Star Trek: DTI: Watching the Clock

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Firstday/Vien 3/Bregat 8, YC 867 (A Sunday)

  04:17 UTC

  Lucsly and Dulmur found Professor Vard at the scene of his unlikely rescue, scanning the alleyway with a whirring, rod-shaped sensor device. Dulmur had met the man only once—arguably twice—but he was still much as Dulmur remembered him: a tall, flamboyantly attired, middle-aged Tandaran with a wavy shock of what appeared to be badly dyed black hair framing a heavily lined, square-jawed face. The V-shaped ridge between his bushy eyebrows was sharper-edged and narrower than most Tandarans’. His gray eyes brightened as the agents approached. “Ahh, the amaranthine Agent Lucsly. I knew it was only a matter of time before our worldlines would converge again.”

  “Professor.”

  “And this must be your partner, Agent Delmer.”

  “We’ve met,” Dulmur said patiently, shaking his hand. “Eight years, three months, one week ago. And it’s Dulmur.”

  Vard blinked. “Really? You’re satisfied with a name beginning with ‘dull’?” He shrugged. “Well, you are DTI.”

  Dulmur let it roll over him with practiced ease as Lucsly said, “Professor, we’re here to investigate—”

  “Of course you are. The greatest temporal researcher of our age almost assassinated? I daresay you’d better investigate! But not to worry, I’ve already made thorough scans of the area. With better equipment than yours, I might add.” He flourished his scanning device.

  “So you believe the hoverbus crash was an assassination attempt?” Dulmur asked.

  “Surely you’ve spoken to the inspectors,” Vard said, “and learned that the crash has no discernible cause. Sabotage by an anachronistically advanced technology is the only explanation. And look!” He showed them the readout on his device. “Look at the residual spin states in the indium nuclei in that display panel. A clear tachyon resonance signature. Based on the decay coefficient, the tachyon field strength at the moment of the crash must have been at least three-point-seven kilomalocs. Compelling evidence of a temporal displacement. The polarity and entropy readings are consistent with a prochronistic incursion.”

  “Do you know why someone from the future might target you, Professor?” Lucsly asked. “Are you working on any sensitive projects?”

  “At the moment, I’m focused on teaching,” Vard said. “Passing on my wisdom to the minds of tomorrow—surely there’s no more important project than that.”

  “Then maybe you weren’t the target,” Dulmur suggested. “Maybe they were after one of your graduate students.”

  “Them? They’re nobody!” Vard cried, incredulous. “Obviously they were after me for something I will do in the future. Something they hoped to prevent!”

  “Leave the deductions to us, Professor,” Lucsly said. “We still don’t know for sure that the crash was a paracausal event.”

  “Well, can’t you check your shielded files to determine if it occurred in the unaltered history?” He frowned. “No, wait. The shielded files would only retain information recorded before a merger of quantum realities, information that would normally have been erased in the quantum convergence. In this case, the attack would itself have caused a divergence of timelines, with the merger occurring in the future at the moment of the time travel. Any information in your files about the time of the crash would have been recorded in this temporal branching, so they’d be of no use to you.”

  Dulmur was surprised. “You know about our shielded files?”

  Vard’s expression was the worst simulation of modesty he’d ever seen. “I designed the phase discriminators they use, Agent Duller.”

  “Dulmur.”

  “Of course. Now, obviously, the next step is to figure out what it is I’m supposed to do in the future that they wanted to stop.”

  “Don’t you think it’s more important to protect yourself against further attacks?”

  “No need,” Vard said. “How do you suppose I survived the first one? One agency from the future tried to kill me, another acted to save me. Clearly keeping me alive is important to the future of the galaxy. I’m sure I’m in safe hands. Safer than DTI could provide, certainly.”

  Lucsly and Dulmur exchanged a look. The professor barely noticed as they moved to the rear of the alley, out of Vard’s earshot. “You know there’s a possibility he’s overlooking, right?” Dulmur asked.

  Lucsly nodded. “That the crash was supposed to happen. That saving him and his students was the alteration.”

  Dulmur got a sinking feeling in his stomach. “What do we do if history says they were supposed to die?”

  “Let’s not go there yet,” Lucsly said. “Let’s focus on figuring out who came back. Maybe then we can find out what their purpose was.”

  Dulmur looked back at the professor, who was cheerily humming to himself as he fiddled with his sensor. Dulmur had never disliked someone so readily while so desperately hoping he was right.

  16:55 UTC

  With the chroniton scans proving inconclusive, Dulmur had proposed a more traditional approach to detective work: checking the area for DNA residue, reviewing security footage, questioning bystanders to find if they’d noticed anything unusual. Temporal operatives were skilled at making themselves nondescript, even invisible, but sometimes they were careless.

  And sometimes they were familiar. A few of the witnesses described a woman leaving the alley shortly before Vard and his students were found there semi-conscious: a wiry, compactly built humanoid with black hair, brown or bronze skin, a temporal ridge that might be Tandaran or Bajoran, and perhaps some form of decoration or natural ridging on her ears. Luckily for the agents, Tandaran society still employed public surveillance more than most Federation worlds, and thus Dulmur was able to turn up one-point-eight precious seconds of security footage revealing a face he and Lucsly both recognized. “Jena Noi,” Dulmur said.

  “Jena Noi,” Lucsly echoed, giving a solemn nod. He drew out his padd and began to enter text.

  Dulmur saw that he was filing a report of Noi’s presence with the Department. “Hoping to draw her out?”

  “Mm-hm.” Dulmur understood. Lucsly wanted this discovery, and its precise place and time, on the record . . . for posterity. It was the best way to send Noi a message.

  “No need,” came a new, clear voice. The agents whirled. There stood a familiar woman dressed in ordinary Tandaran garb: mahogany-skinned with just a hint of green, her face youthful with lambent gold eyes and fantastic cheekbones, her black hair pulled back into a shoulder-length braid exposing intricately scalloped, pointed ears resembling those of an Ocampa (a Delta Quadrant species Dulmur recognized from the logs of temporal incidents aboard the Starship Voyager, notably the biotemporal regression incident of Stardate 50812). If a time agent’s goal was to be nondescript and blend in, Jena Noi’s striking features made her a poor fit. No known species had her exact mix of traits; but then, she was most likely descended from multiple species, some not even contacted yet.

  “Agent Noi,” Lucsly said.

  “Long time no see,” Dulmur added.

  “Longer for you than me, Dulmur,” Federation Temporal Agent Noi said with a tiny smirk. “The lines give you character, in an old-fashioned sort of way. And Lucsly, I like the gray.”

  “Are you the one who rescued Vard and his students?” Lucsly asked. “Or the one who tried to kill them?”

  “You know I can’t answer your questions, Gariff.”

  “Who was the target? Who should we be protecting?”

  “You should go home. Just report that everything is under control. You aren’t needed here anymore.”

  Dulmur stepped forward, keeping a full head of bluster to fight the intimidation he felt at confronting a temporal operative from nearly seven centuries uptime. “This is our era, Noi. Our jurisdiction. We have a responsibility—”

  “To uphold the Temporal Accords. You know the rules as well as I do, Agent Dulmur. You’re asking me to pollute the timestream.”

  After that, there was nothing more to s
ay. As much as it rankled him, Dulmur knew she was right. The flow of information from the future could alter the timeline. In cases like this, Dulmur had no choice but to turn off his need to find the answers, to let the mystery stand.

  But that meant trusting the good intentions of a woman who, by her very nature, could never give him enough information to prove that trust was warranted.

  Seeing that she’d gotten her point across, Noi turned to leave. But she paused and turned back, her expression softening. “Just know the threat is past. The timeline is as it should be.”

  “For now,” Lucsly said. “What if the saboteurs strike again?”

  “They won’t. We got them.”

  She didn’t hide her expressions as well as she should. “They won’t strike here,” Dulmur interpreted. “But there’s something bigger going on, isn’t there? Something that affects this time as well as yours.”

  “If there’s anything the DTI can assist with,” Noi said coldly, “you will be informed, insofar as temporal regs allow. For now, consider this an order from a temporally superior authority. Go home.”

  She strode briskly from the alley and turned the corner. Dulmur knew there was no point in pursuing her; even if they’d been right behind her, she would have vanished the moment she was out of their line of sight. And no one in the street would report having seen her at all. That was the nature of the quantum-tunneling time portals the Temporal Agency used. They affected reality on a subtle level, created an ambiguity the brain couldn’t process, and so it was always impossible to perceive the moment of her arrival or departure. The brain just overlooked the discontinuity, as it would in a dream.

  Sighing, Dulmur turned to his partner. “You know her better than I do. Can we trust her?”

  Lucsly pondered. “To do what she thinks is right.”

  “Which isn’t necessarily good for us.”

  Lucsly met his eyes. “She specifically brought up asking for our assistance.”

  Dulmur nodded, understanding. “You think she wouldn’t have mentioned it if there weren’t a chance it could happen.”

  “It’s as much of a gesture of trust as we can expect.”

  “Maybe,” Dulmur said. “But trust from Jena Noi has a way of leading us into trouble.”

  DOWNTIME

  STARDATE 43731.5 to 43738.6

  VII

  Day of Sharing, Week of Laughter, House of the Heart, Year 467, Risian Calendar A Friday

  DTI Branch Office, San Francisco

  16:38 UTC

  “You’re late,” the transporter operator told Dulmur once he’d finished materializing. “Lucsly’s gonna be ticked off.”

  Dulmur headed for the exit. “Yeah, when isn’t he?”

  “See what I did there? Ticked off? Like his clocks.”

  Dulmur ignored her. He had no patience for time jokes right now, especially since the order to report in had robbed him of the quality time he’d been planning to spend with Megumi today. It was the first chance he’d had in weeks to spend any real time with his wife, and he needed that now more than ever.

  He stormed toward the assistant director’s office, where he saw Lucsly and Andos meeting with an unfamiliar woman with long, braided black hair. He was ready to barge in and speak his mind about the sacrifice of his long-overdue vacation time, but some instinct caused him to slow. There was something in the way Lucsly and Andos held themselves in the presence of the woman, a mix of deference and extreme wariness, as if it were dangerous even to speak to her. The exotic-featured, dark-skinned woman, whose species Dulmur didn’t recognize, looked way too young to command such deference. She wore an odd black uniform made of a shimmering, striated material, but it had no markings to identify her.

  Her bright eyes fixed briefly on Dulmur and seemed to analyze and judge him in a split second. She turned to Lucsly and asked a question, her expression severe. Lucsly gave a cool reply, followed by a more emphatic one from Andos. The mystery woman appeared to relent, though not without reservations, and gave Lucsly a nod as she spoke again. Lucsly’s eyes met Dulmur’s through the window, and the younger agent took that as his cue to enter.

  But instead, Lucsly moved quickly and intercepted Dulmur just outside the door. “Come on,” he said. “We have a case.”

  “What? What case?”

  “If you’d shown up on time, you’d know. I’ll fill you in en route.”

  “Hey, wait a minute!” He dashed after Lucsly, who was heading back the way Dulmur had just come from. “For your information, I would’ve got here on time, but I got sidetracked by an argument with my wife.”

  “You seem to be having a lot of those lately,” Lucsly observed. “I’d think you’d be able to adjust your time budget to accommodate them.”

  Had it been anyone but Lucsly, he would’ve taken it as snide. But Dulmur knew it was just his partner’s perennial cluelessness about anything not chronological. “I had ‘budgeted’ the whole weekend to her. You know that. A nice long weekend to make up for having so little time for her lately.” The past few months had been rough. He and Lucsly had been run ragged chasing down the Ky’rha Artifacts, a set of ancient time-displacement devices created by an ancient civilization that had been wiped out nine thousand years ago by the Shenchorig. Why the Ky’rha’s mastery of time travel hadn’t saved their civilization was a mystery; perhaps they’d simply fled into another time like the Sarpeidons had to escape the Beta Niobe supernova. Or perhaps the devices had been too few in number, too new a technology or too difficult to replicate. Only eighteen had been found in anywhere near an intact state. Mercifully, only two had been in working condition, and the Alpha Centaurian archaeological team that had discovered them, led by a Professor Miliani Langford, had used the second to repair the timeline after a member of their team had used the first to travel back to the prime of Ky’rha civilization and inadvertently created an altered history in which—according to Langford’s debriefing—the Ky’rha had successfully repelled the Shenchorig from their territory, driving them instead to migrate toward the Alpha Quadrant and overrun the Federation core worlds in the sixth millennium BCE. Afterward, Langford had shown the good sense to contact the Department immediately and turn over the five devices her team had found, which were now secure in the Eridian Vault. Despite Lucsly’s grumbling about civilians tramping around in the past without proper training, Langford had done the Federation a great service.

  But thirteen of the devices had been taken off-planet by tomb raiders and sold to the highest bidders, and it had been a race for Lucsly, Dulmur, and their fellow agents to track them all down and confiscate or destroy them before they could be repaired. In some cases, they’d had to negotiate with their counterparts in foreign governments and trust in their good faith and judgment with respect to timeline integrity—not always a safe bet when dealing with the Romulan Temporal Assessment Group or the Cardassian Obsidian Order. Luckily, the Artifacts’ technology was so advanced that no one had managed to figure them out yet.

  Still, as long as the risk had existed, there had been no rest for the DTI agents. Even when Dulmur had gotten to spend time at home with Megumi, he’d been preoccupied with the hunt. At first, Meg had understood, thinking it was the same obsessiveness he’d always had. But she’d usually been able to get him to relax and step back from that. This time, with so much at stake for the galaxy, he hadn’t been able to stop worrying for a minute. And he hadn’t been able to explain why to his wife, since the specifics of the case were highly classified. The more time he’d spent away from home, or physically at home but mentally on the hunt, the more frustrated Meg had become. She’d even accused him of having an affair. He’d joked that he wished he had time for one, but that hadn’t gone over as he’d intended.

  Now that the Artifacts were all safely in the hands of either the Department or its more trustworthy foreign counterparts, the immediate crisis past and the timeline as secure as it ever got, Dulmur had been counting on this weekend to reconnect with Meg and ma
ke things right. So for this to happen now . . . “I gotta tell you, Lucsly, for once your timing is just atrocious.”

  “Not my decision. Threats to the timeline can crop up at any moment.”

  “Save me the recruiting speech. Couldn’t you have gotten someone else to do it?”

  Lucsly stared at him. “You’re my partner.”

  “I know, but—”

  “I’m the only agent Jena Noi trusts, and she approved you for this because of your connection to me.”

  Dulmur blinked. “Who’s Jena Noi?”

  “I’ll tell you later. Right now, all you need to know is that we have to be at Risa within two days, eighteen hours.”

  “Risa?!” Dulmur grabbed Lucsly’s arm. “Are you crazy? Meg already suspects me of cheating on her! How’s it gonna look if I ditch our special weekend and go off to the hedonism capital of the galaxy?”

  Lucsly pondered for a moment. “Bad.”

  “You think?”

  “But we still have to be on Risa within two days, eighteen hours.”

  “Or what?”

  “You really don’t want to know.”

  Galartha Sector, Risa

  Day of Release, Week of Laughter,

  House of the Heart, 467 (A Monday)

  02:39 UTC

  Lucsly would tell Dulmur nothing on the transport to Risa, considering it insufficiently secure. It made for quiet company. Dulmur spent what time he could on the comm with Megumi, trying to appease her anger at him for putting his work above her again. But he couldn’t get out of telling her where his transport was headed, so the call ended with two minutes, forty-eight seconds of shouting and profanities from Meg.

  It was some small comfort that, upon arriving at the pleasure capital of the quadrant, Dulmur was given no opportunity to partake of the sybaritic indulgences that Meg had accused him of seeking out. No sooner did they arrive at the sunny Siraven Resort that Lucsly dragged Dulmur after him toward the rocky hills and cliffs beyond.