Department of Temporal Investigations

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Ranjea wished he could speak out and reveal the truth to the unsuspecting agent. All he found himself able to say was, “I’m merely surprised that this office is so far from the city. Doesn’t the Aegis prefer its agents closer to the heart of events?”

  Tseechin shrugged. “We’re Rikeen living on Feth. Little better than slaves. The Fethetrit need us to build their machines and weapons, to grow the crops that feed the livestock they prey on. But they keep a close watch on those nearest to their centers of power. Here, in an agricultural complex, I can assume a position of midlevel authority and freedom while mostly being far from Fethetrit scrutiny, since they have little interest in the growers of plants.”

  Looking out the window, Ranjea noted a cloud of dust and combustion exhaust moving along a roadway from the city toward this complex. “It seems ‘mostly’ is the key word there.”

  Tseechin moved alongside him, grimacing at the sight of what was now visible as a convoy of vehicles of various sizes. “Damn. I should have known. With Vanthralak’s court on its way to the city for the big gathering, naturally the local chieftain wants to inspect his facilities and intimidate everyone into giving their best. I’d hoped to have more time to prepare you for this. A Rikeen’s first encounter with the Fethetrit is always unnerving. Humiliating. We are livestock to them. But whatever you do, you must not show defiance. They welcome any excuse to torture and kill Rikeen—and, yes, to eat us. They’ve even built organized sports around it—but sometimes they hunt and kill us just for fun.”

  Tseechin speared them both with her piercing gaze. “So whatever you do, do not give them an excuse to notice you.”

  * * *

  The Fethetrit did not arrive at the farm complex so much as descend upon it. A pack of about a dozen of the massive, furred bipeds roared in on a collection of crude three- and four-wheeled motor vehicles emitting a ferocious din and spewing toxic-smelling black fumes. The riders themselves roared almost as loudly as their vehicles, making several posturing circuits around the front of the complex until the entire Rikeen staff had come out to meet them. Their appearance certainly matched Daiyar’s tales of their ferocity. They were giants, over two and a half meters tall, with carnivorous faces that suggested a cross between a bear and a wolf, bracketed by large, cupped ears whose rims extended from their brow ridges, like Ferengi ears crossed with those of certain Terran bats. Ranjea could see a few evolutionary features in common with the Rikeen, suggesting a panspermic exchange of genetic material between the companion worlds or perhaps parallel evolution due to similar planetary conditions, but the Fethetrit were far less humanoid. Their hands were four-fingered and double-thumbed, with scimitar claws extending from their middle four knuckles. Their simian-tailed bodies were covered in thick fur in various shades of red and orange, allowing them to go mostly nude save for heavy leather kilts and equipment belts, and long, thick manes of unruly hair blew behind them as they rode. The group was exclusively male, presenting a contrast to the Rikeen staff, whose highest-ranking members were overwhelmingly female.

  On debarking from their vehicles, the predators closed swiftly on the Rikeen laborers and began barking commands and threats, harrying them inside like dogs herding a flock of frightened sheep. The laborers, along with the Aegis agents and Ranjea, were commanded to strip and collectively hosed down with forceful streams of cold water. “Filthy animals, grubbing in dirt!” the pack leader snarled. “Just because I have to stay here year-round to tame you vermin, that doesn’t mean I have to endure your stench!” Ranjea realized that the leader must resent his low status that forced him to stay in one place tending farmers while the elites were free to exercise their nomadic hunting instincts, so he compensated by demeaning and humiliating those of even lower status. Could it be, Ranjea wondered, that this brutality was atypical, a consequence of being forced to live in opposition to the Fethetrit’s nature? Or was Daiyar right that the culture of abuse was the societal norm?

  Afterward, the naked laborers were lined up for inspection, forced to endure pawing and rough handling at Fethet hands. The forepersons were commanded to report on productivity, and those laborers deemed weakest and least productive were dragged away screaming, no doubt to be hunted down and devoured. Ranjea closed his eyes and tried to remind himself that this was history, that every one of these people had died centuries before he was born. It didn’t help.

  When one of the Fethetrit inspectors reached Daiyar and Ranjea, Tseechin was forced to step forward. “They are new, master,” she said, her eyes submissively lowered. “They have no work record as yet. But you can see, they are large and strong and well fed. They will make us very productive—”

  “Do not tell me what to think!” the Fethet snarled, cuffing the side of her head and knocking her to her hands and knees. “I remember you. Always so smug, like you know more than you should. You need to be taught your place.” Dragging Tseechin forward by her hair, making sure she was in view of the rest, he began to kick at her and beat her with closed fists. He kept his knuckle-claws bent backward for now, but Ranjea feared that might change at any moment.

  Deltan empathy let him sense Daiyar’s visceral terror and rage at witnessing the Fethetrit’s brutality, at even being in their presence. But she kept her outward affect tightly controlled. “She’s Aegis,” she whispered to Ranjea. “She’s more durable than she looks. She’ll survive.” Still, a tear glinted in her eye.

  * * *

  Once the Fethetrit deemed they had sufficiently cowed the workers into submission and roared away on their smoky vehicles, Ranjea and Daiyar carried Tseechin back to her office. The complex had a medical clinic, but the office had Aegis technology that could heal her faster and ease her pain better. Still, Ranjea was concerned that the limited aid the office could provide was not sufficient. Once Tseechin was sedated and he was free to speak, he asked, “Can’t we take her back to the ship and use the med unit?”

  Daiyar shook her head as they put their clothes back on. “We don’t want her to heal too quickly, or it would be suspicious. Besides, we can’t get to the ship now. The time drive your agency so thoughtfully provided has another use—one I already employed uptime to prevent your colleagues from following us. It can damp subspace activity within a sizable volume of space—including spacetime warps and transporter beams. That’s how I plan to prevent the Aegis from undoing my change to history. Just before we beamed down, I set the field to block all further long-range and temporal transports as well as warp effects. We can still use the office’s transporter to travel around Feth as needed, but even if I signaled the ship to deactivate the field, it would take days to dissipate and allow transport.”

  “I thought you wanted to keep a low historical profile so they couldn’t tell where and when you would strike. A systemwide subspace disruption field is a rather significant footprint, isn’t it?”

  “My goal was to keep them from intercepting me before I could complete my plan. Once I’ve achieved a change on this scale, it shouldn’t be hard for them to track down the point of divergence. So my priority now is to keep them from intervening directly at that point—both by blocking their access and by minimizing their ability to discover exactly how I made the change.”

  “What’s to stop the Aegis from sending agents back even earlier to await your arrival?”

  “There are hazards to too much repeated tampering with a single event in time,” she replied. “I believe your colleagues experienced that at the Rakon IV conference a few years ago, when a Temporal Cold War battle escalated out of hand and almost tore a rift in spacetime with all the competing alterations.”

  “Yes. I was not a participant in those events, but I was fully briefed afterward.”

  “Given that risk, there’s a resistance to changing an event too many times, at least among the older and wiser time agencies. If I succeed in making this change and preventing its immediate alteration, the Aegis should be reluctant to intervene
further back. Failing that . . .” She gave a shuddering sigh. “Well, now you’ve seen how savage those monsters are. No less so toward one another. As I said, there were many instances when they almost destroyed themselves. If I fail to change this one, I can try again elsewhen.

  “Besides,” Daiyar continued more intently, “ending the Fethetrit here means that dozens of other civilizations will never be conquered or eradicated in the future. Countless billions will be spared from the brutality you just witnessed. It will be a better timeline for the galaxy as a whole. I hope that once the Aegis sees that, they’ll accept that it would be a mistake to change it back.” Her eyes locked pleadingly on his. “I hope that you can see that now, Ranjea.”

  He needed several moments to find a reply. “I see that they are damaged, lost. Their way of life was disrupted, and the disruption has propagated. It does not mean they cannot be redeemed. You said this Vanthralak united his people despite their history of tribal conflict. Doesn’t that prove they have the potential to outgrow violence?”

  “Only by directing it against others. Vanthralak cares only about the more complete subjugation of Keekuwa, and of other worlds in generations to come.”

  “What about their future role in defending the Gum Nebula against cosmozoan threats?”

  “Any of the civilizations they slaughtered could take their place and do just as well, if not better.” Catching the look in his eyes, she stepped closer. “I know what you’re thinking. The vaunted Federation ideal that every species has value. It’s an ideal the Aegis shares, or they never would have protected the Fethetrit in the first place. But there are exceptions. You’ve seen that now. At this stage of their evolution, the Fethetrit are simply too predatory, too irrational, to be permitted the power of a spacefaring civilization. And that evolution needs to be allowed to run its natural course, weeding out a culture too dangerous to be unleashed on the galaxy.”

  “At the cost of billions of lives.”

  “Fethetrit throw their own lives away almost as casually as the lives of others. This just ensures they don’t take so many others with them.”

  “Would you be so compelled to save those lives if they did not include ones you loved? Do not pretend your motives are not selfish, Daiyar. You are doing this because you seek to reunite with a love you lost.”

  “Is that what you think?” She shook her head. “You misunderstand, Ranjea. I have no intention of going back. Even if I do restore the ones I lost, that does not erase my own culpability in their death. I do not deserve to be with them anymore. And I came back here with the full knowledge that I might have to give my life to save them.”

  He held her gaze for a long moment. “And yet you still chose to bring me back with you. Do you care so little for my safety?” He paused. “Or is your determination to be alone not as absolute as you insist?”

  Daiyar looked away. She had no answer for him.

  VI

  * * *

  April 12, 2385

  Interstellar space, unspecified sector

  It took nine days for Rodal’s scout ship to reach the edge of the subspace dead zone. After less than half that time, Rodal and the DTI agents were able to calculate the location of the zone’s edge by comparing incoming lightspeed-delayed pulsar signals with their latest FTL readings from before the field was initiated. But knowing the length of their wait had not made the waiting any easier. Dulmur missed his fiancée more with each passing day; the best part of his choice to accept promotion to a desk job had been the chance to enter into a stable relationship and go home to Cymmen every night. As good a rapport as he and Lucsly had always had as an agent team, it was anything but a substitute for that.

  Indeed, Lucsly had been quieter than usual on this trip, probably out of unease toward Teresa Garcia’s anxiety. To her credit, the young agent had striven to discipline her emotions, recognizing that there was no way she could direct them usefully as long as she was stuck on this scout ship. She had presented her fellow agents and Rodal with as meticulous a report as possible on her team’s investigation into Daiyar and the Tomika’s actions during their confrontations, and she had participated gamely in their strategy and planning sessions as they constructed contingencies for what might come next.

  But Dulmur could tell that her separation from Ranjea, along with her uncertainty about his fate in the distant past, was tearing her up inside. He’d never seen a pair of agents form such a close personal bond while still maintaining an effective level of professional discipline. He’d never seen a human get so close to a Deltan of their preferred sex without becoming overwhelmed. Garcia and Ranjea had managed to build something special through years of hard work and mutual trust, along with some alchemy that DTI training didn’t qualify Dulmur to define. He cared deeply for Garcia himself; he had sponsored her application to the Department and mentored her ever since, and he felt a fatherly pride in her accomplishments. But what she and Ranjea shared went beyond that. He kept up a confident front for Garcia’s benefit, much as she did for his, but in his private thoughts, he feared for what would become of her if Ranjea never returned. He trusted that she had the strength to recover from the loss, but she might not be willing or able to continue in this work if it took her dearest friend from her. Assuming, of course, that history didn’t change in such a way that she forgot him altogether. Some traitorous part of Dulmur’s mind sometimes thought that might be a blessing.

  In an odd way, Lucsly’s growing reserve in reaction to Garcia’s sorrow had been to her benefit. She seemed to look to his stoicism as an example to emulate. It wasn’t something Dulmur would recommend for a long-term response; Garcia was nowhere near Lucsly’s end of the human psychological spectrum, so for someone of her emotional flexibility, embracing her feelings openly was healthier than suppressing them. But if it helped her remain focused on her work, that was something she and everyone around her needed in the current circumstances.

  As for Rodal, he remained as reserved as Lucsly, resisting the agents’ attempts to grill him for more secrets of the Aegis. In his view, they’d penetrated the veil too much already. Meneth, of course, remained an enigma. There were moments when she let Dulmur catch a glimpse of her humanoid form for a brief moment, only to revert to civet form once his gaze was diverted even for an instant. He was certain she was toying with him. Once, he could have sworn he was awakened by the sound of Lucsly and Meneth carrying on a mutual conversation in low tones, but when he’d sat up and looked over at them, he’d seen only the civet stretched languidly across the seat opposite Lucsly’s. The older agent had professed to know nothing about it when Dulmur asked later on.

  On the ninth day, the tension mounted as the ship neared the edge of the subspace damping zone. The agents had deduced, and Rodal had confirmed, that if history had been altered in the universe outside, they would not feel its effects until they left the zone. Quantum-state changes in one part of the universe did not affect other parts until they interacted and became correlated. Normally, thanks to the tachyonic, tetryonic, and other signals that propagated at hyperlight velocities through subspace, a timeline convergence’s effects would spread rapidly through the galaxy. But in this zone, isolated from subspace, the occupants of the ship would have been insulated from such a change. This had given the agents time to prepare. Lucsly’s temporal tricorder was phase-shielded and loaded with a streamlined version of the DTI’s master database of historical events, and he’d taken care to upload historical records from the Vomnin nations and other known Gum Nebula civilizations as well. If the scout ship’s occupants underwent convergence with an altered timeline upon their emergence from the damping zone, then they would forget the original history, but Lucsly’s tricorder would register the discrepancy as soon as it pinged the available databases, alerting them to the change. Rodal confirmed that the Aegis-provided ship had its own equivalent warning system—as did Meneth, though Rodal would not elaborate upon that.


  But knowing about the change was one thing. Being able to change it back was another. And what if the change were radical enough that one or more of them no longer existed in their current form? Would they or the scout ship even be here once the temporal convergence overwrote their current quantum state?

  Even though there was nothing they could do, the entire team was on tenterhooks as they neared the border of the dead zone. Even Meneth was restlessly pacing the floor and stress-grooming her fur almost nonstop. Dulmur and Garcia clasped hands and squeezed their eyes shut as the seconds counted down . . .

  And nothing happened. Nothing bad, anyway. The scout ship’s computer emitted some optimistic-sounding beeps, and Dulmur heard a surge of power from the rear. “Warp engines show ready status,” Rodal announced after a moment. “Subspace sensor readings incoming. Transporter carrier signal positive. We are clear of the damping zone.” Meneth’s ears perked up, and her head darted around as if she were seeing something invisible to human eyes—which she probably was, now. Dulmur idly wondered what that said about all the other cats in the galaxy who seemed to act the same way.

  “Any sign of changes?” Garcia asked.

  Lucsly checked his tricorder. “Database pings under way.”

  Rodal checked a reading. “Our systems register no aberrations.”

  Once Federation issue caught up with Aegis issue, Lucsly nodded. “No discrepancies in evidence. The timeline appears unaltered.”

  Garcia sighed. “Then Ranjea must’ve stopped Daiyar. Oh, I never should’ve doubted you, partner.” Her relief was incomplete, though. “But where is he? Did he get back?”

  Rodal rose. “We can find those answers more swiftly back at the outpost. We no longer require the ship; I’ve requested that the Aegis beam us back to the Tanka Misata observation post. Stand by.”