The Collectors

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “So? This just proves my case. You’re interventionists now, playing dangerous games with time.”

  “Look closer,” Danlen said. “See what we’re not doing. Check the history of the Federation, of its major worlds. What do you see?”

  Just the thought triggered a response, and the map adjusted—at least from her point of view—to highlight the portion of the timeline in question. She saw fewer interventions there, fewer branchings and terminations. Where alterations had occurred, they had been to shield Federation worldlines from disruption—though often at the expense of others.

  “You’re wrong about our origins and purpose, Jena,” Danlen told her. “We’re not tools of the interventionists—we’re the Federation’s best defense against them.”

  “By using their methods?”

  “Sometimes that’s the only way to win. You don’t know what it was like. You’re right—without a galaxywide defense, we were helpless at first, besieged. We had no choice but to strike back.”

  He came around to face her. “But eventually we built something better than what you had. Your Accordists and anti-Accordists watch each other warily across the barrier of your defense grid, but you haven’t really done anything to beat them, because you’re too afraid of changing anything. We’ve taken the fight to them. We’ve prevented most of them from ever inventing time travel. And we monitor the timeline to make sure time travel doesn’t fall into unapproved hands.”

  “And who does the approving? You?”

  “Who else? We’re protecting the Federation. If that means only the Federation gets to have time travel, it works for me.”

  “And everyone else can go to Gre’thor, is that it?”

  “What’s good for the Federation is good for the galaxy.”

  “Not if the Federation thinks that way.”

  “We’ve had few complaints.”

  “Because you’ve erased anyone who wouldn’t go along!” She studied the map some more, still struggling to believe any version of her colleagues could be responsible for such crimes. “Why does the Aegis tolerate this?” As the most ancient and pervasive temporal agency around, one that had played a subtle yet critical role in shepherding the Federation’s own founding worlds to maturity, the Aegis must surely have survived largely intact in this history.

  “Oh, we’ve had our clashes with them over methods,” Danlen conceded. “But you know them: always having to be subtle and secretive and indirect. They tolerate us so long as we leave the major events alone. Naturally, we protect the history leading up to events like the Borg Redemption, the accord with the Body Electric, and the defeat of the Ekpyrotics. That means the galaxy as a whole is safe, even if the flow of events changes now and then.” He tilted his head. “Sometimes the Aegis tries to stymie our plans, but they know better than to try unmaking us altogether. It wouldn’t go so well for them if they tried.” She hoped that was simple bluster.

  Noi continued to study the timestream map around her, disturbed by how few of the temporal branches it displayed continued indefinitely forward. Naturally, anything that happened could never unhappen; every original timeline coexisted alongside its altered counterparts. But under the right circumstances, depending on the nature of the alteration, an original and its paracausal offshoot would retain a quantum correlation strong enough to draw them into merger once they both reached the moment when the time travel was initiated, at which point the original would be absorbed into the altered one, its quantum information erased, inaccessible from that point onward. Those timelines, then, had no futures, only pasts. And it was shocking to see how many of them, at least in that sheaf of timelines connected by TIA activity, had their futures cut off, pruned from the tree. The agency was practicing bonsai on a multiversal scale.

  Her own reality was on this map, tantalizingly close alongside the TIA’s home timeline. In theory, she could still access its past if she wanted to, just by initiating the right kind of quantum shift. But in present time, it was already in the process of merging into the TIA’s history. The chart grew unclear at this point, offering projections and potential branchings rather than certainties; but the projected odds for the survival of her timeline were slim. In theory, as long as Noi had the opportunity to return to the point of alteration and negate the triggering event—whatever it was—she could shift the quantum balance back to her own timestream, bringing this chaotic one to an end. Normally she preferred to find an alternative solution, one that would allow both timelines to survive stably; but this timeline sheaf was too potentially hazardous to the rest of the multiverse.

  But she knew that Danlen and his people saw the probabilities too. To them, the lingering echo of her history was a threat to be contained. So long as they were convinced that they were defending the Federation, they would never agree to help her.

  Then again, she could tell that the situation was not as secure as Danlen had claimed. She pointed, directing his attention to one of the temporal battle fronts. “Looks to me like a few rival factions have managed to avoid getting decohered. So much for prevention.”

  “There are a few lingering versions of various rival forces maintaining holding actions, but it’s only a matter of—” He cleared his throat. “They’re not a serious threat.” Evidently TIA agents hated time puns as much as DTI agents did.

  “And what about this?” She gestured at another TIA intervention in the late twenty-seventh century. “That’s not in response to a temporal incursion.”

  “Our mission is to protect the Federation from threats. The Norolob would’ve conquered half the Carina Arm sectors of the Federation if we hadn’t prevented their acquisition of slipstream drive.”

  “And that conquest spawned a resistance movement that eventually spread to the Norolob’s own empire and led to their government being replaced with a more benevolent one. The Norolob Republic is one of our staunchest allies in my timeline, and they were vital intermediaries in building a lasting peace with the Voth. You’re not protecting the Federation by coddling it. You don’t have the ability or the right to decide what parts of history are helpful and what parts are hurtful.”

  Danlen studied her, then shook his head. “I should have known you’d be this stubborn. All right, let me show you this.” With a gesture and a thought, he zoomed out the timeline chart to a megayear scale. Most of its detail vanished, but he called out several hexagonal windows pinned to various points in spacetime millions of years and thousands of parsecs apart. “Do you recognize these energy signatures?”

  She did. “Obelisks. Ours isn’t the only one.”

  “Our investigations of the timeline have been more . . . robust than yours,” Danlen said. “We’ve exploited uptime technology you’ve probably avoided. So we’ve found many of these artifacts seeded through history and prehistory. Several of them have triggered historical alterations, but generally ones remote enough not to affect the Federation.”

  “You don’t consider that a hazard, then?” she challenged.

  “Actually, Jena, I do, though not for your reasons. These obelisks are immensely powerful. They originate somewhere far up the timestream, and whoever’s up there evidently doesn’t much care what effect they have on history. That’s a hazard we can’t afford to overlook. We’ve worked for centuries tailoring the optimal history for the Federation. We can’t risk letting a wild-card factor disrupt our efforts.”

  He softened his stance and tone a bit. “We have different philosophies, different histories, but we have a common cause here, at least. We need to understand and contain these obelisks. And you have direct experience that we need. I want you to work with us on this. It’s in both our best interests.”

  Noi studied him, trying to get a read beneath the surface. Her Vulcan and Ocampa ancestry on her mother’s side, combined with a touch of Cygnian on her father’s, granted her moderately strong telepathy, and this was no time to respect a colleag
ue’s mental privacy—not after he’d already tried to do the same to her. Danlen proved difficult to read, though. He wasn’t entirely human, and as a temporal agent he was highly disciplined and good at keeping secrets. Still, she caught a whiff of unsecured emotion off him as he pondered the obelisks: envy and craving. He couldn’t stand the thought of anyone having temporal resources that the Federation lacked. He didn’t just want to eliminate the obelisks as a threat; he wanted to possess their power and wield it for his own ends. If he achieved that goal, there would be no chance of restoring her own history.

  Still, for the moment, she had no choice but to play along.

  “All right,” she said. “As long as you guarantee that Lucsly and Dulmur won’t be harmed.”

  “We have no interest in harming them. They’re still colleagues of a sort, even if their agency’s methods were misguidedly conservative.” Danlen loomed over her again. “But they will remain in custody for the duration of our partnership. I trust you understand the importance of not doing anything . . . disruptive that might jeopardize their safety.”

  She didn’t need telepathy to read his subtext, nor did he to read her reaction. It was lucky for him that she hadn’t inherited Ocampa telekinesis, or his blood might now be boiling in a far more literal sense than her own was.

  Danlen escorted her toward the exit. “I understand why you’re upset, Jena. This isn’t the reality you know, and that must hurt. Naturally you’re wary. But I think that once you get to know us, understand more of the threats we’re facing and the good we’re able to do, you’ll come around.”

  “I’ll work with you, Director, as long as it’s in our mutual interests,” she replied as they exited into the corridor. “But you’re dreaming if you think I’ll ever agree with your cause.”

  Danlen simply smiled as he showed Noi around the curve in the corridor. A moment later, she found her way blocked by the one person she’d prayed she wouldn’t find here: a mahogany-skinned, golden-eyed woman with shaggy-short black hair and scalloped, tapering ears, her sleek, compact frame encased in the gold-trimmed black uniform of the TIA—and her face twisted into a smug, arrogant smile the likes of which Jena Noi had never seen in a mirror.

  “Wanna bet?” asked the other Jena Noi.

  VII

  * * *

  May 3, 2384

  Eris

  Ranjea wasn’t sure what was more uncomfortable: the temporal communicator encasing his head or the aura of anxiety emanating from Garcia and Warain. “Having second thoughts?” he asked his partner. He knew that anxiety was simply the state that Warain found most comfortable.

  “I don’t know,” Garcia said, pacing back and forth in front of the observation gallery viewports. They had come to the site of the disappearance, as it was the best way to get a reading on the event. “We only have a best guess for how these things work. What if they interact in some weird way?”

  “Believe me,” Warain said, “I’ve already considered a dozen possible scenarios for unintended interactions. I’m fairly sure I can rule out eight of them and have containment strategies in place for the other four.” He blinked. “Five. Hold on.” He slid his chair across to another part of the console and began inputting instructions.

  Garcia leaned in to whisper to Ranjea. “He makes me nervous.”

  “He shouldn’t. As you can see, his own nervousness makes him a vigilant guardian against every conceivable disaster.”

  “Except the one that happened to Lucsly and Dulmur. The problem with our job is that its overlap with ‘conceivable’ tends to be pretty narrow.”

  “At any rate, it’s Warain’s job to be overcautious. We’re dealing with simple communication and detection here. There’s not much that could go wrong.”

  “Physically, no,” Warain interposed, “but there’s no telling what might come flooding into your consciousness if we aren’t very careful.”

  Garcia’s dark eyes locked on Ranjea with fierce intensity. “You didn’t say anything about that, partner.”

  He took her hand. “Teresa—I’m used to opening my mind to that which lies beyond the confines of self-identity. And I’m used to finding myself again afterward.” He smiled. “Besides, how can I pass up the chance for such a novel perceptual experience?”

  The young human gave a slow, uneasy sigh, not letting go of his hand. “Okay, so how do we start?”

  “I start by probing slowly back from the present. The last people in this room, other than Doctor Warain, are the ones we seek. So they shouldn’t be hard to find. Once that’s done, just place my hand on the curve tracer and have it scan me. It should register two traces: my own and that of whomever I connect to.”

  “And I set it to track that one.”

  “Mm-hm.” He turned to the Vault engineer. “Doctor, are we ready?”

  Warain clapped a hand to his high, cylindrical head and shook it despairingly. “There’s no way this will ever work.” He looked to Ranjea with a shaky smile. “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  “That’s the spirit.” Ranjea closed his eyes. “Activating now.”

  The helmet was already on standby; the activation command was psionic, a state of ready openness that he now broadcast to the device. He felt the connection form, enhancing his sensory awareness of his surroundings. He willed the communicator to direct that awareness backward, into the past.

  Of course, the place he now occupied was not technically the same place where the disappearance had occurred; in the eight hours and twenty-four minutes since the event, even Eris’s languid orbital speed had carried it nearly 96,000 kilometers through space. But that was the benefit of quantum entanglement: It provided a tie between particles that was independent of their position or motion. Even as Ranjea tracked the gallery back through time and thus through space, it remained as close in his empathic perception of the past as it was in the physical present.

  After a time, he felt glimmers of other empathic auras that he recognized as Garcia’s (intense, impassioned, sardonic, vulnerable, driven) and Warain’s (neurotic, hyperactive, hypervigilant, yet surprisingly confident) as they flitted in and out of the room in reverse, accelerated time. Somehow he did not register his own mental presence, no doubt because he was already immersed in it. He pushed back farther and—

  Noise. An overpowering burst left him dazed and sense-blind. “Are you okay?” he heard Garcia ask.

  “Stand by.” He used a meditative exercise to clear the sensory overload, accepting it and letting it flow through him and away. Now he felt other presences. In the background was a sense of world-weariness and relentless commitment, and the tantalizing hint of another mind, controlled and tightly disciplined so that almost no emotion leaked through. “I sense Marion and Gariff,” he said. “But there’s another presence. It’s strong.” His mind was drawn to it reflexively, like to like.

  “Can you tell who it is?”

  “Another empath, or a telepath. I don’t want to probe too actively lest I draw her attention.”

  “Her?”

  “Definitely a female humanoid. A powerful mind, disciplined. Fierce, but kind. Extremely sure of herself, yet subtly conflicted.”

  “What are Lucsly and Dulmur feeling?”

  “Irritation, wounded pride . . . also sexual attraction from Dulmur, though he feels she’s far out of his league and far too young for him. I think he’s wrong about the latter point by several decades. As for Lucsly’s reaction to her . . . oh. Interesting.”

  “Save the juicy gossip for later, partner. Can you lock on to one of them strongly enough for the curve tracer to register it?”

  “I have to be careful to keep the connection one-way. It’ll be easiest to lock on to the telepath. Whatever happened, it caught up all three of them. It’s safe to assume they’re together.”

  He cleared his mind, let his awareness of the woman fill his perceptio
ns. It felt voyeuristic, improper, to merge minds with her in this way without her knowledge, so he kept it brief. Eyes still closed, he nodded toward Garcia and felt her place his hand on the curve tracer’s reader plate. He felt a slight tingle in his body as the tracer scanned him on a quantum level, not unlike the beginning of the transporter process.

  “Yes! We have a reading,” Garcia called.

  “All right, I’m breaking the connection.” Ranjea eased his way out of the mental link, came back to awareness of himself. He wordlessly asked the communicator to go into standby, then opened his eyes and lifted it from his head. Warain gingerly took it from his hands and tiptoed with it over to a sensor platform; as Vault curator, he had to find out if the artifact had been damaged or altered in any way.

  Garcia studied the readout on one side of the ovoid tracing device, a display hooded over by a cowling vaguely reminiscent of the viewers on mid–twenty-third-century Starfleet vessels. “I’ve got two traces: one reading zero displacement from here and now, the other holding at about eight and a half hours in the past. I guess we programmed the language and unit conversions right. Setting it to track the second trace—your telepath friend.”

  A moment later, Garcia pulled back, startled. “What is it?” asked Ranjea.

  “It’s plotting a double trace. Oh, of course. First she came here from the future, then left—or was taken—with the big guys.”

  “Taken in which direction?”