The Collectors

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “But they were,” Noi said. “There were no warnings on your instrument, nothing to alert sentient observers to the risk. And removing these men from their proper timestream did alter history in a drastic way.”

  “History is a small-scale concern,” Collector #2 replied. “Such adjustments to the paths of individuals and civilizations are minor and generally self-correcting in the long term. Our responsibility is to preserve entire species and biospheres, to recover lost geological eras.”

  “You don’t understand,” Noi said. “This particular disruption has the potential to affect the course of events on a galactic scale for millennia. There are events in the era in question that could affect the evolution of life on planets throughout the galaxy, even the very survival of those planets.”

  “Then it is fortunate,” said the Warden, “that our instruments have the ability to access multiple timestreams. Any biospheres so endangered can be rescued. We seek to preserve as many extinct forms as it is possible to reach.” Dulmur realized that could explain how they’d returned to the Collectors’ original timeline despite their detour into an alternate track.

  “And what are you going to do with them now that you have them?” Lucsly countered. “Even this torus is finite. Will you just keep these species here forever, trapped in their carefully groomed enclosures? What kind of survival is that?”

  “This is a pilot program. In time, we hope to engineer planets on which they may be resettled.”

  “And what then? Planets still change. Climates and biospheres come and go. That’s why extinction happens: because species adapted for a given environment can’t survive when it ceases to exist. Eventually these species would die out all over again. Or evolve into something completely different.”

  “That is a concern for the future, true. But we have hopes that our own descendants will continue our work. At least we could send instruments into the far future, transplanting today’s species uptime to preserve them as well.”

  “Until what?” Lucsly asked. “Until the galaxy’s completely overrun with every species that ever went extinct? Where will there be room for the new species? And how will the old ones survive in an era that wasn’t meant for them?”

  The Warden’s mental projections grew almost wistful. “The modern galaxy is . . . becoming sparser with life. Increasingly more of its civilized species have reached a point where they feel their evolution has reached a plateau on the physical plane, or that population pressures have become too great. Thus it has become fashionable to transition to incorporeal existence or other dimensional planes. There will be an abundance of room soon enough.”

  “But some of us,” Collector #2 added primly, “still value the beauty and fulfillment of the physical world. We choose to hold on to our heritage as corporeal beings, and to affirm our ties to the cycles of biological evolution that produced us.”

  “That explains it,” Noi said. “The powerful psionic presence you emanate. The energy within your bodies. You’re halfway to incorporeal already. You’re just not willing to let go. Is that what the harnesses are for? Do they anchor your postcorporeal neural matrices to your bodies?”

  The DTI agents traded a stunned look. Dulmur was starting to agree with his partner: They were learning way too much about the future.

  “The change is not inevitable,” the Warden insisted. “What we have seen of the new way of being, the new reality beyond this one, is distasteful. Too little of what we know and value is retained there. The beings residing there already are too alien in their nature and beliefs. The new energies and experiences, the new forms of communication, are disagreeably intense.”

  “Those who enjoy them have no taste or standards,” Collector #2 put in. “I think it is only a fleeting experiment. It will not last.”

  “But if it does,” the Warden continued, “then we welcome the others’ departure. It leaves the galaxy free for those of us who still value the truths of the past.”

  “What truths?” Lucsly asked. “That you don’t like what’s new and different? What about all these other life-forms you’ve brought into a universe so different from their own? If you have the right to resist being dragged into the future, what about them?”

  Lucsly met Dulmur’s eyes as he continued. “It’s natural to want things to stay the way they were before. It’s comfortable. Familiar. But the hard fact is, time is change. What defines one moment in time as different from another is the evolution of the universal wavefunction in the interim. Change is what makes time happen in the first place.” He glanced down briefly. “Much as we may want it to, nothing is supposed to last forever. There always comes a point where clinging to the past becomes an exercise in futility. Where it hurts more than it helps.”

  Dulmur held his partner’s gaze. “He’s right,” he told the Collectors. “The past belongs where it is.”

  “And some things deserve to stay extinct,” Noi added. “The Borg most of all.”

  “Do not mistake our curiosity for open debate,” the Warden told them, its tone growing sterner. “Whatever authority your agencies gave you in the remote past no longer exists. As it is, you are merely prehistoric samples that have arrived in place of our intended research subjects. Thus we are researching you instead, studying your responses and cultural values. In this way, you repay us for your vandalism of our project.”

  “And what gives you the authority to imprison us?” Noi demanded.

  “Consider it an act of mercy instead. Your worlds, your civilizations, have changed beyond recognition. There is nowhere for you in the modern galaxy—except the environment we have the power to create for you. If you prove amenable subjects, we will retrieve other suitable specimens of your respective species. When properly activated, the instruments can sample a much larger volume than what you experienced. Thus it should be easy to establish a large enough population base for breeding—although you, Agent Jena Noi, may be difficult to match.”

  “Oh, you did not just say that,” Noi said. “If you think we’re going to let you breed us like—”

  Suddenly, the Collectors grew agitated, their tentacle bundles splitting and waving frenetically. “Alert!” cried one of the junior Collectors. “We have an incoming parachronistic incursion. It is not one of our own instruments!”

  “Location?” demanded the Warden.

  “The same enclosure where these beings arrived!”

  “Image it!”

  Something happened to Dulmur’s perceptions. He could still feel himself standing on the platform, but his viewpoint was back in the scrubland enclosure, hovering near the obelisk. Somehow he could see in all directions, as if through a Collector’s eyes. And there, above the obelisk, were three sleek, advanced battleships, resembling the vessel that had escorted him and the others to Tandar Prime.

  “It’s the TIA,” Noi said. “They’ve followed us!”

  XI

  * * *

  c. 21,436,000 CE

  Collector Preserve

  “Hit them hard and fast,” Timot Danlen reminded his gunner as he took in the sight of the hideous floating things gathered around the obelisk. “Don’t give them a chance to think.” When facing beings this advanced, it was necessary to gain an immediate advantage.

  “Yes, Director!” the Hirogen gunner barked, firing eagerly at the creatures while taking care to avoid the obelisk.

  “Serel, stand by to begin ground assault. Secure that obelisk at all costs!”

  “Yes, Director,” replied Agent Jeihaz through the comlink in his head. Moments later, when the ground around the obelisk had been cleared, he gave the order, and the hazy blue form of the holographic giantess blinked into view on the ground below, accompanied by four of Danlen’s fiercest fighters. While her strike team laid down cover fire, Jeihaz moved to the obelisk to phase-shift it out of its possessors’ control. Once that was done, Danlen would order the
ship to move over its position, then shift phase to match, rendering the ship invisible and safe from attack, with the obelisk inside it.

  But when Jeihaz signaled ready and Danlen tried to issue the order, he found himself paralyzed. He couldn’t move his eyes, but he could tell that the other team members in his field of view were frozen as well, as were the organic strike team members visible in the holotank before him. Jeihaz and Darro remained in motion, suggesting that the flesh-and-blood agents were paralyzed by some telepathic force. The hologram and the android fired on the incoming creatures, but those creatures now had personal shields engaged. One of them made a gesture, and some sort of energy pulse overloaded both remaining agents’ circuits. Darro fell rigidly to the ground, followed by Jeihaz’s mobile emitter as her body projection dissipated.

  Now Danlen got a sinking feeling, literally and otherwise, as the ship descended, along with the others on the screen. The landing rocked him; unable to move, he teetered, fearing for his balance. Outside, he could see a group of the squidlike creatures descending, accompanied by a hover platform carrying the hated duplicate of Jena Noi and her two accomplices from the temporal backwater of the twenty-fourth century.

  “Hm,” he heard the one called Dulmur say. “That was easy.”

  Just then, Danlen felt the ship’s temporal drive engage. The scene faded, and when his senses cleared, he could move again. The ship was in a temporal hover, holding just before arrival, flanked by the other two vessels. A glance at a monitor showed that the strike team was back aboard. As per their preprogrammed instructions, the ships had transported themselves and all their occupants several minutes backward to just before their original arrival.

  “All right, people,” Danlen said. “That was a good trial run—we know what we’re facing now. Ready countermeasures.”

  On their second try, the ships’ telepathic circuits broadcast a psionic jamming field. Jeihaz and Darro stayed aboard; Jeihaz manned the guns while the Hirogen, Sulirr, led the strike team. This time they got as far as landing around the phased obelisk before they were thrown into a slow-time field. The automatic backstep was barely able to overcome it and jump them back into inverted spacetime.

  “A direct attack isn’t going to work,” Jeihaz advised. “There are too many of them and they’re too powerful. Our best option is to distract them. Send in a stealth team, do some sabotage before we bring in the ships. Give them a bigger problem to worry about while we make off with an obelisk or two.”

  “What kind of problem?” Danlen asked.

  Sulirr laughed. “Have you seen the menagerie down there? It is a hunter’s paradise. They have some of the most fearsome predators in the history of the galaxy.”

  “ ‘Fearsome’ is an understatement,” Darro said, anxiety clear on the Soong-breed’s golden face. “They have Borg down there.”

  “Then they will have a very large problem to distract them,” Sulirr countered.

  “But our team will be down there too. What will happen to them?”

  “We can handle the Borg,” Danlen told him. He added to himself, Just so long as they don’t have a Mro.

  “Can we even break them out, though?” Darro persisted. “The shields must be very advanced to resist their adaptations.”

  “Must be easier from the outside,” Jeihaz replied. “If not, we’ll just keep resetting until we figure it out.”

  “Ready your team, Serel,” the director ordered, giving his agents a satisfied smile. “It’s time for the animals to take over this zoo.”

  “It’s the TIA,” Noi said. “They’ve followed us!”

  “How?” Lucsly asked.

  “No idea.” She turned to the Warden. “But they’re here for the obelisk—the instrument. You can’t let them have it.”

  “Have no concern,” Collector #2 transmitted. “We can easily handle their primitive—”

  “Warden!” The junior Collectors began writhing their tentacles in alarm once more. “Barriers are falling all over the preserve! Many specimens are escaping!”

  “Don’t tell me,” Noi said. “The most dangerous ones?”

  “Correct!”

  “The Borg?” Lucsly asked, his stoicism failing him for once.

  “Correct. They have already begun spreading into the neighboring biomes.”

  “This is a diversion,” Noi realized. Dulmur wondered how the TIA could have known in advance how to stage a diversion at the very moment of their arrival.

  “This must be our priority,” the Warden instructed. “The safety of the specimens is paramount.”

  “Then send us to deal with the intruders,” Noi urged. “My actions brought them here. Let me take responsibility for stopping them.”

  “If it will keep you out of our way, very well,” came the Warden’s distracted thoughts. “Accompany them,” it went on, somehow mentally indicating two of its entourage. The rest of the group teleported away.

  A moment later, the scene shifted around Dulmur as he and the others were teleported to the obelisk site. The two Collectors veered off to engage two of the TIA battleships, which opened fire on them. The third battleship fired at the hover platform, making Dulmur’s heart leap into his throat, but the platform must have had shields, for the blasts were deflected safely away. In another moment, the platform had settled down behind the obelisk, which even the TIA was unwilling to risk hitting.

  But a trio of TIA bruisers was on the ground already, closing on the obelisk. Beside Dulmur, Noi was carefully securing her long braid into a compact knot. “I’ll handle the ground team,” she said. She produced a small device from somewhere—Dulmur was beginning to suspect her uniform contained either extradimensional pockets or a minireplicator—and handed it to Lucsly once she had adjusted its setting. “Get this onto the obelisk and activate it,” she said, indicating the correct icon. “It’ll phase-shift it randomly, keep them from getting a lock.”

  “We’re not fighters,” Lucsly reminded her. Dulmur would have said the same, but he was still dealing with shock from having a battleship shoot at him. Which pretty effectively made the point for him, come to that.

  “You shouldn’t have to be.” She squeezed both men’s shoulders, then leapt into the fray.

  Dulmur could not adequately describe or characterize what happened next. He could tell that Noi was engaging the TIA troops to keep them from the obelisk, first with the TIA sidearm she’d acquired back in 3051, then with some kind of closer combat, but the details went by too fast, and were simply too strange, for him to make sense of them. Noi and the other combatants moved at varying speeds, jumped from one place to another, and at times were literally in two places at once, if not more.

  “Dulmur!” He realized that Lucsly had been guiding him forward from the cover of one low shrub to the next, inching them toward the obelisk. “Focus on the task,” the gray-haired agent said.

  It was what he needed to hear, the mantra that had kept him sane and functional despite all the paracausal insanity he witnessed in his job. He’d long since internalized it when it came to investigating complicated and counterintuitive anomalies, but he’d been in combat only a few times before, and it was hard to be blasé about seeing a colleague—a friend?—risking her life on his behalf. Not to mention the voice in the back of his head that was screaming because the Borg were back and they were running around loose somewhere not very far from here. . . .

  But Lucsly was right: There was a job to be done, and that was where his attention was required. So he concentrated on getting to the obelisk, hopefully without attracting the interest of anyone or anything with predatory designs.

  Luckily, they were DTI agents, the epitomes of the nondescript. Surrounded by superhuman fighters and hyperadvanced aliens and transcendent technologies and exotic landscapes and extinct monsters, two middle-aged baseline humans in conservative gray suits were by far the least interesting thi
ngs to look at in the entire preserve. And so they were able to work their way up to the base of the obelisk unnoticed, allowing Lucsly to attach the device and hit the activation key. Dulmur grinned as the obelisk shimmered out of phase, safe from the TIA.

  And then stiffened when he realized its abrupt invisibility and intangibility left the two of them completely exposed in what was now the center of attention.

  But then Noi was there in front of them, breathing hard but standing firm, her braid knotted less tightly but still holding. Two of her opponents were down, and the third, a Hirogen of all things, was limping. This is the woman I’ve been arguing with all these years? Dulmur thought. If he’d seen this side of her before, he never would have dared.

  “It’s over!” Noi called. “The Collectors will never let you have their technology, and neither will we! So you might as well just go home!”

  “That’s not going to be so easy.” Director Daniels had materialized several meters away, along with a woman who was on her knees before him, arms bound, with his phaser aimed at her head. Dulmur realized it was the alternate Jena Noi, the one who’d betrayed her director to help them escape. He hadn’t recognized her at first, since she’d been stripped of her uniform, instead wearing a stark brown jumpsuit no doubt devoid of any inbuilt weapons or defenses. “You see, we only managed to get this far uptime by using the quantum resonance between the two of you to piggyback on the artifact’s travel curve. You know our drive doesn’t have the power to jump back twenty-one million years. Our only way back is with one of these obelisks.”

  “I’m sure the Collectors will be happy to send you back.”

  “If they don’t decide to throw you in their zoo,” Dulmur got up the nerve to add. “We’re still debating that one with them.”

  “Well, then, I assume they wouldn’t want any harm to come to this precious specimen,” Daniels replied, sneering as he jammed his phaser against the other Noi’s temple. “And neither would you. So I suggest you hand over the obelisk.”