The Collectors

by Christopher L. Bennett

“Hold on, it plots in three dimensions. . . .” She worked the controls, presumably to adjust the display vantage. “Yeah, they went uptime—but not on the same curve she used to get here. The tracer’s projecting . . . That’s odd.”

  “What is?”

  “Well, if I read this right, the Feynman curve projection is for a course into the deep future, millions of years ahead. But it loses direct tracking somewhere around the mid–thirty-first century.”

  Ranjea frowned. “Maybe that’s where they ended up? The uptime agent could have interrupted its curve.” The time frame suggested the Federation Temporal Agency, which might well have the technology to do so.

  “It’s more like they just disappeared from scan range.” Garcia looked up at him, her brow furrowed. “Do you know if this thing can trace into alternate histories?”

  “Almost certainly,” Warain interposed. “Wouldn’t be much use otherwise, especially given all the possible future branches there are.”

  “Then maybe something broke their entanglement,” Ranjea said.

  “I hope so,” Garcia said. “Because the other possibility is that they’re dead.”

  “This is most unfortunate,” Director Andos said when the agents relayed the news to her office over subspace.

  “ ‘Unfortunate’ is putting it mildly, ma’am,” Garcia said. “We need to find out what happened—will happen—to our people. It’s time to consider going to get them.”

  “You miss my meaning, Agent Garcia,” said Andos. “Ranjea, I trust you understand?”

  Garcia looked up at her partner, disturbed by the grim resignation on his face. “If we’d found their curve went downtime,” he said, “we’d be obligated to retrieve them to prevent timestream disruption. But since they’ve gone uptime, our hands are tied.”

  “What?”

  “Remember your training, Teresa,” said Andos. “Part of our brief is to prevent the future from contaminating the present.”

  Garcia had remembered all along, but she hadn’t wanted to accept what her training implied. “So we have to leave them stranded uptime, maybe even dead, just because they might bring back information from the future? Ma’am, if anyone can be trusted not to reveal prochronistic knowledge—”

  “Yes, I know. No one is more responsible than Agents Lucsly and Dulmur. But, by the same token, they would be the first to agree that they cannot be allowed to return and risk some inadvertent contamination to the timestream.”

  “And who defines what counts as contamination? Ma’am, our history has been shaped by uptime intervention and knowledge before.”

  “But our Accordist partners in the future have their history as well, and that is the history that would be endangered should Lucsly and Dulmur return. They have as much right to want their version of the timeline protected as we do.”

  “So we strand our best agents up there out of, what, professional courtesy?”

  “Agent Garcia,” Andos went on, her sharper tone puncturing Garcia’s swelling anger, “you have not yet had occasion to learn how much we depend on the cooperation—and, to a large extent, the indulgence—of our uptime counterparts. We are by far the junior partners in that relationship, despite being very much their seniors in linear terms. We are barely even qualified to make a decision with such impact upon them, let alone entitled to do so.”

  Andos softened. “Agents Lucsly and Dulmur have served the Department faithfully for a large portion of their lives, and their impact on our temporal security has been immeasurable. It will be a terrible blow to lose them. But we cannot honor their legacy unless we accept the necessity of their loss.

  “Let us take comfort in the probability that the agents will still be active in a future century and, if possible, will continue the good fight to preserve the most natural flow of history—perhaps with far more potent resources than they had access to in our time. We, in the meantime, will simply have to carry on without them as best we can, and strive to live up to their example.”

  After a respectful silence, Andos straightened. “You’ve done exemplary work there, Agents, but your work is concluded. Please return to headquarters for debriefing, after which counseling will be available. I’ll find someone else to attend the Alpha Centauri conference. Andos out.”

  The screen went dark, and Garcia kicked the base of the console. “This stinks! How can we just strand them there?”

  Ranjea put his arms around her, and she hugged him back tightly. “Remember who they are, Teresa. They’d never forgive us if we did anything else.”

  “Lucsly wouldn’t,” she admitted. “But Dulmur . . .” She couldn’t believe the kind man who’d sponsored her entry into the DTI, who’d given her a new purpose and an anchor in a time not her own, who’d been a surrogate father to her for the past three years, would be so pragmatic and detached about abandoning his life—his loved ones—in the twenty-fourth century. He would accept the necessity, do his duty as he always did, but at great personal cost. She had been displaced only fifteen years into the future, but it had still felt like an alien universe, far from the home she had known. Dulmur was lost in a world far more alien still. It would be a difficult adjustment. She had been determined to spare him that if she could.

  Garcia glanced toward the exit, her mind racing beyond it to the aisles full of reality-bending wonders out there, just sitting on drab shelves, imprisoned and bereft of purpose. There were so many ways available for her to act. Getting past Vault security would be next to impossible, but, even if she failed, could she live with herself if she didn’t even try?

  The fantasy fell away quickly when she imagined what Dulmur would think if she made the attempt. He would do his duty, she reminded herself. Above all else, no matter how hard it was. The job always comes first. That’s what he’d expect from me.

  She pulled free of Ranjea’s embrace, straightened, and tugged on the hem of her nondescript gray jacket. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  VIII

  * * *

  Day 266, 3051

  TIA Headquarters, Tandar Prime

  Of course, Jena Noi thought as she studied the face of her alternate self. It stood to reason that the Noi of this timeline would still be here; after all, with their different histories, there was no guarantee that she would have been sent on an equivalent mission to retrieve the obelisk. True, in some circumstances, two alternate versions of the same individual would spontaneously merge, but only if one of their timelines had collapsed. Since Noi’s own timeline was the one currently in a deferred state, she would be the one doomed to disappear, not her shorter-haired TIA counterpart. But her suit’s phase shielding protected her against that, as did the underlying physics of this particular situation. At least she hoped so. In general, such erasures occurred only once the probabilities had been definitively resolved. Her continued existence implied that she still had an opportunity to restore her own reality.

  But her gut told her that the woman facing her now would make that a significantly more difficult goal to achieve. The other Noi was built much like her but was harder, wirier. Her bearing and expression were those of a seasoned soldier, though she was not above a smirk and a swagger as she stepped forward to examine herself. “So this is the ‘original’ model, hm? The one who presumes she has more right to exist?”

  Danlen moved into Noi’s field of view. “Agent Jena Noi of the Federation Temporal Agency, allow me to introduce Assistant Supervisor Jena Noi of the Temporal Intervention Agency. One of my top people.” He smirked. “Maybe two of my top people now, if you agree to cooperate. Hmm . . . how about I call you ‘Jena,’ ” he said to the FTA agent, “and you ‘Noi,’ ” he went on to the TIA supervisor. “Or just ‘Agent’ and ‘Supervisor’ in more formal contexts.”

  Supervisor Noi was pacing slowly around Agent Noi, sizing her up from all angles. She took hold of Jena’s long queue of black hair, stroking it. �
��I haven’t worn my hair like this since college,” she said. “Kind of impractical, isn’t it? Especially in a fight.”

  “I try to avoid those.”

  “Too bad,” the supervisor said. “Because we’re planning to start one, and the director wants you along.”

  Jena turned to Danlen. “The obelisk. You’re going to trigger its return function and send a strike force with it.”

  The other Noi grinned with pride. “She’s smart. No surprise there.”

  “You must agree,” Danlen told the agent, “that the obelisk technology must be secured, its creators . . . dissuaded from continuing their actions. Given how advanced they will be, we need every advantage we can get in case we meet resistance. Two Jena Nois on the same team would be quite an advantage.

  “Not to mention that your firsthand experience with the obelisk could be invaluable. We have the theory, but you’re the only one who’s ridden the thing before.”

  “I had no control. It was a desperation move that got me here at all.”

  “Any experience is valuable, Agent. Now, do we have your cooperation or not?”

  Jena faced her double. “I assume you’ll be leading the strike team?”

  Noi gestured to her counterpart and herself in turn. “Agent; supervisor. I guess you weren’t as ambitious as I was.”

  “I guess you have more attrition in your ranks.”

  The supervisor’s smile was cold. “Works out nicely, though, doesn’t it?”

  Danlen smiled thinly. “Supervisor Noi’s peculiar sense of humor aside, this is a vital mission to all of us, so we don’t want to lose anyone if we can help it. Thus, Jena—Agent Noi—you will attend the team briefing at 1500, so we can get you up to speed on our methods and tactics, and you can share what you know about the obelisk.”

  “Understood—sir,” Jena said. “Will we be taking a ship, or . . . ?”

  “From what you’ve told us, the obelisk only transports the life-forms around it; otherwise you would have brought a chunk of the Eridian Vault uptime with you. We don’t think it would take a ship.”

  Noi clapped Jena on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, you’ll be fully briefed in forty-three minutes. Take the time to rest, get something to eat. I know I don’t like to time travel on an empty stomach.”

  Danlen had a subordinate escort Jena to guest quarters where she could freshen up. The agent appreciated the privacy, for she had some planning to do. She had sensed something when her alternate touched her. Since telepathy was a form of quantum communication, it was difficult for a telepath to hide her thoughts from her own quantum double; and Supervisor Noi was too accustomed to wielding her power overtly, unlike the stealth and discretion favored by the FTA. That discretion let Jena hide her own reaction to the supervisor’s thoughts.

  What she’d sensed was confirmation of the very thing she’d feared when she first saw her other self. Since the two of them were technically the same being in dual quantum states, they could be merged into a single individual by beaming them into the same coordinates and allowing the superposition to spontaneously collapse. Jena had done it herself with stray temporal duplicates spawned by particularly complex missions. Although the basic process wiped the memory of the duplicate foreign to the timeline, FTA technology enabled the preservation of those memories in the merged agent. No doubt the same was true of TIA tech.

  Which meant that the easiest way for Danlen to gain all of Jena’s knowledge was to force her into merger with Noi. Since this was the supervisor’s home timeline, her quantum state and thus her personality would predominate in the merger, making it a death sentence for Jena. Danlen apparently had reasons for keeping her in existence for the moment—perhaps the exact reasons he’d claimed, or perhaps for the purposes of some further study. But the other Noi’s slip of the mind had made it clear that once she’d outlived her usefulness, she would be merged—or, more bluntly, executed. And there was no telling what would happen to Lucsly and Dulmur if that occurred.

  So Jena needed a plan—and she needed to control her thoughts very carefully to avoid tipping off her other self. She took a calming shower, then meditated, drawing on all her innate mental disciplines and FTA training. Luckily she’d worked very hard on the latter. The FTA preferred its field agents to be nondescript, easily overlooked sorts like Danlen, the better to go unnoticed in the past. Jena Noi had the handicap of being exotically beautiful, the kind of person who got noticed without having to try. Even by thirty-first-century standards she was an unusually diverse and striking blend of species traits. And unlike Jeihaz, she couldn’t just reprogram her outward form at will. So she’d had to train carefully in stealth and disguise in order to minimize her noticeability when traveling downtime. And a large part of that training was mental discipline, minimizing the presence she projected to others.

  When escorted to the briefing, Jena radiated the most calming, nonthreatening aura she could, even adding a bit of psionic sweetening to reinforce the TIA agents’ trust and cooperation. She found it distasteful to tamper with anyone’s free will in that way and rarely did so (although Lucsly and Dulmur seriously tempted her sometimes), but under the circumstances, she had no choice. There was more than just her own survival at stake, or even that of her timeline. There was no telling what chaos the TIA could wreak on panreality if they gained control of the obelisk.

  Plus it would be all her fault if they did. So there was that.

  Jena thus played along throughout the briefing, putting on a good show of being a willing and cooperative partner. This time she dialed up her charm, getting herself noticed and liked, joking with the strike force and getting drawn into their camaraderie; it was only what was under the surface that she kept hidden.

  Once Supervisor Noi wrapped up the briefing and led the strike force to the staging area, Agent Noi strode alongside her, companionably close, even allowing the occasional accidental touch, enough to seem like she had nothing to hide but not so much that she failed to hide it. The team appeared to accept her readily as they collected and checked their gear. They fell easily into the rhythms they had employed countless times before, secure in their own routine, feeling unthreatened in these final moments before facing the enemy. Like clockwork, they took their assigned weapons and broke them down to check them.

  And at that moment, Jena made her break. Shifting into an accelerated time frame, she drew a time-dilation grenade from its phase pocket in her uniform and threw it into the center of the room. At hyperspeed, she was out the door before it detonated and froze the strike team in a temporary slow-time bubble. She raced down the corridor—

  But a leg shot out of nowhere and tripped her up, sending her crashing into the curving outer wall at enormous speed. If not for her Vulcan and Melikaz heritage and some judicious gene tweaking, the impact would have put her in the hospital or worse. As it was, she was dazed and hurting. A hand grabbed her shoulder and forcefully rolled her over, her back against the wall. Woozily, she gazed up into her own face.

  “I knew you’d figured it out,” Supervisor Noi told her. Two more strike-team members, a Gorn named Ssrax and a Soong-breed android named Darro, came up to flank her. Noi must have gotten them out of the dilation field just in time. “You thought playing nice would fool me, but I sensed it the moment you realized the truth. I guess Danlen’s right: I can be overconfident.”

  “No kidding.” Jena shifted phase and tumbled through the wall. Finding herself in a maintenance corridor, she instantly rotated her phase polarity off the horizontal, allowing herself to fall through the floor and the one below it, then shifted back to normal phase, hitting the next floor down with considerable force. Her suit fed her a measured dose of painkillers, stimulants, and repair nanites to help her get back on her feet.

  But as soon as Jena exited into a lower corridor, Noi and her compatriots beamed in right in front of her. Jena turned and ran, leading them after her, but D
arro closed in quickly. Reaching a corridor junction, she split her quantum probability three ways and took off down every available path, splitting up her pursuers. Once they’d gained enough separation, she collapsed her waveform down to occupy the single self that was fleeing Ssrax, the slowest of her pursuers. She accelerated herself again, but only by a factor of two, speed-shy after the last time.

  Then her counterpart appeared in front of her again. Jena was ready this time, striking out, but the supervisor had accelerated herself too, and they exchanged a lightning flurry of blows and kicks. Noi tried to shift herself into an even faster mode, but Jena gave her few opportunities.

  Then a clawed manus slashed across Jena’s back. Ssrax had caught up with her. Screaming, she fell to her knees. The suit’s durable fabric had resisted the Gorn’s claws, protecting her from disembowelment, but the blow had cracked ribs.

  Noi looked down at her, gloating. “Danlen wanted you alive for now. Needed you for the mission, he said, but he’s always had a soft spot for me. Maybe he was hoping you’d be more eligible.”

  The supervisor crouched and took Jena’s chin in her hand. “But he’ll just have to make do without you. Not to worry, though: Soon enough I’ll know everything you know about the obelisk.”

  “You talk too much.” Jena grabbed at her sleeve controls and backstepped ten seconds, materializing around the corner of the junction behind her. Willing herself back to her feet, Jena flattened herself against the wall and accelerated herself. When Ssrax ran past in slow motion, she grabbed his sidearm from its holster, made sure it was on heavy stun, and fired. The Gorn writhed and fell unconscious. Jena had gambled correctly: The guns were security-locked so no enemy could use them; but, by military logic, they weren’t individually gene-coded but responsive to any member of the team so that a fallen member’s weapon would still be usable. This was part of why she’d waited until she’d already been logged in as a team member.

  Still weak but growing stronger, Jena clambered over the Gorn and ran forward to back up her past self, getting a bead on the supervisor. But then a second Supervisor Noi backstepped right into her path, looking somewhat the worse for wear than the first, due to whatever Jena would have done to her in the next few moments before Noi managed to step back. Jena didn’t have time to shift phase and pass through her, so they collided and tumbled to the floor together. Though the nanites had already begun repairing her ribs, it still hurt like hell.