The Collectors

by Christopher L. Bennett

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  To William, Patrick, Jon, Tom, Peter,

  Colin, Sylvester, Paul, John, Christopher, David, Matt,

  and the other Peter.

  Historian’s Note

  * * *

  The main portion of The Collectors takes place in early May 2384, approximately fourteen months after the 2383 portions of Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations—Forgotten History and approximately five weeks after the resolution of the Breen crisis in Star Trek: The Next Generation—Cold Equations Book II: Silent Weapons.

  “Then we came to a gallery of simply colossal proportions, but singularly ill-lit. . . . Here I was more in my element, for rising on either side of me were the huge bulks of big machines, all greatly corroded and many broken down, but some still fairly complete. You know I have a certain weakness for mechanism, and I was inclined to linger among these; the more so as for the most part they had the interest of puzzles, and I could make only the vaguest guesses at what they were for. I fancied that if I could solve their puzzles I should find myself in possession of powers that might be of use against the Morlocks.”

  —H. G. Wells,

  The Time Machine (1895 CE)

  Prologue

  * * *

  Stardate 61263.6

  April 16, 2384 CE (a Monday)

  The obelisk was a work of art. Its sinuous, vaguely conical form was in fact a bundle of dozens of separate plates, each as thin as a butterfly’s wing yet rigidly holding its shape, each enmeshed with the others in an intricate, mazelike spiral—with none of the plates touching one another at any point. Tricorder scans showed that the pattern continued fractally, each visible plate itself consisting of thinner, unconnected layers that were themselves made of thinner layers, down to the thickness of single molecules. The gaps were narrow enough to exploit the Casimir effect, excluding most of the constant storm of virtual-particle formation and annihilation that gave the cosmic vacuum its baseline energy levels, creating a localized negative energy field within. The sheer surface area of all those microscopically entwined layers meant that the obelisk was charged with the densest concentration of negative energy that Kyeera Janyl had ever seen. “By all rights,” said the Tormandar science officer, “it should’ve collapsed in on itself from vacuum pressure alone.”

  “Yet here it stands, Lieutenant.” Captain Bazel of the U.S.S. Rhea gazed up at the obelisk with his bulbous eyes. The Saurian closed his nictitating membranes, filtering out all light but infrared, but this revealed nothing beyond the subtle warmth that emanated from the structure. Although what he saw was nothing compared to the emanations Janyl’s tricorder had revealed: that characteristic, disquieting mix of negative energy, Hawking radiation, gravitomagnetic fields, and exotic-particle decay signatures that Starfleet science officers shorthanded as “temporal energy”—and Starfleet captains simply called “trouble.”

  Reopening his membranes, Bazel cast his gaze across the surrounding wilderness. They stood at the narrowest point of a valley limned by craggy sandstone peaks, the dusty soil of the valley floor adorned with patchy purple grasses and diminutive, twisty shrubs. “The question is, why does it stand here? Who was it made for, let alone by? Any sign that this planet has ever had sentient life?”

  “Not a trace, sir,” Janyl replied, shaking her reddish-furred head. “Evolution here hasn’t advanced far enough yet, and there are no geological or genetic signatures suggesting any past alien tampering in this world’s development. And the way things are going, it’s not likely to evolve any intelligence in the foreseeable future.”

  The clouds of volcanic ash looming on the horizon reinforced her words. This still-nameless planet had recently—that is, within the past ten thousand years—undergone an orbital shift due to a chaotic gravitational interaction with its neighbor worlds. The resultant tectonic upheavals were bringing about a global extinction event. Few of the planet’s impressive megafauna still survived, and the planet’s future orbit would be too erratic, shifting annually between ocean-boiling heat and atmosphere-freezing cold, to support the evolution of any future sapient forms. Which ruled out the other possible direction from which an object with temporal properties could have originated.

  “So somebody from some other world, perhaps some other time, has placed this here,” Bazel remarked. “But why here? Why now? Some kind of survey probe?”

  “I don’t read anything that I recognize as sensor emanations,” Janyl replied. “It could be a passive sensor, but why go to all the trouble to send a probe such a distance through time—especially one as potentially powerful as this—and limit it to that?”

  “Such a distance?”

  Janyl shrugged. “I can’t be sure, but the quantum dating readings are off the tricorder’s scale. It’s from a more remote point in time than I’m equipped to determine.”

  “Unfortunately, we don’t have much time to evaluate this thing in situ,” Bazel told her. “Unless the forecast has changed.”

  “No, sir. The herd will reach this valley within three days. It’s a natural bottleneck, and they’ll be packed shoulder to shoulder.” The six-legged, blue-skinned ungulates were the largest and most socially complex species still surviving on this world, and though their numbers were greatly diminished now, each one was larger than a Type-11 shuttlecraft.

  “Do you think the obelisk can survive that?”

  “I’m not sure how it holds its form as it is, so I can’t rule out the possibility. But subjecting it to that much of a pounding could damage it. Or . . . trigger it.”

  When dealing with a powerful and advanced temporal artifact with unknown properties, neither of those was a gamble worth taking. “Very well,” Bazel said. “Coordinate with Commander Blair. Make arrangements to move this thing to Rhea—very delicately.”

  “Um, with respect, Captain, I’m not sure it’d be any safer to keep this thing in our hold for the five weeks it’d take to get back to a starbase. And we’re still not done with our survey of the biosphere. Captain,” she went on with passion, “this may be our last chance to document many of these species before they’re gone forever. The loss to science—”

  “Easy, Lieutenant. I’ll contact Starfleet—they’ll probably be willing to divert a slipstream ship our way for something like this. They’ll want to get this into the hands of Temporal Investigations as soon as possible.”

  The young Tormandar frowned, her sensitive pheromonal receptors perhaps registering his own wariness toward that civilian agency. Or maybe she could just hear it in his voice. “What do you think they’re going to do with it, sir?”

  “I know nothing beyond rumors,” he told her. “But by now, I think the DTI must have a fair collection of items like this hidden away somewhere.”

  I

  * * *

  May 2, 2384 (a Wednesday)

  Dwarf planet 136199 Eris, Outer Solar System

  “So are you going to take the job?”

  Marion Dulmur stared at his fellow special agent, surprised by the question. In the eighteen years, nine months, and sixteen days since he had first been partnered with Gariff Lucsly, he had rarely known the older man to initiate a conversation that wasn’t in the line of duty. Normally it would have been Dulmur who’d feel compelled to break the long silence at a time
like this. They had spent the past three hours and fourteen minutes in a maglev carriage, descending via orbital tether from Eridiosynchronous orbit. Stretched out below them, drawing rapidly nearer in the final minutes of their descent, was the snowy-white yet dimly illuminated surface of Eris, a lifeless ball of ice on a wide, lonely orbit through the outer fringes of the Sol system, well removed from civilization or public attention. Here was where the Federation Department of Temporal Investigations maintained the Eridian Vault, the top-secret storage facility housing the most sensitive and dangerous temporal artifacts known to the Federation—or at least those that could be safely moved here. The artifact discovered sixteen days before by the crew of Rhea had so far fit into that category, but given the delicacy of the obelisk’s structure, no one was willing to risk sending it through a transporter, and thus it had to be delivered to the surface the old-fashioned way, gingerly lowered down a superstrong cable thousands of kilometers long. Dulmur and Lucsly had spent the past twelve days aboard a Starfleet slipstream courier, securing the obelisk and shepherding it back to the Vault; and now, after so much time aboard the fastest spacegoing conveyance the Federation had yet mastered, they had to spend the final leg of the journey on the slowest one still in use. It allowed the anticipation to build as they neared the moment when they would have to secure this powerful alien object in the Vault and pray that it didn’t have some unpredictable interaction with one of the dozens of other artifacts therein, artifacts with the power to rewrite reality. So most people would feel the need to indulge in small talk to avoid having to contemplate the immensity of it all.

  Not Lucsly, though. The lanky, silver-haired, stone-faced special agent was a stalwart of the DTI, largely because he was simply too prosaic and unimaginative to be troubled much by the existential anxieties of temporal investigation. Normally it was Dulmur who carried the brunt of the conversation between them, for he’d never been able to achieve quite the same level of stoic professionalism as his partner.

  But today, he’d been more subdued than usual, his thoughts about the recent offer preoccupying him. Now that they were almost home, he knew he couldn’t put the decision off much longer, so it weighed more heavily on his mind. Thus the conversational void that Lucsly was now unwontedly attempting to fill.

  “I’m tempted, sure,” Dulmur finally replied. “Just like I was tempted the other three times they offered.”

  “The Denobula branch office is an important addition to our facilities. It needs a capable assistant director.”

  “I agree. We need a stronger presence out that way.” The growing tensions between the Federation and the more aggressive members of the Typhon Pact—the Breen and Tholians in particular—created a delicate situation where temporal security was concerned. In the two years and eleven months since the Pact had gone public, its members had generally adhered to the Temporal Accords, for any sane government understood that tampering with time could backfire in unpredictable ways. But just over five weeks ago, the increasingly erratic and belligerent Breen government had attempted to capture a derelict starship from a parallel quantum reality with the intent of using its extratemporal technology to gain a strategic edge. The derelict had been destroyed and the Breen leader deposed for his failure, but the incident had created uncertainty about the Pact’s reliability as a partner in temporal regulation. Thus a stronger DTI presence toward the Federation’s spinward border, where the Pact’s more bellicose members were concentrated, was very much worth having. The new office at Denobula Triaxa would also allow closer coordination with the nascent temporal management agency that the Ferengi Alliance was in the process of establishing at the behest of Grand Nagus Rom, whose prior personal experiences with transtemporal and allohistorical displacement had left him sympathetic toward the DTI’s goals. Rom had done the Department a great service the previous year by drawing on his personal fortune to purchase an ancient yet functional vortex manipulator that the Redheri had discovered and auctioned, whereupon he had bartered it to the Federation in exchange for fairly reasonable trade concessions—which, by Ferengi standards, was effectively a donation. The manipulator had been the most recent addition to the Vault’s inventory, until today.

  “So you’re considering the job?” Lucsly asked.

  “I always consider it. But it’s like I’ve said before—I can do the most good out in the field with you.”

  “You said that ten years, six months, and twenty-five days ago, when we started to get warning signs that a new front of the Temporal Cold War was about to open in our era. That conflict was resolved two years, two months, and two weeks ago, our time.”

  “As far as we know. Sure, Agent Noi said things would calm down for us in the future, but we both know there are many futures to choose from. The one she comes from might not be the one we get.”

  “Hm,” Lucsly replied.

  “And even without more invasions from the future, things in the present are getting pretty intense, with the Breen and everything. No telling what other dangerous tech they might want to get their gloves on. So, best to stay ready.”

  “Hm.”

  For another 3.8 minutes, there was nothing but the hum of the maglev carriage’s motors. “Still,” the older agent finally said, “there are other facets of the future to consider. More personal ones.”

  Again, Dulmur was surprised. True, he made no secret of his desire to settle down and start a family one day, but he’d become increasingly resigned to the unlikelihood of that as he’d grown older and more entrenched in his job. And he’d never known Lucsly to encourage him in that pursuit. “You hate change, Lucsly. You really want the hassle of breaking in a new partner again?”

  “No.” Twelve seconds later: “But change happens. That’s just reality. Sooner or later you have to face it.”

  Dulmur studied his partner’s lean, stoic face for a long moment. “Look . . . partner . . .”

  The carriage hummed louder as it began its final deceleration. “We’re about to arrive,” Lucsly said. “Time to get this artifact checked in.”

  Two decades of practice let Dulmur follow his partner’s lead and set personal issues aside as they proceeded with the work. The next hour was spent delicately transferring the obelisk to the processing bay, where it would be examined with great caution to determine whether it could be safely neutralized, or at least effectively shielded from the Vault’s other most powerful artifacts. True, the majority of those artifacts were mercifully nonfunctional, but some required only an infusion of temporal energy to be triggered, and the obelisk emitted it in abundance.

  “You must be joking,” moaned Doctor Warain, the Caldonian temporal physicist who supervised the study and management of the Vault’s contents. The towering, brown-complexioned humanoid shook his bulbous head at the readings on his console as he and the two special agents monitored the obelisk from the observation chamber. “These negative-energy readings are unprecedented! And the chroniton emissions . . . no, no, if this thing is placed anywhere near the Mervynian chroniton polarizers while one is switched on . . .”

  “I don’t think there are any plans to switch them on, Warain,” Dulmur said.

  “And are you confident that you can rule out a recursive retrocausal anomaly arising from the gravitomagnetic interactions that could result? Because I can’t. It’s an allowable solution to the equations, you know.”

  “Yes, we know,” Lucsly said, even as he finished logging the obelisk into inventory on his part of the console. “We’re aware of the challenges. The courier’s engineer raised similar concerns about the slipstream interaction, but they managed to avoid problems.”

  “So if they could do it,” Dulmur went on, “you can do it. Right? You’ve come up with containment solutions for dangerous items before.”

  “Oh, I have a containment solution, all right.”

  “Great! Let’s hear it.”

  “Phaser a hole fifty k
ilometers deep in the ice and dump this thing in. On the opposite side of the planetoid.”

  “We’ll take that under advisement,” Lucsly told him dryly. “In the meantime, if you could determine how much we need to shore up the containment fields in Bay D14 . . .”

  Warain glowered down at him. “You know it’s not that easy, right? There’s no way this will ever work.” He sighed. “I’ll get right on it.”

  The Caldonian strode from the chamber, muttering anxiously to himself. Dulmur would have been more worried if not for the fact that Warain reacted the same way to virtually every new addition to the Vault. It had once amazed Dulmur that someone so neurotic could handle the responsibility of a job where one misstep could erase oneself or one’s whole civilization from existence. Over the years, he’d come to realize that it was simply how Warain coped, a façade masking the intricate calculations and strategies always percolating in that massive brain of his. The towering scientist had managed to keep the Vault free of major temporal mishaps for the entirety of his tenure here, and so Dulmur was confident that—

  “He’s right, you know.”

  Dulmur spun, startled by the new yet familiar voice. Lucsly had already turned and showed no sign of surprise at the presence of the unauthorized visitor: an elegant, exotic female with mahogany skin, large honey-colored eyes, black hair worn in a long braid, scalloped Vulcanoid ears, a subtle chevron ridge between her eyebrows, and truly spectacular cheekbones. The interloper’s sleek frame was clad in the close-fitting, ribbed black jumpsuit of the Federation Temporal Agency, the thirty-first-century descendant of the DTI. True to form, she’d arrived imperceptibly, as though she’d been there all along and simply hadn’t been noticed. Her quantum time-travel technology not only created that illusion, but made it child’s play for her to bypass Vault security. “Agent Noi,” Lucsly said. “You know you’re not authorized to be here.”