Department of Temporal Investigations

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “Never mind,” Dulmur and Lucsly replied in tandem.

  “All you need to know,” Lucsly went on, “is that within the field’s influence, it’s as though subspace doesn’t exist. Any technology based on subspace phenomena is nullified. Correct?” Rodal nodded.

  “So no subspace comms, no transporters, no warp drive?” Garcia asked. “We’re stuck here? For how long?”

  “Unknown,” Rodal said. “The field must be large, considering that the planet has already moved thousands of kilometers through space in the past several moments and yet we are still within the field limits. It may be expanding outward from the point of origin at, I would guess, the speed of light. It will probably weaken over time, eventually dissipate altogether, but we have no way of knowing how long it will take.”

  “Now that you know what it is, you can’t neutralize it somehow?” Dulmur asked.

  “Not from within, certainly. The temporal drive is from the distant future, beyond even the range of history that the Aegis concerns itself with. It’s not something we’re prepared to cope with. I see that Daiyar had a reason for stealing the drive beyond its untraceability.”

  “Yes,” Lucsly said. “This may be how she intends to prevent the Aegis from undoing her changes in the past. If she installs the drive on the planet whose history she alters and keeps a disruption field in effect, there would be no way to use a spacetime warp or temporal transporter to reach her and undo her changes.”

  “It will be challenging,” Rodal acknowledged. “But do not underestimate the resources of our benefactors.” He stroked the recovering Meneth’s head, evoking a loud, basso purr. “We still have a chance to stop her.”

  “If we can ever get off this planet,” Garcia countered. “We could be stuck here for days, weeks. Maybe more. It’s not like anyone can send a ship to us through the field.”

  Rodal chuckled, striding forward more confidently as he led the humans back toward the beam-in point. “You still think of time too linearly, young agent. You forget that cause need not precede effect. The solution is simple: once we get back to base, I shall simply arrange to have a high-powered sublight vessel delivered to this planet at some time in the past few days—say, cloaked in the small gully beyond the point where we arrived. That way, it will be waiting for us when we get there now.”

  Dulmur stared in disbelief. “A Matheson-Solomon retroanticipation loop? You don’t actually expect that to work, do you?”

  “Let’s see, shall we?”

  A few moments later, they returned to the beam-in point and kept on beyond it until the bottom of the adjacent gully came into view. As the group clambered down into the gully, Rodal raised his servo and emitted a signal. A moment later, a sleek scout ship rippled into view. Dulmur could only stare for a moment. “Whoa,” he finally said. “It worked.”

  “Most excellent,” Garcia said, impressed. “Now let’s get the hell off this rock.”

  “It might still take days,” Rodal warned as they boarded. “Perhaps even longer. We are limited to sublight flight within the field, after all, and we have no idea where its boundary lies.”

  “We still remember the original history, though,” Lucsly said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be aware of the risk of its being changed. So we must still have a chance to preserve it.”

  “Or maybe Ranjea managed to stop her on his own,” Dulmur countered.

  “I hope so,” Garcia breathed. “And I pray it’s in a way that will let him return to us.”

  V

  * * *

  1807 CE

  Skalat star system

  When Daiyar’s scout ship emerged from the temporal warp, Ranjea saw a wide binary pair of M-class planets through the forward viewport, illuminated by the ruddy light of what was presumably a red dwarf star. The first thing the Tomika renegade did was to consult an instrument that Ranjea believed to be a temporal scanner. “Excellent. The drive appears to have performed as advertised: no temporal trace, no sign of pursuit. I’m grateful to your Eridian Vault staff for maintaining it in such good condition.”

  “Then perhaps you will reconsider the use to which you intend to put it,” Ranjea replied. “Give me a chance to assist you in finding a healthier response to your grief.”

  She chuckled. “Well, that’s one difference between you and Riroa. She was never quite so corny.”

  “But I share her sincerity. And her concern for your well-being, Daiyar.”

  “It’s a sweet offer, Ranjea, but I’m afraid we don’t have time. I must not have set the drive as precisely as I’d thought—I have a deadline that’s a few hours closer than I’d hoped. So we have little luxury for conversation.” She rose from her pilot’s seat beside Ranjea’s and stepped back toward the aft compartment, stopping before a covered bed of sorts that Ranjea believed to be an automated medical unit. Working controls to initialize and program the unit, she said to Ranjea, “I’m going to need you to get into this chamber. I trust you don’t mind disrobing first? I’d rather not make that part an order. I’m taking more than enough advantage of you as it is.”

  “Of course I don’t mind,” he said as he began to undress. “But may I ask what you intend to do with me?”

  “We need a bit of cosmetic adjustment to blend in where we’re going. The medical unit will apply the prosthetics and pigmentation, as well as making a few tweaks to our metabolic readings. It can only do so much with your Dhei’ten pheromones, though, so I expect you to keep them reined in.”

  “Does it need to be such a thorough change?” he asked, now completely nude.

  Daiyar was smiling at the sight despite herself. “We . . . we may be there for a while, and we need to be able to convince Aegis sensors.” She cleared her throat. “Please get into the med unit now.”

  The cosmetic procedure didn’t take long. In addition to a series of injections to alter his pigmentation and metabolism, Ranjea felt the tickle of a transporter effect applying prosthetic pieces to his forehead, ears, and scalp, including what felt like a narrow strip of hair running from his forehead to the nape of his neck. Once the medical unit’s lid hinged open, he could see that his dark brown skin had been subtly reddened, with a pattern of slightly darker, mottled stripes slanting inward along his torso and converging along its centerline, as well as running nearly straight down his arms and legs to terminate at his digits.

  Daiyar, now nude herself, greeted him with “Sorry about this” and a burst from her servo to renew its hypnotic influence. Dazed but conscious, Ranjea observed himself obeying as she instructed him to rise and present himself. The slender Tomika woman walked around him, inspecting the transformation both visually and with her servo in scan mode. “Excellent. You make a convincing Rikeen, albeit an unusually tall one. But then, I will be as well. Oh, I’ve prepared some wardrobe for us,” she added, gesturing to a small table across the compartment. “You may get dressed now.”

  Obediently, he moved to the table and reached for the larger set of garments, which were fairly drab and utilitarian. As Ranjea dressed, Daiyar knelt to reset the med unit for her own transformation. He appreciated the opportunity to observe her body’s strong, graceful movements without clothing in the way, feeling an echo of Riroa’s pleasure at the same sight. Once the initial shock of the servo blast had subsided, he managed to speak again. “Rikeen? I thought your quarry were the Fethetrit.”

  “The Fethetrit are brutes,” she said. “Little more than wild animals. They never could have developed an advanced civilization unless they’d stolen the means from someone else.” The hatred in her voice made her suddenly far less attractive.

  She rose, continuing as she waited for the unit to complete its reset. “The larger planet out there is Feth. The smaller is Keekuwa, the Rikeen homeworld. The Rikeen were an inventive, inquisitive people, inspired by the sight of a living world in their sky to develop science and space travel in nearly record tim
e. They traveled to Feth with great eagerness to discover who lived there—and their first scouts were hunted down and devoured. By the time the second expedition came, some smarter-than-average Fethet—that’s the singular—had realized that it would be better to keep one or two of the astronauts alive and torture them for information.”

  She climbed into the bed. “To shorten a long and extremely grisly story, eventually the Rikeen decided they’d had enough and attempted to conquer the Fethetrit, hoping to tame them enough to let the Rikeen study the rest of the planet and cultivate its resources. But the Fethetrit were nomadic hunters by nature, too large and ferocious to control and too adept at surviving in the planet’s dangerous wilds where the Rikeen couldn’t follow. They went to ground, then eventually turned the tables on their occupiers, killed and ate most of them and enslaved the rest, and took control of the civilization they had built, including the means to travel between planets.” She lay back, and the lid began to close. “I’ll let you imagine what they did to Keekuwa in retaliation.”

  While Daiyar underwent the change, Ranjea went to the cockpit and checked the ship controls, but his attempt to unlock them proved futile. The most he could do was take a scan of the nearby planets. Both were industrialized and polluted, and both showed evidence of radioactive contamination, either from poor nuclear containment or from the deliberate, localized use of nuclear weaponry. Yet both planets were largely intact and supported sizable populations, cities, and infrastructures—more so on Keekuwa than Feth, though Feth seemed to have a wider distribution of smaller settlements, plus indications of localized power usage and fossil-fuel pollution scattered through the wilds and deserts in between. It was consistent with a semi-nomadic civilization whose permanent settlements produced food and resources to support a migratory population.

  He mentioned as much to Daiyar when she emerged from the med unit, now red-brown and striped like himself but a few shades lighter. Her strip of hair, he saw, was bright red and a hand’s span in length, and her protruding orbital ridges stretched back to connect to the tops of her enlarged, cuplike ears, vaguely suggesting a Ferengi’s physiognomy in a more streamlined and elegant way.

  Daiyar clarified the matter as she dressed in the other set of garments. “Oh, they didn’t destroy Keekuwa completely. They may not be inventive geniuses, but they have a gift for exploiting other life-forms. Their war priests recognized the benefit of letting Rikeen civilization survive unconquered, free to continue creating technologies, goods, and wealth that the Fethetrit could periodically plunder—not to mention continuing to breed so that they could be hunted down as prey.” She shuddered, looking nauseated. “Understand, Ranjea, I am not exaggerating about their brutality. You need to know that for when we go down among the Fethetrit in Rikeen guise. This will not be a particularly safe operation.”

  “Just what is the operation?”

  “I’ll tell you what I need from you at the appropriate time. What you need to know now is that you and I will be impersonating a pair of midlevel Aegis agents. The Fethetrit themselves were too . . . unmanageable for the Aegis to cultivate as operatives, so we used Rikeen instead. Normally we prefer to draw on members of the ethnic or cultural group that will be dominant at a planet’s time of crisis, but that was not an option here.”

  “I take it there’s already an Aegis presence on Feth?” he asked, and Daiyar nodded. “How do you plan to convince them of our bona fides?”

  “By intercepting the actual pair of agents who are about to beam in, sedating them, and taking their place.” She moved over to the transporter booth at the rear of the compartment and powered it up. “Don’t look at me that way. You knew I was committing a crime.”

  “I didn’t expect you to attack your own people so directly.”

  She went on entering commands, setting the transporter to receive mode. “They won’t be harmed. You know firsthand that we have gentler ways of making people do what we want.” She gave a wry smile. “I’m actually lucky you came along. It would’ve been harder to explain why only one agent arrived when two were expected. That’s why I used a hypnotic block on you—I need you free and servo-equipped to pass muster, but I need you obedient.”

  “I must nonetheless register my formal disapproval of this plan.”

  “Noted, for the record.” She sighed. “If we had a record. The less history knows about what I’m planning, the better.”

  “You plan to ensure the Fethetrit’s self-destruction at their moment of greatest peril. Are you really so confident the Aegis couldn’t track you to this time?”

  “Have you heard anything I’ve said about the Fethetrit? They live to kill. They have no fear of death and very little restraint. And they have access to nuclear energy. What makes you think there was only one occasion when they almost destroyed themselves? They kept the Aegis busy for generations. I had plenty of crisis points to choose from, which should make it harder for my pursuers to anticipate my target.”

  The transporter powered up. “Ah,” the Tomika said, entering some final commands into the console. “Our guests are arriving.”

  Ranjea understood what was about to happen. The crew of James Kirk’s Enterprise had first discovered the Aegis (though not yet learned its name) during an experimental time journey to 1968 CE, when their transporter had accidentally intercepted the beam of the Aegis agent known as Gary Seven, causing him to materialize in the starship’s transporter room instead of his headquarters on Earth. Daiyar no doubt intended to intercept the incoming agents in the same way, then beam herself and Ranjea to the surface of Feth in their place.

  But foreknowledge did not give him power, so long as Daiyar’s hypnotic block still held. He could only watch helplessly as the two Rikeen agents, a man and a woman, emerged from the blue energy mist on the pad. He urged himself to move forward or shout some warning, but he remained outwardly passive as Daiyar stunned the agents with her servo before they could recover from their surprise.

  The frustrating thing was that, as Ranjea had said to Teresa back (or forward) in 2385, he had an inbuilt affinity toward Daiyar. Riroa had loved her and wanted nothing more than to make her happy. Ranjea had never regretted taking Riroa’s essence and memories into himself, but now they worked against him, amplifying the hypnotic compulsion to cooperate with Daiyar. Normal hypnosis was a voluntary submissive state in which the subject chose to trust in another’s guidance completely, becoming highly relaxed but remaining fully conscious, contrary to popular belief. Thus, its subjects could not be compelled to obey any order they did not feel comfortable obeying. There were various forms of telepathic and technological mind manipulation that could compel actions against the subject’s will, but they could be resisted by a disciplined mind. Ranjea had been subjected to mind control before, on his mission to the Axis of Time, but he’d been able to resist it then by drawing on Riroa’s sense of duty and on his bond with Teresa Garcia. But now he was centuries away from Teresa, and Riroa’s love for Daiyar was interacting with the servo’s compulsion to put him in a state of willing submission. He intellectually recognized his duty to resist her, but he could not bring himself to want it enough to take action.

  So when Daiyar handed him the servo she’d taken from the stunned male agent, he took it unresistingly. And when she ordered him to join her on the transporter pad, he did so readily. Still, he hoped that, by staying at her side, he could find an opportunity to say or do something that would prevent her from bringing about the death of an entire species.

  Feth

  They materialized in an office of some sort, in a transporter compartment that became concealed behind a sliding wall section once Ranjea and Daiyar had exited it. Looking around the austere office, Ranjea saw a set of large windows overlooking what appeared to be an industrial farming operation, its fields stretching for some distance. A small, haphazardly assembled city was visible beyond the fields.

  The diminutive Rikeen f
emale who was the office’s lone occupant greeted them with a puzzled expression. “You’re not 121 and 168,” she said.

  “Agents 864 and 879,” Daiyar announced. “Sorry you weren’t informed of the change in assignment, 143. It only just happened.”

  Agent 143 frowned. “I don’t remember ever seeing either of you back in the enclave.” Her eyes roved up and down Ranjea’s body. “And I think I would’ve remembered you.”

  “We’re from a future generation,” Daiyar replied with surprising casualness. “Miknee and Versekk happened to have some information needed for an investigation in our era, so we took their place in return.”

  “It’s somewhat irregular,” the Rikeen agent said. “It means our Beta 4 won’t have your voice patterns on file. You know the drill: give me the nature of myself and our mission here.”

  “Your name is Tseechin,” Daiyar recited, “descendant of Rikeen ancestors taken from Keekuwa some three thousand years ago. The problem your lineage has been trained to address is that the acquisition of Rikeen technology by the Fethetrit has accelerated their industrial and military development far more rapidly than their social order, endangering the survival of both species.

  “Your specific mission, and ours, is to prevent the assassination of Vanthralak, a Fethet conqueror in the process of uniting Feth under his rule—at least to the extent that unity is possible. By dismantling the old tribal confederacies and creating ethnically mixed military and political units whose loyalty is strictly to him, he is suppressing most of the planet’s intertribal warfare and reducing the probability of a global nuclear conflict. Should he be assassinated, the old tribal divisions will reassert themselves forcefully, which, in combination with the drive for vengeance from Vanthralak’s remaining loyalists, will likely trigger a war that escalates into a global conflagration.”

  “All right, close enough,” Tseechin said. Her dark golden eyes shifted to take in Ranjea. “The big one doesn’t say much, does he? They breed us tall in your era, it seems.”