The agents of the Department of Temporal Investigations are assigned to look into an anomaly that has appeared deep in Federation territory. It’s difficult to get clear readings, but a mysterious inactive vessel lies at the heart of the anomaly, one outfitted with some sort of temporal drive disrupting space-time and subspace. To the agents’ shock, the ship bears a striking resemblance to a Constitution-class starship, and its warp signature matches that of the original Federation starship Enterprise NCC-1701—the ship of James T. Kirk, that infamous bogeyman of temporal investigators, whose record of violations is held up by DTI agents as a cautionary tale for Starfleet recklessness toward history. But the vessel’s hull markings identify it as Timeship Two, belonging to none other than the DTI itself. At first, Agents Lucsly and Dulmur assume the ship is from some other timeline . . . but its quantum signature confirms that it came from their own past, despite the fact that the DTI never possessed such a timeship. While the anomaly is closely monitored, Lucsly and Dulmur must search for answers in the history of Kirk’s Enterprise and its many encounters with time travel—a series of events with direct ties to the origins of the DTI itself. . . .
™, ® & © 2012 CBS Studios Inc. STAR TREK and Related Marks are trademarks of CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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“IS THERE ANY SIGN OF ACTIVITY FROM THIS TIMESHIP?” THE DIRECTOR WENT ON.
“No, ma’am,” Dulmur said. “It’s adrift. The subspace confluence seems stable.”
“Then we have time to examine the records. I’m granting you full clearance to whatever classified DTI and Federation Science Council records from the period you believe may be relevant to your investigation. I’ll request the equivalent clearance from Starfleet Command. And I’ll tell you what I can remember about those early days.”
“If it wasn’t Grey,” Lucsly said, “we should track down who in Starfleet would’ve headed up the investigation of the Enterprise’s temporal incidents. We know Starfleet undertook some reckless experiments with time in those early days. This must have been one of them.”
“Then how did the ship end up with civilian markings?” Dulmur asked. “Department markings?”
“Don’t get ahead of the process, Dulmur,” Andos said. “To reconstruct the truth, we need to follow the chain of events from their beginning.”
“And their beginning, as always,” Lucsly said, “was James Tiberius Kirk.”
OTHER STAR TREK NOVELS BY CHRISTOPHER L. BENNETT
Star Trek: Ex Machina
Star Trek: Titan—Orion’s Hounds
Star Trek: The Next Generation—The Buried Age
Places of Exile (from Star Trek Myriad Universes—Infinity’s Prism)
Star Trek: The Next Generation—Greater Than the Sum
Star Trek: Titan—Over a Torrent Sea
Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations—Watching the Clock
Star Trek: Typhon Pact—The Struggle Within (e-novella)
SHORT FICTION
“Aftermath” (from Star Trek Corps of Engineers: Aftermath)
“. . . Loved I Not Honor More” (from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—Prophecy and Change)
“Brief Candle” (from Star Trek: Voyager—Distant Shores)
“As Others See Us” (from Star Trek: Constellations)
“The Darkness Drops Again” (from Star Trek: Mere Anarchy)
“Friends With the Sparrows” (from Star Trek: The Next Generation—The Sky’s the Limit)
“Empathy” (from Star Trek Mirror Universe: Shards and Shadows)
MORE NOVELS
X-Men: Watchers on the Walls
Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder
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ISBN 978-1-4516-5725-8 (print)
ISBN 978-1-4516-5726-5 (eBook)
In memory of Fred Steiner
Those who would protect the past may be obliged to reinvent it.
—Vaacith sh’Lesinas
On the Edge of Yesteryear
Contents
Prologue
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Prologue
U.S.S. Everett NCC-72392
Stardate 60143.8
February 2383
A Tuesday
Agent Teresa Garcia of the Federation Department of Temporal Investigations stared at the Starfleet officer across the table. “How can you be disappointed, Heather? We just spent a week in a pocket universe!” She laughed. “This is why I love this job. I keep saying sentences I never imagined I’d say.”
Across from her, Commander Heather Peterson, the Everett’s strawberry-blond chief science officer, shrugged her slender shoulders. “I know, it should be amazing. And getting clearance to visit Elysia at all is a rare privilege, et cetera. Believe me, I was thrilled when we got the word.” For over a millennium, the pocket dimension known as Elysia had been unknown to the outside universe, for travel through the interphase zone that led there—a region of space that humans had redundantly dubbed the Delta Triangle more from historical resonance than geometric accuracy—had been only one-way until just over a hundred and thirteen years ago, when Captains Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise and Kor of the I.K.S. Klothos had joined forces to break free of the dimensional trap. Soon thereafter, a safe method for two-way travel had been developed by the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, but the Elysians—the crews of the hundreds of ships that had been stranded there over the centuries, many of them enemies in the outside universe—had wished to minimize disruptions to the insular,
peaceful utopia they had built from necessity, so their interactions with the outside universe had remained infrequent.
Peterson sighed. “It’s just that it didn’t quite live up to the hype. All the Elysians’ talk about how time stands still there. The mystery of how they remain ageless. I mean, obviously it couldn’t literally be that time doesn’t pass there, or nobody could move, talk, think. I knew all the arguments from the skeptics, that it was some kind of metaphasic radiation that kept them young or something, but I wanted to believe there was something new to be discovered about the nature of time.”
From where he sat between the two women at the round table in Everett’s crew lounge, Agent Ranjea spoke in his gentle, lilting tenor. “Well, we did gain insight into the differing laws of work and entropy in Elysia,” the Deltan agent pointed out, tilting his hairless, brown-skinned head. “I find it fascinating. Less energy expended, less disorder created in achieving the same amount of work. So our bodies wear out less, and our healing mechanisms are far more effective.”
“You find everything fascinating,” Peterson teased. From what Garcia gathered, the science officer had come a long way since she’d first met the gorgeous Deltan man ten years, seven months ago, when she’d gone all giddy in his presence and striven desperately to impress him and catch his eye. It was normal enough behavior for humans around Deltans, excusable given the sheer potency of Deltan pheromones. Garcia was still embarrassed to think about her own desperate crush on Ranjea back when they’d first been partnered—and grateful to him for his patience and understanding in helping her overcome those feelings, allowing their relationship to mature into the stable, trusting partnership, and friendship, that it now was.
“With much reason, in this case,” Ranjea replied. “Could this be part of why their society is so peaceful? If every action, even thought, comes more easily, the mind works better, endures less stress. It makes it easier to see constructive solutions, less common for distress or fatigue or frustration to cloud the judgment and provoke hostile or selfish choices. Imagine if we could find a way to replicate the effect here in our universe.”
Heather looked abashed; there was still enough of that smitten young ensign left in her that she didn’t like to risk Ranjea’s disapproval. “Of course, I can see the potential, the importance of the research. It’s just that it’s not about time. That’s what we’re supposed to investigate, right?”
Garcia suppressed a smile at the thought of how Agent Dulmur, who’d sponsored her entry into the DTI, or his legendary partner, Agent Lucsly, would react to a Starfleet officer’s presumption in speaking as though she were a member of the Department. Everett was a Nova-class scout ship attached to the DTI, providing transportation and scientific or logistical support when needed, but most career DTI agents found it an uneasy partnership at best, given Starfleet’s reputation for stumbling into temporal anomalies beyond their expertise and threatening the integrity of the timeline through their well-intentioned but often reckless meddling.
“Well, I had a blast,” Garcia told her. “The chance to study ships from over a hundred cultures stretching back over a millennium? To meet and interview people who were actually alive back then? I was in heaven!”
Peterson chuckled. “Still an archaeologist at heart. Do you ever wish you’d stayed with your studies? That you hadn’t been—” She broke off, realizing she might have touched on a sensitive subject. Teresa had been on her way to graduate studies at the Regulus III Science Academy in 2366 when a spatial anomaly had flung her transport ship, the Verity, fifteen years into the future, to find Regulus devastated in an attack by a ruthless enemy called the Borg. Her shipmates had sought to return to their own time and warn of the oncoming disaster, but Garcia had stopped them, convinced that reckless, uninformed meddling in history could do far more harm than good. Ostracized by her fellow displacees, she’d been invited by Agent Dulmur to join the Department of Temporal Investigations, where he felt her instincts for protecting history at all costs would serve her well. She’d taken his offer because she’d had nowhere else to go in this new time, and hoped that working for the DTI would help her accept that she’d done the right thing.
And it had worked—mostly. She smiled at Ranjea. “No,” she told Heather. “I’m exactly where I belong.”
“Bridge to Commander Peterson.” It was the voice of Everett’s captain, Claudia Alisov.
“Peterson here.”
“Report to the bridge, please. Are Ranjea and Garcia with you?”
“We’re here, Claudia,” Ranjea told her as all three rose to their feet.
“We’ve detected a temporal anomaly forming about eight parsecs away, just beyond the Lembatta Cluster. We’re changing course to investigate. Would you care to join us on the bridge?”
“It would be my pleasure,” Ranjea purred. He didn’t make a conscious effort to be suave, charming, and irresistible; it just happened. And every compliment and gesture of appreciation he offered was sincerely meant, if more platonically than their recipients often hoped. After all, for most humanoids, intimacy with Deltans had effects ranging from addiction to a permanent loss of self-identity, and most Deltans were far too considerate to exploit other species in that way.
“At last,” Peterson crowed as the three of them hurried from the lounge, “something interesting!” There was that carefree Starfleet enthusiasm. But Ranjea and Garcia exchanged a solemn look. Disruptions to the normal flow of time could have devastating consequences. Consequences that DTI agents understood better than most—for it was their job to clean them up.
It took six hours, twenty-three minutes to reach the anomaly, in which time the DTI agents contacted their Aldebaran branch office and received formal clearance to investigate. Aldebaran sent their own scans of the anomaly to the Everett, as did the nearby Tandaran Institute of Temporal Studies, one of the Federation’s leading temporal research centers. Neither set of scans was as clear as the Everett’s, but even the Everett could discern little through the subspace interference. “Odd sort of interference, too,” Heather Peterson reported. “It’s like two different sets of spacetime topologies and energy distributions were superimposed on one another.”
Captain Alisov’s cherubic features, framed by a mop of red-brown curls tinged with gray, drew into a frown. “You mean like a dimensional interphase?”
“There are interphasic aspects, but it’s more than that. This isn’t just an overlap with a parallel timestream; there’s a spatial displacement as well. I’m getting gravitic and radiation readings through the effect that are consistent with a quiescent neutron star, but there are no neutron stars in this sector.”
“We’ve encountered interspatial fissures that connected with other parts of the universe,” Alisov said.
“But those interphases connected with subspace domains that allowed shortcuts between those regions. This is . . . more than that. It’s like the region we’re scanning doesn’t just connect to a different place and time—it actually is both places and times at once.”
“How could that be?”
“This subspace reading might be a clue. You know that space and subspace are different facets of the same manifold, right? The conditions in one shape the conditions in the other, and vice versa.”
Alisov nodded, not confirming or denying that she knew that. “Go on.”
“But the way in which they’re interrelated isn’t uniform. Mathematically speaking, there’s more than one way that a given subspace topology can map onto a given set of spatial conditions. It can be affected by the larger-scale conditions—the position within the galactic gravity well, the subspace field density, and so on.”
“And this is relevant how?”
“Captain, the subspace configurations I’m reading are merging—but they seem to be merging toward a configuration that can map perfectly onto both sets of spatial readings. They’re becoming completely homeomorphic—pretty soon, as far as the universe is concerned, they’ll effectively be the same
place. Even though they’re definitely widely separated places in space. Maybe even separate times, or even timelines.”
Alisov blinked. “That latter part sounds more important to be definite about, don’t you think?”
“I’m working on it, Captain. The computer turns up references to a theoretical construct called a subspace confluence. First showed up in some papers in the late twenty-two sixties. Stand by.” Peterson spent a few minutes searching the theoretical physics database. “Odd. There’s not much research on the subject . . . and some of the passing mentions I find are linked to references that don’t seem to exist.”
Alisov turned to the senior DTI agent. “Ranjea? Is this one of those ideas that the DTI, in its infinite wisdom, has decided is too dangerous to let people know about?”
Ranjea shook his smooth-skinned head. “If so, it’s above my clearance level.”
Alisov’s eyes darted to Garcia, who shrugged. “Don’t look at me, I’m the new kid.”
“Captain,” called the tactical officer, a coral-hued Saurian female. “Readings on the anomaly are growing clearer. There’s some sort of ship in there.”
“On screen.” All eyes turned to the main viewer.
Only a vague gray blur appeared at first. “The image should improve as the ship comes into phase with our reference frame,” Peterson said. Indeed, the resolution quickly increased. “Definitely getting time displacement readings now . . . similar to a slingshot signature.”
“And that ship is in the middle of it,” Garcia said.
Ranjea nodded. “Heather, is it generating any kind of energy that could be causing the anomaly?” Garcia understood his thinking. Timeships intruding on the present from other centuries were a perennial nuisance for the DTI, especially when they were operated by uptime scientists or temporal agents who insisted they knew better than the time police of a more “primitive” era.
“Its engines are generating power,” she confirmed. “Basically a warp drive signature, with a chronitonic component . . . but with anomalies I haven’t seen before. Not sure where the power’s going, though. The ship has lost attitude control . . . No active sensors or comms . . . It’s warm enough to be inhabited, but it’s adrift.” She frowned. “Still, that underlying signature . . . it’s a little too basic. Like Federation basic.”
Star Trek: DTI: Forgotten History Page 1