Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations - 01 - Watching the Clock

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Lucsly winced and put a hand to his forehead. “You’re not helping.”

  “I’m just telling you what we already knew, pal.”

  “I know. I know.” He sighed. “At least before . . . at least I could believe those things were out of our hands. That they were accidents or retrocausal loops, or enemy action that caught the Accordists off guard. At least I thought they were trying to keep things on track as much as possible.” He took a look at his drink, then downed it. He coughed a few times. “At least . . . at worst, I could convince myself those things were all in the past, that going forward we were all trying to keep history from changing any more.”

  “From their point of view, that’s what they’re doing now,” Dulmur said.

  Lucsly laughed. “‘Now.’ What the hell does that word mean anyway? Everything’s now to somebody. How does it go? The distinction between past, present, and future is persis . . . no, that’s not it . . .”

  He trailed off and ordered another drink. For a moment, Dulmur thought he’d forgotten what they were discussing, but then Lucsly said, “But this . . . a Federation citizen committing such an ugly, selfish . . . ugly crime against history . . . and our own people letting her get away with it . . . intervening to make sure she got rewarded for it . . . that’s just petty.”

  “Jena said they had a good reason. Their hands are tied by history as much as ours are. We don’t get to pick and choose which parts of the past we like. It’s our past, and we protect it. Can you really blame her—any of them—for doing the same?”

  A heavy sigh. “I guess not.” Lucsly stared at his drink for a while, but didn’t do anything else with it. “How can I go back, Dulmur? How can I keep doing it if I don’t know whether any of it really accomplishes anything?”

  “First off,” Dulmur told him, “you stop overreacting.” Lucsly stared, but Dulmur went on. “You know how I got into this business in the first place? I lost a case. I lost a case, I lost a job, and I thought it was the end of the world. And that brought me to the Department, and I’m grateful for that. But in order to do my job at the Department, I had to learn that you just can’t win ’em all. Sometimes the problems are out of your hands. Sometimes all you can do is watch from the sidelines while starship captains muddle through history and try to tidy up the loose ends afterward. Sometimes you have to plead with foreign governments and hope they’ll see reason. Sometimes you have to step back and let the Accordists handle things and hope to hell they know what they’re doing. And sometimes,” he finished, “sometimes, my friend, you just have to take one on the chin.”

  Lucsly gulped down his drink. “Damn. That sounds like a really lousy job. How do you cope?”

  Dulmur smiled. “By remembering what my partner taught me from day one. That we’re not heroes. We’re not here to save the universe. We’re government employees. Our boss gives us a job, and we do the job we’re given to the best of our ability, and at the end of the day, if we finish that particular thing and get all the paperwork in order, then we’ve done everything that’s expected of us. You don’t drive yourself crazy wondering what it all means, you don’t dwell on how your actions will affect the future hundreds of years from now. That’s not your department. You just focus on the job in front of you. And if you lose a case, then you file your report, you take your lumps, and you move on to the next file on your desk.”

  Lucsly thought it over for a long time. “And that’s enough? Just being cogs in the machine?”

  “Gears in the clock, man. They don’t need to know where the hands are pointing, they just need to keep on turning.”

  Lucsly’s eyes grew unfocused, wistful, like he was imagining himself somewhere else. Somewhere peaceful and simple.

  Then he looked down at himself in disgust. “Let’s get out of here. I need a shave. And a shower. And my suit.”

  Dulmur happily led him toward the door. “Right this way, partner.”

  “And I’m three hundred thirty-four hours late to water my fern.”

  “Welcome back, Lucsly.”

  PRESENT TIME

  STARDATE 59087.2 to 59155.0

  XVII

  Day 5, K’ri’lior, 1148 After Settlement, Romulan Calendar A Monday

  DTI Headquarters, Greenwich

  19:16 UTC

  “Come on, Lucsly,” Jena Noi said. “Surely by now you understand why we had to let Admiral Janeway’s actions go uncorrected. If the past and future Janeways hadn’t destroyed the Borg transwarp hub, the Borg wouldn’t have been provoked to invade the Federation when they did, and the Caeliar would never have transformed them.” She took in their reactions. “I know what you’re thinking. Sixty billion dead to preserve our future. But the alternative was death or a worse fate for quintillions more. In virtually every known branch of the future where the Borg threat isn’t ended in this century, they become too big to defeat. They assimilate the entire galaxy by 2600 at the latest.”

  “So every uptime temporal agency,” Andos interpreted, “occupies a timeline where the Borg have been eradicated.”

  “Exactly. If Admiral Janeway hadn’t violated the Temporal Prime Directive, whatever her motivations, the entire galaxy would’ve been lost.”

  “Why not just go back and prevent the time loop that created the Borg in the first place?” Dulmur asked.

  Noi fidgeted. “That produced its own benefits too. You both know how it works. Sometimes a tragic event in history is necessary for the greater good of the future.”

  “Or maybe it’s just that the Caeliar won’t let you tamper with those events,” Lucsly said. Noi glared at him, but said nothing. “Tell me I’m wrong,” the DTI agent insisted.

  “I can’t tell you anything!” she shouted. Lucsly was taken aback; he’d never seen her lose her cool like that. “You think I want to do this, to shut you down after what they did to Shelan? After you’ve been violated like this?” She shook her head, eyes glistening. “I know you think I don’t respect the DTI, but we’re all partners in the Accords. This hurts me too, Gariff. More than you can know.” She looked away.

  Andos’s Rhaandarite perceptions missed nothing. “You know exactly who erased Shelan and why,” she accused. “And yet you do nothing to restore her.”

  “I don’t know why,” Noi said. “Not why it had to be this way. It was so needless.”

  “Yet you feel culpable for it. You had a hand in it.”

  At Andos’s words, Dulmur charged forward and slammed Noi against the wall. “You? Tell me what you did, dammit!”

  “Dulmur, you’d better let me go, you know I’m a lot stronger than I look.”

  “Tell me!”

  “Dulmur!” At Lucsly’s shout, his fellow agent froze, then relaxed a moment later, resigned. Lucsly stepped forward and laid a hand on his shoulder, pulling him back, but Dulmur swept his arm around, brushing him off and moving away under his own power.

  After a tense moment, Noi looked at Andos. “The fact that I let my guard down enough to let you read that much should tell you how deeply this affects me. But that’s all I can give you. That and the promise that if there is anything I can do to bring Shelan back, I will do it. I consider it my personal responsibility.”

  “That’s not good enough,” Lucsly said. “To you she’s just a pawn on the chessboard of history. This century is our home. Our jurisdiction. And Shelan was one of ours. You don’t have the right to take this from us.”

  “I don’t have the choice to do anything but. The best way to serve both our common goals is to keep certain things from ever being found out.”

  She caught her breath fractionally, hoping they hadn’t noticed it, but Andos had. “‘Ever’? You’re not just talking about something you won’t tell us, but about something you don’t know. Something you don’t want to know.”

  “But you know about Shelan,” Dulmur growled. “This is something bigger, isn’t it? Whatever these attacks are building up to, it’s something massive. Something so big it’s got half the factions in t
he Temporal Cold War up in arms. And you expect us to believe you don’t know what it’s all about?”

  Noi gave a wistful smile. “Think about it, Dulmur. What’s the best way to keep a secret safe from time travelers?”

  “Keep it out of the history books,” Lucsly answered. He stared. “Is that what all this is? Are all these random attacks an effort to flush out some secret? Or—” The other possibility was horrific to contemplate. “Are you all just guessing? Striking at random and hoping you hit the right target? What stakes could be so great as to justify such psychotic recklessness with history?”

  But Noi had firmed up her self-control and gave him no more. “Trust us, Lucsly. All the full Accordists are working nonstop to protect history. You know that.”

  “You failed in the Carnelian Regnancy.”

  “We minimized the impact.”

  “You failed with Shelan,” Dulmur reminded her.

  “And I’ll fix that mistake if I can,” she said. “But wars have casualties. She’s far from the first. Just be grateful they limited it to her instead of wiping you all out!”

  The agents stood firm, and Noi gave a sad laugh as her golden eyes roved across them. “You aren’t going to be talked out of this, are you? I should’ve known. How could I have thought for a moment that Lucsly and Dulmur could ever be convinced to back down?” She shook her head. “You have no idea how much you two are respected by every time agent who’s ever worked with you. It’s why we’re willing to trust you with any information about the future at all. But if there was ever a time when the secrets had to be kept, this is it.”

  “Even if it keeps us from heading off a time war in our backyard?” Dulmur challenged. “Even if it costs us more of our own?”

  Noi sighed. “If there’s anything you can do to help, I will let you know. You deserve that much. But for now, you have to respect the temporal chain of command.” She straightened. “By the authority vested in me by the Temporal Accords, Fourth Revision, I hereby order you to halt all investigations into incidents suspected of relating to the Temporal Cold War, until further notice.” After a moment, she stepped forward and looked up into Lucsly’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Gariff. You’re off the case.”

  “The order is acknowledged and understood,” Director Andos said, her tone utterly formal and precise.

  “Thank you,” Noi said.

  A moment later, the DTI agents and director were alone in the room. Silence reigned for a long moment. “Gentlemen,” Andos said at length, “you’re dismissed.”

  The two agents left the room together. “You know,” Dulmur said, “there’s no record of that meeting.”

  “No, there isn’t.”

  “It’s like she never talked to us at all.”

  “Officially, she didn’t.”

  “So officially, we’re still under orders to investigate.”

  “Mm-hm.” Technically, that wasn’t so; there was certainly a record uptime, and there were procedures in place under the Accords for penalizing agents who defied the temporal chain of command. But from a linear point of view (the kind Lucsly was most comfortable with), any such records and procedures wouldn’t exist for generations yet. And Lucsly had good reasons for favoring that point of view, reasons he’d read in Jena Noi’s face. “Someone screwed up. Shelan’s gone because someone uptime made a mistake.”

  “So who are they to tell us they know best?” Dulmur said.

  “Who indeed. Let’s go.”

  Vomnin Confederacy Outpost, Axis of Time

  Early Warp Age, Anthropocene

  Subdirector Vennor Sikran glared at Ranjea and Garcia as they sat across from him at a low Vomnin table, flanking him. “Why am I the first person you interrogate in this investigation?”

  “The principle of proximity,” Ranjea said. “Something must have recently changed to precipitate this rash action to blockade the Axis. The greatest recent change in the status quo is the beginning of contact with the Vomnin Confederacy. So it’s reasonable to investigate whether you may have done anything—however inadvertently—to trigger such an extreme reaction.”

  “Neither I nor the Confederacy could possibly benefit from this,” Sikran said.

  “We’re not suggesting you did this,” Garcia said. “You’re absolutely right—what’s happened here is damned inconvenient for you and Lirahn. It blows all your plans right out of the sky.”

  “That’s exactly right,” Sikran insisted.

  “So maybe that was the whole idea.” She leaned forward. “Maybe whatever it was you and Lirahn were trying to do spooked someone so much that they were willing to sabotage the entire Axis to stop it.”

  Sikran puffed out his cheeks, a Vomnin gesture of confusion. “I can’t imagine why.”

  “What were you trying to get from her?” she pressed, getting more aggressive. Ranjea allowed her to continue; she made a more convincing “bad cop” than he did. “What ancient technology did she have to offer you that was so dangerous to the timeline?”

  “Nothing!” Sikran insisted. “You have it all wrong! I was the provider of the artifacts, not the purchaser!”

  Garcia broke off, trading a puzzled look with Ranjea. The Deltan agent turned back to Sikran. “Lirahn was seeking to obtain artifacts from you?”

  “From the Confederacy, yes.” Sikran spread his hands. “It was nothing like you suggest. Nothing dangerous. She was fascinated by our archaeological findings,” he said proudly. “Particularly those from her own era. She was able to direct us to new places to search for artifacts, the ruins of Selakar and other contemporary civilizations. In exchange, she wished to obtain selected pieces for her own collection.”

  “Wait, wait,” Garcia said. “She told you where to find half-million-year-old ruins from her own civilization, and bought them from you?”

  “Selected pieces, yes. As compensation for her information.”

  “Didn’t you find that a little strange? I mean, she lived in the time these artifacts were made. If she wanted them, why not just stay in her own time and get them when they were new?”

  The Vomnin tilted his broad head. “Lirahn is a refugee. I assume she no longer had access to her native technology in her own era.”

  “Then why come so far forward? Why not pick the next era after her own and get them when they were only a few thousand years old, not half a million?”

  Sikran laughed. “Young lady, surely you are aware that the value of antiquities appreciates with age.”

  “And depreciates with condition,” Ranjea said. “After so much time, what could be left that was functional?”

  “The Selakar built extremely well. True, we found nothing in a functional state, but we could certainly learn much by reverse engineering. We have never encountered such formidable psionic technology.”

  “So if nothing’s left that works,” Garcia pressed, “what does she get out of it?”

  The Vomnin spread his hands again. “Some collectors have eccentric tastes.”

  “It didn’t really matter to you what her motives were, did it?” Ranjea asked. “She was providing you with the means to locate potentially valuable relics of a highly advanced civilization, and thus augment Vomnin technology—or your own career, or both. So you didn’t stop to question what her true purpose might be.”

  “It’s not my place to pry.”

  “Well, it is ours,” Garcia said. “So why don’t you tell us exactly what you gave her?”

  Sikran called up the items on his padd and showed it to them. “Just fragments of devices, mostly, as you can see.”

  Ranjea studied them: seemingly simple, decorative constructs of organic crystal, but the Vomnin’s analysis showed complex biocircuitry within them. He pointed out one in particular, a lenticular blue crystal about half a meter wide and a hand’s width in thickness. “This device seems almost intact.”

  Sikran looked it over. “Yes. A remarkably strong carbon-based quasicrystal, almost indestructible.”

  “And your analysi
s suggests it has psionic properties.”

  The subdirector nodded. “Possibly, yes. Much technology of that era was psionically based. However, it’s useless without its power core, and no such artifact exists.”

  “Can a substitute be made?”

  Sikran shook his head. “The design is unique, an organically grown crystal matrix we have no means to replicate. The instrument is useless.”

  Ranjea and Garcia exchanged a look. “Maybe someone else doesn’t know that,” Garcia said. “Or doesn’t believe it.”

  “A psionic device,” Ranjea said. “Potentially very powerful. Potentially able to augment the psionic powers of a Selakar?”

  Sikran looked nervous. “It could serve as an amplifier of some kind. But perhaps just for communication?”

  “Perhaps. But we know the Selakar have considerable coercive powers.”

  Garcia’s eyes widened. “Powers that they use to enslave the Siri. And the Siri are gifted engineers.”

  Ranjea rose to his feet, Garcia right behind him. “Gifted enough to alter the initial conditions of Axis timespace?”

  She grinned. “Let’s go ask them.”

  DTI Headquarters, Greenwich

  Day 19, K’ri’lior, 1148 AS (A Saturday)

  09:06 UTC

  Considerable consternation reigned at Greenwich when Agent T’Lem confirmed that Korath, Ronarek, and Nart, each of whom had quietly excused himself from the scientific exchange tour to pursue a separate errand over the past

  week, had all failed to arrive at their reputed destinations despite records and images to the contrary, records that

  had proved to be cunning forgeries. Two weeks of delicate probing since Agent Shelan’s erasure from history—hopefully delicate enough to evade notice by the uptime agencies—had produced nothing but frustration, and now this. The possibility that Shelan had been erased to leave the temporal researchers vulnerable lingered in every agent’s mind.

  Yet the consternation became even greater when T’Lem tracked the three physicists down—because of where they were headed. “I made contact with the Ferengi who arranged their transport—and their cover stories,” the young Vulcan agent reported over the holomonitor in the situation room, with Andos and multiple agents looking on. “He proved amenable to pecuniary persuasion, and informed me that their destination was the Rakon system.”