“Yes, ma’am. At its power levels, the propagation speed would be low, but we don’t know how close it is to the nearest ship or subspace beacon in its own timeframe. We could have weeks before it’s detected or only hours.”
“Damn,” Dulmur said. “If some ship on the downtime end picks up that distress signal and comes to investigate . . .”
“They could scan through the confluence, even travel through it, and gain knowledge of the future,” Lucsly replied, his voice grim. Of course, his voice was grim even when discussing the weather—or would be if he ever discussed the weather—but this time it was really grim.
“I concur,” Ranjea said from the Everett. “This poses an imminent risk to the timeline.”
“Director, this is Captain Alisov,” came a new voice. “Do you want us to target the vessel?”
“Negative,” Andos said promptly. “We don’t know the fate of this vessel or its crew in their own timeframe. Destroying them could alter history.”
The next voice they heard was Agent Garcia’s. “Then we’ve got to beam over there and shut down the distress signal.” Even without seeing the grim looks the agents traded, she must have sensed their reticence—naturally, for she’d had the same training as the rest of them, and far more recently. “Sure, that poses its own risk of timeline contamination, but it’s better than the alternatives.”
Andos pondered it only briefly. “Agreed. Do what you can to minimize the exposure risk, but get that signal shut down!”
U.S.S. Everett
Stardate 60145.1
“I don’t get it,” Teresa Garcia said as she and Ranjea donned a pair of holographic isolation suits prior to boarding the timeship. Since the Everett was attached to DTI service, it was equipped for dealing with situations of potential temporal contamination, and thus it carried a supply of the suits, a technology normally used by Starfleet survey teams to study pre-warp worlds without exposing their presence. The silvery, hooded suits rendered their wearers invisible to conventional humanoid senses and masked their biosigns from standard sensors—hopefully including the timeship’s intruder alert sensors.
“What is it?” Ranjea asked as he donned his own suit, which fit his frame far less baggily than the more diminutive Garcia’s. Somehow the Deltan was even able to make it look dapper.
Garcia gestured to the padd he held, containing the briefing Lucsly and Dulmur had transmitted minutes ago. “The quantum convergence of the duplicate Timeship One doesn’t make sense. I mean, I know how it’s supposed to work. If you create an alternate timeline through time travel, it coexists with the original for the whole period of their overlap, up until the moment of the original time travel. Everything leading up to that event still has to happen, or there’s a paradox. But after that moment, the timelines collapse together and only the altered one continues forward. The quantum information from the original is erased, and that includes any temporal duplicates like the other timeship and its crew.”
“Generally, yes. Unless the duplicate becomes sufficiently entangled with its new timeline to survive.”
“But that’s for downtime travel. Timeship One went uptime. The furthest forward point of divergence should’ve been when it arrived twenty-six years in the future.”
“But it wasn’t there long enough to effect any significant change,” Ranjea replied promptly. “They arrived and promptly returned. There was no interaction with the rest of the universe, so any local alterations didn’t propagate and got damped out. The only significant change was the choice made in 2272 not to launch the ship at all. So that was the point of convergence.”
Garcia nodded. “I get it. Sort of.” The timeline was only split for three days, from September 6 to 9, 2272. A ship moving forward from either of the branches that had run in parallel for that three-day interval would’ve therefore found itself in the same singular future, like two roads merging into one. The reality was far more complex than that, but the straightforward analogy helped. At least it was a more useful explanation than “Time is just weird,” though perhaps equally truthful.
Timeship Two FDTIX-02
Confluence 2275/2383
To minimize the risk of their arrival being seen or heard, Ranjea and Garcia materialized in a vacant cargo bay near the keel of the ship. The holographic camouflage of their suits let them see themselves and each other through their visors, so they were able to work their tricorders to scan for biosigns and energy signatures. “So where’s the best place to cut off a distress signal?” Garcia asked her senior partner. “The bridge? Engineering?”
“No. Somebody must be alive and conscious in one of those places to have activated the signal,” Ranjea said. “Our best bet is the main subspace transmitter junction. We can rig an apparent malfunction. It wouldn’t seem out of place.”
He led her to the door, scanned for activity on the other side, then opened it and preceded her through. The corridor was empty, so they were able to move quickly to the ladder alcove at the forward end. Garcia gazed curiously at her surroundings. A student of galactic archaeology with a focus on starfaring technology, she was familiar with the configurations of Federation vessels from past centuries. Although the exterior of Timeship Two had been fitted with more advanced equipment, the interior layout was still largely that of a Starfleet vessel from the 2260s, albeit with a few modernizations here and there.
The three-sided ladder in the vertical shaft took them into a horizontal Jefferies tube with bright red and yellow power and supply trunks running along the walls. Every few meters was an angular white archway containing overhead and floor-level lights that flickered unhealthily. It smelled clean, new, barely used, but there was a whiff of burned lubricant and ozone. Ranjea had to crouch to avoid hitting his head, but Garcia was able to stand nearly upright. They made their way across to a more central, larger service corridor with a hexagonal shape and gray walls, stretching away in both directions. Ranjea checked his tricorder, looking back and forth between the two ends of the corridor. “The transmitter junction should be forward,” Garcia said, “near the deflector dish.”
“Understood,” he said. “But I’m getting a strange power reading in the other direction, toward main engineering.”
Garcia brought her own tricorder to bear. “You’re right. Are those interphasic readings?”
“The distress beacon is a symptom,” Ranjea said. “This could lead us to the source of the problem. The sooner we can get that information to the others, the better.”
It struck Garcia as a Deltan way of thinking, giving a higher priority to sharing with the group than taking autonomous action. But that didn’t make it more right or wrong. It was the diversity of the DTI’s agents, the breadth of perspectives they brought, that gave the agency its strength—one thing they and Starfleet had in common. Besides, she trusted her partner. His perspective had proved very beneficial to her, both on the job and personally. “Lead the way, boss,” she said. She rarely called him that anymore, since they had a more equal partnership now than when she’d first been assigned to him (was it really just seventeen months and eight days ago?), but she felt the affirmation was appropriate, for her own benefit at least.
Ranjea led her several dozen meters aft to another ladder junction, which led to a corridor near the center of the ship. Garcia gasped when she emerged and saw a number of humanoids lying crumpled on the deck, all of them clad in blue civilian jumpsuits. She instinctively moved forward, but Ranjea held her back. But she could hear the pain in his voice when he said, “Teresa, we can’t intervene.”
Regulations or not, she ran a tricorder scan. “They’re alive . . . but they’re weak. Neural activity is erratic.”
“Yes,” Ranjea said, checking his own temporal tricorder. “I’m detecting quantum phase variances in their nervous systems. It could’ve exacerbated the effects of slingshot blackout.”
Garcia took that in. Take the acceleration-induced blackouts of a Tipler slingshot maneuver, then add to that the effects of
phase variances in the brain and body—different parts of the self shifting subtly out of alignment with their home reality and losing contact with one another—and the consequences could be far worse. “Will they live?” she asked.
“If they get medical help in time.”
“They’ve been here awhile, Ranjea. Help may not be coming.”
“If that’s what happened, we can’t risk altering it.”
She winced. “I know. I know.”
They moved on down the corridor, turning a corner. The interphasic effects grew worse as they came nearer to the source of the readings. A Caitian female lay mewling and panting on the deck, eyes darting around in terror at things only she could see. Nearby, a human man covered in scratches consistent with the Caitian’s claws was crying and banging his head against the bulkhead. Garcia recognized the effects of interphase psychosis, another consequence of the disruption of neural function. Farther along, a woman lay unconscious on the deck, her lower legs sunken into its solid surface. It must have phased out temporarily as she walked over it, trapping her. Judging from the swelling beneath her jumpsuit fabric, the woman’s circulatory system was badly compromised by the deck molecules sharing space with her insides.
Walking past all these people in need and doing nothing was the hardest thing Garcia had done since she’d stopped her fellow passengers on the time-displaced transport Verity from going back through the temporal warp to save Regulus from the Borg. In a way, it was even harder. Far more lives had been at stake then, but they had been abstractions, too many for the humanoid mind to grasp as individuals. She hadn’t had to look at their faces, to make the choice to walk right past them and do nothing to help. Garcia tried to remind herself that she was over a century removed from these people, that most of them were long dead already in her frame of reference. That what she saw before her was the past, its immediacy as illusory as a holodeck program.
It didn’t help.
So she tried to distract herself by wondering about the corridor itself. On a standard Constitution-class ship of this vintage, this space would have been occupied by the massive power conduits that fed the main deflector dish. But the more modern, more efficient dish up front was autonomously powered, so the conduits wouldn’t have been needed. Still, the corridor was significantly forward of the main engineering complex. What took up the intervening space?
They found out when Ranjea opened the doors on the corridor’s aft wall and led her inside. Beyond was a large, open bay three decks high, ringed by a catwalk a level above them. The deck level was equipped with a pair of freestanding, 2270s-vintage control consoles mounted against a railing that surrounded . . .
“What the hell is that?” she heard herself asking.
Whatever it was, it bore no resemblance to any Federation technology she knew. It was an intricate spherical lattice at least eight meters across, with softly glowing orbs at every node where the thick, golden-brown arcs of the lattice intersected. Within it were another couple of nested lattices, each about three-quarters the size of the next one out but equally intricate, connected to each other by radial tubes that joined their luminous nodes. There appeared to be a central core within, not quite half the radius of the whole and hovering in the center with no physical connection to the lattices. It pulsed with blue-white light and rotated slowly, revealing that it was not a perfect sphere but a multilobed shape like the inside of a mandarin orange or mangosteen. The whole thing looked organic and extremely high-tech at the same time.
“Whatever it is,” Ranjea said, “it’s drawing power from the warp engines.” He circled the construct and Garcia followed, taking care to avoid the jumpsuited personnel who lay unconscious—she hoped—around it. Now she could see the more conventional framework that held the giant bauble in place, the standard power transfer conduits that had been grafted onto its nodal spheres, an intrusion that seemed crude, almost obscene, against the diatomaceous beauty of the artifact. “And,” the Deltan agent went on, “it’s partly opaque to neutrinos.”
Garcia stared. Neutrinos could pass through entire stars and planets without even noticing they were there. “There . . . aren’t a lot of things that can do that.”
“This is undoubtedly the source of the confluence effect,” Ranjea declared. “And it is undoubtedly not Federation technology.”
“It’s so advanced,” Garcia said, as much an intuition from its design as a deduction from the tricorder readings. “But it doesn’t match the tech of any past or present supercivilization in the database. Could it be from the future? Our future?”
Ranjea tilted his elegant bald head. “There are more supercivilizations we don’t know about than ones we do,” he said, his tone hushed. “It’s a big galaxy.”
“Yeah, but if we don’t know about them today, how could these guys have a piece of their technology eleven decades ago?”
Ranjea stared at the artifact—the drive?—a while longer. Garcia knew he must be admiring its beauty, a beauty he probably perceived more keenly than she could. But then he shook himself. “We should let the brain trust back home chew on that,” he said, tapping the buttons to upload his tricorder readings to the Everett. “We need to take care of that distress signal.”
DTI Headquarters
Stardate 60145.3
A Wednesday
It was the middle of the night in Greenwich, but time of day had always been the least important temporal referent for the DTI’s personnel. Lucsly disliked the irritating tendency of reality to disrupt his neat, regular schedule, but he had long since learned to accommodate it, seeking order and regularity where he could. The timeless quality of the DTI’s secure offices, located underground beneath an unassuming row of Victorian houses just off Greenwich Park and insulated from the diurnal cycles of light and dark that prevailed above, helped him to cope. So did the presence of the familiar faces who shared the large situation room with Lucsly, Dulmur, and Andos, colleagues he’d worked with for decades. They included Virum Kalnota, the Zakdorn head of research; Loom Aleek-Om, the department’s senior historian; and of course Doctor T’Viss, who had been the DTI’s senior physicist since shortly after its inception. Members of their respective staffs hovered in the background, ready to chip in or follow instructions as needed.
Aleek-Om had been brought in more for his personal history than anything else, for the elderly Aurelian, like Andos and T’Viss, had been there from the very beginnings of the department. But, as he had apologetically explained, he had been just a consultant at that early stage, often called on for assistance by his colleague Meijan Grey, but still maintaining his tenured position at the Institute of Galactic History on Alpha Centauri III. It had only been later, as the department’s size and responsibilities had grown, that Director Simok—Grey’s successor and the longest-serving director of the department—had persuaded Aleek-Om to come aboard full-time.
As for T’Viss, she had been unable to offer any insights beyond what the official records showed. Yes, she had liaised between her DTI employers and her former colleagues on Delgado’s Science Ops team during the Timeship One project, but to the best of her knowledge, there had been no further research after the experimental vessel was shelved and eventually dismantled.
But then the Everett had transmitted the on-site agents’ scans of the device in Timeship Two’s extra engine bay. A reconstruction of the device was projected holographically above the round, black-surfaced table in the center of the room, while updated schematics of the timeship showed on one of the wall screens, next to the screens showing the Everett’s sensor feed and subspace schematics of the growing confluence zone, and opposite the master situation wall, which displayed currently active investigations and agent deployments and the status of known temporal anomalies and unsecured artifacts. Distracted by the mysterious object, Lucsly was slow to recognize that T’Viss had fainted where she sat. The others’ reactions to the event drew his attention. “Call a doctor,” Dulmur was saying. While T’Viss’s age of 18
1 standard years was well within normal Vulcan life expectancy, it was advanced enough that an episode of syncope, rare among Vulcans in any case, was worth taking seriously.
But T’Viss had already recovered consciousness and waved Dulmur off. “That will not be necessary,” she said.
“T’Viss, you fainted,” Andos said.
“No, Director,” the physicist replied, as primly and severely as she would deliver any other correction to any other person. “I . . . withdrew. The sight of that object”—she gestured at the holographic image—“in combination with the ongoing confluence event, seems to have triggered a memory.”
“You do know something about this second timeship?” Kalnota asked.
“I believe I do. However, I do not yet know what I know.” Andos’s gaze alone made it clear she was awaiting further explanation, and T’Viss strove to provide it. “The memory is . . . hidden. It has been locked away from my conscious awareness for a very long time.”
“A repressed memory?” Dulmur asked, shocked. “You mean someone, someone did this to you? Suppressed what you knew?”
T’Viss glared at him. “Had such a thing been forced upon me, the neurological consequences would have been considerable. It could not have remained hidden for so long. And it would have taken an especially formidable telepath in any case to overcome the Vulcan mind’s resistance to tampering.”
“So what you’re saying,” Lucsly said, “is that you did it to yourself.”
“Correct, Agent. I chose to repress this memory.”
“Why?”
“I do not yet know. I will need to meditate further to recover it fully.”
“But if you had reason to hide it, even from yourself . . .” Aleek-Om began.
“I believe that reason is obviated by the exigencies before us. In fact, I believe it may be urgent that I recover the memory now. And I believe, Director, that I have knowledge that will be needed at the scene of the incident, once I have recovered it from my subconscious.”
Star Trek: DTI: Forgotten History Page 14