The Collectors

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Ranjea leaned forward to read the tag on Bay J18. This was one of the aisles containing smaller artifacts, so the bays were more numerous. “Hmm. Mervynian Feynman curve tracer. Allows tracking of individual worldlines through temporal displacements.”

  Garcia grinned, jogging to his side. “Perfect!”

  He called up more detailed data on the display and shook his head. “No. It only works if it’s been quantum-entangled with the subject beforehand.”

  “Any chance Lucsly or Dulmur used this thing sometime in the past?”

  “Checking the access logs . . . No, it was recovered by Agent Sonaj from an archaeological dig on Mervynia in 2341. And no one’s used it since except the research department.”

  “Damn.” Garcia had to admit it made sense. As a rule, DTI agents sought to avoid traveling through time, and only someone with the premeditated intention to do so would have reason to use this device. “That’s the problem with this place,” she said as she moved down the aisle again. “We try so hard not to use any of this stuff that we don’t really understand how most of it works. So how are we supposed to keep it all in check when things go wrong?”

  “Well, the idea is to minimize the chance that it will be misused.”

  “Yeah, and we’ve seen how well that worked.” Her eye almost skipped over the dull, hand-sized black stone in Bay J32. The label described it as a powerful chroniton emitter, but with no other known or usable properties. Typical, she thought. “You ask me, ignorance and avoidance usually aren’t the answer. The problems you bury away and try to avoid thinking about are the ones that usually come back to bite you in—”

  “Your cute ass?”

  That earned him another affectionate glare. “Don’t avoid the issue—although you’re so right. Really, we rag so much on Starfleet for taking reckless chances, but isn’t it sometimes more reckless to avoid gaining knowledge? Can we really call ourselves protectors of the timeline if all we do with this stuff is hoard it in our really big basement?”

  Coming up alongside her, he placed a hand on her back. “Right now, Teresa, what we are is Lucsly and Dulmur’s best hope.”

  She tilted her head. “Good point.” She resumed scanning the shelves, muttering to herself. “Mervynian chroniton polarizers . . . no. Mervynian ansible beacons . . . not unless they took one with them, which I doubt. Unidentified Mervynian artifact—damn, those Mervynians were industrious little time meddlers, weren’t they?”

  Moving on, she nearly ran into Doctor Warain, who ran out from a side junction, panting heavily. “There’s a problem in Aisle F,” he said. “The ice bores . . .”

  Still catching her breath from the startling near-collision, Garcia looked up at the towering Caldonian in irritation. “The ice bores are your problem, Doc. We have something a little more urgent to deal with.”

  “This is about to become very urgent,” Warain insisted. There was more than the usual level of anxiety in his voice—far more. Garcia traded a look with Ranjea, whose expression was quite grave. If his Deltan empathy told him it was that serious . . .

  They ran after Warain to Aisle F—which the agents had skipped over in their search, for it was mainly for large anachronistic items with no time-travel potential, such as time-displaced inventions and artworks that hadn’t been created yet. “The surge and the vortex effects,” the doctor said, “must have affected the stasis field. It’s shrunk enough to expose the power relay crystals in the base, and the crystals look enough like ice to attract the bores—and are delicate enough to melt from their heat. I fear the field is close to failure.”

  “The field over what, Doctor?” Ranjea asked.

  “The Mro!” Warain cried.

  Garcia’s blood ran cold. “We have a Mro?! Nobody told me there would be a Mro!”

  “Just hurry!”

  “And why are we running toward it?” she demanded as they rounded the corner at full speed.

  But it was already a moot question. There before her in Bay F6 was the stasis-encased Mro warrior. Its appearance more than lived up to its species’s reputation as the scourge of the quadrant from 214,000 to 212,000 BCE. It was a massive crustacean creature with four arms and four legs, topped by a low, armored dome of a head with eyes facing in all directions so no enemy could sneak up on it—or avoid the psionic pulse that would shatter the sanity of any with the misfortune to meet its gaze. Its chitinous carapace had duranium-composite armor reinforcements and multiple energy-weapon emitters literally grown into it, the creature’s very genome modified to let its body accommodate and power the weapons. This was considerable overkill, given that most enemies they faced would already have been driven mad by their gaze—but, then, it was helpless enemies that they had enjoyed killing the most. Only the Iconians had been strong enough to hold the Mro at bay, but ultimately the only reason the Mro had fallen was because they had run out of other races to massacre and had turned on one another.

  And the stasis field around the monster was flickering. There at the base, a dozen finger-sized Andorian ice bores were blithely, obliviously on the verge of condemning the entire population of the Vault—and perhaps of whatever ships came later—to a gruesome and horrific fate.

  Garcia grabbed at the front of Warain’s tunic. “Call security.”

  “Uh, they’re not cleared to be in here. They’re supposed to keep people from getting in, not—”

  “Then clear them!”

  “I don’t have the authority or the time!”

  “Okay, then where do you keep the phasers?”

  “Its armor would protect it.”

  “I mean for the ice bores! To stop them before it’s too late!”

  Warain blinked. “But—that would be cruel!”

  “Just get the damn guns!” The Caldonian ran off. “Why do we even have this here? Shouldn’t this be a Starfleet problem?”

  “We’re better qualified to maintain the stasis field,” Ranjea said.

  She grimaced. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

  “Teresa,” Ranjea breathed, pointing. “It’s too late.”

  The stasis field flickered out. The Mro soldier began to move toward them. Garcia grabbed Ranjea’s hand and clung to it tightly.

  And the Mro toppled over and clattered emptily on the floor.

  After several moments spent just staring and blinking, Ranjea found the presence of mind to deploy his tricorder. It was specialized for temporal detection, but it still had basic sensor functions. “Apparently the stasis field didn’t slow time to quite the degree we’d believed,” he went on in a shaky voice. “The Mro must have starved to death a hundred millennia ago. Its soft interior has already decayed to dust.”

  “Oh!” Garcia took a few more shuddering breaths. “Well.” She wrenched her hand free of Ranjea’s, shook it out, and brushed down the front of her suit. “Never mind, then. Back to work.” She tried to stroll away casually—then ran for the nearest head to throw up.

  When she emerged again, Ranjea was waiting nearby, and Warain was tiptoeing back to the weapons locker to return the several phasers he was cradling awkwardly in his arms. “Feeling better?” Ranjea asked her.

  “Mm-hm. Actually, I had an idea. Come on.”

  She led him to Aisle H, where a helmetlike device rested in Bay H20. “I saw this earlier.”

  “A telepathic temporal communicator?”

  “Yeah, the, um, visit with the Mro back there got me thinking about psionics. It’s basically quantum entanglement, right?”

  “Essentially, yes.” Ranjea raised his brows. “I think I anticipate you. The curve tracer needs to be entangled with its subject.”

  “Right. So if someone with psi abilities—like, say, you—were to use this communicator to connect with Lucsly or Dulmur before the accident, then you’d be entangled with him, and we could then entangle you with the tracer.”

&
nbsp; “Hm,” Ranjea replied. “It’s a long shot. I’m an empath, not a telepath. I’m not sure how much of a connection I could make.”

  “If it doesn’t work, we could ask Andos to send T’Lem or Teyak. But come on, boss, who’s better at making a personal connection than a Deltan, huh?”

  “Well, it’s worth a try,” Ranjea said. He entered his access code to deactivate the force field and reached for the device. He looked it over skeptically.

  “What’s wrong?” Garcia asked.

  “It’s just . . . whoever designed this headgear had no sense of fashion. This is not my color at all.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I promise not to laugh. Much. Now let’s go get you entangled with Lucsly and Dulmur.” After a moment, she winced. “Well, there’s an image I won’t be unseeing for a while. . . .”

  VI

  * * *

  Day 266, 3051

  TIA Headquarters, Tandar Prime

  Agent Dulmur paced the austere cell he shared with Lucsly, who sat as still as a statue. “I tell you, I’ll never complain about Jena’s agency again.”

  “Yes, you will.”

  “They’re condescending, yes. Imperious, yes. But they don’t just beam your clothes off and have a telepath rummage around in your head uninvited.”

  “At least they gave them back.”

  “The clothes, yes. My mental privacy, no. I would’ve thought you’d be far more pissed about that.”

  “I have nothing to hide.”

  Dulmur stopped pacing and stared in wonderment for a moment. “We’ve been partners eighteen years, nine months, and seventeen days, and I know practically nothing about your private life.”

  “There’s not much to know.”

  Dulmur shook his head and resumed pacing. Having been separated from Lucsly before the “examination,” he had no way of knowing how his partner had really reacted to the invasive treatment. He wondered if Noi had been subjected to the same thing, though he suspected the TIA would probably have shown her more courtesy as a temporal peer. At the very least, she surely had better defenses against telepathic probing than either of them.

  That got him thinking about what he’d seen of this era as a whole. “The hell of it is, the rest of this timeline looks like a pretty amazing place to live.”

  “We don’t belong here.”

  “We may have to, partner. We know too much already. You know the rules.”

  “Mm-hm.” Lucsly straightened in his chair. By his standards, it was an outright fidget. “But Noi said she could wipe our memories. Send us home. That would be optimal.”

  “Maybe.”

  Lucsly peered at him, noting the uncertainty in his voice. “Watch it, Dulmur. Remember training. The future can be alluring, but we need to earn it.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.” Dulmur looked down, placing his hands on his midriff, feeling the undamaged flesh beneath the gray fabric. “But I can’t help thinking about what they did for me. Just beamed me up and restored me from mortal injuries. And I have to wonder: Why can’t we already do that?”

  “You know the limitations on transporter technology. To store complete quantum-level detail about every particle in a body would require at minimum an exactly equal number of particles to store it in—that’s the absolute limit of information theory. Not to mention the Uncertainty Principle and its—”

  “Yeah, I know, it’s why transporters can’t copy living people or store permanent backups of them.”

  “And why replicators can’t make living animals—or organs. Not yet, anyway,” Lucsly added, his eyes flicking to the site of Dulmur’s effaced injuries.

  “But we know transporters can alter a pattern dynamically during beaming. They can filter out infections or toxins, neutralize or remove weapons. They’ve even been used to repair genetic damage or accelerated aging, and that was decades ago. Repairing organs or curing degenerative diseases can’t be so different from that.

  “And look at what else they have. Androids and holograms walking around. People uploading their minds into holoemitters, living indefinitely. These are technologies we have the potential for already. The Federation has encountered techniques for transferring consciousness before. But we’re just sitting on them.”

  “Humanity still remembers the Eugenics Wars and the twenty-second-century Augment crises, human and Suliban alike. There’s resistance to diverging too far from what’s natural.”

  “Those were centuries ago. And we still haven’t moved on? Does that seem healthy to you?” He broke off. “Sorry, wrong person to ask.”

  The older agent crossed his arms. “What are you saying?”

  Dulmur spread his arms, starting to pace again. “I don’t know, partner. I just wonder if we’ve let ourselves get too complacent. You heard Jena: We already have interstellar beaming, but we’re sitting on it because we haven’t made it safe enough. How many other technologies have we known about for decades without really making the effort to advance them and use them? Even something as simple as a holocommunicator. When was the last time you saw someone using one?”

  “They were a fad. Took up too much space.”

  “Every breakthrough seems to be a passing fad these days. That’s the problem.”

  “Define ‘these days.’ ”

  Dulmur threw him a sour look. “You know what I mean. When I was a kid, the Federation was all about progress and exploration, looking forward to the future. But now . . .” He shook his head. “This past generation, we seem to have gotten so stagnant.”

  “There’s been a lot of conflict. Wars, invasions.”

  “Even before then, though, it’s like there was less will to move forward. There was this big push for new exploration, and then it fizzled out. There were big breakthroughs in holography and AI for a while and not much since, except by accident.”

  “There’s slipstream drive.”

  “Which we got from an alien culture on the other side of the galaxy.”

  Lucsly leaned forward. “What’s this really about, Dulmur? Conservatism is an asset in our work. Why would this bother you?”

  “I’m just wondering if we’re too attached to our past to move forward into the future.”

  “Look around. These advances are part of our future.”

  “But how long do we have to wait for them to happen? If I’d been hurt like that in our own time, I’d probably be dead now, or at best getting bionic parts grafted into me and needing weeks to recover.”

  Lucsly examined him. “So is this about the Federation’s future . . . or your own future?”

  Dulmur found himself at a loss for words. Once more, Lucsly filled the void. “If resisting change is such a bad thing . . . then what are you still doing in this job?”

  “There’s something you need to understand, Jena.” Director Danlen faced Noi calmly across the table in the stark interrogation room, where he’d spent the past forty-three minutes grilling her about the events that had brought her here. “We’re perfectly well aware that this is an altered timeline. We’ve known it for centuries. And we like it that way.”

  “How could you?” Noi asked. “Without a defense grid, you’re fair game for raiders from any century. You’re living under constant siege. Is it worth it for the freedom to rewrite time?” She shook her head. “This is the kind of universe the anti-Accordists wanted to create. Where history was a free-for-all, a battlefield to be reshaped by whoever could manage to get a temporary advantage. Total chaos.

  “That’s it, isn’t it? It’s got to be. Somehow the anti-Accordists altered the Federation’s history. Your history, Timot. The Danlen I knew would never support such unfettered interference with time. They must’ve—” She frowned. “It’s got to be the obelisk. It’s powerful enough to burn through the grid like it was nothing. They wanted me to bring it here, to an undefended timeline, so they co
uld steal it, go back, and create the timeline to begin with.” Danlen took her circular logic in stride; no doubt, like his counterpart, he’d witnessed such causal anomalies firsthand. What might seem paradoxical to a civilian accustomed to cause following effect could make perfect sense where time travel was concerned, so long as the chain of events was self-consistent. “The Certoss raid may have been an attempt to steal it. Or you could have a mole within the agency. Timot, you’ve got to let me take charge of the obelisk. You can’t trust your own people with this.”

  Danlen considered her for a moment, then stood. “Come with me, Jena. I want to show you something.”

  He led her out into the corridor. “Where are the DTI men?” she asked.

  “They’re safe. We don’t want them to see too much of our operation—you understand.”

  “So you’re showing it to me?”

  “Up to a point. In order to make a point.”

  He led her into a room that she recognized as the counterpart to the master temporal observatory in FTA headquarters: a large, domed chamber with a raised central platform ringed with consoles, around and above which was an intricate holographic map of the charted timestreams of the multiverse. Unlike the soothing blues and sweeping curves and spheres of FTA graphics, the TIA’s display was more red and gold, its shapes more angular.

  Danlen led her to the central platform and spoke to a Choblik technician. “Grant our guest Level Two psi clearance,” he ordered. The small, deerlike biped nodded and swept a robotic forelimb over her console.

  A moment later, Noi found herself tapped into the observatory display on a deeper mental level, her neural implants giving her far more information than her eyes alone. When she looked at any given point in the tangle of branched timelines and travel curves, she was able to perceive its details, to understand what it represented, at least to the extent her low clearance permitted. Looking over the map, getting a feel for its contents, Noi recognized that it was depicting not only research ventures, monitoring missions, and potential interventions and hazards in need of heading off, but the temporal equivalent of troop movements, campaigns, strikes, and counterstrikes. To be sure, her own agency’s master map was not devoid of such notations, due to the need for constant vigilance against anti-Accordist factions. But they were a far more dominant theme here, and she saw far more interventions initiated by the agency itself, backward-arcing travel curves that triggered new offshoot branches and eventually terminated their originals. Of course, that was nothing their name hadn’t given away.