later, they were both gone, with nothing to herald their passage but a quiet whop as air rushed in to fill the space they’d left. “Dulmur!” Lucsly looked around frantically, watching for signs of reality fading around him, though he knew it wouldn’t work that way.

  But then he felt a tap on his shoulder. He whirled to find Dulmur standing there, holding the Ky’rha Artifact. “You called?”

  Lucsly stared. “Where’s Whitcomb?”

  Dulmur gestured with his head, leading Lucsly around a corner. There he found Whitcomb, Boen, and the other mutineers all secured, their wrists bound. “We got lucky. I guess the Artifact defaults to the nearest habitable place and time if there’s no firm destination set, and out here that means this place. We jumped back about eight minutes. So when my earlier self got here four minutes ago, I met myself and worked out that little diversion you saw. I held back till you and . . . I were out of the way, then came in and tied up these guys. The rest, you know.”

  Lucsly glared at him. “I should put you on report, mister! You deliberately interacted with your past self! Why?”

  “Because I already knew I would. What, you wouldn’t want me to change history, would you?”

  Dulmur had him there. Lucsly shook his head. Obviously the man’s time away from the Department had eroded his respect for regulations. Still, however questionable his means, Lucsly couldn’t argue with his ends. “Dulmur . . .”

  “What?”

  “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  Dulmur grinned. “What a coincidence. I couldn’t have done it without me either.”

  Lucsly stared him down. “You’re making jokes. About time. You know I hate that.”

  “Yeah.” The younger agent sighed. “I hate that too. Call it a defense mechanism.”

  There was a long pause. “Megumi?” Lucsly asked.

  A longer pause. “That was another life,” Dulmur said. “This is who I am now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Maybe I can’t have a wife, a family . . . but I’ve got a partner. Maybe . . . in its way . . . that’s something just as . . .”

  “You’re not about to say something sentimental about me, are you?”

  Dulmur’s eyes widened innocently. “Me? No. No way.”

  “Good.”

  “Perish the thought.”

  “Because I hate that.”

  “Never crossed my mind.”

  “Just so we understand that.”

  Dulmur chuckled and clapped his fellow agent on the shoulder. “I missed you too, partner.”

  PRESENT TIME

  STARDATE 58923.8 to 59046.6

  XI

  Décade II Quartidi Frimaire, Année DXC de la République, French Republican Calendar A Friday

  Château Thelian, Loire Valley, European Alliance

  04:56 UTC

  As Laarin Andos walked down the long corridor separating the presidential residence’s transporter suite from its living chambers, she was tempted to ask her escort, security agent Steven Wexler, for information on why President Bacco had summoned her at this hour of the morning. But she could easily read from the man’s body language that he was as much in the dark as she was, a state he found puzzling and upsetting given his high status in the president’s security hierarchy. Andos knew that humans were generally more tolerant of breaches in accepted hierarchical protocols than Rhaandarites were, but that was a matter of degree; where professional pride and status were at stake, humans could be even more inflexible than her own people, who had multiple tiers of backup protocols to adapt to any conceivable situation. No, that’s unfair to him, Andos reflected after a moment’s more observation. Wexler’s frustration was motivated more by a fear that he would be unable to protect the president adequately if not fully informed.

  What Andos could not tell at this point was whether his reaction was predicated on a real threat. That was something the president had insisted she would only reveal to Andos in private. Andos was hardly a stranger to discussing classified temporal security matters with the Federation president, but almost invariably it was conducted in the presidential office in the Palais de la Concorde or in the situation room at Starfleet Headquarters, with other key administration or military personnel present, or at least, in Bacco’s case, with her inseparable chief of staff, Esperanza Piñiero. And the regular monthly briefing was only a week uptime. A middle-of-the-night command to come alone to the president’s sleeping quarters was highly anomalous.

  When they reached said quarters, the female Pandrilite guard stationed outside them signaled on the intercom. “Is Andos here yet?” came the president’s gruff voice.

  “She’s just arrived, Madam President.”

  “Well, what the hell is she waiting for, the Pioneers to win the pennant? Bring her in!” Oddly, the voice seemed to originate at a greater distance from the intercom pickup, yet Andos had heard no sounds of body movement. Curious, she thought, placing a hand in her pocket.

  The Pandrilite didn’t notice any anomaly, though. “Yes, ma’am. Director, please go on in.”

  When Andos entered through the wood-paneled (but tritanium-cored) doors, she found the president’s bedchamber dimly lit. A figure moved forward, lean and white-haired. As Andos’s eyes adjusted, she was able to see the wizened but lively face of President Nanietta Bacco. The leader of the United Federation of Planets was attired in fuzzy slippers and a nightshirt emblazoned with the legend PIKE CITY PIONEERS and the number 14. “Laarin, hi. Sorry to get you out of bed this time of night. It’s much more fun to get Esperanza out of bed this time of night, but this is a situation I can only come to you with.”

  “Think nothing of it, Madam President. As those in my profession are aware, time is a relative concept.”

  “Tell me about it.” It was President Bacco’s voice—but it came from the ’fresher at Andos’s right. The director turned to see another Nanietta Bacco standing in the doorway, this time dressed in one of her usual dark suits. Standing next to her was a lanky, brown-haired human with a haughty expression on his thin face. He wore a black uniform somewhat resembling modern Starfleet attire, but with the right shoulder quilted in dark blue. His insignia was a horizontal version of the Starfleet arrowhead in gold combined with a silver diamond shape, and the three rank pins on his collar were chevron-shaped.

  Andos nodded at them both. “Madam President,” she said. “And Commander Ducane. Greetings.”

  “Director,” Ducane said.

  The nightshirt-clad Bacco stared at her. “You know this clown?”

  “Yes, Madam President. Juel Ducane is an officer of Starfleet approximately five centuries from now. He is attached to the Temporal Integrity Commission and is responsible for monitoring events in our generation.” Andos’s gaze shifted between the two Presidents Bacco. “Although I imagine at least one of you has already been introduced.”

  “Once or twice,” the suited Bacco said.

  “Mister Ducane, I trust there was some urgent reason for duplicating our president?” Andos asked. “And are
we dealing with a temporal reversal or an alternate present?” She kept the terminology simple for Bacco’s benefit.

  “Believe me, Director Andos, I wouldn’t have doubled President Bacco back on her own timestream without a very good reason. You know the TIC takes the integrity of the timeline very seriously.”

  “Oh, really?” Nightshirt Bacco said. “I never would’ve guessed, what with you putting it in your name and all.”

  “My, you got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning,” Suit Bacco told her.

  “Look who’s talking. You got up on the wrong side of reality.”

  “Madams President,” Andos interposed, “if someone could explain, please?”

  Ducane seemed reluctant to speak, the usual reticence of uptime agents to reveal information to downtime listeners. But Nightshirt Bacco had no problem filling the gap. “Well, from what I’ve been told, I’m apparently due to be assassinated in a few hours.”

  “Was due to be assassinated,” Suit Bacco hastened to interpose.

  “It can’t be a ‘was,’ it hasn’t happened yet.”

  “It has for him,” Suit Bacco said, tilting her head toward Ducane. “Apparently, the first time the moving finger wrote, I got written out of the story with extreme prejudice. But somehow, don’t ask me to explain the physics, this guy knew his own past had been changed and came back to fix it.”

  Andos caught the significance of her words. “Then I take it the assassin is not of contemporary origin?”

  “That’s right,” Ducane said grudgingly. “But rest assured, the situation has been resolved.”

  “Took a few tries, though,” Suit Bacco said. “Mister Ducane here apparently failed to save my life at least once on his own—so I apparently got killed twice, which I’m not sure if I should be proud of or creeped out by.”