The Collectors

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Dulmur looked around. Where were their Collector escorts, anyway? They had incapacitated the TIA warships, it seemed, but now they were nowhere in sight. But from the noises he was hearing in the distance, it was possible they’d been called in to deal with the escaped “specimens,” leaving the time agents to fend for themselves.

  “And then what?” Lucsly called. “You have no idea how to operate the device. We only got it here by deactivating the mechanism that held it in the past. Now that it’s returned to its origin, none of us has any idea how to displace it through time again.”

  “You let us worry about that, Agent. You should be worrying about the contents of Supervisor Noi’s skull right about now. I know you’re not ruthless enough to sacrifice her.” Daniels tilted his head. “I’d count down from ten, but of course you can all keep perfect time.”

  The other Noi rolled her eyes. “Either save me or let him shoot me, so I don’t have to listen to this anymore.”

  “There’s no need for this, Director,” said Jena (as Dulmur decided to call her to keep them straight). “We’re all strangers in this time. None of us has the advantage.”

  “Holding at three,” Daniels said. “Last chance.”

  The only reply was a deafening roar. All eyes turned to the craggy outcropping nearby, where something was just cresting the lower side, sending a tumble of loose rocks down toward them. It was a massive creature, over four meters tall and greenish-gray, with an erect trunk on a tripedal base. Three tentacles were uncurling from its shoulders, reaching a good four meters each themselves. At the top was a thick, flexible neck supporting a head with wide-set eyes and a large, ravening mouth. It descended the slope toward them—and a second creature of the same species became visible over the hill, also heading their way!

  Daniels aimed his phaser and fired, but only the creature’s middle tentacle fell limp, and it lunged toward him with startling speed. The director broke and ran, leaving the bound Noi helpless. “Get to cover!” Jena said, then broke into an astonishingly fast run toward her other self—and toward the giant creatures bearing down on her.

  Lucsly led Dulmur to a smaller outcropping. Dulmur couldn’t bear to look back and see what was happening. But by the time they reached the rocks, both Nois had caught up with them. Jena was helping the brown-suited Noi out of her bonds. “Thanks,” the latter said.

  “I owed you,” Jena told her.

  “Damn straight you did.”

  “Have you ever seen creatures like that?” Lucsly asked both of her.

  They shook their heads. “Either before my time or after it,” Jena said.

  One of the creatures was heading their way now, and Dulmur was unsure how effective the rocks would be at providing cover. But before he could find out, a new noise came over the hill. A band of upright reptilian bipeds, the ones he’d seen hunting the large mollusk, charged into view. On seeing the tripedal giants, they gave off trilling howls and began hurling stones at them.

  The ensuing battle was like something out of a monster holonovel, but Jena and Noi urged the men to run for safety while both sets of predators were mutually occupied. The four (or technically three) time agents fled as swiftly as they could, though Dulmur had no doubt he and Lucsly were holding the women back.

  But they pulled up short when they heard a growing, continuous thundering and bellowing coming toward them. Trading wordless looks of understanding, they scaled the nearest outcropping just before a herd of humpbacked, duck-beaked hadrosaurs came racing past. This was something Dulmur had seen in holosuites, but now he could see what the reconstructions had gotten wrong.

  “Uh-oh,” Lucsly said.

  “What?”

  “They’re running from something.”

  Dulmur’s eyes widened. They weren’t coming from the same direction as the giant tripedal things.

  Then he heard the footsteps: fast, heavy, confident, yet with a clockwork regularity that sounded unnatural. Something massive was moving through the cloud of dust kicked up by the hadrosaurs. He caught glimpses of its massive jaws, its bulky body and tail. It was the T. rex, just as he’d feared.

  Except . . . where was the feathery mane? The top of its head was smooth, gleaming, almost black. Its back was bare too—no, there were some kind of protrusions along its spine, glinting dully through the dusty haze. Its flanks were pale, all its color leached away.

  One of its eyes became clearly visible through the dust, and it locked onto them. It shone with a vivid red glow from within, flecks of laser light forming a dotted trail through the clearing dust. Its claws snapped at them with a metallic sound.

  It was a Borg Tyrannosaurus rex.

  Dulmur’s brain almost shut down just from looking at it. But Jena fired her phaser, hitting its armored chest. It staggered, but it was too massive to be felled by one blow. She fired again, but a force field blocked it.

  It let out a deep, growling hiss, and Dulmur somehow knew it was trying to say “Resistance is futile.”

  But it was enough to break his trance. He ran like hell. He was aware that the others were close at his flanks. It wouldn’t have changed anything if they hadn’t been. He just ran. And he could hear the Borg dinosaur (the Borg dinosaur!) coming after him. Slowly, methodically, without the ravening intensity of the pure predator—but with the tireless fixation of the Borg. It would not slow until it had them.

  Since when did the Borg assimilate animals? some part of his mind cried, as if hoping to banish the horrifying reality by declaring it illogical. But it was a futile objection: Of course the Borg would adapt to use whatever resources were available in their environment, and their current environment was a nature preserve. Under the circumstances, an enormous apex predator would certainly qualify as biological distinctiveness worth adding—

  Dulmur’s foot struck a rock. He hit the ground hard, tumbled. The others had already passed him. Meters away, they stopped, looked back. Tried to move toward him but hesitated.

  He looked up. The assimilated carnosaur loomed over him. Its jaws were closed, but it bore a far more terrible weapon than its teeth now. An arm reached out. Assimilation tubules shot from it, snaking toward Dulmur’s head—

  And dangled uselessly in midair!

  He was saved by the T. rex’s tiny little arms!

  He felt the others pull him to his feet and drag him away. He realized he was laughing hysterically. “Hah! Not such a great idea after all, was it?”

  “Don’t stop running,” Lucsly barked, his stern voice as potent as ice water to the face. “Remember: Borg adapt.”

  Jena and Noi led them toward a steep hill, hoping the massive theropod would be unable to scale it. But the cyborg claws on its feet gave it firm purchase, and it came after them slowly but relentlessly.

  At the peak, they found a flickering force barrier with a different enclosure on the other side, this one a bronze-hued grassland grazed by six-legged creatures whose anatomy suggested they were distantly related to the tentacled giants from before. They seemed harmless enough, which was good, since the temporal agents had no choice but to cross the force barrier anyway and hope to find cover. Or help. What was keeping those damned Collectors?

  Someone else, it seemed, had had the same idea. Director Daniels came into view as they descended the shallow slope. He brandished his weapon, but after a moment, Dulmur realized it wasn’t pointed at them. “Is it following you?” he asked the Nois.

  “Yes,” said Jena.

  “With two phasers, we can take it,” he said.

  “It’s already adapted,” Noi told him.

  “The Borg stopped adapting nearly seven centuries before our time. Our technology can beat theirs.”

  “You don’t know the Borg,” Lucsly told him. “They’re just a history lesson to you. I warn you, don’t underestimate them.”

  Daniels scoffed. “It’s literally a dinosa
ur.”

  “A member of the most successful and enduring vertebrate order in Earth’s history. Remember, they never died out—they just became birds.”

  Dulmur heard another growl that he could swear had six syllables. He spun to see the cyborg sauropsid cresting the hill. The force barrier flickered to greater strength, leading Dulmur to hope the Collectors were beginning to regain control. But it adapted quickly, piercing the force barrier with minimal effort and stomping methodically down toward them.

  Daniels strode forward. “Come on, we can take it! Set to transphasic rotation and fire!”

  There was no time to argue. Jena joined him in firing at the beast. A few of their shots pierced its shielding, making it stagger. But that just made it tumble down toward them even faster. The time agents fell back, Daniels stumbling and landing on his rear, losing his phaser. He crab-walked back as the Borgosaurus regained its footing with eerie, mechanical grace. Jena kept firing, but its shields were adapting now. It was injured, slowing, but it still stomped toward Daniels with the combined relentlessness of both the Cretaceous Earth’s and the Anthropocene galaxy’s apex predators, arms extended toward the TIA director.

  Daniels laughed. “Hah! You can’t even reach me, you stupid beast!”

  Its jaw opened, descending toward Daniels. Its tongue shot forward, spawning assimilation tubules. Daniels made a small, choking gasp as they penetrated his shoulder. “No!” Noi cried.

  Jena did something to her phaser, and the dinosaurian drone fell to her assault—but it was only down, not out. It still moved, its shielding returning to protect it from her ongoing fire, and it tried to regain its footing. Daniels rolled over and scuttled away, but then he fell, panting.

  Noi crouched near him. “Director!”

  “Don’t get too close!” Dulmur warned. “He’ll be one of them soon!”

  “I can fight it,” Daniels gasped. “Got—own nanite defenses.”

  Lucsly’s voice was heavy, matter-of-fact. “You’ve seen how quickly they adapt.”

  The director met his eyes, growing solemn. “I know. I’m already losing.” His skin was starting to turn gray. “But I can hold it off.”

  He looked to Jena. “Give me your phaser.” She hesitated. “It’s okay, I’m still in control.”

  The two Nois traded a look. The TIA operative nodded, and the FTA agent handed her weapon to the shuddering Daniels. He looked up at her in gratitude. “Maybe you were right. This was supposed to be . . . about protecting lives. Maybe we forgot that.”

  He turned back to see the reptilian Borg beginning to regain its footing. “Run,” Daniels ordered the rest of them, though his eyes were locked on Jena’s. “Put it all right. However you can.”

  They ran as fast as they could. Eighteen seconds later, there was a searing burst of light, heat, and wind from behind them. When Dulmur turned back, he saw only a smoking crater.

  Jena stood beside him, stunned. “I will,” she said at length. “I’ll put it right.”

  Noi took her double’s hand in hers. “We will.”

  XII

  * * *

  c. 21,436,000 CE, next day

  Collector Preserve

  “We knew an incident like this was inevitable,” said Time Guardian Jheress. “Unfortunately, the Collectors were operating within the letter of this quadrant’s temporal regulations.”

  “I understand,” Lucsly said, the two temporal protectors bonding across 21.43 megayears over the perennial regulatory impediments to their vital work. Jheress was an androgynous humanoid (identifying as female) whose smooth head and diminutive, slender body were covered in a seal-gray integument with sinuous, cream-colored stripes and whorls that occasionally luminesced from within. Lucsly could not tell where skin ended and clothing began, if either term was applicable. According to her, the Collector Preserve had been a thorn in the Time Guardians’ side for the past century. But the prominence of its operators’ species in the coalition that governed this galactic quadrant (which could not be mapped onto any quadrant from his own time, for the galaxy was fluid over such a timescale) had stymied the Guardians’ efforts to halt the operation.

  But the recent incident had humbled the Collectors. The loss of numerous precious specimens and several of their own personnel had forced the Warden and its advisors to concede that the small-scale, local temporal disruptions their sampling methods created could indeed have significant lasting consequences. For all their conservatism, their high intelligence made them quick to adjust to the irrefutable, and so they had regretfully permitted the Time Guardians to oversee the shutdown of their operation and the restoration of the surviving specimens to their original times and places.

  “But what about me?” Supervisor Noi wondered, speaking to her alternate self and Dulmur as they watched the Time Guardians coordinate with the Collectors to round up the first of the specimens—the shaggy, sucker-mouthed bipeds and their prey beasts—for return to their home era. “Once everything’s put back, I won’t have a timeline to go back to. I’m an anomaly.”

  Jena put her hand on her duplicate’s shoulder, speaking tentatively. “We could merge. That way at least your memories would survive.”

  The supervisor met her eyes solemnly. “You wouldn’t want them. I’ve been in your mind—you’re actually at peace with yourself. I can’t take that from you.”

  Dulmur cleared his throat. “You know . . . we have counselors to help people adjust to being out of time.”

  The short-haired Noi laughed. “You think I could be happy in your primitive era?”

  Dulmur glared. “I just meant Jena’s agency must have people like that too. They could help you find a place in her timeline.”

  Noi shook her head. “Too close to home. It’d be too much of a reminder.”

  But then her gaze fell on the lissome forms of the Time Guardians, and a calculating smile formed on her lips. “On the other hand, I bet those guys are always looking for new talent. After all, they’ve got a lot more history to cover than we do.” She turned to Jheress. “How about it? You hiring?”

  The Guardian examined her briefly. “You would need extensive retraining and reorientation. We have no use for your primal aggression.”

  “Sounds good to me,” she said, her voice hard. “I’d just as soon have no more use for it either.”

  Catching the look on Jena’s face, Noi laughed. “What’s the matter, sister? Not comfortable having an evil twin running around? One with better toys than yours?”

  “If you were evil, I wouldn’t be here,” Jena said. “Still . . . let’s just say it’s a good thing there’ll be twenty-one million years or so between us. Should be a pretty good buffer.”

  Noi laughed. “Oh, I don’t know, sister. Something tells me we’ll meet again.” Her eyes roved across Lucsly and Dulmur with playful menace. “I might even drop in on you boys someday, if you’re not careful. So try not to screw up the timestream anymore, okay?”

  She strode away, beginning a lively conversation with Jheress. Dulmur stared at both Nois in turn, and then at Lucsly. “Damn,” he said. “I gotta say, it’ll be a relief to get back to the simpler problems of a DTI agent.”

  “Agreed,” Lucsly said. “The sooner we return to our proper worldline coordinates, the better. Subjectively speaking, of course.”

  “Of course.” Dulmur turned to gaze at the force barrier on one edge of this enclosure, and Lucsly knew what lay beyond it. “Still . . . it seems to me the Guardians owe us a favor. Maybe we could take a quick detour—”

  “No.”

  “We’ve already bent enough regulations—”

  “No.”

  “Come on, partner. Are you really telling me you aren’t tempted?”

  “I’m not tempted.”

  Late Maastrichtian Period, c. 66,018,180 BCE

  Future site of Bozeman, Montana


  “I knew you were tempted,” Dulmur said.

  “I was outvoted,” Lucsly replied, his arms crossed. But Dulmur could tell he was glad they were here. The two DTI agents and Jena Noi gazed around them in wonder as the returned dinosaurs spread out into their home environment. The landscape here was sparser, less hospitable than the Collectors’ preserve, with a disturbing whiff of sulfur in the warm, humid air, the signature of the volcanoes whose intense activity over the past millennia had softened up the biosphere for the deathblow of the impending asteroid impact in the Yucatán. The repopulated animals would have a harder time surviving here than they would 87 million years uptime—but here they were home. Even Dulmur felt it; despite the alienness of this environment, he could still sense in his bones that this was his home planet, the place where he belonged. He suspected the dinosaurs could feel it too.

  But home or not, he was farther from the year of his birth than he had ever been or probably ever would be again. He was living every Terran child’s dream, watching live dinosaurs in their natural habitat—a landscape close to the one he knew, yet with the differences made all the more alien by contrast. He looked up at the gibbous Moon that stood in the midafternoon sky, subtly larger and smoother-faced than the Moon he knew. A small flock of broad-winged birds with stout bodies and toothy beaks flew past it overhead, startled from their treetop perches by the thundering of the Triceratops herd. They and their kin would be the ones to keep the dinosaurs’ heritage alive into Dulmur’s era and hopefully far beyond.

  He heard a faint rustle from a nearby stand of trees. Glancing down, he spotted a small head peeking out of hiding, some kind of early mammal or marsupial, a scavenger most likely. With the return of the local T. rex population, its life would probably get a lot more difficult now. But the consolation was that, in the fullness of time, its descendants would inherit this world. And eventually, not far from this very spot, one of those descendants would launch Earth’s first warp-driven ship into space and take his people to the stars.