Star Trek: DTI: Forgotten History

by Christopher L. Bennett

“No, Lieutenant,” Jalili said. “It’s . . . er . . . not a general broadcast.”

  “What?” Delgado demanded. “It was beamed specifically here?”

  “Yes. Sir . . .” Jalili was hesitant. “It’s . . . on Timeship One’s encrypted frequency!”

  DeSalle was stunned. After a moment, he gathered himself and looked around at the bridge crew, all of whom were clearly in the dark. “We’re not transmitting,” Hadley assured him.

  “Put it through,” came the admiral’s voice.

  After a moment, a static-drenched voice began to speak. “. . . miscalculation . . . critical . . . braking thrust failed . . . we overshot by decades. Integrity field . . . inadequate . . . major structural damage. Hawking radiation . . . overloaded shields . . . lost half the crew . . . Hadley . . . Dierdre.”

  DeSalle spun to face Watley, who was staring back at him in horror. He saw in her piercing eyes what he’d failed to realize himself: that the voice he was hearing was his own.

  “Couldn’t let it stand,” the voice—DeSalle’s voice—went on. “Only chance . . . reverse slingshot. No way . . . survive a second trip . . . but had to warn . . . star nearby . . . gave the order . . . go back . . . warn ourselves . . . don’t launch the mission! Don’t launch the mission! For . . . love of God . . . don’t . . .”

  The voice trailed off into static. After a long moment, Jalili spoke into the void. “Signal power is fading, sir.”

  “Admiral, let us go,” DeSalle pleaded. “We’re faster than anything else at the station.”

  “No!” the admiral barked. “We don’t know what effects there might be. And I wouldn’t wish that on you, Vincent.”

  “Sir, we—”

  “Stand down, Commander, that’s an order. We’re dispatching the Hypatia to investigate.” A pause. “For now, power down the ship and return to the station. Do you hear me, Mister DeSalle? Get off that ship.”

  Warlock Station

  Stardate 7261.3

  September 2272

  As Meijan Grey had raced toward the Black Star system on the fastest ship available, she had hoped that the distress signal from Timeship One had been a hoax, some trick by Romulan or Tholian spies who had learned of the DTI’s experiments and wished to scuttle them. But the updates she’d been sent throughout her journey, the images and data she’d pored over for hours and then relived in her nightmares, had been undeniable.

  The Hypatia had found the timeship adrift fifty-eight hundred AUs from the dim red dwarf Gliese 229, its hull scarred and half melted from radiation, its superstructure warped and buckled from overwhelming gravitic stresses—even as the exact same timeship sat pristine and undamaged back at Warlock Station. The boarding party had arrived too late to find any survivors—and it was clear that even the faster Timeship One would have had no better success. The surviving crew had evidently tried to shield themselves by donning the surplus life-support belts from the timeship’s emergency supplies, but the fierce radiation—both the runaway Hawking flux of the time warp and the more exotic radiations from the compromised warp reactor—had disrupted their force fields. Only the diminished bridge crew had been far enough from the engines for their belts to remain functional, but the miniature air tanks and carbon-dioxide scrubbers in the belts’ dorsal packs had been damaged by the turbulence of the return trip and had failed shortly after Commander DeSalle’s distress transmission. It was a textbook illustration of why the force-field belts had been phased out after less than two years in service—several fatal incidents had driven home the folly of trusting one’s life to a system with no way of failing safely. Had the crew worn spacesuits, at least a power disruption wouldn’t have instantly depressurized and suffocated them. But the timeship project relied heavily on surplus technology that Starfleet wouldn’t miss, and it had been assumed that the belts would be adequate for whatever crises might arise in a “simple” test flight.

  Maybe that underlines the overconfidence that went into this whole project, Grey thought as she surveyed the wreck of the timeship, now docked in the free-floating drydock berth several kilometers from Warlock Station, while the intact, earlier iteration of the timeship remained docked at the station itself. The theorists had no reason to believe the two ships—or rather, the two distinct spatiotemporal quantum states of the same ship—would spontaneously reconverge or blow up or whatever if brought together, but Delgado’s team hadn’t wanted to take any chances—an admirable, if belated, sentiment. Or perhaps they simply didn’t want to force the occupants of the station to see the devastation of their dreams, the burned and broken remains of their colleagues and friends.

  “Have you determined what went . . . what will go wrong?” she asked Delgado later as they met alone in the conference room, taking care not to put any flavor of accusation in it. She knew he’d cultivated her friendship for selfish reasons, but she could be selfish too; she enjoyed his attention, as far as it went, and it was better personally as well as professionally if their interactions remained cordial. Besides, she’d come to trust that, however manipulative his methods may have been, his motives for pursuing time travel were reasonably constructive and selfless. And frankly, she’d wanted the project to succeed too. She didn’t want to be at odds with him over this.

  “It’s hard to say,” the admiral replied. “The data banks are badly corrupted. It could take weeks to reconstruct what happened. Clearly they went much further forward than intended, though not nearly as far as the Enterprise journeyed back on two occasions. Our best estimate is twenty-six years.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. We’ve added more shielding, more structural bracing, than the Enterprise ever had. And the warp field, the gravitomagnetic field, it all checks out fine in the real . . . the original timeship. Maybe . . . DeSalle said it was a miscalculation, so maybe someone . . .” He trailed off before he said something regrettable about the dead—the dead who were still living.

  Grey furrowed her brows. “How long until the ship was meant to launch?”

  “Thirty-two hours.”

  “What will you do when the time comes?”

  “We have no choice but to suspend the launch. At least until we can understand what this . . . manifestation truly means. Or determine a way to prevent it.”

  “If T’Viss is right . . .” Grey began. “If time can’t be changed . . .”

  “No,” Delgado reassured her, placing his hand briefly on hers. “Even if timelines can’t be erased, they can still branch out. What we’re seeing is just one possible branch. We just have to ensure we take a different one. The very fact that we received this warning shows that we’re already on a new branch. We’ll just . . . we’ll wait, we’ll study these ruins down to the atom until we determine what went wrong, and then we’ll fix it.” He mustered a tentative smile. “This could turn out to be a blessing in disguise, Jan. To be forewarned about a great disaster, to have an opportunity to make sure it never happens . . . it illustrates the whole reason I’m pursuing this.”

  Grey stared at him. “How can you look at . . . at that and be optimistic?”

  He met her gaze soberly. “Because I have to. It’s the only way I can face it. I have to believe the universe gives us the chance to correct our mistakes.”

  Wordlessly, she took his hand and tried to share in his hope.

  The station’s teams worked nonstop analyzing the remains—both of the ship and its crew—but for Grey, and for the timeship’s crew themselves, the next thirty-two hours had the feel of a vigil, a long, still period of waiting for . . . something. T’Viss insisted that the moment would pass like any other, that there would be no tangible sense of change; indeed, if this timeline had already diverged from the one in which Timeship One was destroyed, it had done so the instant the vessel had been returned from the future. But to the non-Vulcans in the station’s complement, the moment loomed like the sword of Damocles.

  As the time neared, Grey, Delgado’s core team, and the timeship crew all gathered in the station’s control
center, their eyes on the original Timeship One outside the port and its derelict twin on the main viewscreen. Even T’Viss was there, though she displayed no sign of interest in the vigil and was concentrating on the forensic analysis of the wreckage. Technically the moment of the timeship’s scheduled launch from the station had already passed; with the ship powered down and the crew standing here aboard the station, there was no way they would make the slingshot jump at the same moment Jalili was counting down to. But that was the moment that carried the most weight for the watchers, the point of no return, and Grey could see Dierdre Watley mouthing the numbers silently as well. “T minus five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . mark.”

  Grey looked around at the timeship crew, reassuring herself that they were still here, safe and sound. DeSalle and the others let out held breaths and began to chuckle in relief and embarrassment.

  But then alarmed cries came over the comm channel from the drydock. Grey and the others spun to face the viewscreen—and saw only an empty scaffold. The duplicate timeship was gone! Grey turned back to the viewport—the original, intact ship was still there.

  “Admiral, this is the infirmary!” came a new voice. “All the bodies . . . they’ve vanished!”

  It took a few minutes to collate the reports and sensor readings. No one had actually noticed the moment of disappearance, and lack of attention couldn’t account for it. Doctor ch’Venethes had been conducting a quantum scan on one of the bodies, looking right at it, and yet she had no memory of seeing it vanish, simply of realizing after a moment that it wasn’t there anymore. And the quantum scanner no longer held any data from the scan in progress, as though it had never begun, even though more conventional recorders did still show the presence of the ship, equipment, and bodies, a presence which abruptly ceased at the moment the time jump would have occurred. The playbacks showed it all briefly blurring out, as though the readings became ambiguous, before it vanished without a trace.

  Of all of them, it was the unflappable T’Viss who seemed the most stunned. “This should not have happened. It suggests . . . some form of quantum reconvergence . . . the alternative-state information collapsed, erased. But that would suggest . . .”

  When T’Viss resisted saying it, Grey filled the void. “It would suggest that it is indeed possible to unwrite a moment in time. That any coexistence of two timelines may be temporary, with only one state winning out in the end.” She looked around at DeSalle and his crew, at Timeship One, at everything. “If this had gone differently . . . if the ship had gone further back, made some broader change . . . it could’ve been our existence that ceased a moment ago. The existence of everything we know. Just like what Kirk described at the Guardian.”

  Delgado put a hand on her arm. “Jan, what are you saying?”

  “You can’t deny it anymore, Antonio. Don’t let your dreams blind you to the facts. Traveling in time means putting our very existence at risk. It’s too dangerous.” She looked around the room, took in the stunned and sobered expressions, the terror and relief at dodging a bigger bullet than they’d realized. “I think most of us here can see the same thing. This experiment is over. We’ve found out what we need to know about the nature of time. We’ve found out how fragile it can be.

  “I’m sorry, Antonio. But the DTI will support no further experimentation with time travel. I’m ordering this project shut down. Timeship One is to be dismantled.”

  Delgado was shaking his head. “No, Jan, don’t do this. Don’t rush into this decision. There’s still so much we can learn, so much good we can do.”

  “I know, Antonio. I know. But we’re not ready yet. We’re not smart enough to handle this kind of power.”

  She took a breath, considering the ramifications of those words. A new understanding of her role was forming in her mind, and she only hoped she could make Delgado see it too, that they could stay on the same side in this. “The Department of Temporal Investigations was founded to regulate temporal research. But we need to do more than that. If we have the power to endanger the very fabric of reality, then we also have a responsibility to protect it.

  “That’s what the DTI’s mission has to be from now on: preserving the integrity of history itself.”

  VII

  DTI Headquarters

  Greenwich, European Alliance, Earth

  Stardate 60145.0

  February 2383

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Marion Dulmur told his partner once they and Andos had completed reviewing the records of the timeship incident. Andos has been called away to deal with the continuing bureaucratic fallout of the recent Split Infinite affair, so the two special agents were alone in the situation room for the moment. “The ship in the records was Timeship One, but the one Ranjea and Garcia found is Timeship Two. And it only jumped forward about twenty-six years, not a hundred ten years, five months, and thirteen days. And there was no mention of this subspace confluence effect.”

  “The ship’s construction is different too,” Lucsly said, calling up a schematic of Timeship One on the situation room’s display screen, next to a sensor image of the other ship that the Everett had transmitted. “They’re built on the same lines, but Timeship Two incorporates upgrades that were still in prototype as of 2272.”

  “Hmm, but the engine signature is still the same, allowing for minor construction variances. Those are the old Enterprise engines, the ones altered to create a chroniton field.”

  “So we’re looking at a later variation on the same testbed,” Lucsly said.

  “But how? The records, even the classified records, show that the timeship and the Enterprise engines were dismantled. That the research was abandoned and Delgado’s record was uneventful afterward . . . three more routine years in Science Ops, then a year as an adviser to President Lorg, then retirement.”

  “Records have been redacted before,” Lucsly said. “And I have a hard time believing Delgado would give up so easily, even with Director Grey standing in his way.”

  “Yeah,” Dulmur said. Then he frowned. “Although . . .”

  He trailed off, and Lucsly turned to face him. “What?”

  Dulmur hesitated. He knew how Lucsly idolized Meijan Grey. She was the foundation of everything the DTI stood for, and that was everything that Gariff Lucsly lived for. So he spoke carefully. “I’m just surprised that Director Grey was willing to authorize the time research in the first place. I always thought she was a lot more hawkish about protecting the timeline.” Dulmur saw through the bullpen windows that Director Andos was returning to the room.

  “And she was—after the timeship incident,” Lucsly countered, predictably rising to his idol’s defense. “It drove the risks home to her, shaped her into the leader she became. Even before then, she insisted on stringent precautions, traveling only into the future.”

  “It was a different time,” Andos said. “There wasn’t as much temporal research then as now, in the Federation or elsewhere. Not as many people, or governments, were aware that time travel was more than a theoretical possibility. Aside from our work monitoring the Guardian and the Black Star, there was little need for active enforcement, so the DTI was more an institution for research and policymaking. I spent most of my early years there poring over historical records for evidence of anachronisms, or refining algorithms to extract data from old Guardian scans. Director Grey was a scientist first, so naturally she was open to experimentation until it proved too hazardous.”

  “But she was ultimately a practical woman,” Lucsly insisted. “She made the DTI what it is today—never forget that.”

  “Okay, okay,” Dulmur said, raising his hands in surrender. “Believe me, partner, I agree completely. I wouldn’t think of saying a word against our founding mother. It’s just . . . well, you know how it is. You dig closely into the past, you always find that things were more complicated than the history books say.”

  “Hm,” Lucsly grunted.

  “Hell, look at the testimony Captain Kirk gave
for the Council hearings. Who would’ve thought James T. Kirk would be such a strong voice of opposition to temporal research?”

  Lucsly grunted again. “Kirk was always good at giving speeches, but you know exactly how many of his seventeen temporal violations were committed after he gave that testimony. It’s his actions that define him, not his words.”

  Dulmur frowned. “That’s another thing that bothers me. Delgado’s people were unable to make a slingshot work with anything but the old Enterprise engines. Sure, it’s not easy to pull off a slingshot maneuver. Even if you have the right kind of engine and know how to configure it, it’s still insanely risky. Otherwise anyone with a warp drive could change history on a whim. But we know Kirk’s crew was eventually able to configure the later Enterprises’ engines to generate the right kind of chroniton field for a successful slingshot. They even did it with a Klingon bird-of-prey when they went back to retrieve the humpback whales.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “So what did Spock and Scott know that Delgado’s scientists—including T’Viss, by the way—didn’t know?”

  Before Lucsly could reply, the director’s comm signaled. “Andos here,” the towering Rhaandarite said.

  “Signal from the Everett, Director.”

  “Patch it through.”

  A moment later, a melodious, Deltan-accented tenor came over the channel. “Director, this is Ranjea.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Two troubling developments to report, ma’am. The subspace confluence zone around the timeship has begun to expand. Moreover, the ship has begun to emit a distress signal.”

  Andos and the agents traded a concerned look. “Can you tell whether this signal is detectable in the past as well as the present?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Given the ship’s power curve, such as it is, the signal gain is less than half what it should be. That suggests that the majority of the signal energy is being emitted in some other reference frame.”

  “Would the signal still be strong enough to be detectable at interstellar distances?”