Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock

by Christopher L. Bennet

  Lucsly nodded. “I understand.” It was elementary temporal physics, dating back 391 years. Gravity warped spacetime, and if it dragged the axes in the right direction, then one of the spatial axes of the warped region could align with the temporal axis of the broader universe, so that movement back and forth through the space of the warp would translate to movement back and forth through time.

  “So it should be simple enough,” Kadray went on, “to generate an unpolarized chroniton field around the area where a vortex will appear, then induce a polarization opposing that of the vortex as it begins to form. It should cancel out the vortex and prevent its formation.” That made sense. Chronitons were exotic particles with extreme mass and spin, akin to quantum black holes, and they generated a microscopic frame-dragging effect of their own. A polarized field of chronitons, all spinning in alignment, could potentially generate a spacetime warp if certain other conditions were met. So it followed that they could cancel out an equivalent warp.

  “Excellent,” Lucsly said. “But it sounds like you’d have to have it in place before the vortex formed.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Can it be set up in less than six-point-seven hours?”

  “Not from scratch. It requires specialized equipment and expertise to operate. Chronitons are tricky to work with. We’d have to construct the apparatus here and get it to the site before the vortex formed.”

  “So we still need a way to predict where the next vortex will strike. Any luck there?”

  “No,” Kadray confessed. “We’ve alerted all the monitoring posts around known temporal anomalies, but there’s no way of knowing which of them might be the next target. With only two data points, there are too many possible subspace simultaneity relations to narrow down a timeframe or propagation rate.”

  “Then maybe you’re all looking in the wrong place,” came a new voice. Lucsly turned to see Dulmur in the doorway. The junior agent’s hair and suit looked rumpled, as though he’d been up all night and hadn’t bothered to make himself presentable. Lucsly made a mental note to put a demerit in his evaluation.

  “You’re only focusing on the physics,” Dulmur said. “But the Enterprise logs say there’s a consciousness at work here. Something or someone targeted Jean-Luc Picard and Rif jav Balkar. So what’s the common thread between the two of them?”

  “They were the commanders of their respective facilities,” Kadray said. “It targeted them as the ‘brains’ of the entities it attacked.”

  “That’s what the alternate Picard said,” the junior agent countered. “But we only have his word for that, and he wasn’t exactly thinking straight. What if he guessed wrong? What if he and Balkar were the intended targets?”

  “Why would an extradimensional entity target those two people?”

  “Maybe because it had contact with someone in this dimension who had a grudge against them.” He held up his padd. “I’ve been doing a little more digging into the logs of the Manheim Event.”

  Lucsly sighed. “Not this again.” On some level, he respected Dulmur’s bulldog tenacity. But the novice agent needed to learn how to focus it properly.

  “Not quite. I was looking for a connection to the experiment on Vandor IV. But I should’ve been looking at the people. Listen.” He worked his padd. “Captain Picard’s interview with Manheim’s wife Jenice. Starting two minutes in.”

  He hit the playback, and a female voice emerged. “Jean-Luc, he would never knowingly do anything to hurt anyone.”

  Then Picard’s voice, familiar to Lucsly from his captain’s logs pertaining to the Manheim event. “Yes, I believe that.”

  “But as he saw his goal getting closer, seeming possible, he became more and more obsessive. Maybe that clouded his judgment.” A pause of approximately seven seconds, the sound of a person rising from a seat. “This is not how I imagined seeing you again.”

  “Nor I you.”

  “You’ve done well. A great starship in the far reaches of the galaxy. It’s everything you’d hoped.”

  A diffident laugh, very atypical for Picard. “Not exactly. Nothing works just as you hope.”

  Dulmur shut off the playback. “You hear that? Picard wasn’t just the captain of the ship that answered the distress call. He was Jenice Manheim’s old flame! I did some digging—it seems they were pretty serious for a while, back in forty-two. What do you want to bet Manheim saw him as a rival?”

  Lucsly stared. “You’re saying he sent the vortex to kill Picard?”

  “Not consciously. The Enterprise counselor said the thing in the vortex seemed to be acting on instinct. Maybe whatever extradimensional life force Manheim contacted during the accident picked up on his subconscious resentments. And now it’s instinctively striking out at the people Manheim had a grudge against.”

  “But Commander Balkar never even met Manheim!” Kadray protested.

  “You don’t have to meet someone to be a professional rival.” Dulmur worked his padd again and showed them a new file. “Look here. ‘Unitarity Violations in a Nonlinear Spacetime and the Consequences for Alternative Gauge Symmetries.’ Seventeen years ago, Balkar wrote this paper debunking Manheim’s views on nonlinear time. It’s a pretty harsh critique.”

  Kadray skimmed the paper. “Harsh? More like devastating. Ouch! I’m surprised I don’t remember this paper.”

  “The guy wrote hundreds of papers,” Dulmur said. “To him, Manheim was probably just one more upstart theorist to get his kicks arguing with. But Manheim was a fringe theorist with little respectability and Balkar was already one of the authorities in the field. After this paper, Manheim couldn’t get grants for his research. He was practically laughed out of academia. It was a year later that he packed up and vanished for parts unknown. Manheim may have been insecure about Picard and his wife, but he must’ve positively hated Balkar.”

  “So does this help us?” Lucsly asked.

  “Hell, yes! We need to talk to Manheim, find out everyone he has a grudge against, and get them under protection right away.”

  “But if you’re wrong,” Lucsly said, “we could be wasting our effort in the wrong places.”

  “I don’t think I’m wrong. There was a co-author on that paper, a Doctor Yvette Michael. She was on a transport ship that disappeared in the Anchar Sector nine days ago. There was no distress call registered, no wreckage found, no way of pinpointing exactly where or how it happened. Just another ship swallowed up by the vastness of space. So nobody had any reason to connect it to the vortices.”

  Kadray had moved to her console. “We now know the subspace signature of the vortex events. The U.S.S. Aquaria was in the adjacent sector at the time . . . I’m requesting their sensor logs from the date in question.” Since it was more than a week ago, the science vessel’s logs would have been transmitted to Starfleet Command’s mainframe by now, making them accessible to any Starfleet facility.

  In minutes, Kadray had her answer. “There. A surge of chronitons and verterons consistent with the vortex signature, during the time window of the transport’s disappearance. Agent Dulmur, I think we’ve just verified your prediction.”

  “Good work,” Lucsly acknowledged.

  “Turns out not everything we deal with is counterintuitive after all,” Dulmur said with an irritatingly smug expression. “Because sometimes we deal with people.”

  That presupposes one has an intuition for people, Lucsly thought. That was one area where Dulmur had an edge on Lucsly, but then, most people did. Still, the junior agent could stand to be less cocky about it. “Now what we need to do,” Lucsly said, “is talk to Paul Manheim and hope he keeps careful track of all his grudges.”

  08:27 UTC

  On the viewscreen, Paul Manheim was clearly devastated at his inadvertent role in the deaths of seven people, including the other occupants of Yvette Michael’s transport. The sight mollified Dulmur’s anger at the further destructive consequences of Manheim’s reckless experiments. He found himself saying, “You could
n’t have known this would happen, Doctor. Whatever’s doing this, it seems to be acting on instinct. There’s no intention behind it, yours or anything else’s.”

  “That is little comfort, Mister Dulmur,” Manheim said. “I came out here seeking new understanding, and all I have achieved is the magnification of my own flaws.”

  “We don’t have time for self-flagellation,” Lucsly said. “You need to tell us if there’s anyone else you have a grudge against.”

  Manheim shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I wasn’t even aware I had such unresolved anger toward Balkar and Michael. And with Picard, I felt—that is, I thought I felt—”

  “Doctor!”

  “Again, my apologies. I’m trying to think . . . it’s been so long since I left civilization. Besides my wife, most of the people I’ve interacted with in that time are dead. Except for yourselves and your fellow agents and researchers.”

  Lucsly shook his head. “None of whom you met until after your interspatial encounter. The entity wouldn’t have gotten any impressions from you about them.”

  “Then maybe there is no one else,” Manheim suggested. “Maybe there will be no more incidents.”

  Dulmur had a thought. “What about your family, Doctor? Nobody gets under your skin quite as much as family. Any unresolved issues there?”

  “Well, as I say, it’s been so long. My parents are long gone, and my brother and sister . . .” He froze. “My elder brother. He teased me relentlessly. He had all the friends, all the athletic success . . . and Mother always liked him best, no matter what she claimed!”

  Bingo, Dulmur thought. “Where’s your brother living now, Doctor?”

  “I really have no idea. You could discover that better than I could. His name is Alan.”

  Lucsly was already working the computer console. Within moments, he’d tracked the information down. “Alan Manheim, brother of Paul and Erika. Currently resides in the Kaferian capital city.”

  Dulmur stared. “What would happen if one of these vortices opened up on top of a city of ten million people?”

  Lucsly was already out of his chair. “Let’s not find out.”

  Tau Ceti System

  1 T’lakht, YS 9051 (A Wednesday)

  19:36 UTC

  Contacting Alan Manheim proved harder than anticipated. His listed address was no longer valid. Apparently he had been driven into seclusion by the infamy his family had gained as a result of the Manheim Event. And the Kaferians were fervent individualists whose government, such as it existed, was fiercely dedicated to the protection of individual privacy. Even declaring an imminent emergency couldn’t help the agents get the elder Manheim’s address. It seemed the information might not even exist in any government databank.

  As Warlock Station’s runabout Brin, piloted by Commander Kadray, neared Kaferia, Dulmur made several fruitless efforts to track down Manheim through the planet’s public computer network, finding his queries met only with suspicion and disbelief. He was about to try claiming that Manheim had won the Lissepian Lottery when he heard Lucsly say, “Uh-oh.”

  “Uh-oh what?” Dulmur asked. To Lucsly’s left, Kadray’s oversized eyes turned to focus on him.

  “We’re now close enough to scan the area twenty-five arcminutes ahead of Tau Ceti III in its orbit.”

  After a second, Dulmur nodded. “Where the planet will be in six-point-seven hours.”

  “Mm-hm. There’s already a cloud of debris there. From the spread, it’s been there for at least two hours already.”

  “It’s not ordinary asteroidal debris?” Kadray asked. It was a fair question; Tau Ceti boasted an atypically dense cometary disk, mostly in the outer reaches of the system, but enough debris drifted inward to pose a perennial hazard to navigation. The Kaferians had survived the frequent bombardments by evolving the ability to hibernate in underground burrows for long stretches, though now their world was protected by one of the quadrant’s most powerful planetary defense grids. Which would be useless against a transdimensional chroniton vortex materializing near the surface.

  Lucsly shook his head. “I’m picking up considerable organic debris, dead vegetation . . . mineral composition consistent with Kaferia’s soil and crust . . . signs of refined metals, polymers, crystalline composites.”

  “Anything to indicate what part of the planet it came from?” Dulmur asked urgently, aware that they now had less than five hours to locate Manheim and set up the chroniton field at his location. The prototype device they’d brought aboard the runabout wasn’t remotely powerful enough to shield the whole planet, and it would take too long to replicate its components and install them in the defense grid.

  Together, Lucsly and Kadray scanned the debris field. “No unique vegetation,” the Cygnian officer reported. “There are remains . . . Kaferian, human, Andorian . . . not an unusual mix here.”

  “Damn,” Dulmur said. “Wherever Manheim’s secluding himself, he’s not secluded enough. I was hoping if we didn’t save him, at least we wouldn’t lose anyone else.”

  “We would anyway,” Kadray told him. “The seismic and atmospheric stresses created by the vortex would be disastrous.”

  “So how the hell do we find where it hits?”

  But Lucsly was engrossed in working the console. “Well?” Dulmur asked after a moment longer. “What are you doing?”

  “Consulting the Kaferian navigational database,” Lucsly replied. “They track every piece of debris in the system. I’m trying to find the exact moment the debris appeared.”

  Dulmur rolled his eyes. “Does it matter at a time like this?”

  “More now than ever. Kaferia moves through space at thirty-two kilometers per second. It takes three hundred seventy-nine seconds to traverse its own diameter. It has a rotational period of thirty-four hours, nineteen minutes, fifty-six seconds. If I can pinpoint the exact location in space and time where the debris materialized—”

  “You can figure out what part of the planet’s surface will be occupying that point in space in a few hours!”

  “You’re starting to catch on. In this job, precision is everything.” Dulmur had to concede the point.

  Soon Lucsly had his answer. “Uh-oh.”

  Dulmur threw him a look. “I wish you’d stop saying that.”

  “The debris field appeared four hours, fifty-three minutes ago. We have a hundred and nine minutes to find Alan Manheim and erect the chroniton field.”

  “Well, have you got a location?”

  “Within a few hundred kilometers’ radius,” Lucsly confessed. “The unknown duration of the vortex and the . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it. Let’s get down there and start scanning.”

  It took more than half the remaining time to reach Kaferia, get clearance through the defense grid, and fly to the area in question, a densely forested swath of one of the two small continents in the western hemisphere. Though mostly undeveloped, the area sported several small communities and isolated outlying residences—a good place to go into seclusion. It took several minutes more to isolate the human biosignatures and send hails to their residences. None of those who responded knew Alan Manheim, and there were five that gave no answer, all too far apart to be shielded en masse. They would have to try each one in turn.

  Dulmur was rather proud of his insights on this case, but in this last stage there were no epiphanies, no clever deductions—just the legwork that made up the bulk of a detective’s job. After Dulmur had struck out with the two dwellings he visited—one housing a middle-aged poet seeking solitude to find her muse and ranting at Dulmur for forcing her to start over, the other housing an athletic couple who didn’t appreciate having their honeymoon interrupted at the most inconvenient moment imaginable—he got a call from Kadray on his comlink. “Lucsly has him. Stand by for beamup.”

  By the time the runabout landed on Alan Manheim’s property (with Dulmur back aboard), they had barely twenty minutes to get ready. “Can’t we just take him up in the ship, away from the plane
t?” Dulmur asked.

  “If you want to get swallowed whole when the vortex follows us,” Kadray said. “We need the warp reactor to power the chroniton field. We can’t have both.”

  “We could try steering through the center of the vortex like the Enterprise did.”

  “We still don’t know why that worked,” Kadray said.

  “Eye of the storm,” Dulmur suggested.

  “Maybe, but I wouldn’t want to stake my life on it. And the runabout’s thrusters might not have enough power to overcome the turbulence.”

  Lucsly arrived with a confused Alan Manheim in tow. The elder Manheim resembled his brother but was older, lankier, and bald. “I’m still waiting for someone to explain what’s going on here!” he groused. “What is this ‘DIT’ anyway?”

  “DTI, sir. We’ll explain in nineteen minutes,” Lucsly said, “if we’re still here.” He turned to Dulmur. “There are other residents in the area. We need to bring them to the runabout while Kadray sets up the field. Even if we dissipate the vortex, there’ll still be seismic turbulence.”

  “And likely some unpredictable effects from chroniton leakage,” Kadray added as she worked her technological magic. “You’d best hurry.”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Lucsly said, making it simultaneously a promise to her and an instruction to Dulmur. The man’s efficient, Dulmur thought.

  The two agents moved at a brisk pace to get to the nearby residences; transporter power was needed for the shield, so they had to hoof it. For once, Dulmur was grateful for the physical portion of his DTI training.

  Over the next ten or so minutes, they corralled seven other people: four insectoid Kaferians, two Andorians, and a human, matching the bodies found in the debris. Dulmur tried not to think about how creepy that was as he persuaded them to come with him. He soon gave up trying to explain what the DTI was and started telling them he was with the Federation Science Council, here to warn them about an impending seismic event. It had the virtue of being technically true.

  They collected the last local dweller and started making their way back with three minutes to spare. But as they ran toward the runabout, the ground started to rumble and the wind began to blow. Dulmur looked up to see a swirl of blue light beginning to form in the sky. “The field isn’t working!” he cried.