Star Trek: DTI: Forgotten History

by Christopher L. Bennett

  Alisov rose and stared at the screen as the image became clearer. Garcia’s dark eyes widened at the sight. It did have a familiar sort of shape to it, a cylindrical main hull with two nacelles rising from the rear on short pylons. Teresa turned to her fellow agent. “Temporal Integrity Commission again?”

  “No,” Ranjea said. “This design is far less advanced. It seems—”

  “It can’t be,” Alisov interrupted. As the image came into full clarity, Garcia had to agree.

  The main hull was a tapered cylinder with a glowing, recessed deflector dish on the front and a fantail rear. Navigational sensor domes were mounted on the top and bottom of the cylinder. Extending upward from the rear, on two short, boxy pylons, was a pair of cylindrical engine nacelles whose forward Bussard collectors were red domes with faint, swirling patterns of light inside them.

  “My God,” said Alisov. “It looks like someone took the engineering hull of an old Constitution-class ship and converted it to work on its own. Look,” she said as the ship slowly tumbled to present its rear. “They’ve installed an impulse engine where the hangar deck would be. But it’s inconsistent. The warp engines are a design from the sixties—sorry, twenty-two sixties—and the basic hull configuration fits that era. But the impulse engines, the deflector dish, the sensor domes, the hull plating, they’re early seventies. Why keep outmoded warp engines and update the rest?”

  The DTI agents traded a look. Alisov knew this technology firsthand. Like Garcia, she and many of the Everett’s crew were temporal refugees, trapped in a time loop for ninety years when they’d served aboard the U.S.S. Bozeman. The Department had a way of attracting strays. Alisov had been the Bozeman’s chief engineer, and had risen through the ranks on the types of starship she was describing.

  “There’s more,” Peterson said, her voice hushed. “I ran a comparison on that warp signature. It matches one we have in our records.”

  “Well?” Alisov prompted when Peterson was slow to continue.

  Heather swallowed. “The warp signature matches the configuration of the warp propulsion units used in the late twenty-two sixties by the U.S.S. Enterprise . . . NCC-one-seven-oh-one.”

  Garcia gaped at Ranjea, who looked uncharacteristically shocked himself. Teresa remembered the DTI joke that all temporal investigations eventually led to the Enterprise. It was an exaggeration, and was meant to apply to all starships of that name, which tended to have a disproportionate involvement with temporal phenomena. But it mostly applied to the Federation’s first Enterprise, NCC-1701, whose captain—James Tiberius Kirk—was infamous in the DTI for having seventeen separate temporal violations attached to his name, a record unrivaled by any other individual in the DTI’s files.

  “But this doesn’t make sense,” Garcia said. Her training was recent enough that the lectures on Kirk’s infamous ship were still fresh in her memory. “The Enterprise was never turned into . . . into this. It was refitted into a new configuration and served a dozen more years before Kirk scuttled it in the Mutara Sector.”

  “That’s . . . not the only thing that doesn’t make sense,” Ranjea told her. “Look.”

  The ship’s tumbling had brought its hull markings into view. Garcia read them, but couldn’t process them. Couldn’t believe them.

  Timeship Two

  FDTIX-02

  United Federation of Planets

  “‘FDTI’?” Alisov echoed. “Federation . . .”

  Ranjea nodded. There was only one thing those letters had ever stood for in Federation usage. “Department of Temporal Investigations.”

  DTI Headquarters

  Greenwich, European Alliance, Earth

  Stardate 60144.5

  February 2383

  “A DTI timeship?” Marion Dulmur asked, struggling to wrap his mind around the concept.

  “Impossible,” came the blunt reply from his partner, Gariff Lucsly. “It must be from a parallel history.” Lucsly’s gaze reflexively darted to the master timeline display that filled one of the DTI situation room’s long walls, a holographic plot of known or suspected parallel timelines, their divergence and convergence points, their causal interconnections, and other relevant data. It was a sprawling chart, growing larger by the year, yet still frustratingly incomplete as a tool for predicting where or when the next temporal threat would come from.

  “That was the first thing we tested for,” Ranjea told his fellow agents over the subspace link from the Everett. Ranjea was a good man, an accomplished investigator, and Garcia was shaping up well as his partner (Dulmur thought with avuncular pride), but they had both recognized that a find of this magnitude warranted calling in the big guns. “The vessel’s quantum signature is a precise match for our own timeline, correcting for the elapsed interval. Quantum dating puts the origin of its newest components circa 2275 Common Era.”

  “You must have done it wrong.”

  “Lucsly,” Dulmur said quietly. The blond, gruff-featured agent met Lucsly’s eyes and shook his head fractionally. “We all know our jobs, partner. This ship is from our own past. And it’s connected to Kirk.”

  “Kirk.” Dulmur could practically see his taller, gray-haired partner’s hackles rise when he said the name. Gariff Lucsly was a latter-day Phileas Fogg, a man who lived for order and precision. The purity of the timestream was practically his religion. And James T. Kirk, a Starfleet captain who’d gallivanted through time with more frequency than any captain before or since, was his devil. “Somehow he’s behind this,” Lucsly grated through clenched teeth.

  “But how?” Teresa Garcia asked. “How can a DTI ship have the Enterprise’s warp signature when we know the Enterprise stayed in Starfleet service until 2285?”

  “The Enterprise did,” Lucsly replied, “but its warp engines didn’t. The refit of 2272 to ’73 replaced or upgraded everything but portions of the superstructure. Entirely new, state-of-the-art warp engines were installed.”

  “So what happened to the old engines?” Dulmur finished, seeing where his longtime partner was going with this. “You know, given all the temporal displacements that ship was involved with, you’d think the DTI would’ve wanted to study them. Hell, the DTI exists because of that ship.”

  “Because of its captain,” Lucsly corrected. “Still, you’re right. There should be records about the fate of those engines. I remember reading something in the archives, long ago. But it’s been decades.” If Lucsly couldn’t pin it down to the day and hour, his recollection must have been vague indeed.

  “Then maybe,” Dulmur said, “we should ask someone who was there.”

  “I can’t give you the answers,” Director Laarin Andos told Lucsly and Dulmur as they sat in front of her desk. “Yes, I was present at the Department’s beginnings, but only in a peripheral role. I was still an adolescent at the time!” Of course, Dulmur knew, Rhaandarites entered puberty at around a hundred and thirty. The two-and-a-half-meter DTI director was twice that now, in her healthy middle age, with no gray showing yet in the pale hair that adorned her bulbous-browed skull.

  “Still, I heard rumors,” Andos went on. “Or implications. Things people said or didn’t say, or the way they said them, that suggested a deeper story I wasn’t being told.” Dulmur and his partner knew to take this very seriously. Rhaandarites’ gifts for processing social dynamics made them experts at reading between the lines. “Something to do with the Enterprise’s engines and some kind of temporal experimentation.”

  Lucsly shook his silvery head. “No. Director Grey would never have authorized experimentation.”

  “Meijan Grey was not the only voice of authority in those early days,” Andos told him. “The Department didn’t spring to life fully-formed, with Starfleet readily heeding our counsel as they do now.” Dulmur laughed at her sarcastic remark. Lucsly, being Lucsly, did not. But her point had been made.

  “Is there any sign of activity from this timeship?” the director went on.

  “No, ma’am,” Dulmur said. “It’s adrift. The subs
pace 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.”

  I

  Starfleet Headquarters, San Francisco, North Am, Earth

  Stardate 3113.7, Old System

  December 2266

  “I think you’re wasting your time here, Antonio,” said Commodore Burton Kwan. “This story Kirk and his crew are spinning is just too ludicrous.”

  Commodore Antonio Delgado stroked his short, grizzled beard as he considered his colleague’s words. “Did you verify it in the ship’s computer logs?” he asked the younger man.

  “Well, yes, but . . . the computer . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “It kept calling us ‘dear.’ If you ask me, the whole thing’s an elaborate practical joke.”

  “Well, how else do you explain the Enterprise suddenly appearing in the Oort cloud, braking hard from high warp, just hours after disappearing without a trace from Sector 006? We’ve confirmed the presence of that ‘black star’ Kirk advised us of—it appears to be some new class of singularity. And we have found a passing reference in records from the period to an ‘unidentified flying object’ sighting by a Captain John Christopher, United States Air Force.”

  “So you’re saying this is possible?”

  Delgado hesitated. “I’m not saying anything on the record. And neither are you, is that clear?”

  Kwan scoffed. “I’m happy to be left out of it. And even if I weren’t, I know better than to cross someone who plays golf with Admiral Comsol himself.” He came to a halt outside the door to Briefing Room 14. “They’re in here, waiting for you. I leave them and their mess, whatever it turns out to be, in your capable hands.”

  Delgado shook his balding head as the younger commodore strode away. Kwan was the same kind of small-minded bureaucrat as the ones who’d dismissed the Enterprise’s first report of time travel earlier this year—an alleged seventy-one-hour backward jump resulting from a cold restart of the vessel’s warp engines to escape the breakup of planet Psi 2000—as a mere time dilation anomaly. If Kirk’s claim had been taken seriously sooner, valuable time might have been saved.

  Delgado chuckled to himself. Then again, if this pans out, I may have all the time in the universe.

  He entered the briefing room, and Captain Kirk and his first officer, the renowned half-Vulcan Commander Spock, rose to greet him. “Captain Kirk,” he said, shaking the younger man’s hand. “I’m Commodore Antonio Delgado, deputy chief of Starfleet Science Operations. Commander Spock,” he appended, merely nodding at the Vulcan, who returned the greeting in kind. Despite his executive position, Spock wore the blue tunic of the science division rather than the command gold worn by Kirk and Delgado, reminding the commodore that he served as Kirk’s chief science officer as well—a doubling of responsibility that would be difficult for anyone but a Vulcan to pull off. Delgado may have been second-in-command of Science Ops himself, but his role was chiefly administrative.

  “Pleased to meet you, sir,” Kirk said, though his impatience was clear. “If I may, I’d like to ask—”

  Delgado held up a hand. “I know you’re eager to get back to your ship. We’ve put you through enough of a runaround already, and I’m sorry to add to it. But I can tell you that this time, you will be listened to, and you will be believed.”

  Kirk’s eyes widened, his stance easing. “I’m . . . glad to hear that. I appreciate that it’s an extraordinary thing to ask someone to accept, but we’ve offered you the data from our ship’s computers, and Mister Spock’s sworn testimony as well as that of the rest of my crew.” Kirk’s tone conveyed particular disbelief and offense at having the Vulcan’s account called into question. Delgado respected that level of loyalty and trust. It had been rare enough in his own experience. Political loyalty was something he knew how to bargain and barter for, but he knew it came and went as expediency demanded. Personal loyalty, the sort he sensed here, was far more elusive.

  “Well, you understand we needed time to verify the corroborating evidence. It’s essential to be absolutely sure of something like this.”

  “Naturally,” Spock replied, his voice a rich baritone. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

  “So with that in mind, I hope you won’t mind going over your account one more time for me.”

  Kirk suppressed a sigh. “Of course, sir.”

  The three men sat around the polygonal briefing table and Kirk began. “As I said in my log, the Enterprise was en route to Starbase 9 for resupply when we were caught in an intense gravitational pull from an uncharted black star. Like a black hole, but different somehow.”

  “As though its gravitomagnetic effects extended into subspace,” Spock added. “Even at warp, all subspace geodesics tended to spiral in toward the singularity. Only by employing maximum warp power were we able to reverse course and break free.”

  “We hurtled out of control,” Kirk went on. “Most of us blacked out from the acceleration. When we recovered, we found ourselves inside Earth’s atmosphere. We were lucky we didn’t crash into the surface. Attempts to contact Starfleet Control failed, but my communications officer picked up a broadcast on an old EM band, announcing that the first manned moon shot would launch the following Wednesday.”

  “And from that,” Delgado asked, “you concluded that you were in 1969?”

  “Not from that alone, sir,” Spock told him. “It only reinforced the conclusion I had already drawn from reviewing the sensor logs. Our trajectory on breaking free of the singularity was consistent with the theoretical predictions for a closed timelike curve around a Tipler object, which the dense, rotating mass of the singularity might well approximate. My scans of Earth and the Sol system revealed no traces of antimatter use or transtatorbased technology, no orbital facilities or habitations beyond Earth, and no verifiable indications of extraterrestrial life on Earth itself. The configuration of the stars and planets established a date of July 12, nineteen hundred and sixty-nine Common Era in the Gregorian calendar—four days before the launch of Apollo 11.”

  “We then detected the approach of a military aircraft of the period,” Kirk continued. “We attempted to retreat to avoid detection, but our systems were damaged, sluggish. The aircraft was armed with missiles, and from what I recalled of the tense political climate of the period, I knew we were in danger of being preemptively fired upon. I ordered the tractor beam activated to hold the aircraft at a safe distance.”

  “Were you aware that the aircraft might be damaged by the tractor beam?”

  “To be honest, no, sir, it didn’t occur to me,” Kirk said. “Since the aircraft was small enough to fit entirely within the beam, I assumed it would simply feel a uniform attraction, no shear or strain.”

  “In the captain’s defense, sir,” Spock pointed out, “few people today are accustomed to dealing with non–antigravity-based aircraft.”

  “But you recognized the danger, Commander.”

  “Yes, Commodore. Considering the relationship of gravity, thrust, and lift in the operation of a fixed-wing aircraft, I realized that altering the effective gravity vecto
r with our tractor beam would throw off the balance and cause the aircraft to tumble out of control. I promptly alerted the captain to the risk, but at that point the tractor beam had already been engaged, and the aircraft quickly began to break up.”

  Delgado turned back to Kirk. “So you felt you had no choice but to beam the pilot aboard.”

  “Captain John Christopher, yes. He was only in danger because of my mistake, sir,” the captain told him. “I couldn’t let him die.”

  “So instead you thought it was a good idea to give him a guided tour of a starship from centuries in his future. Thereby exposing him to knowledge far beyond what his society was ready for.”

  “Naturally I considered beaming him back immediately, before he knew what had happened. But if he arrived intact on the ground before his aircraft even crashed, I knew that would raise a great many questions.”

  “Did you consider sedating Captain Christopher until he could be returned to the crash site? Perhaps with some minor injuries consistent with ejecting from a crash?”

  Kirk frowned. “With all due respect, Commodore, he was a human. A military pilot from the same country that first put humans on the Earth’s moon. He was a spiritual ancestor, perhaps even a literal ancestor for all I knew. I’d wronged him enough tearing his ship out from under him. I wasn’t going to knock him out and give him a beating as well.” He took a breath, gathering himself. “I felt I owed him an explanation. And owed it to myself to assess what kind of man he was before deciding on his disposition.”

  “And the temptation to meet a ‘spiritual ancestor’ wasn’t a factor?”

  The captain gave a wry smile. “Would you have felt any differently, sir?”