Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock

by Christopher L. Bennet

  Dor gave an unamused laugh. “Detect? Thing opened up practically in front of us. Before we could veer away, we were caught in its gravity well. Damn near tore my ship apart.” The hairless, blue-skinned captain wore a jumpsuit bearing the Regulan flag, a stylized representation of the unique shape of the system’s star, a flattened blue oval brighter at the poles than the equator.

  “Mm-hmm. And what was the exact time of the event?”

  Dor glared. “Why does it matter?”

  “Just getting the facts, sir.”

  “I don’t know, four-three-oh-two-oh point, something. Check the logs if you have to. I had more important things to worry about.”

  Lucsly made a mental note of the captain’s defensiveness. “So your attention was on the anomaly.”

  “My attention was on keeping my ship together. I didn’t know what had grabbed us, I just knew I needed to get out of it. We’re not built for that kind of stress.”

  Lucsly nodded. One of the universe’s best defenses against accidental temporal alteration was that most natural time warps involved intense gravity fields and energies. In most cases, only a ship with an active warp drive, its engines already generating the necessary exotic particles to avert a stress-energy tensor runaway, could survive passage at all, and even then, the added gravitic stresses and energy surges could overwhelm all but the most robust of starships—which was why most such displacement events happened to Starfleet and other military vessels. The Verity’s crew and passengers were lucky to be alive. They survived only because the Kerr loop had been so atypically large that the tidal stresses at its center had been reduced.

  “So what happened next?”

  03:21 UTC

  “Once things settled down, we sized up the damage,” said the Verity’s pilot. M’grash was a young Caitian female with a dark gray mane and gray-and-white striped fur. “Klega said he could get us to port under our own power, but not on schedule.”

  “Klega is the chief engineer?” Dulmur asked.

  “Yes.” She hesitated. “So the captain had me call ahead to Regulus Control, tell them we’d be late. And—and there was nothing. No answer. I tried other frequencies, but . . . nothing. In the whole system.” Her claws dug into the table of briefing room two, but her voice remained flat, almost numb. A native of the Caitian colony on the largest moon of Regulus VI, M’grash was taking the loss of her home system quite hard, but sheer fatigue had set in by now.

  “So I scanned ahead for Reg III, and it . . . it wasn’t there. None of the planets were where they were supposed to be. I widened the scan, and we found them, but they were in the wrong places in their orbits.”

  “And that’s when you figured out you’d traveled through time?” The pilot nodded. Dulmur reflected that such an anomaly would stand out in this system more than most. Regulus A had grown giant and bloated by swallowing the cast-off atmosphere of its dying companion, now a white dwarf. The ancient cataclysm had destroyed the system’s innermost planets, but several outer worlds had been warmed and rendered habitable. Those worlds had long orbital periods, ranging from 21.65 years for Regulus III to 46.8 for Reg VI, so a displacement of fifteen years and change would have put them well out of position.

  Dulmur went on gently. “So . . . you found the planets, and you saw . . .”

  A low rumble sounded in her throat. “Death. Ruin. Nothing left.”

  “I’m very sorry for your loss, ma’am.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What did Captain Dor do then?”

  “He told me to check the FNS bands.” A natural enough reaction for any UFP citizen, to tune in the Federation News Service for more information. “But they were dead too. I scanned the whole subspace spectrum, but there was nothing. Nothing close enough to make out.” She was quiet for several moments. “That’s when we knew it wasn’t just Regulus. The whole sector, more. For all we knew, the whole Federation was gone. We thought . . . maybe we’d come forward hundreds of years. Thousands.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “The captain . . . we had a passenger who was a physicist. He remembered that.”

  Dulmur checked his padd. “Doctor . . . Wataru Takizawa?”

  “Yes. The captain called him to the bridge. He helped us figure out what had happened.”

  “The navigation logs show that you made a series of short warp hops until you settled on a distance of just over three light-weeks from Regulus, a few AUs past the anomaly. Was that Takizawa’s idea?”

  M’grash closed her large gray eyes. “Yes. He scanned the planets . . . figured out whatever happened was less than a month ago. Had us look using lightspeed sensors, find the spot where we could meet the light and see what happened. Like it was happening in front of us, right then.”

  From an Einsteinian perspective, it was, Dulmur thought. Lucsly might have said it aloud. But it was the last thing the distraught pilot wanted to hear right now.

  She shook her head. “What we saw . . . what we learned after the rescue ship answered our distress call . . . we’d never even heard of these Borg.” Dulmur nodded. Jean-Luc Picard’s first contact with the Borg had taken place some five months, two weeks before the Verity was lost, and they had been a folk legend in the coreward Beta Quadrant for at least fifteen years before that; but it was a vast galaxy and not every contact or legend became common knowledge. “Borg” hadn’t become a household name until Wolf 359. “And now we come out and find they’d destroyed everything as far as we could see. We couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t understand how this could come out of nowhere.”

  “Why was it so important to find the exact moment and cause of the destruction?” Dulmur asked.

  05:47 UTC

  “Wouldn’t you want to know? To get any answers you could?” Doctor Wataru Takizawa shook his head. He was a big, burly man, far from the stereotype of a physicist. “There was no FNS, no other surviving planets or ships in comm range, no one we could ask for answers. I realized there was a way we could find out ourselves. We get so used to subspace radio and sensors that we forget there’s a simple way to look back in time, just by using light.”

  “Interesting choice of words,” Lucsly said. “Did the possibility of going back in time enter your mind?”

  “I didn’t think we could,” Takizawa said with a shrug.

  “You’d just come through a temporal displacement vortex.”

  “I didn’t know that. I thought it was just an intense gravity well. I assumed we’d been subjected to extreme time dilation.”

  “You’re an astrophysicist, Doctor,” Lucsly said. “You mean to tell me you don’t know what a Kerr loop is?”

  “Of course I know about Kerr singularities in theory. But they’re not my specialty. I have a passing familiarity with the equations, but that doesn’t mean I could recognize the actual sensor readings.”

  Lucsly studied the doctor. “So you had no thought of returning through the vortex, taking back the data you’d gathered, and warning people of the disaster.”

  Takizawa considered. “No thought? I wouldn’t say that. I’ve read H. G. Wells and sh’Lesinas, run the same time-fic holos as anyone. It’s a natural enough thing to fantasize about at a time like this. But I never thought we actually had a chance of doing it. I know there have been cases of time travel—why else would there be a department to investigate it? But it can’t be very common, can it?”

  Lucsly didn’t answer. One of the unacknowledged parts of the DTI’s job was to keep knowledge of temporal incidents from being any more widely disseminated than it had to be. The more rare and unlikely the public believed temporal displacement to be, the less chance there was of idiots trying to slingshot around their local suns to undo a bad relationship or win the Lissepian Lottery. Of course, normally they would just get their vaporized atoms scattered across decades, but you could never be too careful.

  “So why did the ship subsequently head back toward the anomaly before its engines failed?”

  “We di
dn’t. Captain Dor headed us back to Regulus to search for survivors.” Takizawa gave a sharp laugh. “Look, the ship barely made it through the anomaly the first time. Even if we had known there was a way back, we couldn’t have risked it in the shape we were in. And after the warp drive failed, there would’ve been no point in trying anyway.”

  “So there was no hope of repairing the engines?”

  06:11 UTC

  “None,” said Vorlis Klega, the Verity’s engineer. “They suffered irreversible damage as a result of the passage.”

  “Irreversible?” Dulmur echoed, examining the diminutive, gold-skinned Ithenite male.

  “Well, certainly within the time we—the time before Starfleet found us. The main plasma injectors were fused. We were going nowhere.”

  “But not until two hours, thirty-seven minutes after the passage, during which you made several successful warp jumps.”

  “Against my recommendation,” Klega said. “I could tell the injectors were on the edge. The captain risked it anyway, and that last jump blew them completely.”

  Dulmur frowned. “The plasma injectors are highly shielded, well inside the ship. That’s not the sort of damage you’d expect from gravitic turbulence or Hawking radiation.”

  “There were power surges. Some effect of the weird energy fields interacting with our EPS grid . . . ask Takizawa, or some other physicist. All I know is, the injector manifold needed a complete rebuild before we could go to warp again.” He pursed his lips in sympathy. “The passengers got pretty banged up too, in the passage. That poor girl, Teresa . . . something . . . might’ve died if you’d taken longer to find us.”

  “Teresa Garcia. Any idea why she took such severe injuries in the passage?”

  “She was wandering where she wasn’t supposed to be,” Klega said. “Down in my engine section, there are exposed structural members, hot conduits . . . someone who doesn’t belong there can get themselves in trouble.”

  “Forgive me, Mister Klega,” Dulmur said, “but you sound almost satisfied that Ms. Garcia was injured.”

  “Do I? I apologize,” he said with little sign of sincerity. “I get . . . very protective of my engines. Of course I’m glad she’s recovering.” His golden face grimaced. “Although with all the death we’ve come out in the middle of, what difference would one more really have made?”

  08:27 UTC

  “Yeah, that’s what happened,” Teresa Garcia said. She was a young woman with shoulder-length black hair and large, dark eyes, one of which was still partly swollen from her injuries, though the swelling was diminishing under the ministrations of the Everett’s head nurse. Those eyes remained downcast, rarely focusing on Lucsly or Dulmur.

  The two agents exchanged a look, then turned back to face the young graduate student in her sickbay bed. “Would you like to elaborate?” Dulmur asked. “What were you doing in the engine section?”

  Garcia was slow to answer. It was a challenge getting her to open up. “I was . . . curious. I’ve always been that way. Wanting to see what’s under every rock. It’s why I went into archaeology.”

  “Warp engines are an odd subject of interest for an archaeologist,” Lucsly observed.

  “On Earth or Vulcan, maybe,” she said, showing some animation for the first time. “But there have been warp-capable civilizations in the galaxy for over half a billion years. I . . .” Suddenly she became subdued again. “I wanted to learn more about modern warp systems for comparison.”

  “Was that going to be your field of study at the Regulus III Science Academy?” Dulmur asked.

  Garcia winced. “‘Was.’ I guess . . . I guess they wrote me off for dead fifteen years ago anyway. Now . . . it’s the other way around. Shows what they knew, huh?” She swallowed. “No, no, I hadn’t really settled on a specialization yet. I was just . . . curious.” Those great dark eyes darted around some more. “Look, can we do this later? I could really use my rest.”

  “Of course,” Dulmur said. Lucsly looked disapproving, as usual, since he hated to waste time. But Dulmur knew that if they wanted any more information from Garcia, they’d have to wait until she was ready to tell them.

  Dulmur led his partner into the office of Everett’s chief medical officer, T’Manis. “Well, Doctor?” he asked her. “Do her injuries fit the story we’re being told?”

  “As I told you, it is difficult to be conclusive,” the middle-aged Vulcan woman said. “Her injuries were rather hastily treated with a protoplaser and dermal regenerator, obscuring much of the evidence. Yet what evidence remains is difficult to reconcile with the witnesses’ accounts. The pattern of coup and contrecoup injuries is more consistent with a stationary body being struck by blunt instruments than by a moving body colliding with hard surfaces, though if there were failures in the artificial gravity system, the distinction could be blurred. And certain of the subdermal contusions and skeletal fractures are more consistent with being struck by fists than with the kind of mishap described. But the regeneration work performed aboard the Verity makes it difficult to be certain.”

  “Perhaps intentionally?” Lucsly asked. “To hide evidence that she was beaten?”

  “That determination is beyond my purview,” the doctor said.

  “We need her to tell us what really happened,” Lucsly said, heading back toward the ward.

  “When the time is right,” Dulmur said, his tone bringing his partner to a halt. “Let her be for now. We have other places to look.”

  Regulus Passenger Lines Transport Verity

  10:36 UTC

  “It’s all pretty banged up,” reported Everett’s chief engineer, Ian Purvis, as he surveyed the cluttered engine section of the Verity. “Though in this kludge, it’s hard to tell.” Klega’s assessment had been accurate, Dulmur thought; it was a mess of exposed conduits, coolant pipes, and drive components, many with jury-rigged connections. Quite a few of those connections had been blown apart, and many components were covered in carbon scoring. The lingering stench made Lucsly’s nose crinkle up.

  “The passage did a right number on this thing, that’s for sure,” Purvis went on, running a hand through his wavy black hair. “Considering the damage, it’s a wonder the warp drive held out as long as it did.”

  “So the plasma injectors could’ve been fused as a result of the passage?” Lucsly asked.

  “Well, there are signs of EPS discharges like Klega said. They could’ve contributed to the burnout. On top of all the other abuse these systems took.”

  “Lucsly, Dulmur.” The Everett’s science officer, Commander Heather Petersen, approached, holding up her tricorder—a conventional Starfleet science model, less specialized but more powerful than the agents’ temporal tricorders. Petersen was a specialist in temporal and wormhole phenomena, a wunderkind who had made her name as a Starfleet Academy graduate student during the Bajoran wormhole disruption event of Stardate 48992, and she had a better relationship with the DTI than most Starfleet officers. “We’ve got DNA traces from Garcia and most of the crew and passengers in here. Some blood too, not all of it Garcia’s. But a lot of them were injured, and some of the people who came back to help her would’ve been bleeding too.”

  “How many people does it take to deliver a medikit to one injured woman?” Dulmur mused.

  Purvis frowned at them. “Hang on, Dulmur, are you saying you think that poor girl was attacked? Why?”

  “Maybe for the same reason she was in the engine compartment,” Lucsly said. “Was her DNA found on the plasma injectors themselves?”

  Petersen shook her strawberry-blond head. “Inconclusive. Too much plasma damage.”

  “What, you think she sabotaged the engines?” Purvis asked. “Why?”

  “That’s for later,” Lucsly said. “Right now, the question is whether.”

  “Well, some of this could be the result of sabotage, but with this system taking so many blows . . .”

  “Timing is everything,” said Lucsly. “What damage had to come last?”

>   Purvis turned to his diagnostic padd and ran some analyses. Meanwhile, Petersen turned to the older agent. “Lucsly, I know some things don’t add up here, but sabotage? Assault? Why are you so sure there’s some deep dark secret here?”

  “Because things don’t add up,” he replied. “The events described in the witness accounts don’t fill the necessary time.”

  Petersen smiled. “Most people don’t have built-in quantum clocks like you, Lucsly.”

  The agent shook his head. “Even allowing for error, there just aren’t enough things happening in their accounts.”

  “Here we are,” Purvis put in. “The last damage would’ve been the EPS surges.”

  “Fits Klega’s account,” Dulmur said.

  “Except, hang on,” Purvis continued. “Mmm, no, the surges weren’t the critical damage. If I were the doc, I’d say they were postmortem, not the proximate cause of death, as it were. No, that was here.” He gestured to a point on his flow analysis. “A series of input malfunctions that, on top of the previous damage, fused the system. Could be a computer error, but the EPS surges wiped the logs so I can’t be sure.”

  “Wiped the logs,” Lucsly said.

  “How convenient,” Dulmur answered.

  U.S.S. Everett

  11:02 UTC

  “We have a pretty good idea now what happened, Ms. Garcia,” Dulmur said. “The crew tried to go back in time, didn’t they?” Garcia didn’t answer. Her dark eyes were fixed on the briefing room table, which still bore the scratches M’grash had left in it. “And you stopped them. Stopped them from doing something foolhardy, possibly suicidal, and potentially cataclysmic. So why won’t you tell me about it now?”

  Finally she met his eyes. “Don’t you think those people have been through enough? Whatever they did . . . I can’t blame them for it. Any of it,” she said more quietly, looking away again.

  “Maybe you’re right. Maybe if anything counts as extenuating circumstances, this does. But that’s not for you or me to decide, Teresa. The laws exist for a reason. You must know that, or you wouldn’t have done what you did.”