STAR TREK: Strange New Worlds II

by Dean Wesley Smith (Editor)

  I lowered the padd, trying to remember the specifics of the old case. “There was never any evidence that the Narendra anomaly was more than a single linked-point event, was there?” A single linked-point event connected only two discrete timepoints—in this case, one in A.D. 2344, and the other in A.D. 2367. Since we were past the later time-point, such an event should no longer be a concern.

  Kreinns shook his head, jowls quivering with the movement. “We never reached a solid conclusion. The investigation got cut short during the Borg crisis. Narendra is still a potential poly-point event.”

  Dulmer dropped the padd on his desk. “Is this just a general heads-up, boss? Or do we think the Dominion is tampering with the timeline?”

  “Tell me what you think.” Kreinns handed out two more padds. I immediately noticed this one was a Mark VII-T model. Using triple-redundant temporal phase discriminators, the D.T.I. protected all historical records in VII-T devices, in order to compare realities.

  The file was a weekly status report from Captain Benjamin Sisko, commander of Deep Space 9. Speaking of poly-point events, I thought silently. Sisko had been the focus of another investigation a mere three months and two days earlier, and I was far from pleased to hear from him [203] again. But I pushed these thoughts aside and read on. The Dominion was the primary concern of his report, as would be expected, given his posting. There were several deletions, typical of military records—that much was consistent across all realities. It took a minute and fifteen seconds before I spotted the first obvious aberration.

  “ ‘The Maquis,’ ” I read aloud. “What’s the Maquis?”

  “It was the name of a French underground resistance group during the Second World War,” Dulmer said, eyes still glued to his padd.

  “That doesn’t explain its meaning in the context of a Starfleet status report.”

  “We don’t know,” Kreinns said. “But the way Sisko talks about them in this report, we should. Whatever this group is, for whatever reason, they’ve been eliminated from history.”

  Dulmer and I exchanged a significant look. In our seven years, six months, and nineteen days as partners, we’d come across only three other verifiable timeline alterations. All were, relatively speaking, minor changes—rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, as it were. But this, the removal of a group that apparently was on the same level of importance to Starfleet as the Dominion, was a potential iceberg.

  “I’ve already got Data Analysis going through VII-T files for other references.” Kreinns furrowed his brow as he said this, and I mirrored him. Searching the thousands of gigaquads of reports Starfleet generated on a daily basis, all under temporal protocols, was not going to be a quick or easy matter. It was going to take time and, ironically, temporal investigations never had any of that to spare.

  I scanned the padd again quickly. “All the systems mentioned in connection with this Maquis are along the [204] Cardassian border. That’s our starting point.” With a quick nod from the boss, I pushed myself off my chair, and with Dulmer right behind me, we were on our way.

  Captain Erika Benteen leaned back in her chair, looking into the space between the chairs Dulmer and I occupied in front of her ready-room desk. “Maquis ...” She repeated the word thoughtfully, her face, framed by a row of dark braids, taking on an earnest expression. Finally, she shook her head. “I’m afraid I’ve never heard of such a group.”

  Silently, I sighed. We were already three days, ten hours, and fifteen minutes into our investigation by the time we were able to rendezvous with the U.S.S. Lakota at Starbase 310. Benteen’s ship had been deployed on the edge of Cardassian space since the Battle of the Border. If she could not offer us any insight, it did not bode well for our investigation.

  “There is someone who might be better able to answer your questions,” Benteen then said. She tapped her combadge and said, “Number One, would you step in here, please?”

  Four seconds later, the doors slid open, and Benteen’s first officer entered. He was a large man, broad in the shoulders, with a thick brush of dark, close-cropped hair. But most remarkable about his appearance was the elaborate pattern of lines and curves drawn across his left temple. “Yes, Captain?” he said in a surprisingly gentle voice.

  “Commander Chakotay was born and raised in a colony along the Cardassian border,” Benteen informed us. Then turning to her first officer, she asked, “Number One, are you familiar with a group calling themselves ‘the Maquis’?”

  “Mah-key?” he echoed. “No, I can’t say that I am.”

  I considered the commander at length. The swiftness of [205] his response concerned me, especially when taken with the tattoo. A man who displayed an anachronism like that did so for one of two reasons: a deep reverence for the past, or a disdain for the present. “Are you sure, Commander?”

  “Yes, sir,” he answered, perfectly matching the seriousness with which I posed the question.

  I still wasn’t one hundred percent convinced, but at the moment there was no point pressing. I turned back to the captain and asked, “What can you tell me about Drovoer II?”

  “A former human colony, now on the Cardassian side of the border. The colonists resisted relocation after the first treaty was signed, but when the fighting broke out again, they had a change of heart.”

  “They abandoned the planet?” Dulmer asked.

  Benteen shrugged. “They didn’t want it as badly as the Cardassians did.”

  “Not that they had any use for it,” Commander Chakotay added, a sneer in his voice. “The climate is too cold for them, and its strategic importance disappeared after the second treaty, so eighty thousand refugees ...”

  Benteen raised a hand to silence him. “Thank you, Number One,” she said, somewhat wearily. “Your opinions on the Cardassians are already on record.”

  “And Drovoer II is still uninhabited?”

  “As far as we know, and we have no reason to suspect otherwise.”

  I stabbed my padd, striking that name from Captain Sisko’s list of Maquis strongholds. “How about ci’Nent V? Vesten Prime? Beta Paugdi IV? Are any of these worlds of any significance?”

  Benteen shook her head, perplexed. “Significant how?”

  [206] That, of course, was the very question we were trying to find the answer to. I frowned at my padd again, frustration mounting. It was never an easy matter uncovering facts in a timeline in which said facts were the fictional suppositions of a “What if” scenario. But I knew in my gut there were answers to be found here; I just wasn’t asking the right questions.

  Dulmer must have had the same thought. “How goes the fight against the Dominion?” he asked the Lakota officers.

  Benteen seemed grateful to have a question she could answer. “It’s a constant chess match with them. They make a move, we make a countermove, and both of us always looking at least seven moves ahead.”

  “And who’s winning this chess game right now?”

  Once again, Benteen’s discomfort returned. “We’re getting into an area, gentlemen, that I don’t feel I should be discussing with civilians.”

  I leaned forward, halfway out of my chair, hands on the edge of Benteen’s desk. “Captain, we’re investigating a temporal aberration that may have completely altered the very nature of our conflict with the Dominion. We need to have answers to these questions, and quickly.”

  Chakotay readied himself to protect his captain from an attack, but Benteen didn’t even notice him. She clenched and unclenched her jaw, then fell against the back of her chair. “We’ve been holding our own up to now,” she said slowly. “We’ve been able to more or less contain the Jem’Hadar in the Badlands. But there have been more and quicker strikes into surrounding systems, spreading us, and the Cardassian fleet, thinner and thinner. And now that they’ve taken the Archer system ...”

  Benteen hesitated again, debating the release of another [207] military secret, no doubt. “Go ahead, ma’am,” I prompted her.

  Her face knitted in d
eep concern, and her voice lowered to whisper. “Reports have it there is a certain lichen on one of the Archer moons that can be processed into ketracel-white. If this turns out to be true, the effectiveness of our blockade of the Badlands is cut in half. And if they can cultivate the lichen ...”

  She let that possibility hang over the room, and I carefully absorbed all she said. This scenario would drastically alter the conflict—in the Dominion’s favor. Which led to the question, if the invasion of the Narendra Sector had its benefits for the Dominion in the here and now, why tamper with the past? They still may have stumbled across a poly-point event and eliminated the Maquis, even by accident, but the connection between the two seemed more tenuous now than before.

  “I’m sorry we can’t be of more help, gentlemen,” Benteen told us. “We’re scheduled to arrive at Reves III in two hours. ...”

  “Exactly two hours?!”

  Benteen and her first officer both appeared surprised by our reaction, spoken in unison. “Let me clarify,” the captain said. “We’ll arrive in approximately two hours.”

  I rolled my eyes slightly. “That’s not a clarification, ma’am. That’s a correction.” I stood, along with my partner. “If you have any other corrections to make to your answers, let us know.”

  Benteen merely stared at us as we turned and left her ready room.

  * * *

  [208] Thirteen minutes and twenty seconds after our meeting ended, Dulmer and I were in Paris. Large armored vehicles painted with black eagles and swastikas rumbled down empty streets, belching diesel fumes into the air. Dulmer and I sat at a sidewalk cafe table, unnoticed, watching the holographic scene play out for us, while the rest of the city residents peered out from behind drawn blinds and curtains.

  “Whoever these Maquis are, they didn’t choose their name by accident,” I said, brainstorming. “There’s some parallel here.”

  “The Dominion has been using ‘blitzkrieg’ tactics,” Dulmer said.

  “True,” I said—the Dominion could not be eliminated as suspects. “Then again,” I added, “more than a few people have compared the Cardassians to Nazis.”

  “Same for the Romulans,” Dulmer said with a small shrug. “Not to mention the Klingons, on their bad days.”

  As we pondered these choices, a young Parisian, no more than a teenager, ran out of his hiding place, into the street. He stood in front of the panzer, waving his arms and shouting out a string of curses. The vehicle didn’t even slow down. Instead, it fired a staccato burst of bullets, causing a spray of blood to explode from the kid’s shoulder. He screamed in pain, barely regaining his senses fast enough to jump clear of the heavy treads bearing down on him.

  “Something just struck me,” Dulmer said.

  “What’s that?”

  He pointed to the teenager, still cursing the German troops from the sidewalk. “That’s the Maquis,” he said. “An oppressed people, watching their home being overrun by vicious aggressors, fighting back as best they know how. [209] They’re the good guys, the heroic figures of this period.”

  “Right,” I said, not quite following.

  “The Benjamin Sisko who wrote that report didn’t think they were heroic. He considered them a nuisance, if not a threat. And the way he wrote about them, he wasn’t trying to convince Starfleet of his opinion; Starfleet was already in agreement.”

  Dulmer, I realized, was absolutely right. “We’re assuming the modern Maquis is a human group, just because they took a name from human history,” I said, considering the other possibilities.

  Dulmer fixed me with a dour look. “How likely do you think it is a nonhuman group adopted a human name?”

  I stared blankly at him. Maybe I just didn’t want to see what he was driving at, but he offered nothing more. Instead, he pointed to the teenager on the side of the street. He was still cursing the troops when a German officer on horseback trotted over to the curb and casually shot him through the forehead. Then, even though the program had ignored us thus far, the Nazi seemed to look right at me, his cold blue eyes locked on mine. Evil eyes.

  Human eyes.

  “Computer, end program!”

  Dulmer managed to jump to his feet before his chair reverted back to thin air and free photons. He shot an irritated look at me.

  I shrugged by way of apologizing. “Maybe we’re taking the matter of the name too literally,” I said. It was possible the Maquis and their aggressors were both human. But this was just a guessing game based on limited information, serving no purpose other than to make us question the [210] timeline we were out to restore. And with the guesses we were making, we were only making that job harder to finish.

  We left the holodeck. Commander Chakotay was in the corridor waiting for us. “Agents, I remembered something that I believe might be of significance,” he said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I was thinking about Drovoer II,” he said. “Before the government surrendered the system to the Cardies, there was a huge artists’ retreat there. They held an annual show and competition; painters and other artists traveled from all over the sector. ...”

  I stopped listening to the commander as my mind suddenly jumped to warp. The government surrendered. Of course. Just like the French did in A.D. 1940, the Federation allowed their territory to be taken over, without regard to the affected citizenry. What if some of them stayed behind after the evacuation, intent on fighting the invaders? The answer was so obvious now that it was blinding.

  “... Why anyone would choose to name their group after an obscure painter like August Macke,” I heard Commander Chakotay say as I became aware of him again, “I don’t know. But perhaps that’s a lead?”

  Dulmer was staring daggers at him. “First of all, Commander, it’s ‘Maquis,’ not ‘Macke,’ ” he said, stressing the vowels in both names. “Second, do you really believe the Federation would concern itself with a hypothetical band of disgruntled art-contest losers?”

  The commander was wounded. “I was only trying to—”

  “You’ve been extremely helpful,” I told him as I grabbed Dulmer’s elbow to guide him down the corridor. “Thank you very much for your input.” I caught a last look at Chakotay [211] as I pulled Dulmer into a turbolift to share my newfound insight with him. I believe the commander was more bewildered by my effusive thanks than my partner was.

  After discussing my theory with Dulmer, we contacted headquarters, suggesting a refocusing of data-search parameters, concentrating on the Cardassian treaty negotiations. Within one hour and twenty-seven minutes, Kreinns contacted us with new information.

  “Your hunch turned out to be right on the money, Lucsly,” the boss said, although he didn’t seem particularly happy about it. He lifted a Mark VII-T from his desk. “Apparent point of divergence: stardate 47751. The Cardassian peace treaty had just been formalized, citizens displaced by the new border agreement were up in arms, and the Cardassians were pressing for a speedier evacuation. However, in the real timeline, the first gul on the scene, Evek, ordered his ship not to fire on the Federation.

  “So the Battle of the Border never happened,” Dulmer said, with a slight smile. I shared that sentiment We now had something more palpable than the mysterious Maquis—the over two thousand lives lost in the six-day conflict—that we were out to save.

  But the boss still wasn’t smiling. “New negotiations were initiated then and there, resulting in an agreement allowing the colonists to remain on their homeworlds, but still in Cardassian territory.”

  It took a second and a half for my mind to register that point of information. “In Cardassian territory?”

  Kreinns nodded. “The Cardassians promised to leave them in peace, and the colonists agreed to live as expatriates.”

  [212] “The Federation abandoned them? Just like that?” Dulmer asked, in utter disbelief. I shared his incredulity, although we both knew better than to question outright the veracity of this information. To voice any doubt in the validity of
the real timeline was the quickest way to get thrown out of the D.T.I.

  It took me a while (seven seconds) before I could come up with a safe comment. “As ill-conceived as the first border treaty was, I can’t comprehend how the Diplomatic Corps could have simply cut Federation citizens loose like that.”

  “It wasn’t the Diplomatic Corps that negotiated the new agreement.”

  I shook my head, confused. “Then who?”

  Kreinns hesitated, then said, “You know the old joke ...”

  My partner made a quiet moan. I brought my hand to my face and covered my eyes. Yes, we knew the old joke, a joke as old as the D.T.I. itself (one hundred two years, ten months, twenty-nine days). The joke was, “All temporal investigations lead, eventually, to the U.S.S. Enterprise.”

  “Picard,” I grumbled.

  I hate jokes.

  The former captain of the Enterprise-D, and current captain of the Enterprise-E, scowled at us over the viewscreen. He was obviously just as happy to see us as we were to see him. “What can I do for you, gentlemen?”

  “We need to ask you a few questions, Captain.”

  “This isn’t about the situation in the Narendra Sector, is it?” he asked, a frown drawn across his chiseled face. “There’s really nothing more I can offer about that anomaly—”

  [213] “No. It’s not about your encounter with the Narendra anomaly,” I said. “It’s also not about your encounter with Doctor Cochrane. Or with James Kirk. Or Samuel Clemens. Or Berlinghoff Rasmussen. Or—”

  Picard clenched and unclenched his jaw as I ran through this litany. In our prior dealings with this man, the captain of the flagship and overly decorated “hero” of the Federation, it’s always been necessary to remind him what a grand nuisance he was to the space-time continuum. When he had heard enough to come down a few pegs, he asked, sharply, “What is this about, then?”