Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations - 01 - Watching the Clock Read online

  “CIVILIAN SHIP, THE VERITY, REPORTED LOST ON STARDATE 43021.5. A SATURDAY.”

  “We’re sure it’s a displacement? Not a time dilation event?”

  “Long-range scans show a temporal anomaly near its coordinates.”

  “Active?”

  “Nearly closed. Starship on the scene scanned it—looks like a cosmic-string Kerr loop, probably triggered by the fighting near Regulus.”

  “Twenty-two days after the battle?”

  “Twenty-two light-days out. Didn’t open until the radiation surge hit it.”

  A chill ran through Dulmur. “If the disruption originated in the present, it could’ve caused an alteration downtime.”

  Lucsly shook his head, holding up his temporal tricorder. “I checked the shielded records,” he said. Those records were protected from quantum alteration by multiply-redundant phase discriminators, a technology adopted nearly thirteen years ago. In the event of an alteration, records of the original history would be preserved in the DTI database. “No identifiable divergences. The Verity’s displacement is a self-consistent event.”

  Dulmur sighed in relief. “So all we have to worry about is thirty-eight people who have to adjust to being fifteen years out of date.”

  “And two months and four days,” Lucsly inevitably added.

  Dulmur let out a low whistle. “Twenty-three sixty-six. One of the most peaceful years in recent history. After the Cardassian treaty, before Wolf 359, before the Dominion. To come out now, in the middle of the worst devastation the Federation’s ever known . . .”

  Lucsly nodded. “TDD’ll have its work cut out.”

  “You said it.” He sighed. “This is going to be a rough one.”

  OTHER STAR TREK NOVELS

  BY CHRISTOPHER L. BENNETT

  Star Trek: Ex Machina

  Star Trek: Titan—Orion’s Hounds

  Star Trek: The Next Generation—The Buried Age

  Places of Exile (from Star Trek: Myriad Universes—

  Infinity’s Prism)

  Star Trek: The Next Generation—Greater Than the Sum

  Star Trek: Titan—Over a Torrent Sea

  Short Fiction

  “Aftermath” (from Star Trek Corps of Engineers:

  Aftermath)

  “. . . Loved I Not Honor More” (from Star Trek:

  Deep Space Nine—Prophecy and Change)

  “Brief Candle” (from Star Trek: Voyager—Distant Shores)

  “As Others See Us” (from Star Trek: Constellations)

  “The Darkness Drops Again” (from Star Trek:

  Mere Anarchy)

  “Friends with the Sparrows” (from Star Trek:

  The Next Generation—The Sky’s the Limit)

  “Empathy” (from Star Trek: Shards and Shadows)

  More Novels

  X-Men: Watchers on the Walls

  Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder

  Pocket Books

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  To my father

  (1933–2010 CE)

  “Time is a companion who goes with us

  on the journey and reminds us to cherish

  every moment, because they’ll never come again.”

  People like us, who believe in physics, know that

  the distinction between past, present, and future

  is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

  —Albert Einstein (1955 CE)

  People assume that time is a strict progression of

  cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear,

  non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of

  wibbly-wobbly . . . timey-wimey . . . stuff.

  —Steven Moffat (2007 CE)

  PRESENT TIME

  STARDATE 58188.4 to 58193.8

  I

  March 10, 2381 Common Era, Gregorian Calendar A Tuesday

  Department of Temporal Investigations Branch Office

  San Francisco, North Am, Earth

  18:32 UTC

  “Stay back, all of you!” cried Special Agent George Faunt. “Or her time is up!”

  Great, thought Marion Dulmur. Just great. A veteran DTI agent had suffered a breakdown after a particularly stressful mission, taken a researcher hostage at phaserpoint, and turned the San Francisco office into a siege zone . . . yet he couldn’t resist making a lame time-related pun. I hate those.

  Outwardly, Dulmur kept his cool. Poor Rani Mohindra’s life hung by a thread right now. George Faunt was a good agent, a man Dulmur had worked alongside for years. But he wasn’t the first to be overwhelmed by the existential crises this job forced a person to confront day in and day out. “Just take it easy, George,” Dulmur said as gently as his gravelly voice would allow. “Just relax, take a deep breath, and think about this for a minute.” He winced, but it was too late to call it back.

  “A minute?” Faunt barked a hysterical laugh, and Mohindra jerked and whimpered in his grip. “How many minutes of my life have I given to this job? Six million, five hundred and thirty—no, twenty-seven thousand, seven hundred and, what?”

  Thirty-two, Dulmur filled in despite himself, and Faunt caught him doing the calculation. “You know, don’t you? Down to the millisecond! This job, this job—they train you to pretend time is this rigid, exacting thing, to break it all down into precise durations and dates . . . but it’s just a distraction, Dulmur! The truth is that time is chaos, it’s meaningless. All we are is random quantum fluctuations that can collapse into the cosmic foam just like that!” He punctuated it by jamming the phaser harder into Mohindra’s cheek. She closed her eyes and her lips moved in prayer.

  Faunt’s careless cruelty made Dulmur angry, but he couldn’t hate the man for it, not after what he’d been through. It had only been three weeks and a day since the final blitzkrieg of the Borg invasion. Dozens of worlds had been razed before the collective effort of several Starfleet crews had persuaded the powerful Caeliar
race to take responsibility for their role in the Borg’s creation and eliminate them as a threat once and for all. The truth that those crews had uncovered about the Borg’s origins had been the DTI’s worst nightmare brought to life, a time travel accident that had led to devastation across half the galaxy.

  And yet the Department had more immediate concerns than that ancient anachronism. In the wake of a disaster like this, there were always going to be those who tried to go back in time and undo it, whether through cosmic anomalies, ancient relics, or untested warp modifications—which were more likely to destroy the aspiring travelers than anything else, but still posed unpredictable risks to the continuum. Even some in the UFP government had wished to suspend the Temporal Prime Directive, delve into the DTI’s top-secret vault on Eris, and use some confiscated alien artifact to go back and “fix” things. Director Andos had her work cut out for her trying to convince them that they might do more harm than good—a difficult position for her to take considering that her homeworld of Rhaandarel had been one of the casualties.

  And then there were the visitors from the future who tended to congregate around major historical events. The historians could generally be relied on to minimize their intervention (though there were some infamous blunders such as the Rasmussen affair), but you never knew when someone might come back with a more sinister agenda. The number of identifiable anachronistic incidents during the Borg invasion had actually been much lower than expected, and the DTI’s top analysts were still assessing why. But Faunt and his partner Ranjea, one of the Department’s most reliable teams until now, had been assigned to the most serious incident so far, a temporal rift which had opened up on the ruined surface of Coridan. Faunt and Ranjea had concluded that a timeship from the thirty-sixth century, probably a historical observation craft, had gotten too close during the Borg attack and been crippled. Prochronistic travelers often underestimated past technology to their peril. For whatever reason, no one had come back to retrieve the crashed vessel or prevent the temporal core implosion which had opened a subspace fissure reaching centuries into Coridan’s past.

  On the mission, so Ranjea had dutifully if reluctantly reported, Faunt had been almost overcome by the temptation to send a warning through the rift. He couldn’t save anyone directly, but he suggested leaving a message that would reveal itself shortly before the invasion. Ranjea had insisted that tampering in Coridan’s past could disrupt key events leading to the creation of the Federation, but Faunt had argued that it was worth the risk. The debate had been rendered moot when observations through the rift had revealed a massive orbital space station whose transmissions identified it as an outpost of the Vulcan-Andorian Empire. The fissure wasn’t just intertemporal but interphasic, opening onto an alternate quantum history of the universe. A message sent into the past of a spontaneously divergent timeline would have no impact on the events of this one.

  Faunt had been devastated to have his hopes dashed so completely. He had been ordered to take a recuperative leave, but then this breakdown had happened. Maybe if Ranjea were here, he could get through to Faunt and talk him down. But the Deltan agent was still in Greenwich, helping Director Andos finalize tomorrow’s monthly report to President Bacco. Dulmur would simply have to make do. “Listen, George, we all know how you feel. This has been hell on everyone. Including that young lady you’ve got there. It’s been hard on her too. Do you really think making things even harder for her is going to accomplish anything?”

  Faunt scoffed. “Accomplish? Nothing we do ‘accomplishes’ anything! We pretend we’re protecting the timeline, keeping reality safe, but the truth is we can’t do anything. Space and time are just too big. At any moment, everything we know could be wiped from existence by Temporal Cold Warriors from the future, or by Starfleet idiots stumbling through yet another space warp or ancient portal, or by a Q playing a practical joke! And all we can do about it is file reports after the fact and pretend it makes a difference! We’re deluding ourselves if we think this job actually means anything!”

  “It means we try, George,” said Dulmur. “It means we do what we can, the best we can. Just like you’ve been doing for a dozen years.” He was careful to dial down his long-practiced precision just this once. “You’re a good man, George. You don’t want to do anything you’ll regret.”

  “You just don’t get it,” Faunt moaned, shaking his prematurely grizzled head. “Kill her, don’t kill her, none of it makes a difference to the multiverse. If I blow her brains out now, there’ll be another me who doesn’t. I could kill everyone in this room and you’d all be fine in a million other timelines! So why not pull the trigger?! Why not do whatever the hell I feel like?!” he snarled.

  “Bull!”

  Every head in the room spun toward the source of the contemptuous exclamation. There stood Special Agent Gariff Lucsly, Dulmur’s partner for the past fifteen years, eight months, and fifteen days, on and off. The way the lanky, gray-haired agent strode forward into the line of fire made Dulmur fearful that he might not make it to their sixteenth anniversary.

  “You know better than that,” Lucsly went on, lecturing Faunt as if he were a trainee who’d fumbled an exam question. “Neurons are classical objects. Any alternate quantum solutions to the universal wave equation won’t affect the decision-making process in your brain. If you have a reason to kill in this quantum history, you’ll have the same reason in any other history that branches off from this moment.”

  The others in the office were staring at Lucsly in shock as he confronted the gunman. Was he crazy? Was he so hidebound, so obsessed with accuracy, that he’d risk his life, and possibly others’, just to correct a misunderstanding of temporal theory?

  Hell, yes, Dulmur thought. But there was more to it than that. Gariff Lucsly knew how to use his obsessions to his advantage, and he knew he could trust his partner. “That’s basic Many-Worlds theory,” Lucsly went on, striding closer to Faunt, drawing his gaze away from Dulmur. “It doesn’t mean every imaginable reality happens, only those that have a reason to happen. You know that, Special Agent Faunt.” By now, Faunt’s phaser hand was wavering, swinging between Mohindra and Lucsly. But Lucsly didn’t flinch. He was on a roll. “So stop abusing temporal physics as an excuse to dodge responsibility for your own choices!”

  Dulmur, having eased behind Faunt while Lucsly lectured, now moved in, forced his arm skyward, and wrested the phaser from his grip in one smooth motion. Faunt didn’t even resist as Dulmur tossed the phaser aside and pulled the other agent’s arms behind him; he just broke down crying. Mohindra, also crying, ran into Lucsly’s arms. Lucsly stiffened, more uneasy with this than he’d been with a phaser pointed in his face, and showed relief when the security personnel moved in to take charge of her. Dulmur was just as glad to hand Faunt over to them, but for different reasons. It was always tough when one of their own broke down. That could be me someday, he always thought.

  But then he looked at Lucsly, and it heartened him. His brief brush with human contact now behind him, Lucsly was solid as a rock again, a constant in a chaotic reality. Lucsly was the one human being that Dulmur was certain would never be overwhelmed by the existential angst of facing a mutable reality. He simply didn’t have the imagination for it. He had his job, his purpose, and he pursued it with unfailing clockwork precision. He was an anchor that Dulmur was grateful to have.

  “Thanks, partner,” Dulmur said, giving him a quick, professional smile. “Good job.” Lucsly just offered a small nod in reply. It was all they needed.

  “Got a new assignment,” Lucsly told him as if it were just another day at the office. “Unplanned displacement, arrival detected three hours, twenty-seven minutes ago. In the dead zone, Regulus sector.”

  “Uptime or down?”

  “Up. Civilian ship, the Verity, reported lost on Stardate 43021.5. A Saturday.”

  “We’re sure it’s a displacement? Not a time dilation event?”

  “Long-range scans show a temporal anomaly near its coo
rdinates.”

  “Active?”

  “Nearly closed. Starship on the scene scanned it—looks like a cosmic-string Kerr loop, probably triggered by the fighting near Regulus.”

  “Twenty-two days after the battle?”

  “Twenty-two light-days out. Didn’t open until the radiation surge hit it.”

  A chill ran through Dulmur. “If the disruption originated in the present, it could’ve caused an alteration downtime.”

  Lucsly shook his head, holding up his temporal tricorder. “I checked the shielded records,” he said. Those records were protected from quantum alteration by multiply-

  redundant phase discriminators, a technology adopted nearly thirteen years ago. In the event of an alteration, records of the original history would be preserved in the DTI database. “No identifiable divergences. The Verity’s displacement is a self-consistent event.”

  Dulmur sighed in relief. “So all we have to worry about is thirty-eight people who have to adjust to being fifteen years out of date.”

  “And two months and four days,” Lucsly inevitably added.

  Dulmur let out a low whistle. “Twenty-three sixty-six. One of the most peaceful years in recent history. Before Wolf 359, before the Dominion, right around the Cardassian truce talks. To come out now, in the middle of the worst devastation the Federation’s ever known . . .”

  Lucsly nodded. “TDD’ll have its work cut out.”

  “You said it.” He sighed. “This is going to be a rough one.”

  U.S.S. Everett NCC-72392

  March 12, 2381 CE (A Thursday)

  03:14 UTC

  It took thirty hours, eleven minutes for Everett, the Nova-class Starfleet scout attached to the DTI, to reach the Regulus system at high warp. The Verity and its occupants were being held there for now to minimize their exposure to the society of their future, a standard policy to minimize culture shock. Dulmur had suggested that policy was redundant here, but as Lucsly had reminded him, rules were rules.

  Now, the Verity’s captain, a Bolian named Falvin Dor, sat in briefing room one, across the table from Lucsly. “When did you first detect the anomaly?” the agent asked.