The Collectors Read online

  Jena Noi smiled. “Nice to see you too, Lucsly. And you, Dulmur. It’s been a while.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for it,” Dulmur said. “What brings you to our neck of history? Or can’t you tell us?” True, as a DTI agent sworn to protect the timeline, Dulmur understood the importance of controlling information about the future. But it still rankled when someone from uptime did it to him—usually in the process of throwing their weight around and telling their primitive forebears in the DTI to stand back and let their descendants handle things. He’d seen Jena Noi softpedal such orders often enough to see it coming now.

  Indeed, she sighed and grew apologetic. “It’s simple enough, Dulmur. The obelisk—I’m here to claim it.”

  “And what do you plan to do with it?”

  “Same thing you were: Contain it and keep it safe. But we have better containment methods up in the thirty-first. Surely you can see it’d be better off with us.”

  “Then why didn’t you just pick it up on that planet before the Rhea found it? Save us all the trouble?”

  Lucsly tapped the console. “Because the FTA wouldn’t have known about it until we—”

  “Until we entered it into our records, I get it,” Dulmur finished for him. “But you sure didn’t waste any time getting here, Agent Noi.”

  “I’ll refrain from the obvious time-travel crack,” she replied. “But the sooner we get it out of here, the sooner you can rest easy.”

  “Why this artifact?” Lucsly asked. “We have other hazardous items in storage. Is there some particular danger to this one?”

  “That’s just it, Gariff—we don’t know.” She gestured at the high, tapering structure, its intricately textured surface shimmering with diffraction rainbows under the bright lights of the processing bay. “Look at that thing. It’s beyond anything even the FTA’s ever seen, aside from the Guardian of Forever.”

  “Then what makes you any better qualified to handle it?” Dulmur asked. “We’re all primitives by comparison.”

  “Dulmur, there’s no reason to fight over this.”

  “In fact,” Lucsly told her, “DTI procedure clearly states that nothing is to be removed from Vault containment without clearance through the director’s office. You can’t just come in and take it.”

  “Even though history shows I already did? Guys, there’s no record of this thing being in the Vault after today. The archives say it was retrieved by an uptime agency. Naturally there was no more detail,” she added. Dulmur knew that procedure restricted entering specific knowledge of the future into the official record. “But that’s how I knew to come here. Contact Director Andos if you need to, but you know it’s best to keep this discreet. I’m doing you a courtesy by asking at all.”

  “Very well,” Lucsly said, earning a startled look from Dulmur until he continued: “I will contact the director.”

  Noi held his gaze, but Lucsly didn’t budge. Finally, the uptime agent sighed. “Fine. We’ll go through proper channels,” she said. “But is it all right if I at least help you secure the artifact? I’d rather not leave it unshielded while we sort out the red tape.”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  She hesitated briefly, then deigned to reply. “I can erect a buffer field to contain its temporal emissions. Make sure it can’t interfere with any of the other toys you’ve got in this box.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Lucsly said. Noi took it as consent, correctly so.

  But Dulmur peered at her. “You still have toy boxes in the future?”

  Noi threw him an amused glare. “That’s classified.”

  Dulmur kept an eye on her through the transparent aluminum partition as she moved into the bay and began scanning the obelisk with some kind of instrument, though he had no idea where she’d stored it in her formfitting jumpsuit. “I’m still not sure we should just go along with this,” he said, while Lucsly tried to get through to Director Andos. “We’ve seen that these uptime agents aren’t always content to leave history well enough alone. And you heard her, that obelisk’s high-level stuff even by her standards. It’s either from the far future or some incredibly advanced ancient culture.” He laughed. “Hell, we can’t even get a comprehensible quantum dating off that thing to tell us which direction it came from. What if they learn something from it that they’re not ready to know?”

  “We’d be no more ready,” Lucsly told him.

  “But at least we’d have the good sense to leave the damn thing alone.” He furrowed his brow. “Here’s a thought: Maybe we could take it to the Axis of Time and—”

  A burst of alarms cut him off. Lucsly gave the readouts a quick once-over. “A temporal vortex is starting to form around the artifact. Incredibly powerful.” He triggered the intercom. “Jena, whatever you’re doing in there—”

  “I’m on it! I’m trying to damp its emissions. That should . . .”

  But it didn’t. Dulmur stared in alarm as the obelisk began to expand—no, to unwind, opening gaps between its membranes from which a bright blue glow of Cherenkov radiation emerged. Noi frantically worked her equipment, both the device in her hand and the circuitry built into her uniform, but nothing she did had any effect. A sphere of blue light was expanding outward from the obelisk, already engulfing Noi. Lucsly shot through the door, running toward her, and Dulmur reached after him. But the sphere was still expanding, swallowing up Lucsly, and then it came right through the partition, filling his vision with light . . .

  And then there was blackness.

  II

  * * *

  Uptime

  Dulmur felt the warmth of the sun on his face.

  It startled him back to alertness, for it was the last sensation one would expect out at Eris. He opened his eyes, seeing a glorious clear blue sky overhead. Twenty years of DTI training made him too prosaically minded to consider that he might be in heaven; it was far more likely that he’d been transported through space—and, under the circumstances, probably through time as well.

  Sitting up, he saw Lucsly doing the same a short distance away. Beyond him was Jena Noi, clambering up from a kneeling position before the obelisk, which appeared to have returned to dormancy. But everything around them had changed. That glorious blue sky was scraped by an abundance of similarly glorious towers: They were in a great city. The buildings were a hodgepodge of architectural styles; many seemed human-designed, while others showed Vulcan, Bajoran, Klingon, or more unfamiliar influences. Dulmur saw no aircars or skimmers, but there were quite a few pedestrians walking through the plaza they occupied, and Dulmur glimpsed wide, arbored footpaths between the buildings. At one corner of the plaza was a large booth that soon proved to be a transporter, materializing a family of civilians in less than a second. The family consisted of a Cardassian father, a Bolian mother, and their mixed-species children.

  The crowd gathering at a wary distance around the obelisk and its accidental passengers was even more diverse. Dulmur saw quite a few humans, but many showed traits of other species. The rest included not only familiar Federation races, but a pair of Tzenkethi, a Gororm from the Carnelian Regnancy, even a family of Hirogen from the Delta Quadrant. Not to mention several species he’d never seen before. There were more multispecies hybrids here than he’d ever encountered in one place. Agent Noi would fit right in here—which gave him an idea of where and when she’d brought them.

  But before he could ask, Noi said, “This is wrong. We aren’t where we’re supposed to be.”

  “You’re telling me!” Dulmur said. As he strode toward her, he continued: “So much for your vaunted uptime expertise! You triggered the obelisk, didn’t you?”

  She sighed. “I thought damping the device’s temporal mechanism would keep it from time traveling. That’s how it usually works. But this one . . . I think it must have some kind of connection anchoring it to its home time, like an elastic band.”r />
  “And when you shut it down, it started to snap back. Is that even possible?”

  “To maintain an open Feynman curve like that over such a span of time . . . nothing I’ve ever encountered short of the Guardian has that kind of power.” She looked more uncertain and humble than he’d ever seen her. “I thought I knew what to do, but clearly I miscalculated. I’m as out of my depth here as you guys. I . . . I’m sorry for getting you into this.”

  Dulmur blinked. “Look, um, it’s an honest mistake. Anyone could’ve . . .” He looked to Lucsly for support—and saw that his partner had his eyes screwed shut. “Lucsly, what are you doing?”

  “You know,” the older man said. “We’re uptime. You shouldn’t be looking either.”

  Noi shook her head. “Oh, for— Gariff, stand up and open your eyes. If it’ll make you feel better, I promise to wipe your memory before I send you back. But right now I may need you. This isn’t the right timeline.”

  Lucsly opened one eye, peered at her for a moment, then rose smoothly to his feet and moved toward her and Dulmur—still keeping his gaze from roving to the vista around them. “Explain.”

  “Once I realized what was happening, I used my emergency recall. Tried to override whatever was pulling it toward its time by pulling it into my home time. I got that part right, at least. This is London in 3051 by your calendar. But we should’ve materialized inside FTA headquarters. The coordinates are right, but the building isn’t here.”

  Dulmur smiled. “You kept the HQ in London?”

  Noi’s anxious gaze gave way to a brief smile of her own. “Temporal agents are nothing if not nostalgic.”

  Lucsly dared a glance around. “Are you sure this is an altered history?”

  “It’s not just the building,” she said. “Though I shouldn’t tell you the other discrepancies I see. Not unless you need to know.” Lucsly nodded in understanding—and gratitude.

  Dulmur was surveying the plaza again. “Maybe that’s something we need to know about,” he said, pointing toward a sculpture in the middle of the plaza. “Looks like some kind of memorial. Is that . . . a plaque of names?”

  Noi’s breath caught in her throat. “Like . . . a war memorial?”

  “It’s in the center of a city,” Lucsly said. “And the shape and placement of the plaza suggest the footprint of a tower. Perhaps a bombing? A terrorist attack?”

  Dulmur heard abbreviated transporter chimes. By the time he turned, several police officers had already materialized around them. “Let me do the talking, guys,” Noi told the DTI agents sotto voce. “No mention of time travel until we can reach the proper authorities.”

  “Mm-hm,” Lucsly affirmed, and Dulmur consented through silence.

  The police officer in charge, who seemed to be part Romulan, opened her mouth to speak to the new arrivals. But before she got anything out, there was a thunderous noise from the cloudless sky. Dulmur followed her gaze upward to where a hazy green vortex was discharging several fighter craft. He recognized the characteristics of the vortex. “So much for not mentioning time travel,” he said to the other temporal agents.

  “Twenty-fifth-century design,” Noi said. “I think they’re Certoss!”

  Dulmur recognized the name from DTI records. In one version of history, they had been one of the secondary participants in the Temporal Cold War. Yet in Dulmur’s own timeline, Certoss history had been altered so that their involvement in the time-spanning conflict had never come about. The DTI only knew of their involvement due to an encounter Captain James Kirk—of course, it always came back to Kirk—had once had with a Certoss temporal agent, a paracausal orphan from the effaced timeline, who had hitched a ride with the Enterprise after one of its many jaunts through history.

  But right now there were more immediate concerns—such as the fact that the fighter craft were diving straight toward the obelisk and the three time agents standing beside it. The police shifted their attention to ordering the crowd back, but the fighters had already begun strafing indiscriminately, their blinding blue-green rays tearing through the crowd and blasting shrapnel from the plaza. The heterogeneous crowd reacted homogeneously, screaming and running wildly. But for many, it was already too late. Dulmur saw the head police officer throw herself in front of a fallen bystander, taking the hit meant for him. It sheared her left arm and shoulder clear off, and he saw circuitry and a metallic endoskeleton within. The android officer staggered but managed to lift the bystander to his feet and did her best to escort him to safety.

  “They’re after the obelisk,” Noi said. “This is what I was afraid of. A temporal field this powerful would make quite a target.”

  “Shut down its power again,” Lucsly said. “Snap it back to its own time.”

  “Away from all these people,” Dulmur agreed.

  “Tried that already. It’s in some kind of recharge cycle. Besides, we may need it to restore the timeline.” Lucsly glared at her implicit admission that she’d put the good of the entire timeline second to the immediate safety of a few hundred people. But he, of course, had reflexively made the same choice, so the glare quickly subsided.

  Even as the FTA agent spoke, though, she was working the controls hidden in the ribbed fabric of her sleeve. “What are you doing?” Lucsly asked.

  “At least I can shift the obelisk out of phase,” she said.

  “Hurry!” Dulmur cried as the lead fighter began another strafing run. An Ocampa man took a direct hit to center mass and fell instantly dead, a gaping hole in his torso. Another bolt went through both members of a male couple huddled protectively over their daughter. The two men flickered and faded out, and a pair of mobile holoemitters fell to the ground. The sobbing girl picked up the damaged emitters and hugged them against her chest, rocking back and forth. Her knees were scraped and bleeding.

  Dulmur broke into a run. He didn’t even think about it; if he had, he would’ve been too terrified to act. But nobody else was close enough to save the girl—and her fathers. He scooped her up and ran for the nearest transporter booth. “I’ve got you,” he murmured. “You’ll be all right.”

  A police officer from a green-skinned tripedal species he didn’t recognize took the child in two of its arms. “I have her. Follow me,” the officer said, heading for the transporter.

  “Thanks, but I gotta go.” Dulmur turned and ran back toward Lucsly and Noi, just in time to see the obelisk shimmer out of phase. Good. Now maybe the Certoss will stop—

  Then a bolt of lightning speared him through the back.

  “Dulmur!” Lucsly’s impulse was to run for his partner, but he was not a creature of impulse. He watched the fighters carefully, timing their movements, waiting for an opening. But Noi touched his arm. “Come on. I’ve shifted us .003 out of phase—we won’t be hit.” Lucsly nodded and followed, realizing that if Dulmur’s timing had been a little more refined, Noi could have done the same for him. But indulging in recriminations under circumstances like this would be even worse timing.

  The chorus of energy-bolt whines was joined by a new tone and rhythm, and Lucsly realized that the Certoss fighters had been engaged by a pair of larger ships whose designs had some elements in common with Starfleet vessels. With their target apparently gone, the fighters began circling back toward the vortex. One was destroyed before it could reach the refuge, but the others disappeared one by one back to their own century. To Lucsly’s shock, one of the defending vessels flew into the vortex before it closed, its controllers seemingly unconcerned with the risks to the timeline. Lucsly looked around to see if anything had changed. Normally it would have been an irrational impulse, but he knew that Noi’s uniform had the ability to shield her from timeline alterations, and it stood to reason that she would be extending him the same protection. He saw no sign of local alteration—although he hadn’t exactly been paying close attention before.

  Some sort of aerial drones mat
erialized over the wounded as soon as the battle was over. One was hovering over Dulmur and scanning him by the time Lucsly and Noi (both now returned to normal phase) reached him. “We’re Federation agents,” Noi said to the drone. “Report.”

  Lucsly glanced at her. She was taking a gamble that she was still a government employee in this altered history. Or was she just attempting to bluff the drone? Either way, it took her statement at face value. “Patient condition critical. Extensive damage to liver, dextral kidney, dextral lung. Damage to vertebrae T11 through L1. Severe blood loss and thermal shock. Immediate transreplication is indicated, but patient has no genetic profile on record. Can you provide genotype parameters?”

  “Baseline human,” Noi told it.

  “Please clarify.”

  “You heard me! Baseline human, no modifiers. Use the patient’s existing genome as template and energize.”

  “Acknowledged. Prepare for transport.” Just as Lucsly felt the transporter beam seize him, he could swear he heard the automated drone say, “How quaint.”

  A moment later, he and Noi were standing in what looked like a hospital emergency room. He saw several of the other injured people from the plaza being looked over by doctors—but they all looked healthy and intact. Even the Ocampa man who’d been killed before his eyes was whole and breathing, though unconscious. Lucsly looked down at his partner, discovering that the younger man was also whole again and woozily patting himself down. Even his suit had been repaired. “What . . . what happened?” Dulmur asked, trying to rise.

  “Just lie there a moment, sir,” came a new voice. A Xindi-Arboreal in what looked like a medical lab coat arrived at Dulmur’s bedside. “I’m Doctor Roddall. I just need to check you over, make sure your new organs were replicated correctly. We don’t get many baseline genomes these days. Are you from one of the traditionalist colonies?”