And then a bunch of Starfleet officers would go back in time, become participants in that first launch, and create reams of paperwork for a particular pair of DTI agents. But right now, that seemed like a minor detail.
“You know, partner,” Dulmur said, “you were right. Maybe the Federation has gotten too complacent, too resistant to change—but so have I. I’ve been in a comfortable rut, not wanting to move forward. But that’s kept me from . . . evolving. From exploring my full potential, seeing what else might be there. And maybe I’m blocking the way of the next agent coming up behind me. So I’m taking that assistant directorship.”
Jena Noi beamed. “Congratulations, Dulmur! You deserve it.” She hugged him and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“Great,” he said. “I finally get you to kiss me and I won’t even remember it. No way you’ll let us keep any of these memories.”
Jena glanced thoughtfully toward Lucsly. A butterfly had landed on his shoulder and he was standing stock-still, taking great care not to interfere with it in any way. “You know, I think I’ll have to bend the rules this time,” she said. “Something I did to tamper with your worldlines caused disaster for my history.”
Lucsly spoke quietly. “It was probably to do with the obelisk. Just as you hypothesized.”
“Probably. But time works in complicated ways. I don’t think I should take any chances.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Dulmur said. “What did DTI records say about this little accident? Are we supposed to believe you didn’t know we’d be taken with you? Nobody wrote that down?”
She shrugged. “You know how it is. Records get corrupted or lost. Especially when they’re as classified as DTI files, or as prone to bureaucratic screwups. It’s like archaeology just trying to dig through all the surviving records and identify the important stuff.
“So I can’t really be sure what effect all this will have on your personal histories. I’ll just have to keep trusting you to make sure the proper flow of time stays safe. And after what you’ve seen, I don’t think I have to worry about that.”
The butterfly flew away unharmed, and Lucsly breathed again. “We’ll do our job,” he assured her.
“I know you will. And maybe I’ll be more tolerant of how you do it from now on.” She smirked. “Lately I’ve gotten to experience what it feels like to be on the downtime side, and it’s not much fun.”
“You said it, sister,” Dulmur said.
Then he looked at Lucsly. “You okay with that, partner? Remembering all this?”
Lucsly gazed out at the receding dinosaurs, listening to their grunts and clacks. There were only a few decades left before the Earth was transformed forever, but it was time enough for these dinosaurs to live out their natural spans where they belonged. “Some things are worth remembering.”
Epilogue
* * *
May 5, 2384 (a Saturday)
DTI Headquarters, Greenwich
“For once, your timing is awful,” Teresa Garcia said to Lucsly and Dulmur, though she was grinning ear to ear. She, Ranjea, and Andos stood in the DTI infirmary, where Doctor Sullivan had just given the two returned special agents a clean bill of health. “You couldn’t have come back before I wrote my report on your disappearance, instead of just after?”
“It wasn’t up to us,” Dulmur told her, though there was apology in his gaze nonetheless. Apparently she wasn’t masking her relief as well as she thought.
“So you gained no significant information about the future?” Andos probed.
“Agent Noi redirected us to a containment facility at her own headquarters,” Lucsly replied in a perfect deadpan. “Naturally their protocols for such situations are well-developed. We were returned at the earliest opportunity with no new information about the FTA’s era.”
The towering director peered at him skeptically. “Yet several of Agent Dulmur’s organs read as brand-new,” she said. “Genetically his, yet appearing newly grown or created.”
“Agent Dulmur was apparently injured by an energy discharge as a consequence of the obelisk’s operation. His injuries were repaired before our return.”
Dulmur shrugged. “But neither of us saw anything about how it was done. I, for one, was in no condition to observe.”
The director examined them both, and Garcia couldn’t blame her. Their account seemed suspiciously vague and carefully worded even to Garcia, and she didn’t have a Rhaandarite’s heightened people-reading skills. Yet after a moment, Andos decided not to press the issue. “Very well,” she said. “Best not to be too curious about the future. Agent Noi’s people would not have returned you if they felt it posed a threat to the timeline; therefore, I accept their judgment. Welcome back, both of you.” She smiled at Dulmur. “And congratulations on your impending promotion, Agent. It is well-earned.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“It’s going to be weird not seeing you two working together anymore,” Garcia said. “You’re an institution around here.”
“Change happens,” Lucsly said. “We’re here to protect the future, not resist it.”
Ranjea gave him a quizzical look. “That’s an unusual perspective to hear from you, Gariff. Your journey through time may have been subjectively brief, but it seems to have been broadening nonetheless.”
“You wish,” Lucsly told him. “I intend to have a long talk with both of you about the mess you made of the Vault.”
Garcia winced and grinned at the same time, perversely comforted that some things would never change.
Day 266, 3051
Federation Temporal Agency Headquarters, London Metrocomplex
“What went wrong?” Assistant Director Timot Danlen asked, surveying the containment bay where Jena Noi had arrived by herself. “Where’s the obelisk? Where are the DTI agents?”
“Things didn’t go quite as planned,” Noi told him, masking her relief at seeing him alive, well, and himself again. “I triggered the obelisk to bring us forward, just like their records said, but I wasn’t able to divert it here.”
“But Garcia’s report said their trace showed—”
“Maybe it showed my attempt to create the link here, but the obelisk’s sheer power overrode it. We were carried forward to the obelisk’s origin point, twenty-one million years from now. Once I explained the situation, they sent us back to our respective times.”
“But did you determine the purpose of the obelisk? The threat level?”
“It’s a paleontological research tool—one of many seeded throughout the larger timestream. But I’d say the threat is minimal. The builders agreed to institute further safeguards once this incident came to their attention.”
The nondescript man peered at her. “So that’s it? Nothing more to report?”
“You know the drill, Timot. Better if I don’t say too much about the future. Even a future that distant.”
“But the DTI agents didn’t see or learn anything that could pose a threat?”
Noi smiled at him. “What threat could two DTI men pose? They may not have had our technology, but they could teach us a thing or two about discretion.”
Danlen studied her a moment longer, then nodded, a friendly smile softening his features. “Okay, Jena. I’ll expect your report in my queue by tonight.” He clapped her on the shoulder. “But for now, get some rest. You’ve had a long day.”
“Thanks, Timot.” Longer than you could imagine.
She beamed home for a long, hot bath, making sure she was alone before she lowered her mental guard. What threat could they pose indeed? she wondered. She’d assumed that removing the obelisk had somehow disrupted the history that had created the temporal defense grid. But the obelisk was far uptime, and her history had nonetheless been restored. That left Lucsly and Dulmur as the only remaining candidates for the nexus point.
But how could it be them?
The grid wouldn’t exist until decades after their worldlines ended. What role could they have played—
“Stop,” she told herself in a sharp whisper. There was a reason she hadn’t told Danlen about the timeline alteration, why she could never tell anyone. The origins of the grid had to remain a mystery, for the sake of everyone’s future. And she knew as well as anyone that causality was a complex thing, that removing one seemingly minor domino could cause a whole chain of events to unfold differently. Removing Lucsly and Dulmur from history could have simply been the equivalent of stepping on a butterfly.
She laughed. “Lucsly would make a terrible butterfly,” she muttered. Still, she was perversely glad to think that his quiet, methodical, humorless work on behalf of preserving history, alongside his stalwart partner, might really have made a difference after all.
Even if nobody would ever know it.
Acknowledgments
* * *
Thanks to Margaret Clark for giving me one more opportunity to revisit the Department of Temporal Investigations, and thanks to cousins Barb and Mark for giving me a place to stay while finishing up this novella.
Agents Lucsly (James W. Jansen) and Dulmur (Jack Blessing) were introduced in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: “Trials and Tribble-ations,” teleplay by Ronald D. Moore & René Echevarria, story by Ira Steven Behr, Hans Beimler, and Robert Hewitt Wolfe. The temporal agent known as Daniels (Matt Winston) was introduced in Star Trek: Enterprise: “Cold Front,” by Stephen Beck and Tim Finch. Clare Raymond (Gracie Harrison) debuted in Star Trek: The Next Generation: “The Neutral Zone,” teleplay by Maurice Hurley, story by Deborah McIntyre and Mona Clee. The Borg were created by Hurley, debuting in The Next Generation: “Q Who.” The M-113 salt vampires appeared in the original series episode “The Man Trap,” written by George Clayton Johnson. Tandar Prime debuted in Enterprise: “Detained,” teleplay by Mike Sussman and Phyllis Strong, story by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. The Na’kuhl first appeared in Enterprise: “Zero Hour,” written by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. The name “Aegis” was coined by Howard Weinstein in DC Comics’ Star Trek Volume 2, Issue 50 (“The Peacekeeper, Part Two”), as the name for the employers of Gary Seven from Star Trek: “Assignment: Earth,” teleplay by Art Wallace, story by Gene Roddenberry and Art Wallace. The Certoss Ajahlan were created by Dayton Ward for the novel Star Trek: From History’s Shadow; I’m returning the favor for his incorporation of ideas from DTI: Forgotten History into that book. I’ve also acknowledged what Kirsten Beyer established about the Eridian Vault’s inventory in Star Trek: Voyager—The Eternal Tide.
Thanks to “Lsana” and “Idran” on the Tor.com blogs for insights on information storage and the limits of transporter technology. Subspace transporters capable of interstellar beaming were established as an existing twenty-fourth-century technology in The Next Generation: “Bloodlines,” written by Nicholas Sagan.
I drew on various sources for information about Tyrannosaurus rex and the late Cretaceous, including the article “Did T. Rex Have Feathers Too?” by J. Sherwood, posted in 2012 on Environmentalgraffiti.com; the Unearthing T. rex website at unearthingtrex.com; the article “What Is Enantiornis?” posted April 1, 2012, on dinogoss.blogspot.com; and the Walking with Dinosaurs television series from Impossible Pictures (whose subsequent series Prehistoric Park inspired aspects of this novella’s storyline). My dating of the scene on prehistoric Earth is a compromise between the novel Star Trek: First Frontier by Diane Carey and Doctor James I. Kirkland, which gave a conjectural date of 64,018,143 BCE for the Chicxulub impact event, and 2013 research by the Berkeley Geochronology Center suggesting a date of 66,038,000 plus or minus 11,000 years BCE (see Paul R. Renne et al., “Time Scales of Critical Events Around the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary,” Science 8 February 2013: Vol. 339, no. 6120, pp. 684–687).
About the Author
* * *
Christopher L. Bennett is a lifelong resident of Cincinnati, Ohio, with bachelor’s degrees in physics and history from the University of Cincinnati. He has written such critically acclaimed Star Trek novels as Ex Machina and The Buried Age; the Star Trek: Titan novels Orion’s Hounds and Over a Torrent Sea; the two Department of Temporal Investigations novels Watching the Clock and Forgotten History; and the Enterprise—Rise of the Federation series, so far including A Choice of Futures and Tower of Babel. His shorter works include stories in the anniversary anthologies Constellations, The Sky’s the Limit, Prophecy and Change, and Distant Shores. Beyond Star Trek, he has penned the novels X-Men: Watchers on the Walls and Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder. His original work includes the hard-science fiction superhero novel Only Superhuman, as well as several novelettes in Analog and other science fiction magazines. More information and annotations can be found at home.fuse.net/ChristopherLBennett, and the author’s blog can be found at christopherlbennett.wordpress.com.
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ISBN 978-1-4767-8259-1
The Collectors Page 12
