The Collectors
Author: Christopher L. Bennett
Date: 2014-12-08 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Star Trek
Description: An all-new Star Trek e-novella featuring the Department of Temporal Investigations! The dedicated agents of the Federation Department of Temporal Investigations have their work cut out for them protecting the course of history from the dangers of time travel. But the galaxy is littered with artifacts that, in the wrong hands, could threaten reality. One of the DTI's most crucial jobs is to track down these objects and lock them safely away in the Federation’s most secret and secure facility. When Agents Lucsly and Dulmur bring home an alien obelisk of incredible power, they are challenged by a
Publisher: Pocket Star

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To William, Patrick, Jon, Tom, Peter,
Colin, Sylvester, Paul, John, Christopher, David, Matt,
and the other Peter.

Historian’s Note

The main portion of The Collectors takes place in early May 2384, approximately fourteen months after the 2383 portions of Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations—Forgotten History and approximately five weeks after the resolution of the Breen crisis in Star Trek: The Next Generation—Cold Equations Book II: Silent Weapons.

“Then we came to a gallery of simply colossal proportions, but singularly ill-lit. . . . Here I was more in my element, for rising on either side of me were the huge bulks of big machines, all greatly corroded and many broken down, but some still fairly complete. You know I have a certain weakness for mechanism, and I was inclined to linger among these; the more so as for the most part they had the interest of puzzles, and I could make only the vaguest guesses at what they were for. I fancied that if I could solve their puzzles I should find myself in possession of powers that might be of use against the Morlocks.”

—H. G. Wells,
The Time Machine (1895 CE)

Prologue

Stardate 61263.6

April 16, 2384 CE (a Monday)

The obelisk was a work of art. Its sinuous, vaguely conical form was in fact a bundle of dozens of separate plates, each as thin as a butterfly’s wing yet rigidly holding its shape, each enmeshed with the others in an intricate, mazelike spiral—with none of the plates touching one another at any point. Tricorder scans showed that the pattern continued fractally, each visible plate itself consisting of thinner, unconnected layers that were themselves made of thinner layers, down to the thickness of single molecules. The gaps were narrow enough to exploit the Casimir effect, excluding most of the constant storm of virtual-particle formation and annihilation that gave the cosmic vacuum its baseline energy levels, creating a localized negative energy field within. The sheer surface area of all those microscopically entwined layers meant that the obelisk was charged with the densest concentration of negative energy that Kyeera Janyl had ever seen. “By all rights,” said the Tormandar science officer, “it should’ve collapsed in on itself from vacuum pressure alone.”

“Yet here it stands, Lieutenant.” Captain Bazel of the U.S.S. Rhea gazed up at the obelisk with his bulbous eyes. The Saurian closed his nictitating membranes, filtering out all light but infrared, but this revealed nothing beyond the subtle warmth that emanated from the structure. Although what he saw was nothing compared to the emanations Janyl’s tricorder had revealed: that characteristic, disquieting mix of negative energy, Hawking radiation, gravitomagnetic fields, and exotic-particle decay signatures that Starfleet science officers shorthanded as “temporal energy”—and Starfleet captains simply called “trouble.”

Reopening his membranes, Bazel cast his gaze across the surrounding wilderness. They stood at the narrowest point of a valley limned by craggy sandstone peaks, the dusty soil of the valley floor adorned with patchy purple grasses and diminutive, twisty shrubs. “The question is, why does it stand here? Who was it made for, let alone by? Any sign that this planet has ever had sentient life?”

“Not a trace, sir,” Janyl replied, shaking her reddish-furred head. “Evolution here hasn’t advanced far enough yet, and there are no geological or genetic signatures suggesting any past alien tampering in this world’s development. And the way things are going, it’s not likely to evolve any intelligence in the foreseeable future.”

The clouds of volcanic ash looming on the horizon reinforced her words. This still-nameless planet had recently—that is, within the past ten thousand years—undergone an orbital shift due to a chaotic gravitational interaction with its neighbor worlds. The resultant tectonic upheavals were bringing about a global extinction event. Few of the planet’s impressive megafauna still survived, and the planet’s future orbit would be too erratic, shifting annually between ocean-boiling heat and atmosphere-freezing cold, to support the evolution of any future sapient forms. Which ruled out the other possible direction from which an object with temporal properties could have originated.

“So somebody from some other world, perhaps some other time, has placed this here,” Bazel remarked. “But why here? Why now? Some kind of survey probe?”

“I don’t read anything that I recognize as sensor emanations,” Janyl replied. “It could be a passive sensor, but why go to all the trouble to send a probe such a distance through time—especially one as potentially powerful as this—and limit it to that?”

“Such a distance?”

Janyl shrugged. “I can’t be sure, but the quantum dating readings are off the tricorder’s scale. It’s from a more remote point in time than I’m equipped to determine.”

“Unfortunately, we don’t have much time to evaluate this thing in situ,” Bazel told her. “Unless the forecast has changed.”

“No, sir. The herd will reach this valley within three days. It’s a natural bottleneck, and they’ll be packed shoulder to shoulder.” The six-legged, blue-skinned ungulates were the largest and most socially complex species still surviving on this world, and though their numbers were greatly diminished now, each one was larger than a Type-11 shuttlecraft.

“Do you think the obelisk can survive that?”

“I’m not sure how it holds its form as it is, so I can’t rule out the possibility. But subjecting it to that much of a pounding could damage it. Or . . . trigger it.”

When dealing with a powerful and advanced temporal artifact with unknown properties, neither of those was a gamble worth taking. “Very well,” Bazel said. “Coordinate with Commander Blair. Make arrangements to move this thing to Rhea—very delicately.”

“Um, with respect, Captain, I’m not sure it’d be any safer to keep this thing in our hold for the five weeks it’d take to get back to a starbase. And we’re still not done with our survey of the biosphere. Captain,” she went on with passion, “this may be our last chance to document many of these species before they’re gone forever. The loss to science—”

“Easy, Lieutenant. I’ll contact Starfleet—they’ll probably be willing to divert a slipstream ship our way for something like this. They’ll want to get this into the hands of Temporal Investigations as soon as possible.”

The young Tormandar frowned, her sensitive pheromonal receptors perhaps registering his own wariness toward that civilian agency. Or maybe she could just hear it in his voice. “What do you think they’re going to do with it, sir?”

“I know nothing beyond rumors,” he told her. “But by now, I think the DTI must have a fair collection of items like this hidden away somewhere.”

I

May 2, 2384 (a Wednesday)

Dwarf planet 136199 Eris, Outer Solar System

“So are you going to take the job?”

Marion Dulmur stared at his fellow special agent, surprised by the question. In the eighteen years, nine months, and sixteen days since he had first been partnered with Gariff Lucsly, he had rarely known the older man to initiate a conversation that wasn’t in the line of duty. Normally it would have been Dulmur who’d feel compelled to break the long silence at a time like this. They had spent the past three hours and fourteen minutes in a maglev carriage, descending via orbital tether from Eridiosynchronous orbit. Stretched out below them, drawing rapidly nearer in the final minutes of their descent, was the snowy-white yet dimly illuminated surface of Eris, a lifeless ball of ice on a wide, lonely orbit through the outer fringes of the Sol system, well removed from civilization or public attention. Here was where the Federation Department of Temporal Investigations maintained the Eridian Vault, the top-secret storage facility housing the most sensitive and dangerous temporal artifacts known to the Federation—or at least those that could be safely moved here. The artifact discovered sixteen days before by the crew of Rhea had so far fit into that category, but given the delicacy of the obelisk’s structure, no one was willing to risk sending it through a transporter, and thus it had to be delivered to the surface the old-fashioned way, gingerly lowered down a superstrong cable thousands of kilometers long. Dulmur and Lucsly had spent the past twelve days aboard a Starfleet slipstream courier, securing the obelisk and shepherding it back to the Vault; and now, after so much time aboard the fastest spacegoing conveyance the Federation had yet mastered, they had to spend the final leg of the journey on the slowest one still in use. It allowed the anticipation to build as they neared the moment when they would have to secure this powerful alien object in the Vault and pray that it didn’t have some unpredictable interaction with one of the dozens of other artifacts therein, artifacts with the power to rewrite reality. So most people would feel the need to indulge in small talk to avoid having to contemplate the immensity of it all.

Not Lucsly, though. The lanky, silver-haired, stone-faced special agent was a stalwart of the DTI, largely because he was simply too prosaic and unimaginative to be troubled much by the existential anxieties of temporal investigation. Normally it was Dulmur who carried the brunt of the conversation between them, for he’d never been able to achieve quite the same level of stoic professionalism as his partner.

But today, he’d been more subdued than usual, his thoughts about the recent offer preoccupying him. Now that they were almost home, he knew he couldn’t put the decision off much longer, so it weighed more heavily on his mind. Thus the conversational void that Lucsly was now unwontedly attempting to fill.

“I’m tempted, sure,” Dulmur finally replied. “Just like I was tempted the other three times they offered.”

“The Denobula branch office is an important addition to our facilities. It needs a capable assistant director.”

“I agree. We need a stronger presence out that way.” The growing tensions between the Federation and the more aggressive members of the Typhon Pact—the Breen and Tholians in particular—created a delicate situation where temporal security was concerned. In the two years and eleven months since the Pact had gone public, its members had generally adhered to the Temporal Accords, for any sane government understood that tampering with time could backfire in unpredictable ways. But just over five weeks ago, the increasingly erratic and belligerent Breen government had attempted to capture a derelict starship from a parallel quantum reality with the intent of using its extratemporal technology to gain a strategic edge. The derelict had been destroyed and the Breen leader deposed for his failure, but the incident had created uncertainty about the Pact’s reliability as a partner in temporal regulation. Thus a stronger DTI presence toward the Federation’s spinward border, where the Pact’s more bellicose members were concentrated, was very much worth having. The new office at Denobula Triaxa would also allow closer coordination with the nascent temporal management agency that the Ferengi Alliance was in the process of establishing at the behest of Grand Nagus Rom, whose prior personal experiences with transtemporal and allohistorical displacement had left him sympathetic toward the DTI’s goals. Rom had done the Department a great service the previous year by drawing on his personal fortune to purchase an ancient yet functional vortex manipulator that the Redheri had discovered and auctioned, whereupon he had bartered it to the Federation in exchange for fairly reasonable trade concessions—which, by Ferengi standards, was effectively a donation. The manipulator had been the most recent addition to the Vault’s inventory, until today.

“So you’re considering the job?” Lucsly asked.

“I always consider it. But it’s like I’ve said before—I can do the most good out in the field with you.”

“You said that ten years, six months, and twenty-five days ago, when we started to get warning signs that a new front of the Temporal Cold War was about to open in our era. That conflict was resolved two years, two months, and two weeks ago, our time.”

“As far as we know. Sure, Agent Noi said things would calm down for us in the future, but we both know there are many futures to choose from. The one she comes from might not be the one we get.”

“Hm,” Lucsly replied.

“And even without more invasions from the future, things in the present are getting pretty intense, with the Breen and everything. No telling what other dangerous tech they might want to get their gloves on. So, best to stay ready.”

“Hm.”

For another 3.8 minutes, there was nothing but the hum of the maglev carriage’s motors. “Still,” the older agent finally said, “there are other facets of the future to consider. More personal ones.”

Again, Dulmur was surprised. True, he made no secret of his desire to settle down and start a family one day, but he’d become increasingly resigned to the unlikelihood of that as he’d grown older and more entrenched in his job. And he’d never known Lucsly to encourage him in that pursuit. “You hate change, Lucsly. You really want the hassle of breaking in a new partner again?”

“No.” Twelve seconds later: “But change happens. That’s just reality. Sooner or later you have to face it.”

Dulmur studied his partner’s lean, stoic face for a long moment. “Look . . . partner . . .”

The carriage hummed louder as it began its final deceleration. “We’re about to arrive,” Lucsly said. “Time to get this artifact checked in.”

Two decades of practice let Dulmur follow his partner’s lead and set personal issues aside as they proceeded with the work. The next hour was spent delicately transferring the obelisk to the processing bay, where it would be examined with great caution to determine whether it could be safely neutralized, or at least effectively shielded from the Vault’s other most powerful artifacts. True, the majority of those artifacts were mercifully nonfunctional, but some required only an infusion of temporal energy to be triggered, and the obelisk emitted it in abundance.

“You must be joking,” moaned Doctor Warain, the Caldonian temporal physicist who supervised the study and management of the Vault’s contents. The towering, brown-complexioned humanoid shook his bulbous head at the readings on his console as he and the two special agents monitored the obelisk from the observation chamber. “These negative-energy readings are unprecedented! And the chroniton emissions . . . no, no, if this thing is placed anywhere near the Mervynian chroniton polarizers while one is switched on . . .”

“I don’t think there are any plans to switch them on, Warain,” Dulmur said.

“And are you confident that you can rule out a recursive retrocausal anomaly arising from the gravitomagnetic interactions that could result? Because I can’t. It’s an allowable solution to the equations, you know.”

“Yes, we know,” Lucsly said, even as he finished logging the obelisk into inventory on his part of the console. “We’re aware of the challenges. The courier’s engineer raised similar concerns about the slipstream interaction, but they managed to avoid problems.”

“So if they could do it,” Dulmur went on, “you can do it. Right? You’ve come up with containment solutions for dangerous items before.”

“Oh, I have a containment solution, all right.”

“Great! Let’s hear it.”

“Phaser a hole fifty kilometers deep in the ice and dump this thing in. On the opposite side of the planetoid.”

“We’ll take that under advisement,” Lucsly told him dryly. “In the meantime, if you could determine how much we need to shore up the containment fields in Bay D14 . . .”

Warain glowered down at him. “You know it’s not that easy, right? There’s no way this will ever work.” He sighed. “I’ll get right on it.”

The Caldonian strode from the chamber, muttering anxiously to himself. Dulmur would have been more worried if not for the fact that Warain reacted the same way to virtually every new addition to the Vault. It had once amazed Dulmur that someone so neurotic could handle the responsibility of a job where one misstep could erase oneself or one’s whole civilization from existence. Over the years, he’d come to realize that it was simply how Warain coped, a façade masking the intricate calculations and strategies always percolating in that massive brain of his. The towering scientist had managed to keep the Vault free of major temporal mishaps for the entirety of his tenure here, and so Dulmur was confident that—

“He’s right, you know.”

Dulmur spun, startled by the new yet familiar voice. Lucsly had already turned and showed no sign of surprise at the presence of the unauthorized visitor: an elegant, exotic female with mahogany skin, large honey-colored eyes, black hair worn in a long braid, scalloped Vulcanoid ears, a subtle chevron ridge between her eyebrows, and truly spectacular cheekbones. The interloper’s sleek frame was clad in the close-fitting, ribbed black jumpsuit of the Federation Temporal Agency, the thirty-first-century descendant of the DTI. True to form, she’d arrived imperceptibly, as though she’d been there all along and simply hadn’t been noticed. Her quantum time-travel technology not only created that illusion, but made it child’s play for her to bypass Vault security. “Agent Noi,” Lucsly said. “You know you’re not authorized to be here.”

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.”

“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 materialized 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?”

Dulmur exchanged a look with the other time agents. “Uhh, something like that.”

Roddall proceeded to scan him. “Not that the drones aren’t reliable, of course, but it’s a good idea to double-check their work—even if it stings their pride a bit. Now, I’m just going to ask you a few questions to check your mental clarity. What’s your name?”

“Dulmur.”

“Your full name, if you don’t mind.”

He rolled his eyes. “Marion Frances Dulmur,” he confessed.

“Pleased to meet you, Marion. Now, what is the date?”

Dulmur hesitated. “Thirty-fifty-one.”

Roddall peered at him. “Do you remember what day and month it is?”

“Doctor.” Noi stepped forward. “Perhaps you should try a different line of questioning.”

The Arboreal finally noticed what she was wearing. Alarm flashed in his eyes, but he quickly suppressed it. “Pardon me, ma’am. I didn’t quite recognize the uniform.” He continued the examination as best he could without asking any questions requiring local or current knowledge.

As the examination continued, Lucsly looked around at the other patients. Some of them had panels open for the doctors to examine their parts within; the police officer had not been the only android or cyborg in the crowd. Meanwhile, the little girl whom Dulmur had rescued looked on as a technician repaired her fathers’ mobile emitters, using equipment that seemed to be part of the emergency room’s standard complement.

Finally, Roddall gave Dulmur a clean bill of health and cleared him to leave. “Although you are showing an unusual amount of uncorrected wear and tear, even some minor geriatric degeneration. If you’d like, I’d be happy to send you through the beam once more and repair that for you. Or if you wanted to consider a holoconversion, the upload process is quite painless.”

Dulmur’s eyes widened. The offer—at least the former one—clearly tempted him. But a look from Lucsly was enough to remind him of his duty. The organ repairs he’d already had were enough of an anachronism to bring back with him to the twenty-fourth century—assuming they could get back there. “No, thanks, Doc. Like I said, I’m kind of a traditionalist.”

The doctor glanced briefly at Noi but evidently knew better than to pry. “I understand. Good luck, Mister Dulmur.”

Dulmur had an appraising look on his face as they left the hospital. It gave way to a grin as he jogged down the stairs. “I feel great! That—that was amazing! They just beam me up and I’m already cured. Is that a time saver or what?”

Lucsly was just trying not to think about it. He was glad his partner was all right, grateful to the thirty-first-century medical miracle that had saved him . . . but he really, really did not want to think about it.

III

May 2, 2384

Eris

“You’re telling me,” said Teresa Garcia, “that two senior agents disappeared from the most secure facility in the whole Federation, and nobody has a clue what happened?”

Doctor Warain cringed at the junior DTI agent’s words, even though he towered half a meter above her raven-tressed head. “Well, clearly there was a spacetime displacement event,” he told her defensively. “The negative energy and chroniton field readings bear that out. Unfortunately, the surge was so powerful that it swamped our sensors—and since then we’ve been busy stabilizing the other artifacts triggered by the surge. Do you know that, until an hour ago, there was a vortex in Aisle F opening to the last Andorian ice age?”

Meyo Ranjea, Garcia’s senior partner, spoke soothingly to the Vault engineer. “As long as it’s all contained now,” the tall, striking Deltan male told him. It had been over five hours since the incident. Ranjea and Garcia had been on their way to an interdimensional physics conference at the University of Alpha Centauri when word had come in, making them the nearest field agents to Eris, but it had still taken time for their transport to reverse course and warp back to Sol’s outskirts.

“Well, yes, but now there’s a colony of ice bore worms loose somewhere in the Vault and we don’t have time to contain them. Who knows what could happen if they get out into the Eridian environment?”

“Hey!” Garcia said. “Focus! Lucsly and Dulmur. What happened? Any idea what triggered the surge?”

Warain grew even more nervous, something Garcia wouldn’t have thought possible. “You see, that’s the problem. Just moments after I left the observation gallery, the security feed cut out. There was . . . a kind of quantum interference I’ve seen before.”

“Do you know its cause?” Ranjea asked.

“Well . . . I’m not exactly supposed to know.”

“Doctor, pardon the expression, but time may be of the essence.”

“It’s just . . . that kind of interference shows up on the feeds . . . whenever we get a visit from, well, from uptime.”

Garcia groaned. She hadn’t personally dealt with any of the DTI’s successor agencies yet in her fledgling career, but she knew they liked to avoid showing up on contemporary records and took steps to disable security sensors when they stopped in for an official visit. “Oh, no. So someone kidnapped the big guys into the future?”

“We don’t know for sure,” Ranjea told her, thinking. “It stands to reason that an uptime agency may have had an interest in an artifact so powerful. Conceivably someone may have stolen the obelisk and captured Gariff and Marion when they tried to prevent it.” Garcia stared. Even after a couple of years as Ranjea’s partner, it was still strange to hear anyone refer to Lucsly and Dulmur by the first names they themselves rarely used. “But given the intensity of the temporal surge, it seems more likely that the obelisk itself caused the time displacement, perhaps triggered by some interaction with the uptime agent’s equipment. In which case it may have taken them anywhen.”

“And the temporal interference from, well, everything that’s gone on here since the incident,” Warain went on, “keeps us from getting a clear reading on the event. We can’t calculate how far or in which direction they were displaced.”

“Hold on, guys,” Garcia said, spreading her hands. “Think about this. We’re in a storehouse full of time machines. You’re telling me we don’t have anything that can peek back a few hours and see what happened?”

“Most of them don’t even work,” the Vault engineer replied.

“Which means some of them do.”

“The spacetime metric around the event is complicated enough as it is. I wouldn’t want to step back into that mess.”

“I’m not saying we go back. Just . . . open a crack and take a peek through. Or, failing that, there must be something in here that can track a temporal trajectory, or let us make contact with our people.”

“Teresa,” Ranjea said, “you know we keep these artifacts here so they won’t be used.”

“Yeah, but this is an emergency. For all we know, L. and D. could be back in the past, endangering the timeline.”

“If anyone could manage to avoid altering the timeline—”

“Yeah, I know, it’s those two. But accidents happen.”

“If there had been a change, we would already know from the shielded records,” Warain told her.

“The records are only as good as the record-keeping of the timeline they’re made in. There’s a lot that doesn’t get written down. Stuff on worlds outside the Federation, or in the distant past. Can we really take the chance? We have to try to find them.”

Ranjea nodded his elegant, hairless head. “You’re right, Teresa. We need to contact Director Andos.”

The 263-year-old Rhaandarite director of the DTI had been awaiting their call, so it took them very little time to reach her. The bulbous-browed, sandy-haired female, who towered well above even Warain’s height, listened thoughtfully to their suggestion and folded her hands before speaking. “I believe your instincts are sound, Agent Garcia,” she said in her low, measured voice. “I have attempted to leave a message for the uptime agencies, but there has been no response.” Garcia frowned. Leaving messages for the future was simple; humans had been doing it since the first cave painting. Even the earliest time-fic stories had featured travelers writing letters meant to be delivered centuries later. The DTI had its own more sophisticated ways of doing the same thing with messages encoded for reception by its uptime partners in the Temporal Accords. The Accordists didn’t always answer a summons, but clearly this incident had uptime involvement already. So if they weren’t answering, that meant something was wrong.

“I will authorize you at this point to attempt to determine the time to which Agents Lucsly and Dulmur have been taken, and in whose company. But you are not to attempt retrieval without consulting me first. And it goes without saying that you must take great care. The artifacts of Eris are not to be trifled with.”

“You know,” Teresa Garcia said as she and Ranjea strode through the corridors of the Eridian Vault, “sometimes it can be really, really tempting to trifle with things.”

“Careful, Teresa.” Ranjea’s warning was in good humor. “I know this is your first visit to the Vault, but try not to get too excited.”

“Oh, you can’t tell me you’ve never thought about it. We are surrounded by time machines.” She gestured at the nearby bays, where various temporal artifacts were visible behind heavy-duty force fields. The artifact behind her in Bay D4 was rather unassuming, a low square platform that was believed to be a temporal transporter of uncertain origin. But Bay D5 held a more alluring object, a sleek angular hovercar retrofitted with a prototype temporal deflector by some ambitious twenty-fifth-century inventor who hadn’t survived its first test flight into the past. Garcia spread her arms toward it, her gray-clad shoulders brushing against the fringe of her straight black hair. “Come on, wouldn’t you love to take that baby for a spin? Or—or almost anything else in here? What DTI agent hasn’t fantasized at least once about going on a shopping spree in this place and seeing what kind of havoc they could wreak?”

“Lucsly,” the two agents chorused, followed by laughter.

“I mean, if anyone wanted to conquer the universe,” Garcia went on as she studied the large, perfectly spherical time capsule in D7, “this would definitely be the place to start from. Or maybe you could start out smaller. Maybe, oh, go back to the twentieth century with a pair of gravity boots and a personal force field and try to become a superhero.”

“I think it’s been tried.”

Garcia shook her head, her wavy blond tresses dancing across her shoulder blades. “For a Deltan, you’re such a stick-in-the-mud.”

Ranjea knew she was joking, knowingly exaggerating both the number of functional, controllable artifacts herein and her own interest in using them. Teresa Garcia was herself a refugee from the past, flung forward fifteen years aboard the passenger transport Verity, and she had earned her invitation to the DTI by risking her life to prevent her shipmates from going back and attempting what could have been a cataclysmic alteration. He knew his partner could be relied upon to protect the integrity of history. But her decision still weighed on her, and her humor was a way of coping.

Garcia stopped before Bay D9, the sleeves of her brown faux-leather jacket rustling as she crossed her arms to stare at the object within, an irregular, vertical black slab polished to a reflective gloss. “What do you suppose this thing is?” she asked as she admired the reflection of her slim figure.

Ranjea crossed her arms over her ample bosom. “It’s not a vanity mirror, Teresa. You shouldn’t get too close.”

“Oh, you’re such a big sister.” Garcia leaned forward to read the sign, brushing her red-dyed bangs aside. “ ‘Caution: Worldline destabilizer. Generates localized probabilistic and biographical discontinuities. Highly unstable—approach with caution.’ ” She looked back at Ranjea and shrugged. “I don’t feel any different.”

“Still, you know better than to be reckless, Teri,” Ranjea told her. “What would Stewart think if you let the baby come to any harm?”

Garcia’s hands moved protectively over her swelling abdomen, which was showing more and more as she moved through her second trimester. “You’re right. I forget sometimes. It’s still hard to believe this is real.” She had been dating Agent Peart for over two years before they had decided to take a chance on marriage and parenthood. Few DTI agents were able to make marriage work, but the two young humans hoped that keeping it within the agency would be the solution.

“Oh, soon enough you won’t be able to forget.” The women shared a chuckle. Ranjea reflected on how fortunate it was that she’d elected to have her sex reassigned before joining the DTI. If she had stayed male, she doubted it would have been possible to partner effectively with a female human like Garcia, given their susceptibility to Deltan pheromones.

“Assuming, of course,” Ranjea went on, growing serious again, “that you step away from the destabilizer before it has some effect on you.”

“There you go again, Ranjea,” George Faunt growled, shaking his balding head. “Lecturing me like you’re the senior partner. I’ve got this, young lady.” The grizzled veteran stepped over to the control panel. “I’m the one who found this device, remember? Well, this particular one, at least. Sometimes I wonder how many more are out there,” he went on as he worked the controls to modify the bay’s damping field, “causing localized reality glitches and inconsistencies that nobody notices.” Ranjea smiled, admiring her mentor at work. There had been a time when it had seemed Faunt was on the verge of breaking under the existential anxieties of this job, but Ranjea had taken a chance, very carefully and delicately initiating Faunt as her lover, gambling that his maturity and the strength of their partnership would allow him to survive the experience without forming a dependency or losing his ego identity. The gamble had paid off, and ever since, he’d been a bastion of confidence and commitment, utterly dependable both in the field and in private. “There,” Faunt said after a final adjustment. “It should settle down in a moment.”

Ranjea furrowed his brow. “How will we know?”

Teresa Garcia shrugged, tilting her raven-haired head. “I guess we won’t know. That’s how we’ll know.” She frowned, looking back at the control panel. “How’d I know how to do that?”

“You have good instincts. Just as I’ve always said.” The older Deltan gazed at the glossy black slab, considering the strong masculine contours of his reflection and experiencing a sense of stimulating novelty, as though the sight were unfamiliar. He recalled a time when he’d nearly chosen a different gender identity, though it had been a while since he’d wondered what he may have missed by declining that path. What had brought such thoughts to his mind now? Being male with a young, passionate human woman as his partner had posed its challenges, to be sure. But her ability to cope with her overpowering attraction to him, to transcend it and form the deep platonic partnership they now shared, had been a glorious gift, and he would not trade it for anything.

Although she could be trying sometimes. “Ooooh,” Garcia breathed now, her dark eyes widening as she was drawn irresistibly toward the end of the corridor. Filling Bay D11, seated patiently and expectantly, was a massive, black-armored android more than twice the size of a human, on whose chest was emblazoned the text DO NOT ACTIVATE UNTIL STARDATE 100952 and the equivalent caution in other languages and dating schemes.

Ranjea took her arm, pulling her away before her grin grew any wider. “No.”

“But—”

“No.”

IV

Day 266, 3051 CE (a Tuesday)

London Metrocomplex, West Eurasia

When Jena Noi led Lucsly and Dulmur back to the plaza to secure the obelisk, she found that someone had beaten them there. Inside the cordon the London police had established, she saw several people in ribbed black uniforms employing familiar equipment to scan the obelisk, though they were keeping the alien device out of phase for the moment, invisible to those without the proper ocular enhancements.

But Noi noted differences in their uniforms as she drew nearer. Unlike her own garment, theirs were adorned with insignias, rank pins, and piping that gave them a more militaristic appearance. They also carried firearms at their hips. The humans noticed the discrepancy too. “Uh-oh,” Dulmur said. “Those don’t look like the kind of people who’d react too kindly to time travelers.”

“Just stick with me, you’ll be okay,” Noi assured him. But her confidence was feigned. She’d hoped this timeline would have a Federation Temporal Agency equivalent to her own, sharing common goals and ready to help her restore her proper history (assuming her quantum scans were correct and this was an alteration of her own timeline rather than a spontaneous parallel branch). But from the look of these agents’ uniforms and their proud, assertive bearing, Noi suspected they would not want to let go of their reality easily.

One of the agents, an unfamiliar Vomnin male, caught sight of their approach and called to the agent in charge. As the latter strode over to meet them at the cordon, Noi gradually recognized her as Serel Jeihaz, one of Noi’s own colleagues. Like the Jeihaz she knew, this one had chosen to skin her humanoid-shaped force-field envelope with a translucent blue haze rather than a simulation of organic flesh. She had given up mimicking her original Zetregan appearance two centuries ago, believing, as many holograms did, that their people should embrace their identity as artilects rather than clinging to their biological origins, if any. She kept a humanoid shape only since it was practical for interacting with humanoids and their technology. But while the Jeihaz from Noi’s reality was light and sylphlike, this one had programmed her holographic form to be nearly two and a half meters tall and powerfully built. The cloudy blue mane trailing back from her head also flowed more actively, seeming more like a flame than a languid mist. In contrast to the translucency of her holoskin, the uniform she manifested appeared as solid and militaristic as those of her subordinates.

“Jena Noi.” Jeihaz greeted her with none of her counterpart’s warmth. “Though not the one I know. The outfit’s boring, but I like the hair.”

“Thanks, Jeihaz. I like the, um, height.”

The hologram gestured at the two humans. “I take it you and your associates here are connected with this incursion?”

“That’s right. These are Agents Lucsly and Dulmur of the Department of Temporal Investigations, six-six-seven local years before present.”

Lucsly nodded up at the hologram, offering a matter-of-fact “Ma’am.” Dulmur was too busy trying not to stare.

“It was my mistake that brought them and the artifact here,” Noi continued. “And as mistakes go, it was a big one.”

“That’s fairly evident. Couldn’t you have at least landed the thing in a more secure location? The chronergy it’s radiating is a beacon for time scavengers and raiders. You’re lucky nobody was final-killed.”

“This is a secure location in my timeline. Agency headquarters should be right here.”

The white ovals representing Jeihaz’s eyes narrowed. “So you deleted the Na’kuhl bombing? Or averted it?”

Noi frowned, gazing around her at the plaza and getting a better sense of what the central statue was meant to commemorate. “The Na’kuhl did this?” There was no way it could have been a contemporary attack; the faction of militant temporal interventionists led by Vosk in the twenty-ninth century had been so extreme in their methods that they’d swiftly alienated supporters in their own society and had been short-lived in real-time terms, regardless of how far they’d been able to extend their reach into the past and future. She doubted things would have gone much differently in any other version of history. So the attack must have been parachronistic, a strike from two centuries downtime. “How did they get past the temporal grid?”

Jeihaz tilted her head. “The what?”

“Oh, no.” Noi’s heart sank. Without the galaxywide temporal defense grid in place to regulate time travel, different temporal factions would be free to attack one another directly instead of waging a cold war through proxies in the pre-grid past. Between the earlier Certoss raid and this new information, it seemed that was just what had occurred in this history.

“Don’t worry, we made sure the damn Na’kuhl paid for their crime. But we left the event itself unaltered to remind us of what we’re fighting for.”

Jeihaz’s casual implication that leaving history unaltered was atypical for her agency filled Noi with alarm. Next to her, Dulmur appeared equally disturbed and brimming with questions. Lucsly had his head down, trying to avoid paying attention, but Noi knew him well enough to read the depth of his own dismay.

Noi turned back to the hologram. “Jeihaz, the bombing should never have happened at all. If you consult your shielded archives, you’ll find this is an adulterated timeline.”

Jeihaz crossed her arms over her simulated barrel chest. “Is that so?”

“I’m not sure yet how it happened. But I need your agency’s help in identifying the cause of the alteration and the best strategy for repair.” She nodded toward the obelisk that only she and her fellow blacksuits could currently see. “That artifact’s the trigger, so we’ll need to follow its travel curve back to the divergence point. But it’s got a default retrieval link to far uptime, and I don’t know how to override it.”

The towering agent considered her words, her simulated face revealing nothing of the mental processing taking place in the holoemitter at her center of mass. “If what you’re saying is true, we need to take it up with senior staff. We were preparing the artifact for transport to HQ. You and the humans should accompany us.”

“Sounds good. Where is HQ here, by the way?”

“Tandar Prime.” She looked around. “But catch-up can wait. We’ve registered Aegis transporter signatures on Earth. They may be trying to get an agent in range.”

“You’re not allies with the Aegis?”

“We have an understanding. But this is just the sort of thing that would override that.” She nodded to a Gorn underling, who deactivated the cordon field before Noi. “You three come inside. We’re getting ready to beam out.”

Noi led the DTI duo through the cordon, following after Jeihaz. “I wouldn’t recommend beaming the obelisk. Its fields are delicately balanced.”

“We have it in stasis.”

“Serel, listen. I thought I had it under control, and that’s a mistake that cost me. We need to take extra care here. This is far beyond us.”

Jeihaz considered briefly. “Understood. I’m calling for a ship.” Her eyes fixed on Noi’s. “Just hope nobody attacks us while we wait.”

The holographic agent moved off to ready her team, and Dulmur sidled up to Noi. “You mean we were going to beam to Tandar Prime instead of using a ship? That’s fifty-five light-years!”

“Dulmur,” Lucsly cautioned.

“It’s okay, Lucsly,” Noi said. “You guys have already had subspace transporters for decades, remember? You just haven’t figured out how to make them safe or practical to use. This is nothing you couldn’t have guessed would happen.”

“If you can beam so far,” Dulmur went on, “I’m surprised you still even use ships.”

Noi shrugged. “Even today, a lot of planets are still uncharted, uninhabitable, or unfriendly. Not the kind of places you just beam into.” Not to mention intergalactic travel, she thought, which I won’t.

There was a bang of displaced air. Noi and the DTI men looked up to see a sleek white transport ship hovering overhead, not too different from those of her timeline’s Galfleet, but more heavily armed. It descended to the plaza, opening its rear hatch so the obelisk could be moved inside. Jeihaz came up to Noi again. “Stand by to board,” she said. “We should be at TIA headquarters within twenty minutes.”

Noi looked up at the towering hologram. “TIA?”

Jeihaz nodded. “Temporal Intervention Agency. Why, what’s yours called?”

Noi, Lucsly, and Dulmur exchanged a disturbed look.

Federation Temporal Intervention Agency Headquarters, Tandar Prime

Roughly half of the twenty-minute trip to the Tandar headquarters was spent arranging clearance for landing and debarkation at the high-security facility. It made sense to Noi; in the absence of a galaxywide grid to secure against unauthorized entry from other times or timelines, a temporal security agency would need a robust local defense. And the Tandarans had spent centuries researching temporal defense methods following their decade-long harassment by the Suliban Cabal back in the twenty-second-century front of the Temporal Cold War. At least they’d done so before the grid had made it unnecessary. It stood to reason that in a grid-free timeline, they would have continued their defense research and the Federation’s temporal defenders would have availed themselves of it.

But wait, thought Noi. The only reason the Cold War started at all is because the grid precluded direct attacks like we’re seeing here. Isn’t it? Perhaps, she reflected, her assumptions about Tandaran history had been in error. Perhaps they would have been predisposed to temporal research anyway. And perhaps the twenty-eighth-century Order of Omega would always have been predisposed to augment the twenty-second-century Suliban and attack the Tandarans by proxy as part of their experiments in species modification. Even in adulterated histories, the worldlines of individuals and species had a tendency to correct toward their most probable paths. Every event had a constellation of contributing causes, most of them far from obvious, so altering a few causative factors would often just change the details of an event rather than preventing it altogether. Not to mention that, on a more basic level, people had a way of using external circumstances as excuses for doing what came naturally to them anyway.

While Noi had decades of direct experience with altered and parallel timelines to guide her thoughts, she knew that Lucsly and Dulmur were limited mostly to abstract theory and secondhand reports. She could tell Dulmur was struggling to sort things out, though Lucsly, as usual, played his cards closer to the vest. “I remember what you told us about the grid,” Dulmur said to her as they sat in the transport’s cargo bay, shepherding the obelisk as TIA guards stood vigil over both it and them. “Some kind of network that protects known space from temporal incursions. Created by unknown entities at an uncertain time, so nobody could figure out where to go back to prevent its creation.” Noi gave an uneasy nod. Even telling them that much had been a severe breach of protocol, but she had been left with no choice when the two DTI agents had become caught up in a potentially cataclysmic battle of the Temporal Cold War—two and a quarter years ago for them, less than one for her—and had been the only neutral mediators capable of negotiating a settlement. Still, she’d kept them in the dark about the details as much as possible—which was easy enough, since the details were nearly as obscure to her.

“So how can we be in a timeline where it doesn’t exist?” Dulmur went on. “How could our trip through time have triggered this divergence? Could the obelisk have—”

“Dulmur,” Lucsly said sharply.

Noi put a hand on the sandy-haired agent’s arm. “Lucsly’s right. The less any of us knows about the origins of the grid, the better. If we’re ever going to get me home, and keep me there, those secrets need to stay secret.”

Dulmur looked into her eyes, understanding dawning in his own—along with compassion almost matching what she read in Lucsly’s silent gaze. “I’m sorry, Jena. I didn’t think . . . this must be painful for you. This is—it’s your time, but your world is gone and you don’t know . . .”

She smiled. “I appreciate it, Dulmur, but it’s not my first time dealing with something like this. And I know my reality’s still out there somewhere.”

“But there’s no guarantee it won’t converge with this history and—” He ducked his head. “Sorry, I’m doing a lousy job being reassuring.”

“You’re trying to work the problem. So am I. Right now our focus should be on gathering intelligence.” She turned to the older agent. “And that means I need you both in the game, Lucsly. Observe everything you can. Yes, you’re seeing the future, but it’s the wrong future.”

“One that’s still largely recognizable to you,” Lucsly replied. She gave him a pointed look, and after a moment he sat up and took a breath, visibly coming out of his introverted state—as far as he ever did, at any rate. “Very well. We’re at your disposal.”

She looked back and forth between them. “You won’t resent it if I take the lead on this one?”

Dulmur almost blushed. “We only have a problem with you butting into our territory.”

“And subjectively recent events should demonstrate why,” Lucsly added.

His partner hushed him, then turned back to Noi. “But this is your jurisdiction, in more ways than one. And let’s face it: We’re way out of our depth. We’ll help if we can, but it’s your show, Agent.”

“I appreciate that. Really.” To be honest, there were dozens of more experienced temporal operatives she would far rather have assisting her in this situation. But if she had to be stuck with a pair of twenty-fourth-century DTI agents as her only backup, she was glad it was this pair. They could be a pain sometimes, with their bureaucratic rigidity and their parochial, puritanical attitudes toward time travel, but they were as stable and dependable as any time agents she knew.

Although, in the grand scheme of things, their recorded impact on history after 2382 or so had been relatively minor. So she couldn’t understand how removing them from 2384 could have prevented the defense grid’s creation, particularly since it didn’t come into being until well after they were both dead. Perhaps Dulmur was right, and it had been the study of the obelisk that had somehow contributed something vital to the grid’s origins. But records showed that an uptime agent had taken the obelisk exactly when she had done so. Then again, many records had been forged to protect the grid’s secrets. Had this particular forgery accidentally had the opposite effect?

If so, this might be a Spock loop: a paracausal Möbius strip in which learning of this alternate history would somehow lead her to take actions necessary to create her own history. That was encouraging, for it suggested there was a way out of this mess.

Or maybe it will lead Lucsly or Dulmur to take some action that— She stopped herself. No, Jena. Do not think about it. Just don’t.

The forward hatch opened, and Jeihaz entered, having shrunk her holographic body to fit more easily into the transport. “We’ll be landing momentarily,” she told Noi as the guards fell in alongside her. “Stand by to disembark—and bring your guests with you.”

Once they exited the transport, they found themselves in the receiving area of a large hangar. Looking around, Noi spotted a variety of timeships more heavily armed and armored than those she was used to. Indeed, her FTA made little use of timeships, since quantum temporal transporters made them largely redundant in much the same way that subspace transporters did starships. Their presence here was a disturbing sign that the TIA’s methods were more aggressive.

She also noted that several additional guards awaited her and the DTI agents. “What are they for?” she asked Jeihaz, who was growing back to her full size.

“Standard procedure for anachronistic visitors. You’ll accompany us to the examination section.”

“What kind of examination?” Dulmur challenged.

“The kind you have no say in.”

“Serel, please,” Noi interposed.

The holographic giantess glanced her way, her posture relaxing slightly. “Medical examination, quantum analysis, interrogation. It’s routine, Noi, but it’s mandatory. You come with me. Tell the humans to follow their guards.”

“Lucsly and Dulmur stay with me. I’m responsible for them.”

“Until you submit to examination, you have no voice here.”

“I’m not gonna let you scan my gear. I may have tech you don’t.”

“That seems unlikely,” came a new voice.

Noi turned to see a familiar human male, an inoffensive-looking, narrow-faced man with blue-gray eyes and a high forehead. This version of the man had a more severe, militaristic cut to his brown hair than the one she knew, and his bearing and attitude seemed to match. The pointless frippery adorning his uniform and the deference Jeihaz and the others showed him suggested that this version of her colleague was in charge around here.

Dulmur and Lucsly traded a look. “Agent Daniels,” Dulmur said. “I wondered if he’d show up.”

“Mm-hm.”

Noi reminded herself that the DTI men knew Timot Danlen only by the alias he had used in his interactions with Captain Jonathan Archer in the 2150s. By habit, she declined to fill the gap in their knowledge.

Danlen went on: “We exploit all the most advanced temporal technologies available to us, collected from many eras. I doubt there’s anything your timeline has to offer that ours lacks.”

“Nonetheless—Director?” At Danlen’s nod, she continued: “I have my own procedures to follow, sir. I’m not going to submit my tech to inspection by an unfamiliar agency, even an alternate of my own. And I’m not going to let you separate me from my friends.” Dulmur looked surprised. Granted, “friends” was a strong word for their relationship, but it served her purposes at the moment—and felt somewhat comforting.

“I respect your regard for procedure, Agent Noi,” Danlen said. “But let’s face the facts: If you wish to understand what’s happened, or get back to your own reality, you need our help. And you need the results of our analysis.” He gave a reassuring smile that Noi found no more convincing than that of her own Danlen, whom she had always considered something of a con artist. “So we’ll simply have to trust one another.”

“That implies reciprocal concessions,” she told him, brows raised pointedly.

“Your gear will be returned to you postexamination, rather than confiscated. That’s the best I can offer.”

She turned to the DTI men, reminding herself that they should at least be consulted. “So what do you think?”

“I think we’re wasting time,” Lucsly said. “For once, Agent Noi, try to respect someone else’s procedures.” Dulmur gave her a sheepish look of agreement.

Noi sighed. “Fine. But let’s get it over with. We need to talk, Director.”

Danlen stepped closer, using his superior height to intimidate her in a way her own Danlen never had. “Oh, we will talk, Agent Noi. At length. And you will tell me everything you know about that obelisk.”

Even Lucsly now looked worried as the guards led him and Dulmur away.

V

May 3, 2384

Eris

Ranjea sighed as he and Garcia worked their way through Aisle J, still searching for devices that could let them find Lucsly and Dulmur without unraveling the universe. “Just before I applied to the DTI,” he said, “I was on a case involving an ancient Deltan time viewer employing quantum wormholes. A technology lost by our ancestors when they turned to more spiritual pursuits.”

Garcia perked up. “That sounds like just what we need!”

“Unfortunately, I failed to prevent the Na’kuhl from stealing it and taking it uptime. Well, the Carreon stole it first, and the Na’kuhl stole it from them before we caught up with them.”

The younger agent stared at her partner. “So you lost the time machine—twice—and they still let you join the Department?” She shook her head. “Pff. A pretty face and a cute ass will let you get away with anything.”

“I’ve found it doesn’t hurt.” There was a beatific smile on his face when she glared at him.

Ranjea leaned forward to read the tag on Bay J18. This was one of the aisles containing smaller artifacts, so the bays were more numerous. “Hmm. Mervynian Feynman curve tracer. Allows tracking of individual worldlines through temporal displacements.”

Garcia grinned, jogging to his side. “Perfect!”

He called up more detailed data on the display and shook his head. “No. It only works if it’s been quantum-entangled with the subject beforehand.”

“Any chance Lucsly or Dulmur used this thing sometime in the past?”

“Checking the access logs . . . No, it was recovered by Agent Sonaj from an archaeological dig on Mervynia in 2341. And no one’s used it since except the research department.”

“Damn.” Garcia had to admit it made sense. As a rule, DTI agents sought to avoid traveling through time, and only someone with the premeditated intention to do so would have reason to use this device. “That’s the problem with this place,” she said as she moved down the aisle again. “We try so hard not to use any of this stuff that we don’t really understand how most of it works. So how are we supposed to keep it all in check when things go wrong?”

“Well, the idea is to minimize the chance that it will be misused.”

“Yeah, and we’ve seen how well that worked.” Her eye almost skipped over the dull, hand-sized black stone in Bay J32. The label described it as a powerful chroniton emitter, but with no other known or usable properties. Typical, she thought. “You ask me, ignorance and avoidance usually aren’t the answer. The problems you bury away and try to avoid thinking about are the ones that usually come back to bite you in—”

“Your cute ass?”

That earned him another affectionate glare. “Don’t avoid the issue—although you’re so right. Really, we rag so much on Starfleet for taking reckless chances, but isn’t it sometimes more reckless to avoid gaining knowledge? Can we really call ourselves protectors of the timeline if all we do with this stuff is hoard it in our really big basement?”

Coming up alongside her, he placed a hand on her back. “Right now, Teresa, what we are is Lucsly and Dulmur’s best hope.”

She tilted her head. “Good point.” She resumed scanning the shelves, muttering to herself. “Mervynian chroniton polarizers . . . no. Mervynian ansible beacons . . . not unless they took one with them, which I doubt. Unidentified Mervynian artifact—damn, those Mervynians were industrious little time meddlers, weren’t they?”

Moving on, she nearly ran into Doctor Warain, who ran out from a side junction, panting heavily. “There’s a problem in Aisle F,” he said. “The ice bores . . .”

Still catching her breath from the startling near-collision, Garcia looked up at the towering Caldonian in irritation. “The ice bores are your problem, Doc. We have something a little more urgent to deal with.”

“This is about to become very urgent,” Warain insisted. There was more than the usual level of anxiety in his voice—far more. Garcia traded a look with Ranjea, whose expression was quite grave. If his Deltan empathy told him it was that serious . . .

They ran after Warain to Aisle F—which the agents had skipped over in their search, for it was mainly for large anachronistic items with no time-travel potential, such as time-displaced inventions and artworks that hadn’t been created yet. “The surge and the vortex effects,” the doctor said, “must have affected the stasis field. It’s shrunk enough to expose the power relay crystals in the base, and the crystals look enough like ice to attract the bores—and are delicate enough to melt from their heat. I fear the field is close to failure.”

“The field over what, Doctor?” Ranjea asked.

“The Mro!” Warain cried.

Garcia’s blood ran cold. “We have a Mro?! Nobody told me there would be a Mro!”

“Just hurry!”

“And why are we running toward it?” she demanded as they rounded the corner at full speed.

But it was already a moot question. There before her in Bay F6 was the stasis-encased Mro warrior. Its appearance more than lived up to its species’s reputation as the scourge of the quadrant from 214,000 to 212,000 BCE. It was a massive crustacean creature with four arms and four legs, topped by a low, armored dome of a head with eyes facing in all directions so no enemy could sneak up on it—or avoid the psionic pulse that would shatter the sanity of any with the misfortune to meet its gaze. Its chitinous carapace had duranium-composite armor reinforcements and multiple energy-weapon emitters literally grown into it, the creature’s very genome modified to let its body accommodate and power the weapons. This was considerable overkill, given that most enemies they faced would already have been driven mad by their gaze—but, then, it was helpless enemies that they had enjoyed killing the most. Only the Iconians had been strong enough to hold the Mro at bay, but ultimately the only reason the Mro had fallen was because they had run out of other races to massacre and had turned on one another.

And the stasis field around the monster was flickering. There at the base, a dozen finger-sized Andorian ice bores were blithely, obliviously on the verge of condemning the entire population of the Vault—and perhaps of whatever ships came later—to a gruesome and horrific fate.

Garcia grabbed at the front of Warain’s tunic. “Call security.”

“Uh, they’re not cleared to be in here. They’re supposed to keep people from getting in, not—”

“Then clear them!”

“I don’t have the authority or the time!”

“Okay, then where do you keep the phasers?”

“Its armor would protect it.”

“I mean for the ice bores! To stop them before it’s too late!”

Warain blinked. “But—that would be cruel!”

“Just get the damn guns!” The Caldonian ran off. “Why do we even have this here? Shouldn’t this be a Starfleet problem?”

“We’re better qualified to maintain the stasis field,” Ranjea said.

She grimaced. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?”

“Teresa,” Ranjea breathed, pointing. “It’s too late.”

The stasis field flickered out. The Mro soldier began to move toward them. Garcia grabbed Ranjea’s hand and clung to it tightly.

And the Mro toppled over and clattered emptily on the floor.

After several moments spent just staring and blinking, Ranjea found the presence of mind to deploy his tricorder. It was specialized for temporal detection, but it still had basic sensor functions. “Apparently the stasis field didn’t slow time to quite the degree we’d believed,” he went on in a shaky voice. “The Mro must have starved to death a hundred millennia ago. Its soft interior has already decayed to dust.”

“Oh!” Garcia took a few more shuddering breaths. “Well.” She wrenched her hand free of Ranjea’s, shook it out, and brushed down the front of her suit. “Never mind, then. Back to work.” She tried to stroll away casually—then ran for the nearest head to throw up.

When she emerged again, Ranjea was waiting nearby, and Warain was tiptoeing back to the weapons locker to return the several phasers he was cradling awkwardly in his arms. “Feeling better?” Ranjea asked her.

“Mm-hm. Actually, I had an idea. Come on.”

She led him to Aisle H, where a helmetlike device rested in Bay H20. “I saw this earlier.”

“A telepathic temporal communicator?”

“Yeah, the, um, visit with the Mro back there got me thinking about psionics. It’s basically quantum entanglement, right?”

“Essentially, yes.” Ranjea raised his brows. “I think I anticipate you. The curve tracer needs to be entangled with its subject.”

“Right. So if someone with psi abilities—like, say, you—were to use this communicator to connect with Lucsly or Dulmur before the accident, then you’d be entangled with him, and we could then entangle you with the tracer.”

“Hm,” Ranjea replied. “It’s a long shot. I’m an empath, not a telepath. I’m not sure how much of a connection I could make.”

“If it doesn’t work, we could ask Andos to send T’Lem or Teyak. But come on, boss, who’s better at making a personal connection than a Deltan, huh?”

“Well, it’s worth a try,” Ranjea said. He entered his access code to deactivate the force field and reached for the device. He looked it over skeptically.

“What’s wrong?” Garcia asked.

“It’s just . . . whoever designed this headgear had no sense of fashion. This is not my color at all.”

She rolled her eyes. “I promise not to laugh. Much. Now let’s go get you entangled with Lucsly and Dulmur.” After a moment, she winced. “Well, there’s an image I won’t be unseeing for a while. . . .”

VI

Day 266, 3051

TIA Headquarters, Tandar Prime

Agent Dulmur paced the austere cell he shared with Lucsly, who sat as still as a statue. “I tell you, I’ll never complain about Jena’s agency again.”

“Yes, you will.”

“They’re condescending, yes. Imperious, yes. But they don’t just beam your clothes off and have a telepath rummage around in your head uninvited.”

“At least they gave them back.”

“The clothes, yes. My mental privacy, no. I would’ve thought you’d be far more pissed about that.”

“I have nothing to hide.”

Dulmur stopped pacing and stared in wonderment for a moment. “We’ve been partners eighteen years, nine months, and seventeen days, and I know practically nothing about your private life.”

“There’s not much to know.”

Dulmur shook his head and resumed pacing. Having been separated from Lucsly before the “examination,” he had no way of knowing how his partner had really reacted to the invasive treatment. He wondered if Noi had been subjected to the same thing, though he suspected the TIA would probably have shown her more courtesy as a temporal peer. At the very least, she surely had better defenses against telepathic probing than either of them.

That got him thinking about what he’d seen of this era as a whole. “The hell of it is, the rest of this timeline looks like a pretty amazing place to live.”

“We don’t belong here.”

“We may have to, partner. We know too much already. You know the rules.”

“Mm-hm.” Lucsly straightened in his chair. By his standards, it was an outright fidget. “But Noi said she could wipe our memories. Send us home. That would be optimal.”

“Maybe.”

Lucsly peered at him, noting the uncertainty in his voice. “Watch it, Dulmur. Remember training. The future can be alluring, but we need to earn it.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Dulmur looked down, placing his hands on his midriff, feeling the undamaged flesh beneath the gray fabric. “But I can’t help thinking about what they did for me. Just beamed me up and restored me from mortal injuries. And I have to wonder: Why can’t we already do that?”

“You know the limitations on transporter technology. To store complete quantum-level detail about every particle in a body would require at minimum an exactly equal number of particles to store it in—that’s the absolute limit of information theory. Not to mention the Uncertainty Principle and its—”

“Yeah, I know, it’s why transporters can’t copy living people or store permanent backups of them.”

“And why replicators can’t make living animals—or organs. Not yet, anyway,” Lucsly added, his eyes flicking to the site of Dulmur’s effaced injuries.

“But we know transporters can alter a pattern dynamically during beaming. They can filter out infections or toxins, neutralize or remove weapons. They’ve even been used to repair genetic damage or accelerated aging, and that was decades ago. Repairing organs or curing degenerative diseases can’t be so different from that.

“And look at what else they have. Androids and holograms walking around. People uploading their minds into holoemitters, living indefinitely. These are technologies we have the potential for already. The Federation has encountered techniques for transferring consciousness before. But we’re just sitting on them.”

“Humanity still remembers the Eugenics Wars and the twenty-second-century Augment crises, human and Suliban alike. There’s resistance to diverging too far from what’s natural.”

“Those were centuries ago. And we still haven’t moved on? Does that seem healthy to you?” He broke off. “Sorry, wrong person to ask.”

The older agent crossed his arms. “What are you saying?”

Dulmur spread his arms, starting to pace again. “I don’t know, partner. I just wonder if we’ve let ourselves get too complacent. You heard Jena: We already have interstellar beaming, but we’re sitting on it because we haven’t made it safe enough. How many other technologies have we known about for decades without really making the effort to advance them and use them? Even something as simple as a holocommunicator. When was the last time you saw someone using one?”

“They were a fad. Took up too much space.”

“Every breakthrough seems to be a passing fad these days. That’s the problem.”

“Define ‘these days.’ ”

Dulmur threw him a sour look. “You know what I mean. When I was a kid, the Federation was all about progress and exploration, looking forward to the future. But now . . .” He shook his head. “This past generation, we seem to have gotten so stagnant.”

“There’s been a lot of conflict. Wars, invasions.”

“Even before then, though, it’s like there was less will to move forward. There was this big push for new exploration, and then it fizzled out. There were big breakthroughs in holography and AI for a while and not much since, except by accident.”

“There’s slipstream drive.”

“Which we got from an alien culture on the other side of the galaxy.”

Lucsly leaned forward. “What’s this really about, Dulmur? Conservatism is an asset in our work. Why would this bother you?”

“I’m just wondering if we’re too attached to our past to move forward into the future.”

“Look around. These advances are part of our future.”

“But how long do we have to wait for them to happen? If I’d been hurt like that in our own time, I’d probably be dead now, or at best getting bionic parts grafted into me and needing weeks to recover.”

Lucsly examined him. “So is this about the Federation’s future . . . or your own future?”

Dulmur found himself at a loss for words. Once more, Lucsly filled the void. “If resisting change is such a bad thing . . . then what are you still doing in this job?”

“There’s something you need to understand, Jena.” Director Danlen faced Noi calmly across the table in the stark interrogation room, where he’d spent the past forty-three minutes grilling her about the events that had brought her here. “We’re perfectly well aware that this is an altered timeline. We’ve known it for centuries. And we like it that way.”

“How could you?” Noi asked. “Without a defense grid, you’re fair game for raiders from any century. You’re living under constant siege. Is it worth it for the freedom to rewrite time?” She shook her head. “This is the kind of universe the anti-Accordists wanted to create. Where history was a free-for-all, a battlefield to be reshaped by whoever could manage to get a temporary advantage. Total chaos.

“That’s it, isn’t it? It’s got to be. Somehow the anti-Accordists altered the Federation’s history. Your history, Timot. The Danlen I knew would never support such unfettered interference with time. They must’ve—” She frowned. “It’s got to be the obelisk. It’s powerful enough to burn through the grid like it was nothing. They wanted me to bring it here, to an undefended timeline, so they could steal it, go back, and create the timeline to begin with.” Danlen took her circular logic in stride; no doubt, like his counterpart, he’d witnessed such causal anomalies firsthand. What might seem paradoxical to a civilian accustomed to cause following effect could make perfect sense where time travel was concerned, so long as the chain of events was self-consistent. “The Certoss raid may have been an attempt to steal it. Or you could have a mole within the agency. Timot, you’ve got to let me take charge of the obelisk. You can’t trust your own people with this.”

Danlen considered her for a moment, then stood. “Come with me, Jena. I want to show you something.”

He led her out into the corridor. “Where are the DTI men?” she asked.

“They’re safe. We don’t want them to see too much of our operation—you understand.”

“So you’re showing it to me?”

“Up to a point. In order to make a point.”

He led her into a room that she recognized as the counterpart to the master temporal observatory in FTA headquarters: a large, domed chamber with a raised central platform ringed with consoles, around and above which was an intricate holographic map of the charted timestreams of the multiverse. Unlike the soothing blues and sweeping curves and spheres of FTA graphics, the TIA’s display was more red and gold, its shapes more angular.

Danlen led her to the central platform and spoke to a Choblik technician. “Grant our guest Level Two psi clearance,” he ordered. The small, deerlike biped nodded and swept a robotic forelimb over her console.

A moment later, Noi found herself tapped into the observatory display on a deeper mental level, her neural implants giving her far more information than her eyes alone. When she looked at any given point in the tangle of branched timelines and travel curves, she was able to perceive its details, to understand what it represented, at least to the extent her low clearance permitted. Looking over the map, getting a feel for its contents, Noi recognized that it was depicting not only research ventures, monitoring missions, and potential interventions and hazards in need of heading off, but the temporal equivalent of troop movements, campaigns, strikes, and counterstrikes. To be sure, her own agency’s master map was not devoid of such notations, due to the need for constant vigilance against anti-Accordist factions. But they were a far more dominant theme here, and she saw far more interventions initiated by the agency itself, backward-arcing travel curves that triggered new offshoot branches and eventually terminated their originals. Of course, that was nothing their name hadn’t given away.

“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 colleague’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 perceptions. 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?”

“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 Darro 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.

Unfortunately, this diverted just enough of the earlier Jena’s attention that it enabled the earlier Noi to get the edge in their battle. Struggling to get out from the later supervisor’s grip, Jena watched in horror as the earlier supervisor caught the earlier agent by her braid, spun her viciously around, and snapped her neck with a crack that resonated through the corridor like the report of an antique firearm.

The death of her younger self had no existential effect on Jena now, for the timestream had already branched. But it certainly had an emotional impact. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen a copy of herself die, but it was a sight that never got any easier. The fact that another version of herself had been the killer sickened her even more.

And now it was two against one, and the backstepped supervisor took advantage of her shock to get her in an immobilization hold. “I told you that braid was a bad idea,” she hissed in her own ear.

The other Noi—the murderer—swaggered toward them. “Don’t worry, we still have one of you to merge with,” she said. “You know, I never thought I’d enjoy killing myself, but that felt surprisingly good. You smug pretender, acting like you’re so much more real and righteous than the rest of us.”

“You shouldn’t even exist!” Jena snarled at her, at them. “Is this who you wanted to be growing up? A killer, trapped in an endless war? Is this the kind of future you saw for yourself when Mama taught you about the Federation’s great history and the honor of serving it?”

“I fight for the Federation! We’re stronger now, better protected! We erase our enemies, we don’t hide from them.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Jena insisted. “It never does. You’re a time agent—study your history! When has any society ever been truly defeated by force? That just makes them angrier, more driven to fight back. Why should they love their heritage, their identity, any less than you do? Why should they be any less determined, any less capable of fighting to protect it at all costs?

“All you’ve done is make your enemies more dangerous. You’ve put your own reality, your own people, under greater threat.”

The Noi holding her from behind tightened her grip angrily. “You don’t even want my reality to exist.”

“Because it’s a mistake. A mistake I made that’s created unimaginable suffering. Things shouldn’t be this way. We shouldn’t be this way. You believe you’re fighting for peace and protection, but you’re not. I’ve seen a peaceful, protected Federation, and this isn’t it, my sister.” She turned her head back and forth, trying to catch both Nois’ eyes. “Just let me show you. Open your minds, let us connect. Let’s experience each other’s realities, each other’s lives, and decide which one we’d rather merge into.”

The standing supervisor knelt before her. “Why bother? In a moment I’ll know everything you know, and you’ll no longer exist.” She looked at her own counterpart. “Hold this bitch still and get ready to merge down.” Noi smirked. “I’ve always wanted to try a three-way.”

One Noi’s arms tightened around hers while the other reached forward to touch her. . . .

“April 11, 1868,” said Dulmur.

“A Saturday,” Lucsly replied. “Edo Castle is surrendered to Imperial Japanese forces, ending the Tokugawa Shogunate.”

“Umm, December 18, 2127.”

“A Thursday. First successful warp drive test in the Bolarus system.”

“January 18, 1452.”

“Gregorian or Julian?”

“What, you think I’m an amateur? Julian.”

“A Tuesday.”

Before Lucsly could elaborate, the cell door opened and Jena Noi stepped in. But Lucsly immediately discerned that it was not the Jena Noi they knew. Her short hair, her TIA uniform, her arrogant swagger: This was clearly an alternate, the one native to this quantum history.

“I assume I don’t need to introduce myself,” this Noi said. “Come on, we have some more questions for you about the obelisk.”

“Where’s our Jena Noi?” Dulmur challenged.

“You don’t have to worry about her anymore. Come on.”

Her tone made it clear that it was not a request. The DTI agents traded a look. They were bureaucrats, not fighters. And despite Noi’s lissome build, she was stronger than both of them put together. All they could do was follow her instructions.

Director Daniels (or whatever his real name was) stood watching, accompanied by a male Vulcan guard, as Noi led them out into the corridor. “This is futile,” he said. “These fossils don’t know anything.”

“That’s what my—heh—better half wanted us to think.” Noi tapped her head. “But she’s got no secrets from me anymore. These men have important information, even if they don’t know they have it.”

“I’m not happy that you jumped the gun, Supervisor. We could’ve used her.”

“She left me no choice. Sir.”

Dulmur threw Lucsly an alarmed look, and Lucsly nodded in acknowledgment. They’d seen uptime agents, including Jena Noi, undergo quantum merging with alternate selves before. In those cases it had been with accidental alternates only recently diverged, whereas these two Nois had been separate their entire lives, no doubt with resultant physical differences accumulating. It would not be as easy to achieve a quantum merge between two physically distinct bodies. But it sounded like thirty-first-century technology was up to the task.

Which meant that the Jena Noi he knew—the Jena he had known for most of his career and owed more to than he could ever express—was effectively dead. And these agents had killed her.

Lucsly began thinking very, very carefully about what he could do to make them pay.

But once they passed a corridor junction, there was a burst of phaser fire (or the uptime equivalent) and the Vulcan fell stunned. The short-haired Noi whirled on Daniels and stunned him herself. Lucsly saw Dulmur gaping in delight and relief, and he turned to see Jena Noi—his Jena Noi, complete with that gloriously impractical braid—coming forward to stand alongside her counterpart. “Oh, I have never been so happy to see a time paradox,” Dulmur gasped. Lucsly just held his Jena’s gaze and gave her a nod with the barest hint of a smile. She beamed back at him warmly.

“No time for reunions,” the local Noi said. “We have to get to the obelisk before they raise the alarm.”

The DTI agents hurried after the two Nois. “She said you’d been absorbed,” Dulmur said to the more familiar one.

“I almost was,” Jena said, giving her other self a look.

The short-haired Noi returned it, looking sheepish. “We had her— I had her at my mercy. But . . . let’s just say I saw myself do something awful. If I’d been the one to do it, there would’ve been no going back. But seeing it from the outside made me realize I still had a chance to avoid it. So I . . . stopped myself . . . from merging your Jena down and decided to meld minds with her instead. I saw the life she’s led, the world she’s protecting.” She blinked away tears. “It’s better than this. It lets me be better. If only one of us gets to be Jena Noi, it should be her.”

Dulmur spoke for both men. “I don’t understand half of that, but it sounds good to me. So what’s our next move?”

“All this started because of my mistake with the obelisk,” Jena said. “Our only chance is to ride it back to its origin and hope we can understand what we find there well enough to fix things.”

“Our chance?” Lucsly asked. “You realize what you’re proposing.”

She threw him an affectionate glare. “This is no time to be a stickler, Lucsly. You’re the only allies I’ve got right now, so I’ve got no choice but to throw out the rule book and take you much, much farther uptime.”

“Look at it this way,” her harder-edged counterpart said: “Where you’re going, you’ll all be about equally behind the times.”

Jena gave her other self a look. “You’re not coming with us?”

“I need to run interference here, if I can. Try to stop them from pursuing you uptime.”

The short-haired Noi led them into the TIA’s research facility. In a way it reminded Lucsly of the Eridian Vault, for it stored a variety of temporal artifacts. But instead of simply being secured, these artifacts were evidently in the process of being studied and disassembled. The goal here was to master the use of the artifacts, no doubt for the purpose of rewriting history at will.

In short, this was Lucsly’s personal hell.

The local Noi led them into the bay containing the obelisk, where it stood surrounded by scanners but apparently unaltered as yet. Guards ran toward them, but the two Nois did something the DTI men could barely discern, moving extremely fast. For some moments it seemed there were more than two of them.

But then Jena appeared before the DTI men and drew them forward. “Obelisk, now! She’ll hold them off!”

Jena dragged them to the obelisk at such speed that Lucsly could barely retain his footing. She pulled them down as a phaser beam shot over their heads, and they crouch-ran the rest of the way, finally dropping down with their backs against the obelisk, using it as cover. “Keep them at least fifteen meters away!” Jena called to her other self. Working her sleeve controls, she spoke in more normal tones: “Same drill as before. I’m damping its fields. Get ready for a ride.”

Dulmur craned his neck to peer around the obelisk. “Is she winning?”

“No more time!” Jena cried. “Here we go!”

The obelisk unfurled and the blinding blue light engulfed them once again.

IX

May 4, 2384

DTI Headquarters, Greenwich, European Alliance

“It sounds to me,” Clare Raymond said, “that you’ve already convinced yourself your decision was the right one.”

The Temporal Displacement Division counselor studied Teresa Garcia, who sat in the armchair across from her in her Greenwich office. The coffee table between them, an understated piece from the mid–twenty-first century, was adorned with a few small bits of statuary from still earlier eras. The placid-hued walls of the office were also adorned with antiques, nothing less than two hundred years old, and its small window looked out across Park Row at the National Maritime Museum, its vantage low and narrow enough to conceal the view of central London’s towering skyscrapers to the northwest. The setting was designed to instill comfort in the people Clare counseled, people displaced into the twenty-fourth century by temporal accidents or, as in her own case, long-term cryogenic stasis. Clare herself had long since come to embrace the modern era as a vast improvement over the late twentieth century in which she’d been born, but she still had great sympathy for those who struggled to adjust to an era not their own. She remembered her sessions with Garcia three years earlier, when the younger woman had been adjusting to her own displacement into a more troubled decade than the one she’d left.

Now, though, Raymond found herself faced with the opposite problem: having to counsel those left behind. But she realized that the sense of loss was much the same: Even though Garcia occupied the same world as the one she’d known three days before, it was a world forever changed by the loss of her mentor—not to mention Lucsly, whom every DTI agent and employee had expected to be around forever.

“ ‘Right’? I don’t know.” Garcia sighed, fidgeting in the comfortable armchair. “It was the decision Dulmur would’ve expected me to make. It was my duty. I’m not so sure that makes it right.”

“And what do you think the difference is between those?”

A sharp laugh. “I think we’re flailing around in the dark, Clare. We barely have a grip on how to handle time travel and its consequences. We’re just trying to cope as best we can. We put these rules in place because they give us a sense of order and stability when nothing else in this business does. But that doesn’t make it more than a comforting illusion. We don’t really know what’s right.”

Raymond tilted her gray-blond head. “I’m not sure anybody really does, in any walk of life. We all live by a set of rules because they give our lives structure and purpose. If they work for us, usually that’s enough.” She leaned forward. “So what I’m hearing is that maybe you’re questioning whether the DTI’s rules still work for you.”

Garcia stared. “No, I’m—I’m not thinking of quitting, if that’s what you mean.”

“Okay.” She waited.

“It’s really more about . . . whether we’re going about this right. We have all those resources in the Vault, all that amazing potential, and we just sit on it. We don’t act when we could. I’m—I’m not saying we should be the Time Patrol and go around fixing history or whatever. But other agencies—the Aegis, the Accordists in the future—they don’t just document temporal disasters and file reports, they go to where the problem is and they act. Hell, Starfleet makes a habit of leaping through time rifts to fix things, even though they have no clue what they’re doing half the time. We have resources that could let us do the same in a more controlled way.”

“Resources that, well, don’t technically exist yet.”

“But they’re there. I’ve seen them. I’ve touched them. And some are from the past, from ancient races that mastered time long ago.”

“And still somehow managed to go extinct. Which suggests that time travel didn’t solve all their problems.”

Garcia gave a faint laugh and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Okay, you have a point. But I just—if the Accordists are willing to send back agents with advanced time technologies, why not allow us locals to learn those technologies too?”

“They’ve had centuries more to develop that tech on their own and figure out how to use it safely.”

“But they’re descended from us. Somebody has to take that first step to becoming full-fledged temporal agents. Why not us?”

Raymond tapped her chin. “Let me ask you something, Teresa: Do you have any goal in mind for this new activism other than rescuing Lucsly and Dulmur? Say we change our policies so we can bring them back. What do we do next?”

Garcia was quiet for a while. “I don’t know. I guess I haven’t really thought it through.”

“Okay.”

The agent sighed. “I just miss the big guys.”

“I know. We all do.” She leaned back in her chair, trying to convey a more relaxed attitude. “Think about this, Teresa: If Lucsly and Dulmur are in the future, then maybe they’ll get to be the kind of time agents you wish you could be. But that couldn’t happen if we went forward to retrieve them, could it? So maybe they’re . . . actually better off.”

Garcia’s eyes narrowed and her torso shot forward. “You hesitated, Clare. You don’t believe that, do you?”

Raymond chastised herself for letting her own doubts intrude. But the important thing was to be honest. “I’m worried about them too. We all are. To tell the truth, I think Agent Dulmur will be okay. Adjusting to a new time is rough—I don’t mean to downplay that—but it helps to form personal bonds, and Dulmur has a way of connecting to people.”

The younger woman gave a sad smile. “I know.”

“But I’m more concerned about Agent Lucsly. He’s such a creature of routine.” She wasn’t betraying any confidences, since she’d never had any reason to counsel Lucsly. “He’s good at defending the timeline because he resists change. And now . . .” She shook her head. “Wherever, whenever he is, all his familiar comforts and certainties will be gone. I admit, I have to wonder if he’ll be able to adapt.”

She feared her words would increase Garcia’s anxiety, but, if anything, the agent seemed to get more confident, straightening her shoulders. “As long as they let him do temporal work, he’ll be fine. After all—he’s Lucsly.”

“And Dulmur?”

Garcia smiled. “As long as he has his partner . . . he’ll be fine too.”

X

Far Uptime

Dulmur rubbed his head. The second jaunt via obelisk had taken a lot more out of him than the first. It had seemed interminable, yet somehow also wrenchingly abrupt. “Ohh, I seriously need a hot shower. And a drink. Where are we now?”

Even Lucsly looked shaken this time. “More to the point, when are we?”

Jena Noi was running some kind of scan on the invisible controls in her uniform sleeve. Her voice was hushed as she said, “Over twenty million years uptime. Even I’ve never been this far forward.”

“Which rules out the Axis of Time as a possible return vector,” Lucsly said. “It terminates approximately 1.4 million years CE.”

Dulmur turned to Noi. “I don’t suppose your built-in equipment has the power to jump us that far.”

“I was counting on convincing the obelisk builders to help us. Or forcing them, if necessary.”

Dulmur chuckled. “Right. We ants will force the picnickers not to step on us.”

“Some ants have a hell of a bite.”

Lucsly was looking around. “This is not exactly a high-technology environment.”

Following his lead, Dulmur saw what he meant. Although it was night, he could tell that they stood in the middle of a sparse, dusty scrubland surrounded on all sides by rolling mountains, with some sharper sandstone crags piercing the landscape. He could hear the ripple of a large stream nearby, so at least there was water; but there was no trace of animal life, let alone technology or civilization, anywhere in his line of sight.

“In fact,” the older DTI man went on, “it reminds me of the setting where the Rhea first discovered the obelisk.”

Dulmur nodded. They’d both studied the sensor scans extensively during their long trip escorting the artifact back to Eris. Yet something in the sky caught his eye. He looked up to see a bright, narrow strip arcing overhead, a slim ribbon with perfectly straight sides. The sunlight it reflected down on them was their main source of illumination. “Well, it can’t be the same planet, even twenty million years later. That one didn’t have a moon, so there’d be nothing to break up into a ring.”

“That’s no ring,” Noi said. “At least not the kind you mean. Look closer, about thirty degrees from zenith.” She moved up alongside him to point.

Dulmur squinted at the indicated area. “Something tells me your vision’s a lot sharper than mine,” he said. But he noticed something, an unusually bright glint off an irregular area. “What is that?”

“There are more,” Lucsly said. “I’m not sure how many.”

“Quite a few,” Noi replied. “They’re oceans.”

Dulmur stared at her. “Come again?”

She was grinning now. “We’re on an orbital torus!”

“A what?”

“A kind of megastructure. A constructed ring a few million kilometers in diameter, orbiting a star, spinning for gravity and a day-night cycle. It’s night for us because the local sun is below us. But the torus is tilted just enough that it doesn’t block the sunlight on the other side.” She sounded very impressed. “They have dozens, even hundreds of times the surface area of a planet, but use far less material. They’re a solution to population pressure in eras where the galactic population is so dense that colonizing planets alone won’t cut it.”

Lucsly peered at her. “I thought you’d never been to a time this distant.”

“No, but I’ve met others who have.” She smiled. “You’re part of a much larger fraternity than you realize, Agents.”

Dulmur wanted to contemplate that, but he was too distracted by the here and now. “So we’re on an artificial world built to ease population pressure—but we’re standing in the middle of an empty wilderness.”

The exotic temporal agent tilted her head. “Well, orbitals often contain simulated natural environments for recreation . . . but also for preserving biodiversity. I see what you’re getting at, Dulmur. The obelisk was placed in a setting like this, and it brought us to a setting like this.” Dulmur hadn’t actually been getting at that, but he nodded sagely anyway.

“Tell me,” Noi went on, “were there any interesting animals living in the area where you found this thing?”

“Not many at the time,” Lucsly said. “The planet was in the throes of a mass extinction. But a herd of one of the last surviving species of megafauna was days away from passing through the area. That’s why we removed the obelisk: We weren’t sure it could handle being trampled.”

“Oh, it could have, Lucsly. I think it was—”

The environment around them suddenly brightened, though Dulmur could not spot the source of illumination. A clap of displaced air heralded the instantaneous arrival of a collection of beings as bizarre as any Dulmur had ever seen, surrounding the obelisk and the temporal agents. Each of the nine creatures surrounding them had a blue-gray, eggplant-shaped body about three-quarters of a meter in height and half a meter in diameter, topped with four diaphanous triangular fins at the compass points. A faint glow seemed to emanate from within, as though they were living Japanese lanterns. Four thick tentacles over a meter in length descended from the base of each body but did not reach the ground; the creatures simply hovered in midair. Around the “waist” of each one was a skirt of overlapping fins of some metallic or composite material, reminding Dulmur of nothing so much as a far more intricate, inverted version of the steamer basket in his mother’s kitchen. The hovering mechanism, perhaps? In any case, the overlapping-plate design reminded him of the obelisk’s technology. Underneath each skirt was a harness partly encasing a rounded pyramidal protrusion on the underside of the body; Dulmur was reminded of a squid’s beak at first, but then he thought he could spy some sort of eyes, one on each face of the pyramid. None of the eyes looked directly his way, but he had a palpable sense of being under intense scrutiny.

Something burst into his mind, a powerful sensory overload—no, more a perceptual overload, for it had nothing to do with his senses. He reeled under it. Noi stepped forward as if to shield him and Lucsly, standing more firmly. A moment later, the mental noise subsided.

“They’re telepaths,” she said. “Trying to communicate, but it’s so alien . . .”

“Explain your interference with our instrument,” came a voice that was not a voice. Apparently they—or perhaps Noi—had found a way to bridge the mental gap.

“Our interference?” Lucsly challenged. “If you’re the ones responsible for leaving dangerously powerful temporal displacement devices unattended in the past, then you’re the ones with some explaining to do, whoever you are.”

“You should not be here,” another mental voice declared, as a second creature—presumably the one “speaking”—raised a tentacle to gesture at them. “Where are the hexapedal endothermic grazing animals the instrument was positioned to collect?”

Noi was nodding as if her suspicions had been confirmed. “You’re conservationists, aren’t you? You send these probes back to collect life-forms from the distant past.”

The first creature, evidently the leader or spokesbeing, moved slightly closer. “You are correct,” came its mind-voice. “We are the Collectors. We rescue dead species from extinction.”

“So this was supposed to be the habitat for those animals,” Dulmur said. “You terraformed it to match their environment.”

A third Collector moved over to examine the obelisk. “As closely as we could extrapolate from paleontological evidence and temporal probing,” he sensed it saying. One of its tentacles moved under its body to retrieve an instrument from its harness. Dulmur saw that the tentacle subdivided into four slimmer ones near the tip, though, now that he looked closer, it seemed each of the large tentacles could be a bundle of connected ones. “But the biome samples collected by the instrument would have allowed us to perfect the simulation. Why have no samples come through?”

“Did you remove the instrument from the sample area?” the leader queried.

“We did,” Lucsly told the Collectors. “I’m Agent Lucsly and this is my partner, Agent Dulmur. We represent the Department of Temporal Investigations of the United Federation of Planets, a civilization from the era to which you delivered your probe. We regulate hazardous temporal technologies. This is Agent Jena Noi of the Federation Temporal Agency, one of our partners in the Temporal Accords. Your instrument was found unsupervised on an uninhabited planet, posing a safety hazard, so we confiscated it.”

“Fools!” said the second Collector. “The instrument posed no hazard if left in situ. It should have been triggered by the arrival of the grazing animals to deliver a sample of the herd here as a breeding colony. There would have been no disruption to any other population, and the collection should have had no impact on the timestream, since it was timed to occur near the point of extinction.”

“Why these animals?” Dulmur asked. “What’s so special about them that you needed to bring them here?”

The head Collector drifted closer to him, its steamer-basket skirt closing slightly and pulsing open again. The wispy fins on its head moved too, perhaps aiding in its navigation. “They are special as all creatures are special. All forms of life deserve to be known, remembered, preserved. Come. You will see.”

It gestured, and a vehicle blink-materialized before them. It had the same kind of hoverskirt but bore a railed platform large enough to hold the three humanoids. They traded a look, wordlessly agreeing that there was no sense in resisting. They needed to learn more about these Collectors, and hopefully gain their cooperation in getting home.

Once they were aboard, the hover platform rose into the air, flanked by four of the Collectors; the other five stayed behind to examine the obelisk. The platform accelerated to high speed, but Dulmur felt no g-forces or wind. As it rose above the surrounding hills, he was able to see the vast, flat landscape stretching out on all sides, with no horizons save the edges of the orbital torus, which even in the dark were only vaguely discernible through the atmospheric haze. They must have been hundreds of kilometers away. Ahead and behind, though, there was no sign of an edge, just land stretching to the vanishing point and, in the incomprehensible distance, the slim, bright ribbon of the ring rising overhead. They were so close to the surface here that he could not see its curvature.

“I wonder,” Dulmur said. “I’ve heard of a race called the Preservers that transplanted endangered civilizations. They couldn’t be . . .”

Noi shook her head. “No. There have been a bunch of different groups over history that have done similar things—relocating threatened populations through space, not through time.” Dulmur nodded; he’d known the suggestion was ridiculous the moment he heard himself say it. “I remember from school that some Federation historians used to lump them all together under the ‘Preservers’ label, even though they had clear differences or existed in different eras. Many people even confused them with the Progenitors, the first humanoids who seeded the evolution of all other humanoids, even though they lived billions of years earlier—and created new life-forms rather than preserving existing ones, so the label ‘Preserver’ doesn’t even make sense for them.”

Lucsly shook his head. “Laypeople. They think everything in the past happened at the same time.”

“Oh, don’t get me started.” The three temporal professionals traded long-suffering looks. “Anyway, that’s why the term ‘Preservers’ had fallen out of favor by my time. It was just confusing people.”

Now, although they had leveled out only a few dozen meters in the air, Dulmur could see a day/night terminator sweeping diagonally across the landscape, creeping toward them as they raced toward it. Soon the local sun broke over the rim, and Dulmur could clearly see the landscape around them.

They had already moved well beyond anything that resembled the scrubland where they had arrived. Now they were flying over the canopy of a rain forest dominated by purple and blue foliage. He spotted brightly colored creatures like broad, flat parasols gliding and twirling above the canopy, riding on updrafts. One descended to latch on to a high branch with a hand at the end of one of its six limbs, then folded its limbs and membranes in some complex way that caused them to collapse in around its body, turning it into a brachiator that climbed deftly along the branch to reach a bundle of fruit. Some moments later, another parasol-thing was snagged by some sort of elongated tongue that shot out of a dense clump of growth. It gave off a distress call like a particularly shrill version of a Starfleet alert klaxon, and two other creatures came to its aid, pelting the unseen predator with branches and fruit pits until it let go.

“I am the Warden of this prehistoric game preserve,” the head Collector told them. “Here, we resurrect long-extinct species from every era of the galaxy’s past, such as these specimens from the Hot Age of Hunari IV, before runaway glaciation destroyed all surface life there.”

Next they passed over a narrow arm of an ocean in which Dulmur could see the vague forms of enormous bioluminescent creatures swimming dozens of meters down, followed by a savanna in which a band of reptilian bipeds was stalking a very large, surprisingly fast-moving mollusklike creature. “I know this one,” Noi said. “I saw them in a museum once on a planet in the central Beta Quadrant. An extinct side branch of the line that produced the planet’s civilized species.”

“The reptiles or the mollusk?” Dulmur asked.

Noi chuckled. “Both.”

The savanna gave way to mountains housing aeries for winged, Sphinx-like mammals, followed by a ruddy desert populated by gray-brown, shaggy-maned humanoids with suckerlike mouths and sunken eyes, their bodies loosely draped in some kind of vines or crude textiles. They were attacking a herd of rodentlike creatures the size of golden retrievers, placing their suckered hands on the animals’ heads and apparently draining them of life. Oddly, the rodents seemed unafraid of them, approaching them willingly, as if not recognizing the threat.

“How many species do you have here?” Dulmur wondered.

“Our preserve spans a full twelve degrees of this Ring,” the Warden replied, “and we hope to expand in the years ahead.”

Dulmur whistled. From what Noi had said, a thirtieth of the Ring’s circumference could equal several planets’ worth of territory. This place made the Lactran menagerie look like a petting zoo.

“Those humanoids were wearing some kind of clothing,” Noi said. “Do you have intelligent species confined here too?”

“The definition of intelligence is complex,” the Warden replied. “A great many higher organisms possess some degree of awareness and cognition yet are not generally regarded as meeting the criteria for positive rights as members of civilization.”

“But if they’re capable of technology—” Dulmur began.

The platform and the accompanying Collectors veered to the right and sped up. “Technology does not necessarily equate to free will and individual thought. We have an intriguing example of this which you might find edifying.” The Warden was nothing if not proud of its collection.

But the biosphere enclosure it wished to display filled its humanoid guests with unadulterated horror. It was an unbroken expanse of black and gray geometric constructs, grilles, lattices, and pipes rising dozens of meters into the air, illuminated by sickly green lights. Along catwalks on every level, dark, cumbersome humanoid shapes covered in technological extrusions strode silently, mechanically, giving no sign of recognition or affect. Dulmur clutched the railing, and a moment later he realized Lucsly and Noi were holding him up; his knees had almost given out from sheer terror.

Noi spoke for all of them. “Borg? You brought back the Borg?! Do you have any idea how insanely dangerous that is?”

“Do not be alarmed,” the Warden assured them, its mental tenor breezy and confident. “We are equipped to contain the most hazardous life-forms known to prehistory. This exhibit has been one of the prides of our collection for several years now, and not one drone or nanoprobe has managed to escape the containment fields, despite continuous efforts to adapt to them.”

“You really don’t know what you’re risking here,” Lucsly told them.

“I see, yes, they are from your era, are they not? An intriguing coincidence; you come from the very period of their extinction. Understandable that you would fear their capabilities. But those capabilities are quite primitive by our standards.”

“You’d better be right,” Noi muttered through clenched teeth.

“I apologize for failing to anticipate your distress,” the Warden told them as the platform accelerated in a new direction. “Allow me to make amends. I am informed that we have identified your genetic sequence, Agent Lucsly and Agent Dulmur. We have a biome you may find intriguing.”

Moments later, the platform slowed over a new territory, a flat plain giving way to a misty, forested landscape, some of whose constituents Dulmur recognized as cycads and small sequoias. Small birds fluttered among the branches and bright flowers, their songs almost but not quite familiar. Trundling along the plain, heading for a river valley, was a herd of large, four-legged animals with very familiar bony shields on their heads. “They’re dinosaurs!” he cried, grinning involuntarily.

“Mm-hm,” Lucsly agreed. “A variety of Triceratops, I’d say. Between them and the vegetation, I’d estimate the Collectors sampled the Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous, circa 72.1 to 66 million years before our time.”

Dulmur’s eyes widened. “And that means that these guys would be prey for—”

“That’s right,” Noi said. “To your left, in the trees.”

The platform veered closer, making no sound and drawing no attention from the massive form that lurked below the branches: a bulky, bipedal theropod with massive jaws, its head crested by a mane of fine, downy feathers in muted colors. A coating of shorter, more hairlike feathers ran back along its spine but grew sparser along the rest of the body, save for stunted, winglike fringes extending back from its extremely small, two-clawed arms.

Dulmur searched for breath. “Lucsly.”

“Mm-hm.”

“I am looking at a Tyrannosaurus rex.”

“Mm-hm.”

The most fearsome land predator in Earth’s history was just meters below him, alive and hungry. After the Borg, it looked positively cuddly. Dulmur struggled to get the grin off his face. “This is so wrong.”

“Wrong?” the Warden challenged. “We are rescuing species from a death that was once permanent. Bringing new scientific understanding of life-forms remembered only in legend or in secondhand paleontology, fragmented records from the ruins of later extinct civilizations that studied them.”

“You’re sending immensely powerful temporal displacement generators into the distant past without supervision,” Lucsly countered. “Just randomly sending them back and hoping they retrieve the species you want. Haven’t you considered the enormous risk of disruption to the timestream?”

“We ensure the instruments are sent to eras shortly before the species’ extinction. These organisms, these biospheres, had no future, save what we have restored to them.”

“What about the risk of accidentally affecting more than just your target species? Say, when explorers from another planet happen across one of your instruments and attempt to study it?”

“If you had left the instrument well enough alone,” the second Collector repeated, “you would not have been displaced.”

“But they were,” Noi said. “There were no warnings on your instrument, nothing to alert sentient observers to the risk. And removing these men from their proper timestream did alter history in a drastic way.”

“History is a small-scale concern,” Collector #2 replied. “Such adjustments to the paths of individuals and civilizations are minor and generally self-correcting in the long term. Our responsibility is to preserve entire species and biospheres, to recover lost geological eras.”

“You don’t understand,” Noi said. “This particular disruption has the potential to affect the course of events on a galactic scale for millennia. There are events in the era in question that could affect the evolution of life on planets throughout the galaxy, even the very survival of those planets.”

“Then it is fortunate,” said the Warden, “that our instruments have the ability to access multiple timestreams. Any biospheres so endangered can be rescued. We seek to preserve as many extinct forms as it is possible to reach.” Dulmur realized that could explain how they’d returned to the Collectors’ original timeline despite their detour into an alternate track.

“And what are you going to do with them now that you have them?” Lucsly countered. “Even this torus is finite. Will you just keep these species here forever, trapped in their carefully groomed enclosures? What kind of survival is that?”

“This is a pilot program. In time, we hope to engineer planets on which they may be resettled.”

“And what then? Planets still change. Climates and biospheres come and go. That’s why extinction happens: because species adapted for a given environment can’t survive when it ceases to exist. Eventually these species would die out all over again. Or evolve into something completely different.”

“That is a concern for the future, true. But we have hopes that our own descendants will continue our work. At least we could send instruments into the far future, transplanting today’s species uptime to preserve them as well.”

“Until what?” Lucsly asked. “Until the galaxy’s completely overrun with every species that ever went extinct? Where will there be room for the new species? And how will the old ones survive in an era that wasn’t meant for them?”

The Warden’s mental projections grew almost wistful. “The modern galaxy is . . . becoming sparser with life. Increasingly more of its civilized species have reached a point where they feel their evolution has reached a plateau on the physical plane, or that population pressures have become too great. Thus it has become fashionable to transition to incorporeal existence or other dimensional planes. There will be an abundance of room soon enough.”

“But some of us,” Collector #2 added primly, “still value the beauty and fulfillment of the physical world. We choose to hold on to our heritage as corporeal beings, and to affirm our ties to the cycles of biological evolution that produced us.”

“That explains it,” Noi said. “The powerful psionic presence you emanate. The energy within your bodies. You’re halfway to incorporeal already. You’re just not willing to let go. Is that what the harnesses are for? Do they anchor your postcorporeal neural matrices to your bodies?”

The DTI agents traded a stunned look. Dulmur was starting to agree with his partner: They were learning way too much about the future.

“The change is not inevitable,” the Warden insisted. “What we have seen of the new way of being, the new reality beyond this one, is distasteful. Too little of what we know and value is retained there. The beings residing there already are too alien in their nature and beliefs. The new energies and experiences, the new forms of communication, are disagreeably intense.”

“Those who enjoy them have no taste or standards,” Collector #2 put in. “I think it is only a fleeting experiment. It will not last.”

“But if it does,” the Warden continued, “then we welcome the others’ departure. It leaves the galaxy free for those of us who still value the truths of the past.”

“What truths?” Lucsly asked. “That you don’t like what’s new and different? What about all these other life-forms you’ve brought into a universe so different from their own? If you have the right to resist being dragged into the future, what about them?”

Lucsly met Dulmur’s eyes as he continued. “It’s natural to want things to stay the way they were before. It’s comfortable. Familiar. But the hard fact is, time is change. What defines one moment in time as different from another is the evolution of the universal wavefunction in the interim. Change is what makes time happen in the first place.” He glanced down briefly. “Much as we may want it to, nothing is supposed to last forever. There always comes a point where clinging to the past becomes an exercise in futility. Where it hurts more than it helps.”

Dulmur held his partner’s gaze. “He’s right,” he told the Collectors. “The past belongs where it is.”

“And some things deserve to stay extinct,” Noi added. “The Borg most of all.”

“Do not mistake our curiosity for open debate,” the Warden told them, its tone growing sterner. “Whatever authority your agencies gave you in the remote past no longer exists. As it is, you are merely prehistoric samples that have arrived in place of our intended research subjects. Thus we are researching you instead, studying your responses and cultural values. In this way, you repay us for your vandalism of our project.”

“And what gives you the authority to imprison us?” Noi demanded.

“Consider it an act of mercy instead. Your worlds, your civilizations, have changed beyond recognition. There is nowhere for you in the modern galaxy—except the environment we have the power to create for you. If you prove amenable subjects, we will retrieve other suitable specimens of your respective species. When properly activated, the instruments can sample a much larger volume than what you experienced. Thus it should be easy to establish a large enough population base for breeding—although you, Agent Jena Noi, may be difficult to match.”

“Oh, you did not just say that,” Noi said. “If you think we’re going to let you breed us like—”

Suddenly, the Collectors grew agitated, their tentacle bundles splitting and waving frenetically. “Alert!” cried one of the junior Collectors. “We have an incoming parachronistic incursion. It is not one of our own instruments!”

“Location?” demanded the Warden.

“The same enclosure where these beings arrived!”

“Image it!”

Something happened to Dulmur’s perceptions. He could still feel himself standing on the platform, but his viewpoint was back in the scrubland enclosure, hovering near the obelisk. Somehow he could see in all directions, as if through a Collector’s eyes. And there, above the obelisk, were three sleek, advanced battleships, resembling the vessel that had escorted him and the others to Tandar Prime.

“It’s the TIA,” Noi said. “They’ve followed us!”

XI

c. 21,436,000 CE

Collector Preserve

“Hit them hard and fast,” Timot Danlen reminded his gunner as he took in the sight of the hideous floating things gathered around the obelisk. “Don’t give them a chance to think.” When facing beings this advanced, it was necessary to gain an immediate advantage.

“Yes, Director!” the Hirogen gunner barked, firing eagerly at the creatures while taking care to avoid the obelisk.

“Serel, stand by to begin ground assault. Secure that obelisk at all costs!”

“Yes, Director,” replied Agent Jeihaz through the comlink in his head. Moments later, when the ground around the obelisk had been cleared, he gave the order, and the hazy blue form of the holographic giantess blinked into view on the ground below, accompanied by four of Danlen’s fiercest fighters. While her strike team laid down cover fire, Jeihaz moved to the obelisk to phase-shift it out of its possessors’ control. Once that was done, Danlen would order the ship to move over its position, then shift phase to match, rendering the ship invisible and safe from attack, with the obelisk inside it.

But when Jeihaz signaled ready and Danlen tried to issue the order, he found himself paralyzed. He couldn’t move his eyes, but he could tell that the other team members in his field of view were frozen as well, as were the organic strike team members visible in the holotank before him. Jeihaz and Darro remained in motion, suggesting that the flesh-and-blood agents were paralyzed by some telepathic force. The hologram and the android fired on the incoming creatures, but those creatures now had personal shields engaged. One of them made a gesture, and some sort of energy pulse overloaded both remaining agents’ circuits. Darro fell rigidly to the ground, followed by Jeihaz’s mobile emitter as her body projection dissipated.

Now Danlen got a sinking feeling, literally and otherwise, as the ship descended, along with the others on the screen. The landing rocked him; unable to move, he teetered, fearing for his balance. Outside, he could see a group of the squidlike creatures descending, accompanied by a hover platform carrying the hated duplicate of Jena Noi and her two accomplices from the temporal backwater of the twenty-fourth century.

“Hm,” he heard the one called Dulmur say. “That was easy.”

Just then, Danlen felt the ship’s temporal drive engage. The scene faded, and when his senses cleared, he could move again. The ship was in a temporal hover, holding just before arrival, flanked by the other two vessels. A glance at a monitor showed that the strike team was back aboard. As per their preprogrammed instructions, the ships had transported themselves and all their occupants several minutes backward to just before their original arrival.

“All right, people,” Danlen said. “That was a good trial run—we know what we’re facing now. Ready countermeasures.”

On their second try, the ships’ telepathic circuits broadcast a psionic jamming field. Jeihaz and Darro stayed aboard; Jeihaz manned the guns while the Hirogen, Sulirr, led the strike team. This time they got as far as landing around the phased obelisk before they were thrown into a slow-time field. The automatic backstep was barely able to overcome it and jump them back into inverted spacetime.

“A direct attack isn’t going to work,” Jeihaz advised. “There are too many of them and they’re too powerful. Our best option is to distract them. Send in a stealth team, do some sabotage before we bring in the ships. Give them a bigger problem to worry about while we make off with an obelisk or two.”

“What kind of problem?” Danlen asked.

Sulirr laughed. “Have you seen the menagerie down there? It is a hunter’s paradise. They have some of the most fearsome predators in the history of the galaxy.”

“ ‘Fearsome’ is an understatement,” Darro said, anxiety clear on the Soong-breed’s golden face. “They have Borg down there.”

“Then they will have a very large problem to distract them,” Sulirr countered.

“But our team will be down there too. What will happen to them?”

“We can handle the Borg,” Danlen told him. He added to himself, Just so long as they don’t have a Mro.

“Can we even break them out, though?” Darro persisted. “The shields must be very advanced to resist their adaptations.”

“Must be easier from the outside,” Jeihaz replied. “If not, we’ll just keep resetting until we figure it out.”

“Ready your team, Serel,” the director ordered, giving his agents a satisfied smile. “It’s time for the animals to take over this zoo.”

“It’s the TIA,” Noi said. “They’ve followed us!”

“How?” Lucsly asked.

“No idea.” She turned to the Warden. “But they’re here for the obelisk—the instrument. You can’t let them have it.”

“Have no concern,” Collector #2 transmitted. “We can easily handle their primitive—”

“Warden!” The junior Collectors began writhing their tentacles in alarm once more. “Barriers are falling all over the preserve! Many specimens are escaping!”

“Don’t tell me,” Noi said. “The most dangerous ones?”

“Correct!”

“The Borg?” Lucsly asked, his stoicism failing him for once.

“Correct. They have already begun spreading into the neighboring biomes.”

“This is a diversion,” Noi realized. Dulmur wondered how the TIA could have known in advance how to stage a diversion at the very moment of their arrival.

“This must be our priority,” the Warden instructed. “The safety of the specimens is paramount.”

“Then send us to deal with the intruders,” Noi urged. “My actions brought them here. Let me take responsibility for stopping them.”

“If it will keep you out of our way, very well,” came the Warden’s distracted thoughts. “Accompany them,” it went on, somehow mentally indicating two of its entourage. The rest of the group teleported away.

A moment later, the scene shifted around Dulmur as he and the others were teleported to the obelisk site. The two Collectors veered off to engage two of the TIA battleships, which opened fire on them. The third battleship fired at the hover platform, making Dulmur’s heart leap into his throat, but the platform must have had shields, for the blasts were deflected safely away. In another moment, the platform had settled down behind the obelisk, which even the TIA was unwilling to risk hitting.

But a trio of TIA bruisers was on the ground already, closing on the obelisk. Beside Dulmur, Noi was carefully securing her long braid into a compact knot. “I’ll handle the ground team,” she said. She produced a small device from somewhere—Dulmur was beginning to suspect her uniform contained either extradimensional pockets or a minireplicator—and handed it to Lucsly once she had adjusted its setting. “Get this onto the obelisk and activate it,” she said, indicating the correct icon. “It’ll phase-shift it randomly, keep them from getting a lock.”

“We’re not fighters,” Lucsly reminded her. Dulmur would have said the same, but he was still dealing with shock from having a battleship shoot at him. Which pretty effectively made the point for him, come to that.

“You shouldn’t have to be.” She squeezed both men’s shoulders, then leapt into the fray.

Dulmur could not adequately describe or characterize what happened next. He could tell that Noi was engaging the TIA troops to keep them from the obelisk, first with the TIA sidearm she’d acquired back in 3051, then with some kind of closer combat, but the details went by too fast, and were simply too strange, for him to make sense of them. Noi and the other combatants moved at varying speeds, jumped from one place to another, and at times were literally in two places at once, if not more.

“Dulmur!” He realized that Lucsly had been guiding him forward from the cover of one low shrub to the next, inching them toward the obelisk. “Focus on the task,” the gray-haired agent said.

It was what he needed to hear, the mantra that had kept him sane and functional despite all the paracausal insanity he witnessed in his job. He’d long since internalized it when it came to investigating complicated and counterintuitive anomalies, but he’d been in combat only a few times before, and it was hard to be blasé about seeing a colleague—a friend?—risking her life on his behalf. Not to mention the voice in the back of his head that was screaming because the Borg were back and they were running around loose somewhere not very far from here. . . .

But Lucsly was right: There was a job to be done, and that was where his attention was required. So he concentrated on getting to the obelisk, hopefully without attracting the interest of anyone or anything with predatory designs.

Luckily, they were DTI agents, the epitomes of the nondescript. Surrounded by superhuman fighters and hyperadvanced aliens and transcendent technologies and exotic landscapes and extinct monsters, two middle-aged baseline humans in conservative gray suits were by far the least interesting things to look at in the entire preserve. And so they were able to work their way up to the base of the obelisk unnoticed, allowing Lucsly to attach the device and hit the activation key. Dulmur grinned as the obelisk shimmered out of phase, safe from the TIA.

And then stiffened when he realized its abrupt invisibility and intangibility left the two of them completely exposed in what was now the center of attention.

But then Noi was there in front of them, breathing hard but standing firm, her braid knotted less tightly but still holding. Two of her opponents were down, and the third, a Hirogen of all things, was limping. This is the woman I’ve been arguing with all these years? Dulmur thought. If he’d seen this side of her before, he never would have dared.

“It’s over!” Noi called. “The Collectors will never let you have their technology, and neither will we! So you might as well just go home!”

“That’s not going to be so easy.” Director Daniels had materialized several meters away, along with a woman who was on her knees before him, arms bound, with his phaser aimed at her head. Dulmur realized it was the alternate Jena Noi, the one who’d betrayed her director to help them escape. He hadn’t recognized her at first, since she’d been stripped of her uniform, instead wearing a stark brown jumpsuit no doubt devoid of any inbuilt weapons or defenses. “You see, we only managed to get this far uptime by using the quantum resonance between the two of you to piggyback on the artifact’s travel curve. You know our drive doesn’t have the power to jump back twenty-one million years. Our only way back is with one of these obelisks.”

“I’m sure the Collectors will be happy to send you back.”

“If they don’t decide to throw you in their zoo,” Dulmur got up the nerve to add. “We’re still debating that one with them.”

“Well, then, I assume they wouldn’t want any harm to come to this precious specimen,” Daniels replied, sneering as he jammed his phaser against the other Noi’s temple. “And neither would you. So I suggest you hand over the obelisk.”

Dulmur looked around. Where were their Collector escorts, anyway? They had incapacitated the TIA warships, it seemed, but now they were nowhere in sight. But from the noises he was hearing in the distance, it was possible they’d been called in to deal with the escaped “specimens,” leaving the time agents to fend for themselves.

“And then what?” Lucsly called. “You have no idea how to operate the device. We only got it here by deactivating the mechanism that held it in the past. Now that it’s returned to its origin, none of us has any idea how to displace it through time again.”

“You let us worry about that, Agent. You should be worrying about the contents of Supervisor Noi’s skull right about now. I know you’re not ruthless enough to sacrifice her.” Daniels tilted his head. “I’d count down from ten, but of course you can all keep perfect time.”

The other Noi rolled her eyes. “Either save me or let him shoot me, so I don’t have to listen to this anymore.”

“There’s no need for this, Director,” said Jena (as Dulmur decided to call her to keep them straight). “We’re all strangers in this time. None of us has the advantage.”

“Holding at three,” Daniels said. “Last chance.”

The only reply was a deafening roar. All eyes turned to the craggy outcropping nearby, where something was just cresting the lower side, sending a tumble of loose rocks down toward them. It was a massive creature, over four meters tall and greenish-gray, with an erect trunk on a tripedal base. Three tentacles were uncurling from its shoulders, reaching a good four meters each themselves. At the top was a thick, flexible neck supporting a head with wide-set eyes and a large, ravening mouth. It descended the slope toward them—and a second creature of the same species became visible over the hill, also heading their way!

Daniels aimed his phaser and fired, but only the creature’s middle tentacle fell limp, and it lunged toward him with startling speed. The director broke and ran, leaving the bound Noi helpless. “Get to cover!” Jena said, then broke into an astonishingly fast run toward her other self—and toward the giant creatures bearing down on her.

Lucsly led Dulmur to a smaller outcropping. Dulmur couldn’t bear to look back and see what was happening. But by the time they reached the rocks, both Nois had caught up with them. Jena was helping the brown-suited Noi out of her bonds. “Thanks,” the latter said.

“I owed you,” Jena told her.

“Damn straight you did.”

“Have you ever seen creatures like that?” Lucsly asked both of her.

They shook their heads. “Either before my time or after it,” Jena said.

One of the creatures was heading their way now, and Dulmur was unsure how effective the rocks would be at providing cover. But before he could find out, a new noise came over the hill. A band of upright reptilian bipeds, the ones he’d seen hunting the large mollusk, charged into view. On seeing the tripedal giants, they gave off trilling howls and began hurling stones at them.

The ensuing battle was like something out of a monster holonovel, but Jena and Noi urged the men to run for safety while both sets of predators were mutually occupied. The four (or technically three) time agents fled as swiftly as they could, though Dulmur had no doubt he and Lucsly were holding the women back.

But they pulled up short when they heard a growing, continuous thundering and bellowing coming toward them. Trading wordless looks of understanding, they scaled the nearest outcropping just before a herd of humpbacked, duck-beaked hadrosaurs came racing past. This was something Dulmur had seen in holosuites, but now he could see what the reconstructions had gotten wrong.

“Uh-oh,” Lucsly said.

“What?”

“They’re running from something.”

Dulmur’s eyes widened. They weren’t coming from the same direction as the giant tripedal things.

Then he heard the footsteps: fast, heavy, confident, yet with a clockwork regularity that sounded unnatural. Something massive was moving through the cloud of dust kicked up by the hadrosaurs. He caught glimpses of its massive jaws, its bulky body and tail. It was the T. rex, just as he’d feared.

Except . . . where was the feathery mane? The top of its head was smooth, gleaming, almost black. Its back was bare too—no, there were some kind of protrusions along its spine, glinting dully through the dusty haze. Its flanks were pale, all its color leached away.

One of its eyes became clearly visible through the dust, and it locked onto them. It shone with a vivid red glow from within, flecks of laser light forming a dotted trail through the clearing dust. Its claws snapped at them with a metallic sound.

It was a Borg Tyrannosaurus rex.

Dulmur’s brain almost shut down just from looking at it. But Jena fired her phaser, hitting its armored chest. It staggered, but it was too massive to be felled by one blow. She fired again, but a force field blocked it.

It let out a deep, growling hiss, and Dulmur somehow knew it was trying to say “Resistance is futile.”

But it was enough to break his trance. He ran like hell. He was aware that the others were close at his flanks. It wouldn’t have changed anything if they hadn’t been. He just ran. And he could hear the Borg dinosaur (the Borg dinosaur!) coming after him. Slowly, methodically, without the ravening intensity of the pure predator—but with the tireless fixation of the Borg. It would not slow until it had them.

Since when did the Borg assimilate animals? some part of his mind cried, as if hoping to banish the horrifying reality by declaring it illogical. But it was a futile objection: Of course the Borg would adapt to use whatever resources were available in their environment, and their current environment was a nature preserve. Under the circumstances, an enormous apex predator would certainly qualify as biological distinctiveness worth adding—

Dulmur’s foot struck a rock. He hit the ground hard, tumbled. The others had already passed him. Meters away, they stopped, looked back. Tried to move toward him but hesitated.

He looked up. The assimilated carnosaur loomed over him. Its jaws were closed, but it bore a far more terrible weapon than its teeth now. An arm reached out. Assimilation tubules shot from it, snaking toward Dulmur’s head—

And dangled uselessly in midair!

He was saved by the T. rex’s tiny little arms!

He felt the others pull him to his feet and drag him away. He realized he was laughing hysterically. “Hah! Not such a great idea after all, was it?”

“Don’t stop running,” Lucsly barked, his stern voice as potent as ice water to the face. “Remember: Borg adapt.”

Jena and Noi led them toward a steep hill, hoping the massive theropod would be unable to scale it. But the cyborg claws on its feet gave it firm purchase, and it came after them slowly but relentlessly.

At the peak, they found a flickering force barrier with a different enclosure on the other side, this one a bronze-hued grassland grazed by six-legged creatures whose anatomy suggested they were distantly related to the tentacled giants from before. They seemed harmless enough, which was good, since the temporal agents had no choice but to cross the force barrier anyway and hope to find cover. Or help. What was keeping those damned Collectors?

Someone else, it seemed, had had the same idea. Director Daniels came into view as they descended the shallow slope. He brandished his weapon, but after a moment, Dulmur realized it wasn’t pointed at them. “Is it following you?” he asked the Nois.

“Yes,” said Jena.

“With two phasers, we can take it,” he said.

“It’s already adapted,” Noi told him.

“The Borg stopped adapting nearly seven centuries before our time. Our technology can beat theirs.”

“You don’t know the Borg,” Lucsly told him. “They’re just a history lesson to you. I warn you, don’t underestimate them.”

Daniels scoffed. “It’s literally a dinosaur.”

“A member of the most successful and enduring vertebrate order in Earth’s history. Remember, they never died out—they just became birds.”

Dulmur heard another growl that he could swear had six syllables. He spun to see the cyborg sauropsid cresting the hill. The force barrier flickered to greater strength, leading Dulmur to hope the Collectors were beginning to regain control. But it adapted quickly, piercing the force barrier with minimal effort and stomping methodically down toward them.

Daniels strode forward. “Come on, we can take it! Set to transphasic rotation and fire!”

There was no time to argue. Jena joined him in firing at the beast. A few of their shots pierced its shielding, making it stagger. But that just made it tumble down toward them even faster. The time agents fell back, Daniels stumbling and landing on his rear, losing his phaser. He crab-walked back as the Borgosaurus regained its footing with eerie, mechanical grace. Jena kept firing, but its shields were adapting now. It was injured, slowing, but it still stomped toward Daniels with the combined relentlessness of both the Cretaceous Earth’s and the Anthropocene galaxy’s apex predators, arms extended toward the TIA director.

Daniels laughed. “Hah! You can’t even reach me, you stupid beast!”

Its jaw opened, descending toward Daniels. Its tongue shot forward, spawning assimilation tubules. Daniels made a small, choking gasp as they penetrated his shoulder. “No!” Noi cried.

Jena did something to her phaser, and the dinosaurian drone fell to her assault—but it was only down, not out. It still moved, its shielding returning to protect it from her ongoing fire, and it tried to regain its footing. Daniels rolled over and scuttled away, but then he fell, panting.

Noi crouched near him. “Director!”

“Don’t get too close!” Dulmur warned. “He’ll be one of them soon!”

“I can fight it,” Daniels gasped. “Got—own nanite defenses.”

Lucsly’s voice was heavy, matter-of-fact. “You’ve seen how quickly they adapt.”

The director met his eyes, growing solemn. “I know. I’m already losing.” His skin was starting to turn gray. “But I can hold it off.”

He looked to Jena. “Give me your phaser.” She hesitated. “It’s okay, I’m still in control.”

The two Nois traded a look. The TIA operative nodded, and the FTA agent handed her weapon to the shuddering Daniels. He looked up at her in gratitude. “Maybe you were right. This was supposed to be . . . about protecting lives. Maybe we forgot that.”

He turned back to see the reptilian Borg beginning to regain its footing. “Run,” Daniels ordered the rest of them, though his eyes were locked on Jena’s. “Put it all right. However you can.”

They ran as fast as they could. Eighteen seconds later, there was a searing burst of light, heat, and wind from behind them. When Dulmur turned back, he saw only a smoking crater.

Jena stood beside him, stunned. “I will,” she said at length. “I’ll put it right.”

Noi took her double’s hand in hers. “We will.”

XII

c. 21,436,000 CE, next day

Collector Preserve

“We knew an incident like this was inevitable,” said Time Guardian Jheress. “Unfortunately, the Collectors were operating within the letter of this quadrant’s temporal regulations.”

“I understand,” Lucsly said, the two temporal protectors bonding across 21.43 megayears over the perennial regulatory impediments to their vital work. Jheress was an androgynous humanoid (identifying as female) whose smooth head and diminutive, slender body were covered in a seal-gray integument with sinuous, cream-colored stripes and whorls that occasionally luminesced from within. Lucsly could not tell where skin ended and clothing began, if either term was applicable. According to her, the Collector Preserve had been a thorn in the Time Guardians’ side for the past century. But the prominence of its operators’ species in the coalition that governed this galactic quadrant (which could not be mapped onto any quadrant from his own time, for the galaxy was fluid over such a timescale) had stymied the Guardians’ efforts to halt the operation.

But the recent incident had humbled the Collectors. The loss of numerous precious specimens and several of their own personnel had forced the Warden and its advisors to concede that the small-scale, local temporal disruptions their sampling methods created could indeed have significant lasting consequences. For all their conservatism, their high intelligence made them quick to adjust to the irrefutable, and so they had regretfully permitted the Time Guardians to oversee the shutdown of their operation and the restoration of the surviving specimens to their original times and places.

“But what about me?” Supervisor Noi wondered, speaking to her alternate self and Dulmur as they watched the Time Guardians coordinate with the Collectors to round up the first of the specimens—the shaggy, sucker-mouthed bipeds and their prey beasts—for return to their home era. “Once everything’s put back, I won’t have a timeline to go back to. I’m an anomaly.”

Jena put her hand on her duplicate’s shoulder, speaking tentatively. “We could merge. That way at least your memories would survive.”

The supervisor met her eyes solemnly. “You wouldn’t want them. I’ve been in your mind—you’re actually at peace with yourself. I can’t take that from you.”

Dulmur cleared his throat. “You know . . . we have counselors to help people adjust to being out of time.”

The short-haired Noi laughed. “You think I could be happy in your primitive era?”

Dulmur glared. “I just meant Jena’s agency must have people like that too. They could help you find a place in her timeline.”

Noi shook her head. “Too close to home. It’d be too much of a reminder.”

But then her gaze fell on the lissome forms of the Time Guardians, and a calculating smile formed on her lips. “On the other hand, I bet those guys are always looking for new talent. After all, they’ve got a lot more history to cover than we do.” She turned to Jheress. “How about it? You hiring?”

The Guardian examined her briefly. “You would need extensive retraining and reorientation. We have no use for your primal aggression.”

“Sounds good to me,” she said, her voice hard. “I’d just as soon have no more use for it either.”

Catching the look on Jena’s face, Noi laughed. “What’s the matter, sister? Not comfortable having an evil twin running around? One with better toys than yours?”

“If you were evil, I wouldn’t be here,” Jena said. “Still . . . let’s just say it’s a good thing there’ll be twenty-one million years or so between us. Should be a pretty good buffer.”

Noi laughed. “Oh, I don’t know, sister. Something tells me we’ll meet again.” Her eyes roved across Lucsly and Dulmur with playful menace. “I might even drop in on you boys someday, if you’re not careful. So try not to screw up the timestream anymore, okay?”

She strode away, beginning a lively conversation with Jheress. Dulmur stared at both Nois in turn, and then at Lucsly. “Damn,” he said. “I gotta say, it’ll be a relief to get back to the simpler problems of a DTI agent.”

“Agreed,” Lucsly said. “The sooner we return to our proper worldline coordinates, the better. Subjectively speaking, of course.”

“Of course.” Dulmur turned to gaze at the force barrier on one edge of this enclosure, and Lucsly knew what lay beyond it. “Still . . . it seems to me the Guardians owe us a favor. Maybe we could take a quick detour—”

“No.”

“We’ve already bent enough regulations—”

“No.”

“Come on, partner. Are you really telling me you aren’t tempted?”

“I’m not tempted.”

Late Maastrichtian Period, c. 66,018,180 BCE

Future site of Bozeman, Montana

“I knew you were tempted,” Dulmur said.

“I was outvoted,” Lucsly replied, his arms crossed. But Dulmur could tell he was glad they were here. The two DTI agents and Jena Noi gazed around them in wonder as the returned dinosaurs spread out into their home environment. The landscape here was sparser, less hospitable than the Collectors’ preserve, with a disturbing whiff of sulfur in the warm, humid air, the signature of the volcanoes whose intense activity over the past millennia had softened up the biosphere for the deathblow of the impending asteroid impact in the Yucatán. The repopulated animals would have a harder time surviving here than they would 87 million years uptime—but here they were home. Even Dulmur felt it; despite the alienness of this environment, he could still sense in his bones that this was his home planet, the place where he belonged. He suspected the dinosaurs could feel it too.

But home or not, he was farther from the year of his birth than he had ever been or probably ever would be again. He was living every Terran child’s dream, watching live dinosaurs in their natural habitat—a landscape close to the one he knew, yet with the differences made all the more alien by contrast. He looked up at the gibbous Moon that stood in the midafternoon sky, subtly larger and smoother-faced than the Moon he knew. A small flock of broad-winged birds with stout bodies and toothy beaks flew past it overhead, startled from their treetop perches by the thundering of the Triceratops herd. They and their kin would be the ones to keep the dinosaurs’ heritage alive into Dulmur’s era and hopefully far beyond.

He heard a faint rustle from a nearby stand of trees. Glancing down, he spotted a small head peeking out of hiding, some kind of early mammal or marsupial, a scavenger most likely. With the return of the local T. rex population, its life would probably get a lot more difficult now. But the consolation was that, in the fullness of time, its descendants would inherit this world. And eventually, not far from this very spot, one of those descendants would launch Earth’s first warp-driven ship into space and take his people to the stars.

And then a bunch of Starfleet officers would go back in time, become participants in that first launch, and create reams of paperwork for a particular pair of DTI agents. But right now, that seemed like a minor detail.

“You know, partner,” Dulmur said, “you were right. Maybe the Federation has gotten too complacent, too resistant to change—but so have I. I’ve been in a comfortable rut, not wanting to move forward. But that’s kept me from . . . evolving. From exploring my full potential, seeing what else might be there. And maybe I’m blocking the way of the next agent coming up behind me. So I’m taking that assistant directorship.”

Jena Noi beamed. “Congratulations, Dulmur! You deserve it.” She hugged him and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“Great,” he said. “I finally get you to kiss me and I won’t even remember it. No way you’ll let us keep any of these memories.”

Jena glanced thoughtfully toward Lucsly. A butterfly had landed on his shoulder and he was standing stock-still, taking great care not to interfere with it in any way. “You know, I think I’ll have to bend the rules this time,” she said. “Something I did to tamper with your worldlines caused disaster for my history.”

Lucsly spoke quietly. “It was probably to do with the obelisk. Just as you hypothesized.”

“Probably. But time works in complicated ways. I don’t think I should take any chances.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Dulmur said. “What did DTI records say about this little accident? Are we supposed to believe you didn’t know we’d be taken with you? Nobody wrote that down?”

She shrugged. “You know how it is. Records get corrupted or lost. Especially when they’re as classified as DTI files, or as prone to bureaucratic screwups. It’s like archaeology just trying to dig through all the surviving records and identify the important stuff.

“So I can’t really be sure what effect all this will have on your personal histories. I’ll just have to keep trusting you to make sure the proper flow of time stays safe. And after what you’ve seen, I don’t think I have to worry about that.”

The butterfly flew away unharmed, and Lucsly breathed again. “We’ll do our job,” he assured her.

“I know you will. And maybe I’ll be more tolerant of how you do it from now on.” She smirked. “Lately I’ve gotten to experience what it feels like to be on the downtime side, and it’s not much fun.”

“You said it, sister,” Dulmur said.

Then he looked at Lucsly. “You okay with that, partner? Remembering all this?”

Lucsly gazed out at the receding dinosaurs, listening to their grunts and clacks. There were only a few decades left before the Earth was transformed forever, but it was time enough for these dinosaurs to live out their natural spans where they belonged. “Some things are worth remembering.”

Epilogue

May 5, 2384 (a Saturday)

DTI Headquarters, Greenwich

“For once, your timing is awful,” Teresa Garcia said to Lucsly and Dulmur, though she was grinning ear to ear. She, Ranjea, and Andos stood in the DTI infirmary, where Doctor Sullivan had just given the two returned special agents a clean bill of health. “You couldn’t have come back before I wrote my report on your disappearance, instead of just after?”

“It wasn’t up to us,” Dulmur told her, though there was apology in his gaze nonetheless. Apparently she wasn’t masking her relief as well as she thought.

“So you gained no significant information about the future?” Andos probed.

“Agent Noi redirected us to a containment facility at her own headquarters,” Lucsly replied in a perfect deadpan. “Naturally their protocols for such situations are well-developed. We were returned at the earliest opportunity with no new information about the FTA’s era.”

The towering director peered at him skeptically. “Yet several of Agent Dulmur’s organs read as brand-new,” she said. “Genetically his, yet appearing newly grown or created.”

“Agent Dulmur was apparently injured by an energy discharge as a consequence of the obelisk’s operation. His injuries were repaired before our return.”

Dulmur shrugged. “But neither of us saw anything about how it was done. I, for one, was in no condition to observe.”

The director examined them both, and Garcia couldn’t blame her. Their account seemed suspiciously vague and carefully worded even to Garcia, and she didn’t have a Rhaandarite’s heightened people-reading skills. Yet after a moment, Andos decided not to press the issue. “Very well,” she said. “Best not to be too curious about the future. Agent Noi’s people would not have returned you if they felt it posed a threat to the timeline; therefore, I accept their judgment. Welcome back, both of you.” She smiled at Dulmur. “And congratulations on your impending promotion, Agent. It is well-earned.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“It’s going to be weird not seeing you two working together anymore,” Garcia said. “You’re an institution around here.”

“Change happens,” Lucsly said. “We’re here to protect the future, not resist it.”

Ranjea gave him a quizzical look. “That’s an unusual perspective to hear from you, Gariff. Your journey through time may have been subjectively brief, but it seems to have been broadening nonetheless.”

“You wish,” Lucsly told him. “I intend to have a long talk with both of you about the mess you made of the Vault.”

Garcia winced and grinned at the same time, perversely comforted that some things would never change.

Day 266, 3051

Federation Temporal Agency Headquarters, London Metrocomplex

“What went wrong?” Assistant Director Timot Danlen asked, surveying the containment bay where Jena Noi had arrived by herself. “Where’s the obelisk? Where are the DTI agents?”

“Things didn’t go quite as planned,” Noi told him, masking her relief at seeing him alive, well, and himself again. “I triggered the obelisk to bring us forward, just like their records said, but I wasn’t able to divert it here.”

“But Garcia’s report said their trace showed—”

“Maybe it showed my attempt to create the link here, but the obelisk’s sheer power overrode it. We were carried forward to the obelisk’s origin point, twenty-one million years from now. Once I explained the situation, they sent us back to our respective times.”

“But did you determine the purpose of the obelisk? The threat level?”

“It’s a paleontological research tool—one of many seeded throughout the larger timestream. But I’d say the threat is minimal. The builders agreed to institute further safeguards once this incident came to their attention.”

The nondescript man peered at her. “So that’s it? Nothing more to report?”

“You know the drill, Timot. Better if I don’t say too much about the future. Even a future that distant.”

“But the DTI agents didn’t see or learn anything that could pose a threat?”

Noi smiled at him. “What threat could two DTI men pose? They may not have had our technology, but they could teach us a thing or two about discretion.”

Danlen studied her a moment longer, then nodded, a friendly smile softening his features. “Okay, Jena. I’ll expect your report in my queue by tonight.” He clapped her on the shoulder. “But for now, get some rest. You’ve had a long day.”

“Thanks, Timot.” Longer than you could imagine.

She beamed home for a long, hot bath, making sure she was alone before she lowered her mental guard. What threat could they pose indeed? she wondered. She’d assumed that removing the obelisk had somehow disrupted the history that had created the temporal defense grid. But the obelisk was far uptime, and her history had nonetheless been restored. That left Lucsly and Dulmur as the only remaining candidates for the nexus point.

But how could it be them? The grid wouldn’t exist until decades after their worldlines ended. What role could they have played—

“Stop,” she told herself in a sharp whisper. There was a reason she hadn’t told Danlen about the timeline alteration, why she could never tell anyone. The origins of the grid had to remain a mystery, for the sake of everyone’s future. And she knew as well as anyone that causality was a complex thing, that removing one seemingly minor domino could cause a whole chain of events to unfold differently. Removing Lucsly and Dulmur from history could have simply been the equivalent of stepping on a butterfly.

She laughed. “Lucsly would make a terrible butterfly,” she muttered. Still, she was perversely glad to think that his quiet, methodical, humorless work on behalf of preserving history, alongside his stalwart partner, might really have made a difference after all.

Even if nobody would ever know it.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Margaret Clark for giving me one more opportunity to revisit the Department of Temporal Investigations, and thanks to cousins Barb and Mark for giving me a place to stay while finishing up this novella.

Agents Lucsly (James W. Jansen) and Dulmur (Jack Blessing) were introduced in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: “Trials and Tribble-ations,” teleplay by Ronald D. Moore & René Echevarria, story by Ira Steven Behr, Hans Beimler, and Robert Hewitt Wolfe. The temporal agent known as Daniels (Matt Winston) was introduced in Star Trek: Enterprise: “Cold Front,” by Stephen Beck and Tim Finch. Clare Raymond (Gracie Harrison) debuted in Star Trek: The Next Generation: “The Neutral Zone,” teleplay by Maurice Hurley, story by Deborah McIntyre and Mona Clee. The Borg were created by Hurley, debuting in The Next Generation: “Q Who.” The M-113 salt vampires appeared in the original series episode “The Man Trap,” written by George Clayton Johnson. Tandar Prime debuted in Enterprise: “Detained,” teleplay by Mike Sussman and Phyllis Strong, story by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. The Na’kuhl first appeared in Enterprise: “Zero Hour,” written by Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. The name “Aegis” was coined by Howard Weinstein in DC Comics’ Star Trek Volume 2, Issue 50 (“The Peacekeeper, Part Two”), as the name for the employers of Gary Seven from Star Trek: “Assignment: Earth,” teleplay by Art Wallace, story by Gene Roddenberry and Art Wallace. The Certoss Ajahlan were created by Dayton Ward for the novel Star Trek: From History’s Shadow; I’m returning the favor for his incorporation of ideas from DTI: Forgotten History into that book. I’ve also acknowledged what Kirsten Beyer established about the Eridian Vault’s inventory in Star Trek: Voyager—The Eternal Tide.

Thanks to “Lsana” and “Idran” on the Tor.com blogs for insights on information storage and the limits of transporter technology. Subspace transporters capable of interstellar beaming were established as an existing twenty-fourth-century technology in The Next Generation: “Bloodlines,” written by Nicholas Sagan.

I drew on various sources for information about Tyrannosaurus rex and the late Cretaceous, including the article “Did T. Rex Have Feathers Too?” by J. Sherwood, posted in 2012 on Environmentalgraffiti.com; the Unearthing T. rex website at unearthingtrex.com; the article “What Is Enantiornis?” posted April 1, 2012, on dinogoss.blogspot.com; and the Walking with Dinosaurs television series from Impossible Pictures (whose subsequent series Prehistoric Park inspired aspects of this novella’s storyline). My dating of the scene on prehistoric Earth is a compromise between the novel Star Trek: First Frontier by Diane Carey and Doctor James I. Kirkland, which gave a conjectural date of 64,018,143 BCE for the Chicxulub impact event, and 2013 research by the Berkeley Geochronology Center suggesting a date of 66,038,000 plus or minus 11,000 years BCE (see Paul R. Renne et al., “Time Scales of Critical Events Around the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary,” Science 8 February 2013: Vol. 339, no. 6120, pp. 684–687).

About the Author

Christopher L. Bennett is a lifelong resident of Cincinnati, Ohio, with bachelor’s degrees in physics and history from the University of Cincinnati. He has written such critically acclaimed Star Trek novels as Ex Machina and The Buried Age; the Star Trek: Titan novels Orion’s Hounds and Over a Torrent Sea; the two Department of Temporal Investigations novels Watching the Clock and Forgotten History; and the Enterprise—Rise of the Federation series, so far including A Choice of Futures and Tower of Babel. His shorter works include stories in the anniversary anthologies Constellations, The Sky’s the Limit, Prophecy and Change, and Distant Shores. Beyond Star Trek, he has penned the novels X-Men: Watchers on the Walls and Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder. His original work includes the hard-science fiction superhero novel Only Superhuman, as well as several novelettes in Analog and other science fiction magazines. More information and annotations can be found at home.fuse.net/ChristopherLBennett, and the author’s blog can be found at christopherlbennett.wordpress.com.

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ISBN 978-1-4767-8259-1

Contents

Dedication

Historian’s Note

Epigraph

Prologue

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author