Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock

by Christopher L. Bennet

  He was current on his paperwork, so that left him approximately one hour to devote to the antique Vulcan chronometer that was his latest project. It was a replica of a timepiece dating from circa eleven hundred standard years (fifteen hundred Vulcan years) before Surak, yet was remarkably intricate in its clockwork representations of the cycles of the Vulcan calendar. The intricacies and idiosyncrasies of Vulcan timekeeping had initially frustrated Lucsly. Though the planet’s orbital radius of 0.56 AU around 40 Eridani A gave it a period of 177.6 standard days, Vulcans had long defined their “year,” or r’tas, as exactly 1.5 times that, or 266.4 standard days (252 Vulcan rotations or t’ved), corresponding to the period of an orbital resonance between Vulcan and its sister world T’Khut. Vulcan’s low axial tilt gave it little in the way of solar seasons, but the resonance with T’Khut had a significant effect on the tides of Vulcan’s sparse seas, which in turn had an effect on the growing cycle in the arable lands proximate to those seas. Thus, both ancient and modern Vulcans had seen that cycle as a more useful basis for their calendar than the orbital period. Though Lucsly could see the logic of it, the idea of a calendrical cycle so diametrically out of synch with a planet’s orbital cycle, its solstices and equinoxes, had always raised his hackles. That was why he had sought the challenge of reconstructing this intricate, ancient mechanical timepiece. Seeing the Vulcan chronological cycles distilled to the pure mathematical essence of interlocking gears, wheels, and levers, learning how to assemble those gears and re-create the cycles with his own hands, had given Lucsly a new appreciation for their unique symmetries. It reassured him that, even in the seeming chaos of nature, there were always comforting regularities to be found.

  However, such regularities could be elusive. At 7:51, only fourteen minutes into his session with the Vulcan chronometer, his padd signaled him with a text message ordering him to report to the branch office as soon as possible. The code was for a potential emergency situation. Lucsly sighed, affording precious seconds for a lingering caress of the delicate gears he had hoped to remain engrossed in for another forty-six minutes. But he quickly set that aside, donned his jacket, picked up his padd, and signaled the office’s transporter station, requesting immediate beamover.

  It took forty-two seconds before he felt the tingling begin. Lucsly made a note to chastise the transporter operator for such inefficiency. But five seconds later, at 7:52:53, Gariff Lucsly’s apartment was empty.

  DTI Branch Office

  San Francisco

  16:14 UTC

  Junior Agent Dulmur grinned as he rushed toward Assistant Director Andos’s office in response to her summons. His first case at last! It had taken long enough; he’d needed to deal with relocating, getting himself and Megumi settled in a new place on Earth, and going through all the Department’s background checks and psychological evaluations before he’d even gotten to begin the three months of training. And in the weeks since then, he’d been assigned mostly to cleaning up the lingering paperwork on old cases, since new temporal events didn’t crop up on a daily basis.

  Now, finally, he had a chance to get some action and prove himself, and he was excited at the prospect. Until he entered Andos’s office and saw who else was there already. “You’re late,” Special Agent Lucsly told him.

  “Sorry,” Dulmur replied, a bit breathless. “I had to—”

  “Explaining will just waste more time.”

  Dulmur glared for a moment, then turned to the assistant director, craning his neck up to meet her eyes. Laarin Andos was a full-grown Rhaandarite, with about one centimeter of height for each of her two hundred forty-four years. Though somewhat androgynous to human eyes, she was marked as female by the silver-black spot on her high, bulging forehead, resembling an Indian bindi mark. “You wanted to see me, ma’am?” Dulmur asked.

  “Yes,” Andos replied in a deep alto voice. “I’m assigning you and Agent Lucsly to investigate a serious incident at the Warlock Station facility. Are you familiar with it?”

  Lucsly? That sourpuss? Dulmur had been hoping for a partner with an actual sense of humor. But his superior had asked him a direct question, so he set that aside for now. “Yes, ma’am. The monitoring facility for the Type 3 singularity in Sector 006.” The so-called “Black Star” of Sector 006 was infamous as the known or suspected source of multiple spacetime displacement events over the past few centuries. In the early twenty-first century, it had passed close enough to Sol system to swallow up the Voyager 6 space probe, which had come back much later as the V’Ger entity that almost destroyed the Earth. In 2267 it had sent James Kirk’s infamous Enterprise on its first major journey through time, to the Earth of 1969. Not quite a conventional black hole, the singularity generated chroniton and other exotic particle fields that helped cushion the stress-energy effects of passage through its Cauchy horizon, increasing the likelihood of surviving a spacetime displacement even without warp drive and shielding. Its current location and trajectory placed it near the major space lanes connecting Andor to Sol and Alpha Centauri, and though “near” in interstellar terms was generally nothing to worry about, the Black Star’s exotic properties and past history made it an unpredictable hazard. It was thus orbited by Warlock Station, a monitoring/research facility jointly administered by Starfleet and the DTI.

  “Earlier today,” Andos explained, “on Stardate 42691.62, the personnel of Warlock Station detected a chroniton surge at a position approximately thirty-two degrees ahead of them in their orbit.”

  “Where they would be in six-point-seven hours,” Lucsly added. Dulmur rolled his eyes; the man was a walking cuckoo clock.

  “Upon investigating,” Andos went on, “they discovered something disturbing: the wreckage of a station identical to their own, but slightly out of dimensional phase. Scans revealed humanoid remains that matched the DNA of the station’s own personnel. It was a vision of their own death, less than seven hours in their future.

  “The station’s crew remained to analyze the findings as long as they could, but as the critical moment approached, the station’s commander, Rif jav Balkar, ordered an evacuation as a precaution. Balkar himself remained behind until the last possible moment, then left in the final shuttlepod.”

  Andos closed her eyes. “At the critical moment, the station continued through its orbit unharmed. But an energy vortex materialized at the location of Commander Balkar’s shuttlepod and engulfed it. The vortex soon dissipated, and the debris of the wrecked station vanished. In its place, at the location where Balkar’s pod had been destroyed, they found particulate debris consistent with the explosion of just such a shuttlepod—if it had occurred nearly seven hours before the vortex engulfed Balkar.”

  “Wow.” Dulmur tried to make sense of it, drawing on the physics lectures that were still fresh in his head. “So the wrecked station represented an alternative timeline that was averted . . . so the twinned timelines converged and the particles of the alternate station quantum-tunneled to merge with the originals?”

  “Not exactly,” Lucsly said. “You see—”

  “But close enough,” Andos said.

  “Pardon me, ma’am, but is there really much to investigate?” Dulmur asked. “It’s a shame what happened to Balkar and all, but we know the Black Star has all sorts of weird temporal effects going on around it.”

  “That was the first assumption of the station staff,” Lucsly told him. “But that’s because they didn’t know about a very similar incident aboard a Starfleet vessel near the Endicor system on Stardate 42679.2.” The agent watched Dulmur expectantly.

  “Uhh, four and . . . a half days earlier,” the junior agent interpreted.

  Lucsly didn’t look satisfied with the answer, but continued nonetheless. “The U.S.S. Enterprise encountered a duplicate of one of its own shuttlepods, carrying a duplicate of its captain, Jean-Luc Picard. Its log showed the destruction of the Enterprise approximately six-point-seven hours after the shuttle’s detection. As that time neared, the ship was nearly engulfed
in an identical energy vortex, and Captain Picard—both of him—was struck by some kind of energy discharge that effortlessly penetrated the shields and hull. The uptime copy of Picard, though his mental processes were phase-disrupted by the event, felt a compulsion to leave the ship in a shuttlepod and repeat the cycle. Instead, the downtime Picard prevented his departure and tried the opposite of his strategy, aiming the ship down the throat of the vortex rather than fighting its pull. The ship came out unscathed and the alternate Picard and shuttlepod underwent quantum convergence.”

  “You mean they disappeared,” Dulmur said.

  “I mean what I said. ‘Disappeared’ isn’t a useful description.”

  Dulmur checked his padd. “Endicor . . . that’s nowhere near Sector 006. So you don’t think it’s connected to the Black Star.”

  “At this point, we don’t know the origin of these anomalies,” Andos said. “Nor can we rule out further incidents. The Enterprise is too far away for us to interview its personnel directly, but our nearest branch office has debriefed their command staff via subspace. You and Lucsly will do the same in person at Warlock Station. Hopefully between you, you’ll be able to find some common thread to help us predict and block these vortices.”

  Dulmur’s excitement was returning. His first case was shaping up to be a big one. But the selection of his partner put a damper on his enthusiasm. When Andos dismissed them, Lucsly left promptly, but Dulmur lingered behind. “Why Lucsly, ma’am?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The guy hasn’t approved of a single thing I’ve said or done since we met. If I’m being evaluated for my performance here, I’m not sure you’re giving me a fair chance.”

  Andos contemplated him. “Special Agent Lucsly’s approach to interpersonal interaction is atypical for your species, which can lead to misunderstandings.” He tried not to take Andos’s words as condescension. It was a neurological fact that Rhaandarites’ brains had more highly developed areas for processing social and emotional dynamics, so that the interpersonal problems that stymied humans seemed elementary and simple to a Rhaandarite. “For your benefit, I’ll clarify that the fact that he agreed to partner with you at all is an indication that he’s willing to give you a fair chance. To put it in human terms, Lucsly is not easy to get to know. But he prides himself on his precision, and would never willingly distort the facts. You will be assessed solely on your performance, nothing else.”

  “Okay, but . . . why pair me with him? I was hoping to work with Agent Sonaj.”

  “I felt you would benefit more from association with Lucsly. He is our most successful human agent, and thus might be better suited to guide you than a Vulcan would be.”

  “Species profiling? Is that what this is about?”

  Andos’s gaze softened fractionally. “Of course we always strive to be fair, but when different species genuinely do have different skills and psychologies, it would be unfair to deny it. There are few Vulcan comedians. Few two-armed humanoids can play a Terellian keyboard. And there are few successful human DTI agents. I don’t say that to offend or exclude you, Agent Dulmur. I have every wish for your success. Which is why I’m giving you every possible advantage. Lucsly is not just our finest human agent, but one of our finest agents overall. I ask you to give him the same fair chance he will give you.”

  Dulmur sighed. “Yes, ma’am.” Just don’t expect me to have any fun with it.

  Shuttlecraft Deutsch

  Traversing Sector 006

  21:16 UTC

  “I’ve been thinking,” Dulmur said. He paused to give Lucsly a chance to respond, but got only silence, as usual. Barely three hours into the trip, it was already one of the most boring journeys he’d ever been on. With an inward shrug, he continued. “Both vortex events involved a time loop. Like what happened in the Manheim Event.” Again, Lucsly just looked at him, waiting for him to continue. “And one of them happened to the Enterprise. That was the same ship that was at the heart of the Manheim Event, the one that closed the rift inside Vandor IV.”

  “Mm-hm,” Lucsly granted.

  Progress! “So do you think these vortices could be connected to Manheim’s work at Vandor?”

  “We checked that already,” Lucsly told him. “Manheim isn’t

  running any active experiments, and the rift is still closed.”

  “Still, there’s gotta be a connection.”

  “There have been temporal causality loops before,” Lucsly said. “The Tholian incident of late November 2152. The Tigellan chronic hysteresis of Stardate 8009. The Kyushu incident of Stardate 40402.”

  “Don’t you think it’s too great a coincidence? The Enterprise involved in two time loops less than eight months apart?”

  Lucsly frowned. “There’s a hypothesis that being involved in a temporal displacement alters an individual’s quantum probability matrix in a way that increases the probability of their involvement in subsequent temporal events.”

  Dulmur stared. “So go through time once and that attracts other temporal anomalies to you?”

  The older agent shrugged. “It would explain a lot about James Kirk’s career. Now another Enterprise may be following suit.”

  Dulmur shook his head. “No, I still say there’s a connection. I read Picard’s log of the vortex event—his Betazoid counselor sensed a kind of consciousness inside the vortex. Manheim also said he sensed some kind of extra-dimensional consciousness after the accident on Vandor.”

  “A vague impression from a man whose mental state was highly unreliable.”

  “I’m telling you, Lucsly, my gut tells me it all adds up to something!”

  Lucsly’s eyes fixed on him. “You need to understand something. Everything we deal with is counterintuitive. So don’t trust your intuition. Focus on the facts.”

  Dulmur sighed. “I just gave you a bunch of facts!”

  “Selected to fit your ‘gut’ feeling. They don’t add up to anything yet. Wait until we have more information.”

  Dulmur gave up and seethed to himself for a while.

  But half an hour or so later, once he’d calmed down, he realized that Lucsly had said “yet.” As in, his evidence might add up to something later. It wasn’t a glowing endorsement, but it was the biggest concession he’d gotten from Lucsly yet.

  And it annoyed him that he felt so proud of that.

  Warlock Station

  19 et’Khior, YS 9051 (A Sunday)

  19:59 UTC

  Warlock Station had only suffered one casualty in the incident, but the staff was devastated by the loss. Rif jav Balkar had been not only the head of the facility and a highly decorated Starfleet science officer, but practically an adoptive grandfather to the entire staff—save for Doctor Sagar bav Balkar, his chief subspace physicist and his wife, who was particularly devastated by the loss. Though Commander Balkar had argued as readily as any Tellarite, so the staff related, he had always done it with good humor and redoubtable wit. Being the butt of his latest clever insult had been a mark of pride to the staff. But Doctor Balkar was so broken up by her husband’s loss that she couldn’t even bring herself to say an unkind word about him.

  Despite having some of the most advanced temporal monitoring equipment in the Federation, the station staffers could provide little more insight into the nature of the vortex phenomenon than the Enterprise had. They confirmed that it was extradimensional in origin, but that very fact made it difficult to analyze in terms of this dimension’s physical laws. Beyond the appearance of time-looped debris or, in the Enterprise’s case, survivors, there was no prior indication of an imminent vortex event. And no one at Warlock could offer any theories for why the vortex had selected its targets. Picard’s logs had suggested that the entity inside the vortex had fixated on him as the “brain” of the starship, and the targeting of Commander Balkar supported that. But there was no way of knowing who else the vortices might target. Some of the staffers were attempting to devise a detection strategy based on the conjecture that proximity to
temporal anomalies might be the common factor.

  Still, Dulmur wasn’t convinced they were on the right track. Unfortunately, he had to question the grieving widow to pursue his hunch. “I’m very sorry to disturb you at a time like this, Doctor Balkar,” he said as gently as he could. “But could you tell me if your husband was familiar with Doctor Paul Manheim?” He caught Lucsly staring at him, but declined to acknowledge it.

  “Manheim?” the widow echoed after a moment.

  “Of course,” put in the station’s second-in-command (now head), Lieutenant Commander Mara Kadray, a Cygnian woman with catlike green eyes and violet skin and hair. “Everyone knows that name after what happened last year.”

  “But did Commander Balkar know him before that?” Dulmur asked. “Did he ever visit Manheim’s research facility in the Vandor system?”

  “No,” Doctor Balkar said after a moment. “No, we never met Doctor Manheim. We were distantly aware of his work. It sparked some minor controversy back . . . maybe fifteen, twenty years ago? But Rif afforded it little notice. It was hardly worth arguing with.” She looked away. “Or so we thought at the time. Last year’s events have forced a reassessment.”

  “Does this have anything to do with the vortex event?” Kadray asked impatiently, placing a protective hand on the widow’s shoulder.

  Lucsly gave Dulmur a look. Satisfied?

  Dulmur sighed. “Just trying to clarify something, ma’am.” He had to concede that the Manheim connection looked like a dead end.

  But somehow he couldn’t quite let go of the idea.

  20 et’Khior, YS 9051 (A Monday)

  07:06 UTC

  “We have a defense,” Mara Kadray told Lucsly the next morning. “At least it works in simulation. Comparing our scans and the Enterprise’s scans of the vortex phenomenon, we’ve confirmed that it has the properties of a fairly straightforward Tipler spacetime. The intense gravimetric distortion creates a frame-dragging effect that produces closed timelike geodesics.”