Time Lock
Author: Christopher L. Bennett
Date: 2016-09-05 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Star Trek
Description: An all new Star Trek e-novella from the world of Deep Space Nine, featuring the fan-favorite Federation bureau 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. As it happens, Agent Gariff Lucsly
Publisher: Simon and Schuster

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We wish to thank the United Federation of Planets Department of Temporal Investigations, without whose assistance this novella would not have been possible.

Historian’s Note

Time Lock begins in early July 2384, two months after Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations—The Collectors and shortly before the events of Star Trek: The Next Generation—The Cold Equations Book III: The Body Electric.

“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”

—Anecdotally attributed to Albert Einstein

The New York Times, March 15, 1929

I

Stardate 61512.7

1544 UTC, July 6, 2384 CE (A Friday)

Dwarf planet 136199 Eris, Outer Solar System

Gariff Lucsly stood in an artificial cavern deep within the icy crust of a profoundly hostile world, surrounded by dozens of the most dangerous artifacts ever created, and felt greatly reassured. As long as these implements of temporal manipulation remained here in the Eridian Vault, secured by the Federation Department of Temporal Investigations and locked away where no one else could ever find or utilize them, the universe as Lucsly knew it was, if not safe, at least less endangered than it would otherwise be.

True, this was not a given. It had been only sixty-five days since the Collectors’ obelisk, a temporal beacon from a powerful far-future civilization, had created a major temporal disruption right here within the Vault. This had been partly due to the unwelcome intervention of an interloper from another temporal agency, but excuses did not keep the timeline safe. That was why Lucsly had spent the past three weeks and four days here on Eris, overseeing a systematic review and upgrade of the Vault’s safety and security protocols in hopes of minimizing the chances of a similar occurrence in the future (or, even worse, in the past). Now, at the conclusion of that process, Lucsly felt more confident than ever in the safety that the Vault represented.

Still, not everything about Lucsly’s current situation felt perfect. One major element was missing. Well, not actually missing—just reallocated. But the alteration to Lucsly’s longtime routine was proving difficult to adjust to. Perhaps that was why he did not discourage Marion Dulmur’s nonessential communications. The security risk was minimal: The communications from his former partner’s new post, the recently established DTI branch office on Denobula, was relayed through a quantum-encrypted, dedicated subspace channel from DTI headquarters in Greenwich, minimizing the chance that any outside parties could intercept the communication and lock in on the Vault’s location. Still, it was an indulgence on Lucsly’s part to allow himself such communications outside of essential business.

“You wouldn’t believe the paperwork involved in getting a new office on its feet,” Dulmur’s voice declared over the comm pin attached to Lucsly’s suit collar, echoing faintly as he made his way along Aisle J, containing various small temporal artifacts in the force-shielded bays along both sides of the high-ceilinged passage. “That’s basically all I’ve done since I started this job. No field missions to send out, no crises . . . it’s mostly just personnel interviews, staff meetings, requisitions, talks with the Denobulan government, the works.”

“So nothing exciting happening at all,” Lucsly said.

“Not even remotely,” Dulmur replied.

“Sounds wonderful.”

“It’s heaven. I couldn’t be happier.”

“Sign of a well-run operation,” Lucsly said. He stopped to peruse Bay J77, containing two gray items that resembled wedges of an orange and were believed to be pieces of a spherical temporal displacement device. It concerned him that the remaining pieces were still at large, but at least he could be confident that the device would be useless without these components. “Not like those amateurs and adrenaline addicts in Starfleet. I knew you’d make a good assistant director, Dulmur.”

“I appreciate it, pal, but it’s still a hell of a mess over here. Not like the Vault. It sounds like you’ve got everything good and nailed down now.”

“We’d better,” Lucsly said. “Because our latest acquisition is on its way in as we speak.”

“That’s right, I read a report about that,” Dulmur said. Lucsly could hear his fingers snapping as he called up the memory. “A suspected time portal from the Gum Nebula, right?”

Lucsly declined to point out that the Gum Nebula was a bubble-shaped supernova remnant encompassing a volume of space larger than the Federation and its immediate neighbors combined, making it uselessly vague as a location descriptor. Now that Dulmur was officially his superior, Lucsly felt it would be inappropriate to correct him—even though Dulmur had done nothing since his promotion to pull rank or treat Lucsly as anything less than an equal. Dulmur had his way of doing things, but Lucsly had his own.

“Mm-hm,” he replied instead. “Discovered twenty-two days ago by a Catullan vessel. Cylindrical artifact, metal and crystal, one-point-nine-eight meters high by one-point-two-two meters in diameter. Perfect golden ratio to twenty-eight decimal places. Chroniton and tetryon emitter. Gravimetric readings indicate dimensional warping within.”

“Still no idea where or when it goes?”

“Not yet, but there’s a strong enough temporal displacement registering to warrant caution.”

“Naturally. And it’s a good thing we got our hands on it before the Vomnin could.”

“The Confederacy has agreed to abide by the common protocols for timeline protection,” Lucsly observed pro forma, though with little conviction in his voice.

“That may be,” Dulmur said. “But only after the sanctions they earned through their misconduct in the Axis of Time affair. And the Confederacy is only one of the Vomnin nations. The others might be just as hungry for time technology, for all we know.”

“Maybe.” All of Vomnin civilization, from their beginnings on their native world to the multiple interstellar nations they had subsequently branched into, was built on salvaged and reverse-engineered technology from alien relics and ruins. Both of the Vomnin societies the Federation had contacted to date—in chronological order, the Colonial Consortium and the Vomnin Confederacy—had shown a marked interest in acquiring and exploiting advanced ancient technologies. The Confederacy had shown itself to be the more covetous one in that regard, as the Consortium’s efforts had been directed largely toward defense against the dangerous spacegoing life-forms of the Gum Nebula. But that threat had been brought under control over the past 4.3 years, thanks in part to the actions of the U.S.S. Titan, and there were reports of recent tensions between the Consortium and the Confederacy. A time portal might be seen by either side as an edge worth acquiring.

“Still, that shouldn’t be an issue now,” Lucsly went on. “Whatever hazards this portal might pose, we won’t have to worry about it once it’s secure within a damping field.” He allowed himself a slight upturn of his lips. “Along with the new incursion shielding we have in place now. Wherever and whenever that portal leads, no one will be passing through it while it’s here.”

“Good to hear,” Dulmur said. “Look, Ranjea and Garcia are waiting in my outer office. They’ve been reviewing reports of possible Aegis activity on a pre-warp world near the Ferengi border. I wouldn’t be much of a DTI director if I weren’t punctual.”

“Understood.” The young agents’ report would probably be less important than it sounded. The mysterious ancient organization calling itself the Aegis was one of the key enforcers of the Temporal Accords, so their presence could be a sign of a potential history-changing threat; yet they also often worked in secret to shepherd promising young civilizations through their most turbulent and self-destructive eras, in which case their activities would be none of the DTI’s business. Either way, the Prime Directive limited the Federation’s ability to do more than observe from a distance. And while the DTI did have ways of contacting the Aegis, their representatives were rarely inclined to openness about their goals and operations. Ranjea and Garcia would probably have only inconclusive findings to offer, simply a matter of routine. Which was exactly what Dulmur would undoubtedly prefer.

“So I’ll just wish you luck processing that portal,” Dulmur went on. “Hopefully your day will be as blissfully uneventful as mine.”

“Appreciated, Dulmur. Talk to you later.”

“What was that, sir?”

Lucsly had just rounded the corner into Aisle H, containing moderately larger artifacts. Near the end of the aisle stood Felbog Bu-Tsop-Vee, one of the DTI’s top researchers. The young Choblik looked something like an ostrich in the skin of a deer, but he was adorned with cybernetic forelimbs and cranial augmentations, the outward components of the technological augmentations that gave his species full sentience. A computerlike memory, combined with a natural inquisitiveness, served Felbog well as a researcher and had allowed him to earn clearance to visit Eris after only three years in the Department’s service.

Next to the diminutive Choblik stood the towering figure of Laarin Andos, the DTI’s director, a Rhaandarite who was 247 years in age and nearly as many centimeters in height. The gray-haired, androgynous-featured director nodded in greeting, the lights of the aisle glinting off the circular silver-black mark in the center of her bulbous forehead. “Lucsly.”

“Director,” Lucsly said, then turned to the Choblik. “I wasn’t addressing you just now, Mister Felbog.”

“Is Dulmur doing well?” Andos asked him.

“He sounds quite satisfied with the status of the new office, ma’am.”

“Excellent. Matters here seem well in hand also.” Felbog had been assisting the director in her final check of the Vault’s inventory and systems before she declared the upgrade complete.

“I’m glad to hear it, ma’am,” Lucsly said. “Given what’s at stake.” He glanced at the item in Bay H26, which Felbog had been examining. It was classified as a time drive, for it could convert any warp-capable vessel into a timeship. It had been discovered in the wreckage of a ship whose origin had been estimated by quantum dating at over a million years uptime, a displacement that dwarfed what most of the artifacts in the Vault were capable of. It was a sobering reminder of just how much power and danger was contained herein.

“You don’t need to remind me, Lucsly.” Andos smirked. “Though you always do anyway, and I am grateful for your vigilance. Such preoccupations are not generally healthy in a human, but yours have served the Department extremely well.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Lucsly said. He continued in a deadpan: “You are aware, though, that not everyone in the Department would agree that I am human.”

Felbog’s cybernetic pinnae folded back in surprise at the unwonted hint of humor from Lucsly, but Andos’s gaze showed understanding. With Dulmur no longer present to make humorous observations when appropriate, it was up to Lucsly to compensate as best he could.

“If not, then you’re in good company,” the Rhaandarite director replied. “Shall we adjourn to the processing bay? Warain and T’Viss are ready for us.”

“Certainly, ma’am.”

They made their way to the observation chamber overlooking the newly refitted processing bay, where the time portal, a cylinder of golden crystal filigreed with complex circuitry patterns in silvery metal, stood amidst the newly installed array of sensors, shield generators, dimensional baffles, chroniton dampers, and additional safeguards. The portal artifact itself looked less intimidating than its current surroundings, though Lucsly knew better than to be fooled by appearances.

When Lucsly and the others arrived, they found the two scientists awaiting them in the chamber. Doctor Warain, the tall, nervous Caldonian in charge of safeguarding and studying the Vault’s contents, was accompanied by Doctor T’Viss, the stern, elderly Vulcan woman who had been the DTI’s leading temporal physicist since its founding in 2270. T’Viss had accompanied Andos to Eris for the safety review, but when the new artifact had happened to arrive during their visit, the physicist had naturally wished to witness its processing—not out of scientific curiosity, for she considered real-world phenomena an irritating distraction from her theoretical studies of time, but in order to kibitz Warain’s methods and conclusions. The massive Caldonian sat with shoulders hunched and head lowered as he scanned the artifact, intimidated by the gaunt Vulcan half his size, who stood over him with arms crossed and offered stern criticisms of his technique.

“Problems?” Andos asked as she and Lucsly moved to the monitoring console, though her tone made it clear she expected none. She had known T’Viss for as long as the Department had existed, and thus she surely knew that this was the doctor’s normal behavior and was not a cause for concern.

“Nothing I’m not addressing,” T’Viss replied. “With this overemotional boy in charge of these artifacts, it’s remarkable there haven’t been more disasters. But for now, the upgraded safeguards appear to be operating effectively.”

Andos turned to the Caldonian, pitching her voice to express the confidence in him that T’Viss lacked. “Doctor Warain? Do you concur?”

Warain straightened slightly. “Ah, yes, Director. While the artifact is definitely maintaining a spatiotemporal link with . . . somewhere, the connection remains dormant, like a closed wormhole.” He shook his head. “I can still think of nearly a dozen ways this thing could destroy us all, but at least that’s down from the eighteen that would’ve applied before the upgrade.” He glanced away for a moment. “Nineteen. Though that one would require the presence of a sentient holographic life-form and a malfunctioning rejuvenation chamber.”

“Never mind, Doctor,” Lucsly said. “Can we just finish the processing and get this portal secured, so we can complete this review and get our reports properly filed?”

“Of course, of course,” Warain said. “I’m already configuring Bay G9 for it. Its properties are similar to those of the Golana and Vinduri’dom time portals, so the containment and monitor protocols already in place in Aisle G should be suitable for it as well.”

“Very good,” said Andos. “Proceed.”

But before Warain could initiate the mechanized transfer, an alarm sounded. “Oh, no,” the Vault supervisor intoned. “The portal has become active! A vortex is starting to open within it!” Through the viewports, Lucsly could see the crystal walls of the cylindrical artifact glowing from within and changing in texture. It was as if the solid surface were melting into liquid yet retaining its cylindrical shape.

“I anticipated as much,” T’Viss snapped. “Clearly you’ve done something wrong.”

“Never mind that,” Lucsly said. “This shouldn’t be possible. The defenses should preclude any incursion.”

Warain’s long fingers raced over the touchpad controls. “I think—wait—these displacement readings are fading. They . . . they’re simulated! Masking the true readings. Director . . . it’s not a time portal! It’s just a dimensional pocket!” The doctor laughed. “Oh, that’s a relief. I thought for a moment that we were in real trouble.”

That was when the soldiers started to pour out of the cylinder.

Lucsly got only a glimpse of them before they started firing, their bright green beams blowing out the windows of the observation chamber and forcing its occupants to duck down and crawl for the exit—with Andos having the presence of mind to pull down T’Viss, who had merely been glaring in indignation. But Lucsly’s glimpse had told him much. At least eight soldiers had emerged from the artifact before he ducked, passing through the liquid walls like a time-reversed image of someone sinking into a pool of honey. They had been dressed in nondescript black battle armor, but their anatomy had still been immediately recognizable: broad, flat heads with large eyes, skin tones ranging from bronze to orange, and a long-armed, apelike build, able to function both bipedally and quadrupedally. They were Vomnin.

Once the door slid shut behind them, the party came to its collective feet in the corridor. But that door was not designed to block weapons fire from the inside, so they moved those feet with all due haste, making their way to the Vault’s command bunker. “The artifact was a Trojan horse,” Lucsly said as they ran. “Disguised as a time portal and planted where a Federation ally would find it so that it would be brought here—thus delivering this strike force in the dimensional pocket.”

Andos grimaced. “Bigger on the inside. I should have known.”

“Mm-hm. Most likely they’re raiders, here for the artifacts.”

“Confederacy or Consortium, do you think?”

“I couldn’t tell. They could even be mercenaries. I expect there are plenty of people in the various Vomnin nations who’d pay a fortune to acquire the technologies stored here, functional or not.”

“We can’t let that happen,” Andos said, stating the obvious.

Once they reached the command bunker and secured its hatch, they activated the monitor channel to the observation gallery, only to see two members of the raiding party already gazing into the image pickup. The one in the rear was a Vomnin male, evidently the head of the armored strike force. Beside and in front of him was a more conventionally humanoid female, long-limbed and rail-thin but with power and confidence in her stance. Her wide, rounded eyes were black with red irises, and her long straight hair, tied back in a ponytail, was a mix of the same two hues. Her gray skin bore a faint, scalelike texture of rounded hexagons. Her body armor was as functional as that of the Vomnin troops but more ornate, bearing an intricate pattern in violet and red that suggested either flowers or snarling, predatory faces, depending on how the light caught them.

“Attention, DTI personnel,” the woman said in a melodic alto. “You are outnumbered and outgunned. If you offer no interference, you will not be harmed. Do not attempt to prevent us from gathering artifacts or departing this facility, or you will be dealt with quite harshly.”

Andos stepped forward. “This is Director Laarin Andos. Your actions have already triggered an automatic alarm. Starfleet has been notified and will be sending reinforcements.”

“Director. Thank you for the courtesy of your name. In return, you may address me as Daiyar. But you will have little occasion to use that name, for we will be gone before Starfleet can arrive. We have a cloaked ship waiting in orbit. My strike team is already spreading through this facility, collecting artifacts. They will have your position surrounded within moments. I recommend you cooperate with them and lower this facility’s defenses.”

“I question the assertion that you have a ship in orbit. You may have managed to trick us into bringing you here, but that does not tell you where this facility is located.”

“No, but the powerful surge of temporal energy released from this facility sixty-five Federation standard days ago made an excellent beacon, for those with the skill to detect it. We are two point four kilometers beneath the ice of Amphipolis Planum on the planetoid Eris, in the scattered disk of cometary objects surrounding the Sol system. And we will not be here long.”

Lucsly winced. Even now, the Collectors’ obelisk was still causing problems. He had tried to account for everything in the security upgrade, but some risks had been out of his control.

Andos had grown grave, but she replied to the invader with confidence. “You are quite welcome to see yourselves out, Daiyar. But you will not be permitted to take any artifacts with you.”

“Many of those selfsame artifacts have the ability to send us elsewhere in space and time. If you will not lower the defenses, we may be forced to experiment with some of them. I doubt you’d want to risk that.”

Andos and Lucsly traded a wordless look. Recognizing what was at stake, Lucsly simply nodded.

Andos placed her hand on the command console. “Computer. This is Director Andos.” The computer beeped, signaling its acceptance of her biometric signature. “Activate time lock protocol.”

“Acknowledged. Time lock activated, stardate 61512.736, 1552:23 UTC.”

“What have you done, Director?” Daiyar demanded.

“Now hear this,” Andos said. “I have just activated the Vault’s time lock protocol. This is a time dilation field designed to slow time within this facility at a geometrically progressing rate—decreasing the flow of time by a factor of two every six minutes. That means time will be half as slow after six minutes, four times as slow after twelve minutes, eight times as slow after eighteen minutes, and so on. The longer the field remains active, the faster time will elapse outside relative to our perceptions. Fifteen minutes for us will be nearly an hour to outside observers. Thirty minutes for us will be over six hours for them. An hour in here will be eight days outside. Ninety minutes will be thirty-nine weeks outside. Two hours will be nearly twenty-four years.

“That means that, from our perspective, those Starfleet reinforcements are coming faster by the moment. You will not have time to get away before they arrive. The longer you refuse to surrender, the exponentially worse your tactical situation becomes.”

“Then you simply compel us to experiment with your artifacts as a means of escape.”

“I would advise against that. If you attempt to cross the threshold of the time dilation field with any temporal artifacts in your possession, or to create any spatial or temporal passage through that threshold—including a transporter beam—the time lock will automatically accelerate to maximum time dilation, placing this entire facility in effective stasis. A million years will have passed before you can even push a button.

“We have had a very long time to prepare for the possibility of a raid. And we take the security of the items in this facility extremely seriously. We are prepared to wait as long as it takes, to remain trapped with you indefinitely, in order to prevent you from stealing these artifacts.” Warain and Felbog exchanged a nervous look, but they raised no protest; T’Viss simply looked irritated at the inconvenience. “If you wish to return to your lives and families again, I suggest you surrender promptly.”

The Vomnin strike force leader looked concerned. But Daiyar remained unmoved. “You are not the only ones willing to use patience to achieve your goals. We will find a way around your time lock—or we will force you to lower it for us. There are more painful things to sacrifice than time.”

Vault time: 1554 UTC

External time: 1555 UTC

Daiyar cut the channel to give the Federation agents time to reflect on her ultimatum. She disliked such a brutish means of persuasion, but the subtler forms of coercion that would once have been available to her were now gone, along with everything else she had renounced. This was the path she had chosen, and she could not flinch in her commitment.

She only hoped her partners in this endeavor would show equal resolve. Next to her, Kvolan looked uneasy. Though the Vomnin commander maintained a hunched stance, resting his weight on his knuckles and bent legs, his large size relative to hers brought his head to her shoulder level. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Daiyar. We didn’t bargain on anything like this ‘time lock.’ The plan was a raid, not a siege.”

“Do the calculations, Kvolan. A geometric progression starts out slow. The faster we get our job done, the less cause we have for concern. I trust your troops are already doing their part.”

“Yes, we’ve breached the first few containment fields. We’re collecting promising artifacts even now.” He checked the small heads-up display screen before his left eye, integrated with the wide black helmet he wore. “A ‘psionic temporal communicator.’ A ‘temporal reflection generator,’ whatever that is. And, yes, we’re in the process of securing the artifact you wanted.”

“Excellent.”

“But none of that’s any good if we can’t get out of here before Starfleet reinforcements arrive. So I suggest you start thinking about a way around that time lock.”

“Do you know me so poorly, Kvolan? The components of my plan are already being assembled.”

He took her meaning. “I don’t see how these devices will get us into the command center or persuade the agents to release the dilation field. Instead of wasting my troops on this scavenger hunt, why not force our way into their command center and compel them to comply? It’s what you threatened—why not just do it?” He gave an impatient snort. “If you’d just let me hire a couple of Fethetrit—”

“No,” Daiyar said, suppressing a shudder of revulsion at the thought of being in the same room with one of those vicious creatures.

“I don’t understand why you’re so opposed to using them. They’re the best warriors in the Nebula.”

“They’re the most savage predators. Don’t mistake the two.”

“You said yourself: The faster we go, the better.”

“I was advising efficiency, not desperate haste. The DTI agents have patience on their side. We must be willing to use it to our advantage as well. Speed is preferable, but we must be ready to wait them out if necessary.”

“Until this planetoid is surrounded by Starfleet? And even if we do get out, the longer we delay, the more time the opposition will have to learn of our intentions and prepare countermoves.”

“Then we adjust our intentions. If nothing else, there will always be Vomnin buyers for ancient technology. We could still profit handsomely from this.” Noting that her words failed to reassure Kvolan, she smiled. “Or do you fear that your lady’s fidelity has a time limit as well?”

“Most of us have families, Daiyar. Just because you don’t, that doesn’t mean you can just—”

A split second later, she had him forced against the wall, her forearm pressing against his throat. His large round eyes grew even wider in shock; he had not expected such strength from a body as slight as hers. “Do not . . . presume for an instant,” she hissed through clenched teeth, “that I cannot grasp the longing for family. I understand exactly what is at stake—for all of us. That is the essence of my commitment.” She stepped back, allowing him to breathe again. Daiyar strode toward the observation chamber’s exit, gathering herself. This kind of dissension was the last thing she needed. She had to get this raid back on track. “Now, then—let’s see to that escape plan you wanted.”

Vault time: 1604 UTC

External time: 1628 UTC

Lucsly and the others had spent the past ten minutes watching and waiting as Daiyar’s troopers had spread through the Vault. Lucsly and Andos had armed themselves from the phaser locker in the command bunker, ready in case the soldiers attempted to break in, but so far the raiders’ efforts had been focused on stealing artifacts, using some form of advanced field disruptor to break through the bay safeguards. Warain had moaned and complained about the hazards each artifact posed, and by now even T’Viss had given up trying to remind him that the time lock would preclude their removal from the facility. Starfleet would be in orbit very soon, and eventually the raiders would have no choice but to surrender.

Or so Lucsly hoped. From what he’d observed on the security feeds, most of the raiders—nearly all Vomnin, but including a few from other species indigenous to the Gum Nebula—appeared to be thieves or mercenaries, coarse and aggressive types driven by profit. The head Vomnin raider came off as more of a career soldier, doing his best to organize them into an efficient unit. But Daiyar was more of an enigma. There was something about the way she carried herself that was disturbingly familiar to Lucsly in a way he couldn’t quite place. Moreover, her forces were concentrating on the most functional artifacts within the Vault, suggesting an alarming insight into temporal technology.

“Can you get a read on Daiyar?” he asked Andos. Her gift for interpreting body language and nonverbal cues was impressive even by Rhaandarite standards.

“Without knowing more about her species, whatever it is, I can only verify what I’m sure you’ve already discerned. She’s highly intelligent, insightful, and determined. Calculating but intensely committed—a dangerous combination.”

“Really pretty too,” Warain said. He quailed at the stares this evoked from the others. “Sorry. I don’t get out much.”

Felbog stepped forward. “Ma’am, I believe I’ve found a reference to her species. We’ve never encountered it directly, but records obtained in trade from the Vomnin nations refer to a species called the Tomika, whose physical description is consistent with Daiyar’s appearance. They’re one of the newer civilizations affiliated with the Colonial Consortium, only becoming an interstellar society within the past three decades.”

“Hm,” Lucsly responded. “The Consortium prizes science and intellect highly, from what I gather. But these Tomika are among their younger members.”

“So maybe Daiyar isn’t as knowledgeable as the rest of them,” Warain suggested hopefully. “She could be out of her league.”

“On the contrary,” Lucsly said. “She seems highly knowledgeable. She’s directing them in the choice of items to steal, not the other way around.”

“Sometimes it’s the young who learn the fastest,” Andos observed, “or are the most driven to advance. Consider Earth’s rise relative to Vulcan in the twenty-second century.”

T’Viss sniffed. “A subjective assessment. Speed equates with recklessness more than enlightenment.”

“So are we dealing with the Consortium here?” Felbog asked.

“Not necessarily,” the director replied. “So far, these seem to be mercenaries rather than state actors.”

“Or at least that’s what they want us to think,” Lucsly replied. “Something doesn’t fit about Daiyar. Even if she’s from a fast-learning people, that doesn’t explain her temporal knowledge.”

“Something’s happening,” Felbog warned. “I’m seeing new movement . . . more troops. Maybe there were more in the false portal?”

“What are they doing?” Andos asked.

“Hard to say. Their movements seem erratic. I don’t—”

“Look out!” Warain cried. Lucsly spun to see three black-armored Vomnin troopers fading into existence inside the bunker. It wasn’t a transporter effect or any dimensional transfer he recognized.

But explanations could wait, for they were raising their weapons. Lucsly did the same. Andos came alongside him, drawing her own phaser, and yelled, “Get out!” to the others as the Vomnin began to fire. Lucsly ducked and fired back as Warain, Felbog, and T’Viss fled through the door. It was fortunate, Lucsly thought, that the raiders had appeared on the opposite side from the exit.

Oddly, though, they were firing off to the side, missing the DTI agents. And Lucsly’s phaser bolts seemed to be going right through them. Suddenly the three raiders broke off and marched away double-time—and the first two passed through the wall before the third one faded out in midstride. “Some sort of projection,” Andos said.

Finally Lucsly recognized the effect. “Temporal reflection,” he said. “The reflection generator from Bay H14.” He had never personally seen the generator in action, but he had studied the incident in which the U.S.S. Voyager had encountered a naturally occurring version of the phenomenon while caught within the event horizon of a Type-4 quantum singularity. The device could create duplicate images of events occurring elsewhere in space and time—echoes of the recent past or the near future. “And if this was a decoy . . .”

Trading a worried look, they headed for the exit. Turning down the corridor, they saw that the other three were surrounded by raiders at the far end. Lucsly and Andos crouched down and opened fire, the latter crying “Run!” The phaser barrage provided enough cover for the spry Felbog and the easily panicked Warain to make a break for it, but one raider had managed to grab T’Viss and pull her away. Lucsly tried to get a clear shot, but he couldn’t risk hitting the frail physicist. Three more raiders moved in and opened fire, forcing Lucsly and Andos to flatten themselves against the wall. After a few moments, the three raiders broke and retreated down the corridor—and Lucsly recognized their movements. This was the source of the future echo projected into the bunker moments earlier. The same single action of the same three raiders had both driven T’Viss into the arms of her captors and covered their retreat afterward.

Devilishly efficient, Lucsly thought. Did Daiyar get lucky, or could she have planned it that precisely?

Andos, of course, could read his thoughts in his expression. “Either way,” she replied to his unvoiced question, “they have T’Viss now.”

“That’s right, Director,” Daiyar’s voice came over the intercom. “If you don’t lower the time lock, she will pay the price.”

“Any one of us is expendable in defense of the timeline,” Lucsly called back with equal resolve.

Daiyar’s reply was cold: “We’ll see soon enough if she feels the same way.”

“You don’t know Vulcans,” Lucsly countered. “Or temporal agents. Fifteen minutes now, Daiyar. Nearly an hour has passed outside. A starship should be in orbit by now.”

“And they can’t get in any more than you can get out. We’ve already taken one of you. Where will the rest of you be in another fifteen minutes?”

The channel closed. Andos took in Lucsly and the other two with her gaze. “Back to the bunker,” she advised. “We may be in for a long wait.”

II

Vault time: 1607 UTC

External time: 1648 UTC

DTI Branch Office, Gronim City, Denobula

Marion Dulmur had been glued to the screens in the brand-new situation room ever since the emergency transmission had come in from the Eridian Vault. “Unbelievable,” he muttered for at least the seventh time in the past hour. “I was just talking to him.” About how quiet everything was, he added silently. Anywhere else, someone would probably make a wisecrack about tempting fate. But Department personnel knew all too well that fate was a myth.

The Everett, a Nova-class Starfleet scout attached to the DTI, had arrived in Eris orbit three minutes ago. But there was nothing they could do but watch and wait. The time lock precluded entry into the Vault as well as escape. As Everett’s captain, Claudia Alisov, explained, “Our job is to arrest the thieves once they surrender to the agents inside the Vault—or to prevent their escape if they somehow manage to circumvent the time lock. And we’re scanning for the cloaked ship that was waiting for them, but we’ve had no luck so far. Beyond that, there’s nothing we can do to assist them. And frankly, Dulmur, I don’t see what you can do from your end.”

“We can find out who these bastards are,” said Teresa Garcia. The striking, dark-eyed young agent paced the situation room angrily, but her mind was as clear and focused as ever. “We have images from the security feeds. We know the raiders are from one of the Vomnin nations. Probably the Confederacy. Ranjea and I have dealt with them before. They’re not above this kind of dirty trick to get their hands on advanced tech.”

“Quite possibly,” said Meyo Ranjea, Garcia’s partner. The tall, dark Deltan man spoke in a gentle lilt that contrasted with the younger agent’s intensity. “And if not, our Confederacy contacts could help us identify the raiders’ origins and intentions, or who their backers or intended buyers are likely to be. If we can learn these things, it may provide intelligence that Director Andos and Lucsly can use to talk them down or outwit them.”

“Vomnin space is pretty far away,” Alisov said. “Even if you can hitch a ride on a slipstream vessel, negotiating the politics out there could take a substantial amount of time.”

“That’s the advantage of the time lock,” Dulmur told her. “Slowing time in the Vault not only slows their escape—it gives the rest of us time to work the problem. So far, they’re only forty-odd minutes behind us, but a week from now, not quite an hour will have passed inside.”

“These raiders are pretty aggressive, Dulmur. Can your people even hold out for an hour?”

Dulmur smiled. “Claudia, they’re in a vault filled with advanced technologies whose potentials they understand far better than the raiders do. I’ll put my money on Lucsly.”

His words seemed to reassure Alisov, which was good, because they did little to reassure him. He and his partner had survived some pretty harrowing situations over the years, but this was the first crisis in a long time that Lucsly had faced alone. The last time that Lucsly had needed to fend off a raid on the Vault—ironically, by a few of Alisov’s former crewmates from the time-displaced U.S.S. Bozeman, who had been attempting to return to their native twenty-third century—Dulmur had come out of a brief retirement to assist him. In so doing, he’d chosen his partner over his wife and scuttled his last chance to avoid divorce. It was the only decision he could have made, and he’d justified it to himself over the years with the conviction that his partner needed him. Four years and nine months later, he’d passed up an assistant directorship to keep the team together, believing it was necessary in the face of a possible new front in the Temporal Cold War.

Now, with things seeming quieter, Dulmur had finally decided he was ready to make a change, to leave field work behind him and refocus on his personal life. He was convinced it was not a selfish decision. The DTI had a number of up-and-coming young agents who had proven themselves very effective, with Ranjea and Garcia topping the list. Dulmur himself was getting older and slower. He was twenty-three days from his fifty-sixth birthday—a reasonable time to take on an administrative position and use his experience to guide the agents in the field rather than keep trying to do it all himself. (Granted, Lucsly was his senior by six years and two days, but Lucsly was a machine.)

It had all sounded like such a reasonable plan. But what was that saying about God laughing at people’s plans? Dulmur had barely gotten his office chair adjusted to the way he liked it, and already his former partner was in mortal danger from the worst raid in the history of the Eridian Vault. Dulmur had never believed in cosmic payback, but it was hard not to think the universe was making a point about hubris or something.

After ordering Ranjea and Garcia to make contact with the Confederacy’s Bureau for Historical Resource Development and arrange a meeting, Dulmur left the situation room in search of coffee. The room had its own replicator, of course, but so far only his office replicator had been programmed to make coffee just the way he liked it. Plus it gave him a chance to clear his head and distract himself from the crisis for a few moments.

The Denobula branch office was certainly a distracting place. The Department had wanted a subterranean complex for security, and the Gronim City government had responded by converting a historic stepwell. This was a kind of structure found in monsoonal regions on a number of planets, such as Earth’s Indian subcontinent, where they were called vavs. Since the water table could rise and fall by hundreds of meters between the monsoon and dry seasons, the ancients had needed a way to reach the water at any depth. They had solved the problem by carving deep trenches with long staircases or multiple terraced levels descending into the earth. This allowed access to the water as it rose and fell over the year, flooding the lower levels as the water table rose. A stepwell could be as simple as a cylindrical well with a spiral staircase, but the Denobulans of the Gronim region, like the Indians, had carved their stepwells into architectural marvels full of elaborate stairways and terraced pavilions, their arches and columns providing structural support against the pressure of the water that filled them in the wet season and offering cooling shade during the heat of the dry season. Whereas the Indians had mostly abandoned their stepwells when excess pumping had dried out the water tables, allowing most of them to crumble into ruin, the Denobulans had treated theirs with more respect, either modernizing their facilities for continued use or preserving them as historical treasures—like this one, whose water table had dried up from the construction of the city around it.

Exiting the situation room brought Dulmur into one of the pavilion walkways that overlooked the deep central well, separated from it by a row of arches and a low stone railing, all ornately carved with geometric shapes. This particular stepwell, fittingly, had been designed to represent the cycle of the seasons and the progression of time, with the carvings representing Denobulan agricultural and astronomical deities in some abstract way beyond Dulmur’s aesthetic grasp. The well itself was octagonal, with eight terraced levels surrounding it, symbolizing the subdivisions of the Denobulan year. Each level was slightly wider than the one below it, giving the well a conical shape and allowing the entire structure to be viewed from any angle. Up top, the well had been capped with a broad skylight in the form of an eight-sided pyramid, through which Dulmur could see the gleaming, modern towers of Gronim City stretching toward the sky, providing a striking contrast with this ancient but equally extraordinary architectural marvel striving down into the earth. Down below, the base of the former well had been converted into a fountain whose gentle trickle filled the atrium with pleasant white noise. All in all, Dulmur could not have wished for a more gorgeous place to come to work every day.

Moving a quarter of the way clockwise around the well (again fittingly) brought Dulmur to his office. Upon entering, he was surprised to discover it was already occupied. A short, appealingly plump-faced Denobulan woman with medium brown hair, looking fortyish by human standards (but possibly as much as twice that, Dulmur knew), sat in a relaxed pose on the office couch. She rose as Dulmur sighed. “Doctor Cymmen. I’m sorry, we had a meeting, didn’t we?”

“Quite all right, Director,” Cymmen said as she shook his hand. “I get the impression there’s a bit of a crisis brewing. If it’s inconvenient, I’d be happy to reschedule our little talk.”

Reassuringly, she said this with no hint of disappointment or ulterior sentiments. Cymmen-vennau-roonixx was the local government’s chief liaison with the DTI, representing the Denobulan Science Ministry. It was typical of the Denobulans that they viewed the Department’s work mainly as a scientific exercise, and Dulmur found that attitude refreshing in these times, when so many Federation governments had become preoccupied with security and defense in the wake of the past decade’s conflicts.

“I’m glad you understand, Doctor,” Dulmur said. “Honestly, I just came here to get coffee before going back to work. I do hate to keep you waiting, but—”

She lifted her hands. “Don’t give it another thought, Director Dulmur. We Denobulans are a patient people, as a rule.”

Dulmur punched up his preferred coffee blend from the replicator. “Patience. That’s a virtue I could definitely use right now. That crisis we’re dealing with—it’s the sort of thing where we can’t really do anything but watch and wait. Maybe we can help out in some way, but it’ll be a while before we can see the results.”

“So it’s not a local matter, then,” Cymmen said.

“No, nothing for you to worry about,” he said, once he’d taken his first careful sip of the scalding, bitter brew.

“Then, if I may ask, what makes it a concern of this office?” Anticipating his intent, she walked over to the door.

Grateful to have a liaison he didn’t have to butt heads with, Dulmur led her back into the hall. “For one thing, the director herself is involved, so it’s everyone’s problem. For another, I have a couple of agents here whose connections could be useful.” He sighed, trying to let the trickle of the fountain below soothe him. “But mainly, my old partner’s in the middle of it too. So I feel I have to do something.”

Cymmen nodded sagely. “You’re concerned you won’t be able to do enough if you’re not by his side.”

“I trust him to handle himself. He’s been an agent a lot longer than I have. Still . . . it is an adjustment.”

She patted his shoulder. Dulmur blinked, reminding himself that only Denobulan males were uncomfortable with public displays of affection. “You know,” she said, “I spend very little time with either of my husbands. One is an ambassador to Antar, and the other is a professional athlete who’s frequently on tour with his team. But that’s not unusual for Denobulans. We believe that as long as a bond exists between two people, then the distance between them doesn’t matter. The connection is in our minds, in our feelings, and those stay with us no matter where our partners go physically. You may not be by your partner’s side anymore, but you are still there to support him, and I’m sure he knows it.” She gave him one of those scarily wide Denobulan grins, though it didn’t seem scary to him this time. “Who knows? Sometimes being far away from your partner puts you right where you can do them the most good.”

He smiled back. “Thanks. I appreciate it.” He furrowed his brow. “You said ‘either’ husband. Don’t most Denobulans have three spouses?”

“I’m still looking for a third. Haven’t found the right one yet.” She threw him a rakish look. “Any particular reason for asking?”

Dulmur flushed. “Umm . . . just idle curiosity. Look, I do have to get back to work.”

“I understand. Let me know when you can spare time for our meeting.”

“Sure thing.” He looked after her thoughtfully as she walked away, then shook his head, dismissing the notion. Not that she wasn’t pleasant company, even fairly attractive, but the idea of having to share a wife with two husbands seemed way too complicated for him. He had enough complications in his life as it was.

Vault time: 1610 UTC

External time: 1716 UTC

Eris

“This is unacceptable,” Lucsly said. On the bunker’s security feeds before him, Daiyar’s troops continued to trample through the aisles of the Vault, collecting artifacts as they went. Warain’s attempts to shore up the containment fields from the bunker had delayed them only slightly. The technologies the Vomnin and their associates had at their disposal must be formidable. That was the problem in dealing with a civilization whose technology was scavenged from ancient alien ruins rather than invented: They could easily be millennia more advanced in some regards than in others, so there was no way to anticipate their abilities.

“We can’t just sit here and watch them,” Lucsly went on. “They’re not just going to surrender. Not when they have T’Viss as a hostage.”

“T’Viss is the worst hostage they could have taken,” Andos replied. “They can’t frighten her. As a Vulcan, she can suppress pain.”

“But are we really willing to let them torture or kill her? Of course we’ll all sacrifice ourselves if we have to, but I’m not prepared to accept that as our only option. This is our home turf. We need to seize that advantage.”

“But they took the armory,” Warain pointed out. “We only have your two phasers.”

“There are other resources at our disposal.”

Andos studied him. “You propose countering them at their own game? Collecting artifacts to use against them? You’re the last person I would’ve expected to suggest actually using these items.”

“As a rule, no.” Lucsly fidgeted. “But Ranjea and Garcia proved it was a viable tactic when Dulmur and I were trapped uptime. And the people in this room know these devices and their hazards better than anyone. I’d rather take that manageable risk than allow these . . . ruffians the run of the place. They’ve shown unexpected resourcefulness. We can’t rely absolutely on the assumption that the time lock will stop them.”

“Agreed,” Andos said. “But there is a considerable risk involved if we go out there.”

“It’s still our turf. We can outmaneuver them.”

“A-and if we can’t?” Warain asked.

Lucsly skewered him with a look. “I had no other plans today. Did you?”

Vault time: 1616 UTC

External time: 1852 UTC

Daiyar walked alongside Doctor T’Viss, allowing her to observe the activity of her troops as they broke through the protective fields of the Vault’s storage bays in order to retrieve the more useful artifacts. “So what do you think, Doctor? Do any of these items inspire interesting thoughts with regard to our current situation?”

The wizened Vulcan sniffed. “If your intent is to solicit my assistance in penetrating the time dilation field, your efforts will be wasted. I am a theorist, not an engineer.” She managed to put remarkable contempt into the final word while hardly varying her tone or expression.

“I have sufficient engineering skill already at my disposal, Doctor. It’s the theory that I’m most interested in. The time lock is a fascinating spacetime metric, wouldn’t you say? A stationary time dilation field amplifying at a geometric rate? Let me see if I can reconstruct the correct equation.” She input the metric formula into a padd, including a slight error on purpose. She saw T’Viss inhale and begin to point, but at the last moment, the doctor recalled her duties and resisted her corrective reflex. Daiyar met her silence with only a slight shrug. “Well, perhaps I can refine it as we go. Naturally it’s a gravitational time dilation, or the equivalent subspace field effect. The energy required to drive the amplification must be enormous. Unless . . . if the metric were self-reinforcing, the energy would be drawn out of subspace itself, in order to preserve equilibrium.” She modified the equation. “Yes?” T’Viss maintained her silence.

Kvolan approached them with an artifact his troops had just liberated from its bay. “A temporal accelerator,” he reported. “Speeds the flow of time in a limited area. An experiment that the Federation, in their timidity, deemed uncontrollable.” He handed it to Daiyar to examine. “Could we use it to counteract the slowing effect of the lock?”

The Tomika examined it for several moments, then shook her head. “The field is too small. The effect is too imprecise—and far too extreme for our purposes. If not perfectly calibrated, it would probably trigger the time lock field into runaway dilation.” She turned to T’Viss. “Unless you can propose an alternative model of the interaction?”

T’Viss crossed her arms and looked away. Resisting the urge to lecture was clearly becoming more difficult for her by the moment. This is too easy, Daiyar thought.

Kvolan took the accelerator back, and Daiyar returned to goading the good doctor. “Perhaps we should consider how the effect appears to an external observer. Since the dilation effect is gravitational, does the field appear as an increasing mass? No, probably not; eventually we would become a quantum black hole and pose a navigational hazard. Presumably the standard mass cancellation of warp and similar fields is in effect. But . . . the relative slowing of time would mean a relative slowing of molecular motion. To the outside, this facility is growing colder. How would that affect the surrounding ice over the long term? Might the temperature change cause it to crack? To alter in density?” Daiyar chuckled. “Is it possible that the endgame of the time lock stratagem is to ensure that, if we do not surrender, we will all be plunged to the bottom of Eris’s subglacial oceans, with all these artifacts safely buried forevermore? Such an extreme strategy seems very much in keeping with the DTI’s mentality.” She pursed her lips. “I wonder why Director Andos didn’t mention that prospect. Is she keeping it in reserve to threaten us with later?”

Her casual attitude brought a shocked stare from Kvolan. “Are you serious? Are we in danger of being trapped here if we don’t get out soon?”

“We’re already in danger of being trapped here, Kvolan. I thought you understood that. And externally, it would probably take years for the ice to deform to that degree. Which means we have, oh, another hour and a half before it becomes a concern.”

He frowned. “I don’t understand your attitude, Daiyar. You inform us that haste is essential, but you do not show any sense of urgency yourself.”

Daiyar told him only what she wanted him to know. “Because the ticking clock is what our adversaries hope to use against us. If we panic and rush, we will make mistakes that they can exploit.”

“Sir!” one of Kvolan’s troops called. “An intruder!”

Kvolan ran toward the voice, and Daiyar followed, signaling her escorts to bring T’Viss after her. She rounded the corner into the next aisle to see the troops pursuing a small, bipedal creature with a tail and cybernetic forearms. She recalled glimpsing such an alien upon emerging from the false portal; no doubt it was one of the DTI staff. It was certainly a spry little creature, ducking and weaving through the aisles in a manner reminiscent of a woodland creature scurrying through the trees to escape a predator. Kvolan’s troops spread out to surround it, but it managed to slip past them more than once, no doubt more familiar with the Vault’s layout than they were.

Finally, Kvolan grew tired of the chase and raised the temporal accelerator device he still carried. “No!” Daiyar cried, lunging forward. But it was too late. The Vomnin mercenary fired the accelerator, projecting forth a blue-tinged field that surrounded the little creature. It vanished into a blur of movement as it struggled to get out, trapped within the spherical potential barrier. But barely a second later, it instantaneously appeared on the floor, motionless.

Daiyar caught up with Kvolan and knocked his hand from the control, shutting down the field. “You fool! What are you doing?”

Kvolan stepped over to the fallen creature, gazing in confusion at its desiccated, motionless form, wrinkling his flattened nostrils at the stench that had been released when the acceleration field deactivated. “I don’t understand. I thought the weapon would age it a few decades. Make it weak and helpless.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen it done in vid-dramas.”

T’Viss had arrived on the scene and taken in her colleague’s fate in an instant. Her icy gaze shifted to Kvolan. “Your assumption was imbecilic. Consider being trapped within a spherical barrier for subjective years. Where would you obtain food and water to sustain your life processes long enough to undergo aging?” She moved closer, looming over the knuckle-walking mercenary. “Relative to our reference frame, Mister Felbog died of dehydration in less than one point two seconds. In his reference frame, he has been dead for weeks already. Perhaps in the future, you will know better than to mistake a work of fiction for a scientific tract.”

Her every word to her captors so far had been cold and disapproving, so it was hard to tell—but Daiyar sensed a far deeper contempt in T’Viss’s words now. Daiyar could not help sharing that contempt for herself as she gazed down at the desiccated body of the small cyborg creature. She had gone into this knowing that some people might have to suffer for the sake of her goals . . . but this death had been singularly pointless and random.

Whirling on Kvolan, she wrenched the accelerator from his grasp. “Learn from this, Kvolan. Do not play with devices you do not understand. Consult with me before you even contemplate using one of these artifacts.”

“Why are you so upset?” Kvolan asked. “He was one of them. I remember your instructions to avoid unnecessary violence, but this is the price of doing business.”

“And next time it might be one of us paying that price. You’re lucky it wasn’t. So either you follow my instructions precisely . . . or the next act of violence will be directed against you. Are we clear?”

Kvolan looked her over, clearly remembering the strength contained in her slight frame. “Clear, Daiyar.”

They moved on, leaving their victim where he lay. He had lain there for weeks already, after all; there was nothing more they could do for him.

Vault time: 1628 UTC, July 6

External time: 0428 UTC, July 7

Lucsly had been filled with dismay and outrage when he and Warain had come upon Felbog’s tiny, desiccated body, left lying in the aisle where he had been felled. The advanced state of his deterioration, and the thin layer of dust coating the body and the surrounding floor, had made it instantly clear to Lucsly that the raiders had used the temporal accelerator from Bay H30 on him.

Still, he clung to procedure, which was how he coped with any situation like this. He took out his temporal tricorder to scan the body and confirm what his eyes already told him—and breathed a sigh of relief once he read the results. By now, Warain had called Andos over, and Lucsly was able to give her good news. “Felbog’s alive. Barely. His bionics have placed him into some kind of metabolic suspension. He’s in bad shape, but if we can get him medical attention, he still has a chance.”

“The infirmary,” Andos ordered. They lifted him with care and carried him there. Collecting temporal artifacts could wait for the moment.

Once they had the little Choblik in a biobed with a saline drip plugged into a port on his chestplate and a recharging feed into another, Lucsly noticed that Felbog’s sensory recording function was still active. He fed the playback to the infirmary screen, and the three of them watched as the raiders pursued and attacked Felbog, and then—after speeding forward through some twenty days’ worth of inactivity inside the accelerator field—listened to the argument between Daiyar and her lieutenant, whom she addressed as Kvolan.

“Interesting,” Andos said. “Daiyar is more ethical than she lets on.”

“The same can’t be said for her troops, though,” Lucsly observed.

“Yes. The question is, how well can she control them? And is that dissension something we should cultivate, or something we should fear?”

“Both,” Lucsly said. “We’re in enough danger as it is. Felbog nearly died for us. We have to do whatever it takes to divide them, to undermine them . . . no matter what the risk to us.”

He afforded Felbog one last, lingering look before striding resolutely from the infirmary. “No more biding our time. Now we go on the offensive.”

III

Vault time: 1643 UTC, July 6

External time: 1702 UTC, July 9

Tregon, Beta Rigel V

By good fortune, Ranjea and Garcia had not needed to travel to Confederacy space to meet Vennor Sikran, their contact in the Bureau for Historical Resource Development. On contacting the BHRD, the agents had learned that Sikran was currently in the Federation, conducting a fact-finding expedition about the various extinct, advanced civilizations of the region, such as the Kalandans, Zalkatians, B’nurlac, and Caeliar. It had taken only three days to travel from Denobula to Rigel V for a meeting.

It seemed their gain was the result of Sikran’s loss, however. In the wake of his involvement in the Axis of Time scandal two and a half years before, the former subdirector had been demoted to senior analyst, hence his fairly low-level assignment. Still, Garcia noted, he had managed to remain well-fed to a fault, having put on even more weight since their previous face-to-face meeting.

“Not to worry,” Sikran assured Ranjea and Garcia when he met them in a well-appointed conference room overlooking the scenic Tregon Sea. “I hold no grudge against you or your Department for your role in the Axis of Time affair. I allowed myself to be manipulated and duped by a far more malevolent party. If anything, you spared me from being complicit in a great tragedy.”

“We’re very glad to hear that,” Ranjea said. It was not inappropriate for him to speak on Garcia’s behalf; his Deltan empathic senses, along with their close partnership, allowed him to know just what she was feeling—and he could filter it through a greater degree of tact than she could usually manage.

“Regretfully,” Sikran went on, pausing to pry open an Aldebaran shellmouth and suck out its innards, “there may be little I can do to assist you on this matter. I’ll gladly provide you with what intelligence I have, but you might be better off pursuing contacts within the Colonial Consortium.”

“Our understanding was that the Confederacy and the Consortium had a very close relationship,” Ranjea replied. “During our first meeting, when you referred to the U.S.S. Titan’s dealings with the Consortium during the cosmozoan affair, you spoke of them as if they were your own people.”

“Well, they are fellow Vomnin. That kinship carries weight whatever our cultural or political differences. And at the time, the great nations of the region were unified by the common threat the cosmozoan population posed to all inhabited worlds.” Garcia nodded; in her time aboard Titan during the Axis affair, she had spoken to some of the crew about their cosmozoan encounters. The massive spacegoing animals were abundant within the Gum Nebula, drawn to the resources and energies of the star formation zones at its heart, and many of them were capable of devastating entire worlds to feed their hunger. A race of hunters called the Pa’haquel had led the fight to destroy the cosmozoans before they could destroy inhabited worlds, in partnership with the Colonial Consortium and other regional powers. The Vomnin Confederacy had been on the periphery of the endangered territory, but some of their border worlds were under threat, and so they had supported the efforts of their Consortium neighbors.

“But naturally,” Sikran went on, “the allied powers had our differences. Territorial or ideological clashes, competition for resources, old grudges—all of which we suppressed and deferred in the face of the existential threat we all faced. Now that the Pa’haquel have learned to tame and herd the cosmozoans rather than hunting them, the common threat has subsided. As a result, some of those old tensions have been free to resurface.

“Officially, the Consortium is still committed to its alliances. But there are factions within it that feel threatened by the growing power the Pa’haquel’s alliance with the cosmozoans gives them. They are a predatory race, after all; what if they should decide to use these creatures’ immense power against their neighbors? There are some within the Consortium—particularly some of the younger, upstart members with less experience of the long history of regional partnership—who would go to any lengths to ensure the Consortium’s power is not threatened.”

Garcia leaned forward. “You’re talking about the Tomika. You mean this Daiyar and her raiders are trying to steal time technology so they can go back and change history in the Consortium’s favor?”

Sikran patted his lips with a napkin and shook his jowled head. “I can’t say for certain. It seems an insanely reckless ploy, given how important the new covenant has been to ensuring the safety of inhabited worlds in the region. But it would be consistent with the rhetoric of these radical factions, and with the species makeup of this raiding party. Of course, a mercenary group could draw from multiple nations, but having a Tomika as the leader is certainly suggestive.”

“And you’re positive it couldn’t be someone in the Confederacy behind this?” Garcia pressed, not attempting to mask her skepticism. “Your record isn’t exactly spotless when it comes to shady means of acquiring ancient tech.”

Sikran grimaced as though he’d eaten something sour. Though he’d been eating the entire time, Garcia suspected his reaction had a different cause. “I need no reminder of my own past mistakes, Agent Garcia. My own . . . diminished situation should show you that my government takes ethics violations seriously. I can’t rule out the possibility of a rogue group within the Confederacy, but I have no intelligence suggesting anything of the sort. I’ve offered you the best lead I have, such as it is.”

Ranjea thanked him and made their farewells. As they headed out into the hall, Garcia asked, “You get an empathic read on him?”

“Nothing clear,” the tall Deltan replied. “He was definitely savoring his meal. That sensory experience rather swamped whatever else he was giving off.” He frowned. “There is a . . . shifty quality to him, but there always has been. His embarrassment at his loss of status felt sincere, as did his concern regarding the raiders’ actions. But I’m no Betazoid. In order to read him more clearly, I would’ve had to get more physically intimate with him than I think any of us would have been comfortable with.”

Garcia stared. “I thought you were open to trying anything,” she said.

“But not anyone. My reluctance is more a matter of his character than his physicality. He’s not a very giving individual.”

“But you think we can trust him?”

“I think we have to follow his lead, for we have little else to go on.”

She sighed. “I guess you’re right. What time is it inside the Vault?”

“Still fifty-one minutes into the lock. About six seconds later than the last time you asked.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I have a feeling we’re gonna need plenty of time out here to sort this out.”

Vault time: 1643 UTC, July 6

External time: Evening of July 9

Eris

For decades, Bay J14 had been home to a small but intermittently growing collection of handheld chroniton polarizers, just one of multiple temporal technologies excavated from the ruins of the long-vanished Mervynian civilization. For decades, DTI analysts and researchers had been baffled by the function of the devices. While polarized chroniton fields were a basic element of many spatiotemporal displacement metrics, the polarizers were not chroniton generators in themselves. Were they components of larger devices? Was there some key element made of a fragile material, liquid, or energy field that had dissipated over the past sixty-three millennia? Or did the polarizers serve some purpose not yet conceived?

Gariff Lucsly had found one possible use for a polarized chroniton field nineteen years and six days before (subjectively): It could cancel out the chroniton field of another temporal phenomenon, serving as a defense against dangerous ones. Such a field had saved his life on Kaferia during his first mission with Dulmur as his partner. Perhaps it was fitting that he was now attempting much the same tactic in his first crisis since the end of that partnership.

History repeating itself? he mused. I usually hate that.

Of course, the polarizers needed a chroniton field to polarize, but that was where the item in Bay J32 came in. The small, prismatic black stone was possibly the most mysterious artifact in the Vault and, up until now, perhaps the most useless. It was an intense chroniton emitter, but in decades of study it had never shown any signs of being able to do anything else, beyond resisting all attempts to scan, analyze, or sample it. The records were not even clear on how it had gotten here. Warain once claimed he had seen a member of the Q Continuum appear in the Vault to examine the stone, but security records had shown no one in the aisle at the time except an unconscious Warain, suffering from exhaustion in the wake of one of his periodic, days-long reorganization binges of the Vault’s contents, during which he often forgot to take meal or rest breaks. It was, ironically, easy to lose track of time here in the Vault.

Once Lucsly, Andos, and Warain had removed the black stone from its damping field and focused the polarizers, the raiders began to lose something of their own. The temporal reflections they had been generating to cloak their movements flickered out, and when the two armed agents (leaving Warain behind to tend the stone) moved in to confront a trio of raiders, Lucsly saw that they were suffering from the other effect of the polarized chroniton field: They were reeling, disoriented, moving as if palsied. Just as on Kaferia, the field induced temporal narcosis, disrupting neural and muscular signals by altering the relative time flow of different parts of the body. Lucsly and Andos felt the effect as well, the Vault seeming to weave and twist around them, but both of them had the discipline and experience to resist it and move fairly normally. Thus they were able to get the drop on the raiders and leave them all stunned—though Lucsly admittedly missed his first shot and had to sweep the phaser beam around to hit his target. He was then able to compensate for the sensory distortion and hit the other one on the first shot, while the raider’s fire struck the floor a fair distance ahead of him.

He and Andos made their way around the corner—with eyes closed in Lucsly’s case, relying on touch and his memory of the Vault layout—and found a group of four in the next aisle. Daiyar herself was in the middle of the group. This was their chance to end it all! Lucsly drew on all his focus to aim his phaser squarely at Daiyar. Andos had already taken down one disoriented guard, and another seemed to be vomiting into his helmet. Even though Daiyar would be alert to the threat, she would surely be just as incapacitated . . .

Except that by the time his phaser beam pierced the air, the Tomika woman was no longer in its path. He had not missed; she had already been in motion before he fired.

The next thing Lucsly knew, he was being struck hard in several key nerve clusters by Daiyar’s incongruously dainty hands. Lucsly was no physical fighter, and he went down promptly, the polarizer and the phaser falling from his grip. Moments later, the disorientation passed; she had shut down their polarizers. How did she resist it? Lucsly wondered, but he lacked the breath to form the words.

Before long, Daiyar’s recovered raiders had captured Warain as well, and the three of them had been brought back to the invaders’ staging area in the observation gallery and reunited with Dr. T’Viss. But the wizened physicist stood free and unbound while the other three were placed on their knees with their wrists secured behind them, surrounded by a circle of armed raiders. “Oh, the doctor?” Daiyar said. “She’s proved most cooperative. Since the . . . mishap with your little researcher, she’s realized it’s better to advise us and keep us from making any more fatal mistakes with the artifacts.

“And it’s time you learned to follow her example,” the gray-skinned raider continued. “You will release the time lock or—”

“Or what?” Andos interposed. “Only Lucsly and I have the release codes, and we will both die before we jeopardize the security of the timeline. You cannot threaten us with torture.”

“Not you, perhaps, or the esteemed T’Viss. I understand that Vulcans are not susceptible to torture.” She pointed her gun at Warain, and Kvolan and several others followed suit. “But what of the Caldonian? Would you stand idly by while we—”

Her threat was interrupted by Warain moaning and collapsing into a faint. One of the Vomnin guards knuckle-walked forward and shook the researcher, but Warain was dead to the world.

Daiyar did not let it throw her off for long. “He can be revived easily enough.”

“Good luck with that,” Lucsly said. “Do you see the size of his cranium? The Caldonian brain is a powerful thing. Warain can rapidly assess countless possible outcomes of any situation. He specializes in considering the negative outcomes and devising preventive measures. It’s what makes him so nervous—and so valuable. In this case, he’s calculated that his safest response to torture is to induce a state of deep unconsciousness. The downside of that massive brain is that it demands a steady blood flow, any disruption of which can easily induce syncope. If you revive him, he will simply make himself pass out again. He’ll be feeling no pain.”

The Tomika peered at Lucsly closely. “You’re making that up.”

“I have no imagination. Ask anyone.”

Her wide eyes probed into his. He stared back, giving nothing away. Finally, Daiyar sighed. “Fine. I’m sure you would have given me false codes anyway. Real torture rarely works half as well as the threat of it.”

His eyes narrowed. “You never intended it as anything more than a threat, did you?”

She stepped closer. “Do not mistake purpose for softness, Agent Lucsly. Torture is an indulgence of bullies to make themselves feel powerful. I have no interest in that indulgence and no room for it in my plans. But I will kill if it serves my plans. I have already killed one of your number.”

“No, you haven’t. Your lieutenant there nearly did, but you stopped him in time. You didn’t want to inflict unnecessary death.”

Daiyar blinked. “The cyborg survived?”

“Barely. Though he’s still in danger if he doesn’t get better medical attention than we can provide.”

She pursed her lips. “Do not attempt to appeal to my compassion. No, I desire no gratuitous brutality, but my purpose overrides all else. The risk to your subordinate’s life is an incentive for you to back down, not me.”

“But he swore the same oath as the rest of us,” Andos said. “And in his present condition, he would feel no further pain. We will not back down for his sake. Look around you, Daiyar. This entire facility demonstrates the depth of our commitment to protecting the timeline from the devices you hope to steal. No matter what you do, we will not budge.”

“Neither will I,” Daiyar replied. “We will see who blinks first.”

Her body language as she stepped away was relaxed and unhurried. The same could not be said for her raiders, who exchanged uneasy looks. Kvolan moved toward her, and Lucsly could just make out his words. “What is this, Daiyar? You promised earlier that your plan was to end this siege quickly, before the delay became great. And yet you have done nothing to devise a way to counteract the dilation field. Days have already passed outside! More Starfleet ships have arrived! Our vessel may have already been driven off!”

“Rest assured I have other options for our escape,” the Tomika countered.

“And how long will they take? News of this raid will be spreading—through classified channels, perhaps, but word will reach the opposition.”

“Then we may need to revise our plans. The advantage of time travel, Kvolan, is that it is never too late to affect the events you hope to change.”

“It is if the delay gives others time to preempt our efforts!”

“You realize she’s lying to you?”

Andos’s calm question drew the attention of Kvolan and the other troops. “Be quiet,” Daiyar told her.

The director ignored her. “It’s clear in her body language, in the timbre of her voice,” she went on to Kvolan. “She has no interest in your deadlines or your goals. Whatever agenda she’s pursuing is her own, and she’s tricked you into helping her.”

“No,” the Vomnin lieutenant said, though he lacked conviction. “No, she is the one who recruited us to this cause to begin with. You lie.”

“The director can read body language better than anyone I’ve ever known,” Lucsly said. “It’s a gift of her people. But you don’t need to be a Rhaandarite to see that Daiyar is using you. You can see it yourself—you just don’t want to admit it.”

“Don’t listen to them,” Daiyar said.

“She has no plan to end this siege quickly. She’s already settled in for the long haul.” Lucsly directed his next words to Daiyar herself. “You don’t care if years or decades pass outside. Maybe you even want them to.” It struck him to ask: “Are you from the future? Is this some elaborate plan to get back? No,” he realized, “there are simpler ways to put yourself in stasis. You need more than that, some means to travel back as well as forward. But you have no attachment to this time. And you certainly have no allegiance to its causes.”

Several of the raiders were muttering among themselves now. Clearly Kvolan was not the only one with doubts. But he was the one who spoke. “Is this true, Daiyar? Have you been using us?”

“Does it matter? You were hired to steal these artifacts. You and your families will be well compensated regardless of the reason.”

“I am not doing this simply for profit! I believe in the cause! You promised me that you did as well.”

“With every moment you argue,” Lucsly reminded the lieutenant, “more time slips away outside. That’s what she wants.”

Andos picked up the thread. “There’s no telling how long you’ll be trapped here if you leave her in control. Your cause, your families, they may all be footnotes in history by the time you get free—if you ever do. End this now, surrender to us, and you will see your loved ones only slightly older than when you left them. The longer you wait, the faster they drift away.”

The subordinate raiders were growing more uneasy by the moment. A burly female Vomnin spoke up. “This has gotten out of hand, Kvolan. A quick raid, in and out, that was the plan. We have already failed!” Several other raiders voiced agreement.

“I won’t go to prison, Munetir!” another objected.

“Federation prisons are humane,” the female said.

“To be so far from my family? Intolerable!”

The raiders were dividing into groups now, roughly half coalescing around Kvolan and Munetir, the rest gathering around Daiyar. “Stop this now,” Daiyar told the other group. “You are letting them divide us.”

“You were never really one of us!” Kvolan cried. “You’ve been using us all along! I make my own decisions now!”

He raised his weapon, and others quickly followed. Lucsly, Andos, and T’Viss all flattened, joining Warain on the ground; the agent and the director shielded the researchers with their bodies as best they could. Lucsly was thus unable to witness what followed, but the sounds of energy weapons firing and people screaming were informative enough, along with the bursts of heat against his back and the smell of burned flesh.

Finally, the shooting stopped, and moments later, Lucsly found himself being hauled to his feet by strong Vomnin hands. To his relief, those hands released his manacles a moment later. Turning to assess the scene, he saw that Kvolan’s side had emerged victorious. Daiyar and most of her supporters lay crumpled on the ground, some wounded, others still and silent. Several on Kvolan’s side had fallen as well.

But it was over. Kvolan handed over his weapon to Lucsly, and the other remaining raiders—including the few survivors among Daiyar’s backers—dropped their weapons and stepped away from them as well. “We will offer no further resistance,” Kvolan said, “so long as you deactivate the time lock. We don’t want to be stuck here forever.”

“Agreed,” Andos said. “Provided you try nothing.”

Lucsly moved in to study Daiyar more closely. Her ornately patterned body armor must not have been up to deflecting a point-blank shot from one of the raiders’ weapons, for her chestplate had several holes burned through it—extending into the chest beneath. He grimaced at the sight. Death was never a desirable outcome, even for one who had threatened the timeline. Moreover, Daiyar had raised several puzzling questions in Lucsly’s mind, and he suspected that the answers to them might be unattainable in this time.

Who were you?

Vault time: 1654 UTC, July 6

External time: c. July 17

Kvolan and the others allowed themselves to be confined within the processing bay; with its shields active, it made an effective brig. The revived Warain used the bay’s tractor equipment to lift the false portal out of their reach, just in case; but Andos could read no deceit behind their willingness to cooperate.

Leaving Warain to watch the prisoners and advising T’Viss to have herself checked out in the medical bay, Andos and Lucsly returned to the control bunker. While Andos moved to the master control panel to verify the Vault’s status before deactivating the time lock, Lucsly opened the arms locker to secure the weapons he had confiscated from the raiders.

As he began to put the weapons away, he glanced over at the readout screen that showed the status of the storage bays. The bays that had been broken into were highlighted, and adjacent callout windows showed images and text descriptions of their removed contents. Lucsly paused in stowing the rifles. Something about the list of stolen artifacts was nagging at him.

“All right,” Andos said. “We show secure, and the Everett and the Khatami are in orbit, ready to assist us. I think it’s safe to deactivate the lock. Do you concur?”

Lucsly hesitated. “Something’s wrong. This was too easy.”

“Daiyar is dead, Lucsly.”

“So was the captain of the Kyushu,” he muttered.

“The Kyushu? I believe it was destroyed at Wolf 359.”

“I mean three-point-four years earlier. At Vemlar Four. The artifact they unearthed there allowed them to communicate with their near-future selves. At one point, Captain Tong experienced her own imminent death and was able to avert it.” That beneficial outcome was part of the reason the crew of the Kyushu had allowed themselves to succumb to the lure of the future knowledge the artifact had offered, growing increasingly trapped in a loop of second-guessing and indecision as they continued to search for the ideal future. They had nearly destroyed themselves before they realized that they needed to trust their own judgment regardless of the outcome. Once they had managed to deactivate the device, Tong had wisely called in the Department to secure the artifact, and it had been safely inactive in Bay H22 for the past twenty-one years.

Until now. Andos noted the status readout as well. “I see what you mean. I didn’t see the Vemlar artifact among their collection, but it’s not in its bay.” She turned to him. “You’re thinking that their past selves will have been able to perceive this future. Our deactivation of the time lock.”

“Mm-hm.”

“But the Vemlar device only shows you what your future self perceives. The raiders are secure in the processing bay. They can’t see or hear us enter the code.”

Lucsly hefted the rifles he still held. “But we did bring something of theirs in with us.”

Andos took out her tricorder and scanned the rifles. “You’re right. One of them has an active transmitter. It’s Kvolan’s. He tricked us!”

“And killed Daiyar to do it, knowing that the event would be altered.” No doubt the transmitter was sending to the heads-up display in Kvolan’s helmet. He would perceive the entry of the shutdown code, and the Vemlar IV artifact would send that perception back to his past self, allowing him and Daiyar to shut down the time lock and escape before any of the past few minutes had even happened.

At least, that would have been the plan had Lucsly not caught on. But since he had, that meant that Kvolan knew that Lucsly and Andos had seen through his plan—which meant that the past Kvolan would already have seen it fail and been able to adapt. Which meant . . .

They rushed to the security console. The visual feeds confirmed that the command bunker was surrounded by a full complement of raiders—including Daiyar, alive and well. Lucsly and Andos had been protected from the timeline shift, since the command bunker was adjacent to the phase-shielded historical archives, whose subspace field protected them from timeline alterations. But the past several minutes of history in the rest of the Vault had been altered. And T’Viss and Warain, outside the archive field, had been subject to the changes. Lucsly could see that both of them were now hostages of Daiyar’s troops.

“We’ve both outsmarted each other,” Daiyar said, looking directly into the security sensor’s pickup. “We’re better matched than I expected, Agent Lucsly. I’m enjoying the challenge. I hope you are as well.”

“I am not. I don’t play games with people’s lives.”

“Hm, I wonder if you allow yourself to enjoy anything. You remind me of certain old colleagues of mine . . . who were also determined to stop me in the name of protecting an abstract ideal of historical purity.”

Lucsly perked up at that, hoping she would elaborate. She did not oblige. “Still, you’ve seen that I’m willing to gamble my own life. And I still have the Vemlar device. Since it’s based in quantum entanglement, you can’t disrupt it with a chroniton field. Whatever move you attempt, I will have advance warning. Oh, and coming out shooting with those rifles you now have? I wouldn’t recommend it. It didn’t—rather, won’t—turn out well for you.”

“You’re bluffing,” Lucsly said. “Rifles we obtained as part of your ploy? I wouldn’t trust them anyway.”

“Unless you thought I was bluffing when I told you it wouldn’t work, thereby convincing you that it would.”

“But then you wouldn’t tell me in advance that I’d come to that conclusion.”

“Then maybe it’s because you realized I now have both T’Viss and Warain, and unfettered access to every artifact here. I may not be able to threaten Warain into compliance, but now that I can see my own future, I should be able to find the right strategy to obtain his help in breaching the time lock.”

Lucsly paused. “You may be right. You have a decisive advantage.”

On the monitor, Daiyar smiled. “Except that now you’re relying on the expectation that using the artifact will trap me in a loop of indecision. Given the past few moments of conversation, I can’t blame you. But I understand the limits of foresight better than you think, Agent Lucsly.”

He stared at her image. “You are from the future, aren’t you?”

But Daiyar simply walked away, escorting Warain and T’Viss at gunpoint before her. Lucsly hoped that one of them could devise a way around the advantage the Vemlar artifact gave her. As it was, she had him totally outmatched.

IV

Vault time: 1700 UTC, July 6

External time: 1816 UTC, July 29

Gronim City, Denobula

The office staff had organized a birthday party for Dulmur, gathering in the dining hall that occupied the pavilion one level up from the bottom of the stepwell, overlooking the central fountain. They had made a game attempt to be festive, but it was difficult when Lucsly, the director, and the others were still trapped within the Vault. Only sixty-eight minutes had passed from their perspective so far, but the psychological effect on their colleagues outside was that of a prolonged siege, and Dulmur wondered more with each passing day if the inventors of the time lock had really considered the toll it would take on the Department as a whole.

Still, an assistant director had his team to think of, so Dulmur had made a game attempt to be upbeat and sociable. It wasn’t easy, though, since most of the people here were still fairly new acquaintances. Ranjea and Garcia were the two he knew best, but they were still in the field, trekking out to the Gum Nebula to search for leads on Daiyar and her raiders. All his other close colleagues and friends were back on Earth—or on Eris.

The saving grace of the evening had been Doctor Cymmen. Dulmur hadn’t expected to see the Science Ministry liaison at his party, but she had insisted she wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Cymmen had been one of the high points of this strenuous month, one of the most reasonable and accommodating bureaucrats he’d ever dealt with (speaking as a bureaucrat himself). Not that she was a pushover; Cymmen had her own firm opinions and goals and could not be easily swayed from them. But she was willing to listen and to compromise, and on those occasions when she’d convinced Dulmur to back down or change his mind, it had never felt to him like a loss. In some cases, her recommendations had improved the efficiency of the office and eased its dealings with the Denobulan government.

Cymmen was a lively conversationalist as well, with the fondness for storytelling that was common among Denobulans. She had spent much of the evening regaling Dulmur with tales about the births of her younger siblings and her own two daughters (one per husband), as well as tales of the various weddings within her extended family, and she had managed to extract some of Dulmur’s more embarrassing birthday and wedding stories from him. She’d even gotten him to talk about his ex-wife Megumi, and her kind acceptance had made him feel more at peace with his memories of Meg than he had in years.

“You’ve talked about births and weddings, but not birthdays,” Dulmur said to her at last. “Aren’t those something Denobulans celebrate?”

“Well, more a birth season than birthdays per se,” the pleasant-featured doctor replied. “Since we have a mating season timed with the monsoons, the births usually tend to be clustered within a specific part of the year as well. It takes us about a local year and a half to grow to term, so the birth season’s about half a year after the mating season.”

“Mm-hm,” Dulmur said. “Works out to nine-point-four months, just a bit longer than human gestation.”

She chuckled. “It’s amazing how effortlessly you do that.”

“Comes with the job. Took years to learn it. And I’m still not half as good at it as Lucsly. The man’s a walking calendar.”

He realized he’d fallen silent when she touched his arm a few moments later. “You’ve said yourself, he’s the best person the Department has in a crisis. We just have to wait and see how he sorts it out.”

“Yeah. But for a human, the waiting is the hard part.”

Cymmen furrowed her brow, and Dulmur thought it was adorable. He looked at his punch. Had someone slipped synthehol in it? Or was she just adorable? “Being slowed in time like that is going to throw off Lucsly’s birthdays,” she observed. “I wonder, when he gets out, will he celebrate based on the calendar or will he correct for the time dilation?”

Dulmur laughed. “Lucsly’s not the type to celebrate, believe me. Although . . . well, he would insist on keeping track of how old he is. Knowing him, if he had to choose one, he’d stick with the calendar for the sake of regularity. Time is relative anyway, and calendars are how we standardize it for mutual convenience.”

“Is that Lucsly talking, or you?”

He pondered. “After all these years, it’s hard to know the difference anymore.”

This time he shook himself out of his momentary silence. “So, a birth season, huh? How do you guys celebrate that?”

Cymmen laughed. “Ahh, yes, we do celebrate, Marion. It’s a time of fertility and growth, so we throw massive commemorations in the kaybin districts. Oh, the stories I could tell you of those.”

Dulmur blushed. He’d been on Denobula long enough to know that kaybin was approximately the Denobulan word for “red light” in this context. While not quite as public in their sexual expression as the Deltans, the people of this world celebrated and revered that side of themselves just as much, and the kaybin districts were where they went to do so. He knew that Ranjea and Garcia had both checked them out nearly as soon as they’d arrived here (separately—their partnership remained entirely platonic), but Dulmur felt he was past the age for such heady indulgences.

Still, he found himself clearing his throat and asking, “Stories? Umm, like what . . . kind of stories—”

Before he could get any further, he was interrupted by a signal on his comm pin. Reaching to his collar, he activated it. “Dulmur here.”

“Director,” came the voice of Mexus, the Denobulan male who was manning the situation room this shift. “We’ve gotten a transmission from inside the Vault!”

He threw Cymmen an apologetic look. “Go,” she said, understanding as always. “Plenty of time for those stories later.”

That kept his mind occupied as he jogged up the stairs to the situation room, but once inside, he was all business. “Report!”

“A recorded burst message, sir,” the lanky, blond Mexus reported. “Even so, we had to speed it up considerably.”

Dulmur nodded. At the moment, time in the Vault was nearly 5,600 times slower than normal. Lucsly would have known that and sent the message as a compressed data burst after recording it. “Play it back.”

It was a relief to hear his partner’s voice again, even at his most curt and businesslike. “Raiders still have advantage. Nearly escaped using Vemlar Four artifact to anticipate future. Prior knowledge of artifact hazard suggests same of inventory. Inside source? Investigate.” A pause. “Happy birthday.”

The message ended, and Dulmur laughed, a release of tension that went on for a while. At this point, one minute inside the Vault equaled nearly four days outside, so Lucsly would have had to know within fifteen seconds when his transmission would be received. It was good to know that Lucsly was still as reliable as ever.

Once Dulmur had gathered himself, Mexus asked, “What did he mean, sir? Not about the birthday, but—”

The director set his jaw as he contemplated Lucsly’s words. “If their escape plan relied on using a specific artifact, then they must have had some source of intel about the Vault’s contents. Not a lot of people outside the Department have access to that information.”

The young technician’s eyes widened. “You mean there’s someone inside helping them?”

“Inside, or close enough to have access to inside information. Either way, it’s good to know.”

“Good to know we may have a spy?”

“That’s right, kid,” Dulmur said. “Because it’s a solid lead. We find that leak, and we can follow it right to Daiyar’s accomplices.”

Vault time: 1701 UTC, July 6

External time: c. July 30

Eris

Kvolan had been unable to stop thinking about the future vision that the Vemlar artifact had given him. He knew that the argument and the betrayal had been merely an act, that his near-future self had shot Daiyar dead according to her own plan. But he had seen and felt everything that his future self had, and he knew that the DTI agents’ arguments had raised genuine doubts in him. His future self had ignored them, believing that the plan would lead to the shutdown of the time lock and render any questions about Daiyar’s motives irrelevant. But now that the lock was still firmly in place, the delay worsening by the moment, he no longer had that luxury.

For the past few minutes, he had been shadowing Daiyar on another pass through the aisles of the Vault, one more systematic than the previous raids. Although she had some prior knowledge of the Vault’s inventory, that intelligence had gaps, and Doctor T’Viss had proven quite cooperative in lecturing the raiders on which artifacts might be useful and which ones were too deteriorated or too hazardous to use. No doubt she knew better than to attempt deception, since the Vemlar device was still giving Daiyar and Kvolan knowledge of the near future which would alert them to any deception. It was an odd sensation, experiencing two times at once. Fortunately, Daiyar had taught him how to shift perceptions between the two time frames by concentrating on the one he wanted, reducing the other to background noise. He shifted his concentration to the future only when the sensations or emotions coming from there grew intense enough to demand it.

Right now, though, it was his present thoughts that preoccupied him. Once he managed to get Daiyar alone for a moment, he asked, “Were the agents right when they said you had lied to us? Is your agenda truly different from ours? Do you . . . do you truly have no concern for how long we are trapped in here?”

The deceptively delicate Tomika studied him. “You aren’t thinking of betraying me in reality, are you?”

He stiffened. “I stand by my commitments, and my people stand by me. But loyalty goes both ways, Daiyar. We stand by you because we believe that your efforts will benefit our people as well as yours. How can you demand our trust without extending yours in return?”

After a moment’s thought, she sighed. “You’re right. It’s true, Kvolan, that I have my own purpose distinct from yours. But that doesn’t mean I should casually sacrifice your goals in pursuit of my own. You have risked as much as I have to help me—and you have far more to lose. I should honor that.” She touched his shoulder. “I am sorry, Kvolan. My purpose drives me so relentlessly that I often forget the needs of others. I am ready to make sacrifices—no,” she amended bitterly, “to cause others to make sacrifices when necessary to achieve my ends. But I should not be quick to do so when it is not strictly necessary. That kind of inflexibility—clinging rigidly to a purpose without regard for the cost to others—is the very thing I seek to change. You deserve better for your courage and loyalty.”

Kvolan shifted his weight, uneasy with her sudden display of compassion. “Then . . . can you give us a faster way out of here?”

“There is one possibility,” she said, the promptness of her reply a confession in itself. “But it runs the risk of destroying us all. I had hoped that, with patience, we could find a safer method.”

“But we know the future,” he reminded her. “Surely you can see how to avoid fatal mistakes.”

“Yes.” He saw her close her eyes and shift her concentration away from this time. He followed suit, feeling his way forward up the time stream, probing for a point of decision.

But there was nothing but confusion. He felt a jumble of possibilities, none of which stood out from the mass. He had to retreat from the sheer sensory overload. Opening his eyes, he saw Daiyar staring at him in alarm. “Something is wrong.”

They dashed to where they had stored the Vemlar device, but it still seemed to be functioning perfectly. “Something must be interfering with it. The agents have done something.”

“How? They are trapped in their control room.”

Daiyar frowned. “Oh, no. Get me to Doctor T’Viss at once.”

Within a minute, Daiyar was confronting the elderly Vulcan, dragging her to Bay D9, which held a large, irregular slab seemingly made of obsidian. “The worldline destabilizer,” Daiyar said. “You claimed you were merely reinforcing its containment field. You did something to activate it, didn’t you?”

“Correct,” the physicist said. “I set it to scramble future probabilities, so that your precognitive advantage would be negated.”

“But how?” Kvolan demanded. “We would’ve sensed it ahead of time.”

“I set it to activate on a delay. And I would not recommend attempting to deactivate the device. Its operation is extremely delicate. Any tampering would result in far more drastic effects on present probabilities.”

“This reality would become mutable, unreliable,” Daiyar interpreted for Kvolan. “Very well, Doctor. You’ve outmaneuvered us. I’m surprised: I thought you disdained the practical application of temporal physics. Yet you knew how to operate this device.”

“An unavoidable necessity. It has been a frequent source of trouble over the years, and I have often had to participate in the process of regulating its output. Given that any member of the team may be altered into a form without the requisite knowledge, or be removed entirely from this setting, it is necessary for all team members to be able to perform the necessary operations.”

“Never mind that,” Kvolan said. “It won’t be long before the agents catch on that they’re free to act. And we’ve lost our advantage. We’re not winning this siege, Daiyar. It’s time to make our escape—however risky.”

“You’re right.” She looked around. “Fortunately, most of the key components we need are in this aisle or the adjacent ones. So let’s get to work.”

Vault time: 1704 UTC, July 6

External time: 1907 UTC, August 9

Haunris Spaceport, Tyrellia system

Ranjea and Garcia intercepted Vennor Sikran before he could board his transport to Catulla, the next leg on his lengthy trip back to Confederacy space. “Why the rush?” Garcia asked when the rotund Vomnin protested the delay. “Run out of facts to find already?”

“You . . . you hardly needed to come all the way back here to meet me, Agents,” the BHRD official stammered after they had dragged him into a private port security office. “I understood that you were in Consortium space, investigating my lead. It would have been easier to reach me upon my return to the Confederacy.”

“Oh, yes, our little trip to the Colonial Consortium,” Garcia said through clenched teeth. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to convince Starfleet to let us use one of their slipstream ships, even in an emergency? Or how ticked off they’ll be at us for diverting a slipstream ship for three weeks because we let you dupe us into the biggest wild goose chase since the Time Rings of Vork?”

“Agent Garcia, I assure you I don’t know what you mean.”

“Allow me to explain,” Ranjea said in his most helpful tone. “According to our agents on the inside, the leader of the raiders attempted an escape plan dependent on the use of a specific artifact within the Vault. She had prior knowledge of the dangers that artifact posed and how to counter them, so she could not have improvised the escape plan on the spot. She must have had advance intelligence about at least a portion of the Vault’s inventory—probably even advance knowledge of the time lock, enabling her to formulate a way around it before she began the raid.”

“Internal investigation showed no leaks within the Department,” Garcia said. “But we have occasionally shared classified information with other governments’ temporal agencies, to coordinate our efforts or in exchange for intelligence they may have.”

“And data pertaining to portions of the Vault inventory,” Ranjea went on, “including the particular item in question, was shared seven months ago with the BHRD in exchange for their data on spacetime eddies within the Vela OB2 Association. That information passed through your office, Vennor.”

Sikran fidgeted where he crouched, his heavy, padded knuckles drumming irregularly against the floor. “Many things pass through my office. Whatever my current rank, I still bear much responsibility.”

“Oh, you bear plenty of responsibility, mister,” Garcia growled. “We tracked your movements, your correspondence. The current subdirector—the underling who was promoted into your former job? She was happy to help us dig into your activities. Just how badly did you treat her, anyway?”

“Teresa,” Ranjea cautioned lightly. She caught the subtext: Don’t kick a dog when it’s down. Sikran was slumping, breathing heavily, his eyes darting like those of a cornered animal.

“Please,” he finally confessed. “She made me do it. She blackmailed me.”

“Daiyar?” Ranjea asked.

“Yes. She . . . she knew things about me. All my—all the compromises I made over the years, bending the rules. For the good of the Bureau, of course, but . . . but directing a little profit potential my way where I could. A little political advantage. A few modest items I kept to myself when it wouldn’t harm Confederacy security . . . Things that everyone does, but that the Bureau has to make a show of punishing if they’re exposed. You know how it is.”

“Unh-unh,” Garcia said, shaking her head. “We really don’t.”

“So you’re saying she forced you to give her the information?” Ranjea asked.

“Yes! That’s right!”

Garcia stepped forward. “You sure it didn’t help any that her little band of terrorists was actually working on the Confederacy’s behalf the whole time? That Kvolan Marnak has a long record as a militant Confederacy nationalist, dedicated to ensuring his nation’s ascendancy over rivals like the Pa’haquel—and the Consortium?”

“If they altered history in a way that increased the power of the Confederacy,” Ranjea continued, “surely they could have done so in a way that increased the standing and wealth of Vennor Sikran. Is that what they promised you?”

“You weren’t just looking the other way for them, Sikran,” Garcia pressed. “You didn’t just point us at the wrong nation for them. You came to the Federation, waiting to meet up with them after the raid. You knew the time lock might be activated, so you had to concoct an excuse to be here for weeks, hence your little fact-finding expedition. But once her escape plan failed, you bolted, and here we are.”

“All right! All right. You’ve caught me. Now what do you want of me?”

“Everything you know about Daiyar and the raiders,” Ranjea replied. “Anything we can use to stop them and bring this siege to an end.”

Garcia had a thought. “Is there some way you could send them a message, convince them to stand down? Make them think you had a backup plan to help them escape from Federation custody?”

Sikran shook his broad, jowly head. “I’m not sure anything could convince Daiyar to stand down. She’s an incredibly driven person.” He sighed. “I warned her that this raid would be a mistake. I’m not saying that to cover myself, understand, just to let you know who you’re up against. I warned her the raid would bring too much attention to her cause, attract an investigation. That she risked bringing down the whole movement with this reckless act. But she didn’t seem to care.”

He grew contemplative. “I let her convince me that she was acting in the Confederacy’s interests, because—well, because that’s what I wanted to hear. But I always had the feeling that we didn’t matter to her. That Kvolan and the others, their cause didn’t matter to her either.”

“Then who is she really?” Garcia asked. “We investigated her people, the Tomika. There was no sign that any of them would have the knowledge or the desire to participate in something like this. And none of them seemed to have the unusual strength and perception she’s shown.”

“I don’t know who or what Daiyar is,” Sikran assured her. “All I can say is that she has her own purpose, and that it drives her relentlessly. It might not matter to her if her allies have to be sacrificed in its pursuit.” He sighed again. “Or anyone else.”

V

Vault time: 1706 UTC, July 6

External time: Third week of August

Eris

“Are you ready?” Andos asked.

Lucsly nodded. “Mm-hm.”

Taking a deep breath, Lucsly raised his phaser to a ready position. At Andos’s nod, he activated the door control. The heavy door to the command bunker slid open with disquieting slowness, leaving the agents exposed to the view of the three armored Vomnin outside. The guards seemed frozen in surprise at first, but then they began to recover and raise their weapons.

But Lucsly and Andos were already moving. The director’s first shot was well aimed, the stun beam striking her target right in the jaw, causing him to topple to the floor. Lucsly’s shot only grazed his target’s shoulder; it was difficult to adjust his training for the Vomnin’s low-slung, apelike posture. Still, he moved in quickly and delivered a kick to the guard’s chin, knocking him backward to tumble into the third guard. That guard’s quadrupedal stance served her well, though; she stumbled back but recovered her footing while the dazed second guard shook his head and tried to roll back onto his hands and feet. But Lucsly saw that his abdominal armor was thin; no doubt their forward-angled posture would normally keep that area protected. He had a clear shot at it now, though, so he stunned the guard while the Vomnin was just beginning his sluggish recovery.

The third guard raised her gun and fired at Andos, but the director began her dodge before the Vomnin could even bring her weapon to bear, and the shot missed. The guard compensated swiftly, her bent-kneed stance letting her launch readily into a leap to intercept Andos, tackling her—or trying to. The massive Rhaandarite was not easily toppled. The guard adjusted her tactic, attempting to squeeze the director in her powerful arms, but Lucsly got there before her grip could tighten and pulled her free, spinning her around. A phaser shot to the chin left her stunned before she could react.

Andos caught her breath, brushing herself down. “Well. I’d say we owe Commanders La Forge and Data our thanks.”

Lucsly grudgingly conceded the point. Under normal circumstances, two aging bureaucrats like themselves could never have had the speed or strength to outfight three trained, armored mercenaries. But the current situation had worked to their advantage. Being in the command bunker, right next to the phase-shielded archives, had given them access to a supply of subspace field emitters and phase discriminators. Lucsly had remembered the incident of stardate 46944 in which the Enterprise, while attempting to assist a Romulan ship whose singularity core had been infested by extradimensional life-forms, had been trapped within a temporal fracture phenomenon. Returning from a conference to find the two vessels effectively frozen in time, Commanders La Forge and Data had devised skintight subspace force fields using phase discriminators to maintain their personal time flow at a constant rate, allowing them to pass unaffected through the temporal distortion zones.

Lucsly had realized that re-creating the devices would allow himself and Andos to insulate themselves from the dilation effect of the time lock, which operated on similar principles to the fracture phenomenon. The subspace fields would not return them to external time flow—all time perception was relative, after all—but would prevent them from being slowed any further once they were activated, allowing them to remain at a fixed time rate while the rest of the Vault continued to undergo increasing dilation. He and Andos had commenced work on the devices while the Vemlar IV artifact was still in play, hoping that T’Viss and Warain would find a way to negate it and free them to act. Once they saw on the security feeds that this had occurred, at 1702 UTC Vault time, they had activated their subspace fields, then waited several minutes to allow time to slow around them. At the moment, Lucsly and Andos were moving and perceiving 1.78 times faster than the rest of the Vault’s occupants. From their perspective, the Vomnin guards had been slowed by nearly half, giving the agents ample time to aim their shots and dodge attacks. Lucsly’s kick had struck the second guard with the equivalent of 3.17 times its normal kinetic energy, and the third guard’s tackle of Andos had been softened by the same proportion. The two agents effectively had supernormal strength as well as speed and reaction time, and their advantage would increase by the moment—at least to a point. La Forge and Data had included a force-damping effect at the subspace boundary, otherwise they would have been launching themselves through the ceiling with every step, given the severe temporal differentials they had been dealing with. Lucsly and Andos had left out that component to give themselves a strength advantage, but past a certain point, the force amplification would become too unwieldy to cope with. Even now, they had to move carefully through the corridors, as if walking in low gravity. It would be necessary to take the raiders down quickly, while the advantages still outweighed the difficulties.

They crept at double time through the corridors of the Vault, neutralizing small groups of raiders when they could do so without raising an alarm, avoiding them otherwise. They finally came upon the main group in Aisle D, where Daiyar appeared to be directing her troops in assembling cannibalized parts from the Vault inventory into some kind of apparatus. Lucsly recognized its main component as the chronodeflector from the prototype time vehicle in Bay D5.

Determining the device’s purpose could wait, though, since the troops’ preoccupation with its assembly left Warain and T’Viss essentially unguarded. They had been contained behind the force field of a bay already looted of its contents. Lucsly was able to duck into the corridor, deactivate the field, and drag the captives back around the corner before they could be spotted, though his proportionally accelerated movements were not very gentle on the two scientists. Speaking at half normal speed for clarity, Lucsly instructed them to get to the control bunker and lock themselves in.

But Warain spoke with urgency, and Lucsly strained to decipher his basso whisper. “Theeyy’re builldiing aa suubspaace puulsse emmitterr! Daiiyarr thiinkss iit wiill sshockk thhe ffielld genneraatorss inntoo sshuutdowwnn.”

Lucsly opened his temporal tricorder—which he had already programmed to correct for the subspace field distortion—and extended it around the corner to take a quick scan of the apparatus Daiyar and her troops were building. Studying the readout, he reported, “Looks like she’s integrating the chronodeflector into the frame of the time carriage from Aisle C.”

Warain nodded. “Ffeeedinng innwarrd. Conncenntraate annd ammpliffyy. Ouutpuut too refflecctionn gennerratorr.”

“Mm-hm. Set to release the pulse in a single omnidirectional burst.” He didn’t bother to slow his words, since they were for Andos’s benefit. “You realize what a chroniton burst that intense will do.”

Andos nodded. “To us and the artifacts, yes. But will it collapse the dilation field?”

“It might. But it’s incredibly risky. We have to stop them from activating that device at all costs.”

“Agreed. Options?”

He studied the scan. “It’s too near completion. No time for anything subtle.” How did she rig it so quickly? he wondered, before he remembered the message he and Andos had received from Dulmur while they were readying their subspace pocket fields. Vennor Sikran had given her intelligence on the Vault’s contents. She would have already known what artifacts were available and been able to devise this plan ahead of time. But that meant she would have needed to know about the time lock as well, and that information had not been shared with the Vomnin.

No time, he reminded himself. Explanations would come later, once he got Daiyar into a DTI interrogation room. “Our only option is a surprise attack. I’ll draw their fire—distract them so you can get a clear shot.” He showed her the tricorder readout. “Target the chronodeflector here. Take it out, and there’s no pulse.”

“Understood.” Andos met his gaze intently. Both understood that blasting the pulse generator would probably kill them even if the raiders failed to. But the director could always read what others needed from her, so she kept it professional, giving Lucsly only a matter-of-fact nod. “It was good working with you, Agent.”

“You too, Director.”

Lucsly took one more look around the corner to get the lay of the land before he launched into motion. By now he should be moving more than twice as fast as the raiders, and he took as much advantage of that as he could. His shots knocked down three of the Vomnin before the group could react, though he suspected their armor had left them conscious, merely dazed. (Daiyar would have been his preferred target, but she was by the pulse generator, with too many guards in the way.) He then changed direction and gained ground on them before they could adjust and bring their weapons to bear. He paused and aimed carefully, striking one raider’s gun hand and leaving it numb, her rifle falling lazily from her grip. He saw another rifle’s muzzle coming to bear on him, and adrenaline kicked him into motion just in time to evade the beam.

Determined to maximize the distraction, Lucsly chose to do the sort of thing he generally criticized Starfleet for doing: He ran directly toward the danger. The raiders’ surprise, along with his accelerated speed, allowed him to close to melee range, too close for the raiders to use their rifles without risking friendly-fire casualties. (Good grief, he thought, where did I pick this up? Too many years dealing with Starfleet militarists.) He swung at the raiders with amateurish punches and shoves, but his doubled speed and quadrupled kinetic energy let him strike home with enough effect to knock his opponents down.

Catching a glimpse of Andos carefully aiming her phaser, Lucsly twisted free of the slow-moving hands lunging for him and broke out into the clear, getting some distance from the raiders. This gave him line of sight on the generator and Daiyar, who was just starting to notice Andos. He was at the wrong angle to target the vital components of the generator—but he could target Daiyar herself. Without an instant’s hesitation, he raised his phaser and fired at her unprotected head.

She dodged.

Moreover, she turned her motion into a leap and roll that brought her in reach of the temporal acceleration projector that had nearly killed Felbog. She came to her feet holding the device and swung it upward, seeming to move at nearly normal speed to Lucsly’s eyes. She fired a split second before Andos did.

Lucsly’s eyes darted toward Andos with dismay. Would he see her transform in an instant to a decayed corpse lying on the floor?

No—something else happened. The accelerator’s spherical, blueshifted field appeared in the middle of the corridor, containing only empty air. Andos’s phaser beam struck it and scattered at the boundary. A moment later, a bolt fired from Daiyar’s rifle, forcing Andos to duck.

Gathering himself, Lucsly turned back to Daiyar and opened fire, but she was in motion again, and he missed cleanly. She struck him with the butt of her rifle, and if its impact hadn’t been diminished by 75 percent, it might have caved in his skull.

He was roused a few moments later by a guard dragging him against the aisle wall. The guard bound his hands behind him and took his weapon. He glanced at his arm; the subspace field generator was gone too. He was back in local time flow, as the guard’s apparently normal movements made clear. A moment later, Andos was shoved down next to him, similarly bound and disarmed. At least Warain and T’Viss were apparently safe.

Daiyar came into view, standing over the DTI agents. “These physical antics are beneath us, don’t you think? Still, that was an ingenious trick with the discriminator fields.”

“Likewise with the accelerator,” Lucsly replied. “You realized that, from the perspective of the air molecules within the field, the rapid nadions in the phaser beam would be effectively slowed to a trickle, easily absorbed and scattered by the air itself.”

“Basic physics,” she demurred.

“There’s nothing basic about your understanding of temporal technologies, Daiyar. As the construct behind you makes clear. So surely you’re aware that the tetryon radiation surge that your subspace pulse will generate upon interaction with the time dilation field will be sufficient to kill us all.”

He had pitched his voice to be audible to Kvolan and the other troops who stood nearby. Indeed, the lieutenant did throw a sharp look toward Daiyar. “You acknowledged the dangers, but you did not mention this.”

“That’s because the radiation shouldn’t be intense enough to pose a threat,” Daiyar assured him.

“In here?” Lucsly challenged. “Amplified and polarized by the dilation field? The surge might be survivable if we get prompt treatment, but it would certainly leave your raiders too ill to mount a retreat. You must have known that, Daiyar.”

“You lie,” Kvolan shot back. “Why would she doom herself to failure?”

“Would she be? We’ve all seen that Daiyar has enhanced strength, speed, and reactions. Who knows what other abilities she might have? A resistance to tetryon radiation, perhaps?”

“Ignore him, Kvolan,” Daiyar said. “All of you. You know we serve the same cause.”

“Do you?” Lucsly insisted. “Before we left the bunker, we received an update from our colleagues in Confederacy space. According to Agents Ranjea and Garcia, not only has your contact Vennor Sikran been arrested, but so have the other members of Vomnin Birthright.”

Mentioning his organization by name was enough to convince Kvolan. “Sikran!” the raider cried. “I knew he couldn’t be trusted.”

“His testimony only confirmed what the Confederacy investigators had already determined during the month after they learned of this raid. The arrests would still have been made without him. But he did provide the information we needed to detect your cloaked ship in orbit of Eris. It was captured attempting to flee Federation space.”

Lucsly’s gaze shifted to take in Kvolan and the other raiders. “No one is waiting for you. This siege has dragged on so long that it’s enabled the forces of temporal law and order to tear down your conspiracy. Daiyar allowed that to happen. And now she’s preparing an escape that will leave the rest of you too ill to function, if not dead. This is the woman you have sworn your loyalty to?”

The burly female Vomnin named Munetir stepped forward. “I fear he is right, Kvolan. There have been no reply pings from the escape ship for several minutes, our time. And we know the Federation could not penetrate our cloaks. Not without Confederacy knowledge!”

After a simmering moment, Kvolan turned to Daiyar. “You promised me that you would not sacrifice our cause in pursuit of your own. You said we deserved better for our loyalty. Were you planning to leave me to die or rot in prison, even as you spoke such comforting words to my face?”

Daiyar looked back at him with regret, but the conviction in her voice was as strong as ever. “You cannot understand the stakes of what I fight for, Kvolan. If you knew, you would recognize the necessity of the sacrifices I must make. Not just for my people, but for the Confederacy and so many others.”

“How can I trust that you care about the Confederacy when you would use us and toss us aside so callously?”

“Remember, it was you who pushed me into using this escape plan!”

“And you who did not tell us what the cost would be! Liar!”

Kvolan raised his rifle and fired, but Daiyar had already launched into startlingly fast motion. His beam passed through the empty space where she had been, and she had reached the pulse generator before he could get a bead on her again. She struck the activation panel.

“Kvolan!” Lucsly cried. “Shoot the chronodeflector unit! Now!”

The lieutenant fired at the unit, but it had already begun to activate, and the gravimetric field distortion around it deflected most of the beam. “All of you, keep firing!” Andos barked in her most commanding tones. The rest of the raiders opened fire on the humming, blue-glowing deflector unit. Its hum and its glow continued to intensify, and so did their fire. Lucsly winced, turning his head away from the blazing light and heat.

Finally, out of the corner of his squinting eyes, he saw the beams penetrate and blow out the chronodeflector—but at the same instant, a distortion wave burst outward from the device and swept across him. For a moment, he was intensely disoriented, his sense of time and space severely disrupted.

Once it passed, he saw Kvolan and the others looking around uneasily. Daiyar had vanished from view. “What happened?” the Vomnin lieutenant asked. “Was that the subspace pulse?”

“A fraction of it,” Lucsly said, “or we’d all be far worse off right now.”

“Is the dilation field still in place?”

Munetir checked her helmet display. “No change,” she reported. “Time continues to slow for us.”

“Then what do we do now?”

“Surrender,” Andos told him. “Once you and Daiyar are safely in custody, we will deactivate the time lock.”

Kvolan exchanged a look with Munetir and the others. “We have nothing more to fight for. We will surrender. But capturing Daiyar is your problem.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

Lucsly turned at the sound of Daiyar’s voice. She stood adjacent to the ruined pulse generator, looking serious. Kvolan and Munetir lifted their rifles, but Lucsly raised a hand to forestall them. “Are you surrendering too?” he asked her.

“We have bigger problems. Check your sensors. The subspace pulse is still resonating inside the dilation field. If you don’t see the significance of that, ask Doctor T’Viss.”

Lucsly had a pretty good idea, but he took her advice anyway. Once Kvolan had unbound his and Andos’s wrists, he contacted the control bunker and put the question to T’Viss. “The intruder is correct to be concerned,” the physicist said in the same dry, detached tone she used to give a lecture. “The resonant pulse will grow exponentially more powerful as the dilation continues to intensify.”

“With what effect?” Andos asked.

Warain’s voice took over. “With the convoluted spatiotemporal fields that already exist in here? Sooner or later it’ll cause a subspace rupture. Space and time themselves will be torn apart within the volume of the field. Don’t even ask me what that’ll do to us. We’ll be fragmented through—”

“You told us not to ask you that,” Lucsly reminded him. “Any reason we can’t just shut down the time lock and dissipate the pulse?”

“Oh. Oh! I suppose that would work. But . . . only you and the director have the code.”

The director spoke promptly into the comm. “Computer. This is Director Andos. Deactivate the time lock protocol. Authorization Andos, five seven nine nine nine Tango Bravo Uniform.”

“Authorization accepted. Deactivating.” A moment of tension and hope, then: “Unable to comply. Dilation field generators not responding.”

“Oh, no,” Warain moaned. There was a sound of console keys being pressed frantically. “Oh, no. The pulse damaged the generators! They won’t deactivate! We’re trapped in here. We’re all doomed.”

Lucsly was used to hearing anxiety bordering on panic in Warain’s voice. As long as he was agitated, then he was working the problem. But what Lucsly heard from the Caldonian now was utter resignation. Even with all his predictive gifts, he could see no way out. And that filled Lucsly with genuine dread.

VI

Vault time: 1713 UTC, July 6

External time: Mid-October

Eris

“How much time do we have before the rupture?” Andos asked.

T’Viss answered, since Warain seemed to be quietly whimpering. “Not long. The dimensionality of the subspace domain in which the pulse is resonating means that its amplification rate is the cube of the dilation field’s increase rate.”

“So in another six minutes,” Lucsly interpreted, “time will be half as slow but the pulse will be eight times as strong.”

“Correct. I estimate we have no more than ten-point-eight minutes before a rupture becomes inevitable.”

“But it could happen sooner,” Warain managed to get out, “if some of the artifacts resonate with the pulse and concentrate it around themselves.”

“Then we have to act fast,” Lucsly said. He turned to Daiyar. “You know our inventory. You’re obviously able to adapt it to your needs. Any ideas?”

Kvolan stared. “You can’t trust her! She’s betrayed all of us!”

Lucsly glared at him. “Did you not understand ‘act fast’?” The Vomnin raider subsided.

Daiyar thought it over for a few moments, then spoke to the air. “Doctors, could the temporal accelerator’s field be amplified and broadened enough to encompass the entire Vault? With the correct calibration, could it negate the dilation field and deamplify the subspace pulse?”

The two physicists’ voices murmured over the channel for a few moments.

“Theoretically, it could,” T’Viss confirmed.

“But I have no idea how we could make it work,” Warain lamented. “With the equipment we have on hand, maybe we could rig something, but there are so many possibilities . . . We’d need to narrow in on a list of options, run simulations . . .”

Lucsly looked at Daiyar again. “Any insights?”

She shook her head, her black and red ponytail waving behind her. “You give me too much credit. I needed weeks of thought to devise the pulse generator. We only have minutes.”

“We have minutes,” Lucsly said. “But the time lock can still work in our favor.”

Vault time: 1716 UTC, July 6

External time: 2011 UTC, November 20

Gronim City, Denobula

Cymmen was waiting for Dulmur when he got home, as she so often was these days. She wasn’t exactly living with him; Denobulans rarely slept, so they didn’t need places to go home to at night. Cymmen considered the entire city her home. But for the past month, she’d organized her work schedule to correspond with Dulmur’s and had spent most of her free time with him.

“Welcome home, Marion!” Cymmen greeted him with a hug and a rather heartfelt kiss. She enjoyed throwing herself into the human homecoming routine, which to her was an exotic ritual. She knew better than to ask Dulmur how his day had been, leaving it to him to volunteer the information. She understood that he looked to his time with her as a respite from the stresses of his work.

The past few months had been a difficult time for the DTI. With the raiders’ identity uncovered, their allies routed, and their conspiracy thwarted, there was nothing else Dulmur’s team or anyone else could do to assist Lucsly and the director in ending the siege. All they could do was wait and hope that the team on the inside could resolve the crisis themselves. But the wait grew harder as activity inside the Vault slowed to a greater and greater crawl.

The sense of helplessness that Dulmur shared with the rest of the Department had begun to intensify over the past seven weeks, as it had become clear that some kind of subspace pulse had been released inside the dilation field and had entered a resonant feedback cycle. The field boundary distorted the readings and made the prognosis unclear, but the theorists had reported the possibility that the pulse would amplify within the field to the point of destruction. It had been an excruciating wait to see whether the pulse would subside on its own or continue to amplify, with only a few seconds elapsing within for each day outside. With each passing week, the odds had shifted more and more in favor of the worse outcome. And Dulmur had been forced to watch ineffectually as his longtime partner faced destruction.

Cymmen had been a godsend to him during this time. She had given him her understanding, her patient support, her buoyant companionship, and eventually her love. He had initially been hesitant to embrace the last of those, aware that he would have to share it with her two husbands and the rest of her enormous Denobulan family. But Dulmur had come to see in time that her Denobulan customs were to his benefit. She felt no sense of competition with his work, for she often spent weeks or months apart from her husbands. Without the need to sleep regularly, she could schedule her own work and her other social obligations for when he was at the office or asleep, and thus she could effectively be there for him as much as he needed without sacrificing other aspects of her own life. For now, at least, he was the only partner she was seeing on a daily basis, enough to feel like a full cohabitation in human terms, even though it was a smaller part of her own social repertoire. At first, Dulmur had thought he could not accept that imbalance of exclusivity, but he had come to realize that was selfish. His preoccupation with his work meant that he had never been able to give Megumi as much attention as she had needed, leading to their divorce, and he knew that was unlikely to change with any other romantic partner. Cymmen’s lifestyle meant she was happy with what attention he could provide and could easily adjust her schedule to get the fullest benefit of that attention. How foolish would he have to be to turn that down?

Dulmur nonetheless regretted having to prevail on her patience now, and she sensed it in his expression. “Has something happened?”

“We got a message from the Vault,” he said. “It took hours, even at burst speed. But they need our help. They may have a way to bring down the time lock at last, but the calculations, the simulations, it’s too complicated for them to solve in the minutes they have left.”

Cymmen grasped the potential immediately, her expression brightening. “But we have months!”

“Mm-hm. The DTI’s mobilizing all its science and engineering teams to work the problem, for as long as it takes. This is it—the endgame, one way or the other.”

The brightness faded from her face as she realized what came next. “And you’re going back to Earth to help.”

He lowered his gaze. “I know I’m not a scientist. I can’t help with that. But they’re down a director. Sonaj is a good man, but anything I could do to help coordinate . . .”

She clasped his shoulders. “You don’t need to explain, Marion. Lucsly’s your friend. You need to be there for him.”

“I’m glad you understand.”

“Of course I do. I’m pretty smart.”

He kissed her. “You are both pretty and smart.”

Cymmen rolled her eyes. “Oh, English and its double meanings. Someday I’ll learn to see those coming.”

She moved briskly to the bedroom closet and retrieved his travel case. “Is there anything else I can do to help?” she asked. “In my professional capacity, that is. I do have a whole Science Ministry at my disposal, you know.”

“I’m afraid a lot of the problem we’re working on is classified,” he answered. “We kinda have to keep it in the family.”

“I understand,” she said.

“Not that I don’t consider you— I mean, I was speaking professionally . . . one of those double meanings, you know . . .”

She chuckled. “I said I understand, Marion. And I appreciate the sentiment.” Cymmen examined the items in his closet. “I don’t suppose you can estimate how long you’ll be gone?”

“Afraid not. It’s a tricky problem to solve—and the people in the Vault are going to have to get it right the first time. So we’re going to need to do simulations, build working mock-ups, keep experimenting until we know we’ve got it licked. It could easily take weeks. Or longer.”

Cymmen shook her head. “Amazing. To have so much leisure to solve a problem of such urgency. Whoever invented the time lock was inspired.”

“Or a sadist,” Dulmur replied. “Whichever way this turns out, I’m gonna campaign to have the damn thing dismantled. It’s just not worth the grief for the rest of us. There’s gotta be a better way.” He sighed. “Not that I don’t appreciate having the chance to help Lucsly. But I hate having to be away from you so long.”

“Oh, Marion.” She was the first person in a long time that he didn’t mind hearing his first name from. “I told you the day we met: When two people share a bond, time and distance don’t matter. You’ll still be with me.”

He grew wistful. “I wish I could see it that way as easily as you.”

Cymmen pondered. “Well, maybe I can offer something that will help with that.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, no.” She smiled and took his hands. “For this, I have to ask you a question . . .”

Vault time: 1716 UTC, July 6

External time: Early December

Eris

The solution from outside took forty-six seconds to arrive, meaning that the DTI had spent eighteen days evaluating and testing solutions. Aware of the time limit operating inside the Vault, the experimenters had ruled out more complicated assemblages and focused on devising the simplest, quickest rig that could do the job. Warain had forwarded the message to Lucsly’s temporal tricorder and Andos’s padd, and the agents studied the schematics and instructions with Daiyar and Kvolan looking on. The plan relied mainly on a modification of the pulse generator itself, with the procedure spelled out to take no more than three minutes. The chronodeflector’s emitter array could be used to project and enlarge the temporal accelerator’s field; fortunately, the components that Kvolan’s fire had damaged were mostly nonessential for that purpose, and the rest could be replaced using components from the otherwise nonfunctional temporal transporter and travel sphere in Bays D4 and D7, respectively.

There was, however, one problem that the science teams outside had been unable to solve. The interaction of the accelerator field with the time lock would produce a tetryon radiation surge as dangerous as the one Daiyar’s pulse generator would have caused—probably even worse now, given the greater intensity of the dilation field. The plan called for the device to be activated on a timer while the occupants of the Vault retreated to safety within the maintenance corridors of the shielded archives—a tight but achievable squeeze. Daiyar ordered her troops to withdraw to the archives while she, Lucsly, Andos, and Kvolan remained to rig the accelerator apparatus. Warain and T’Viss reported that they had retrieved Felbog from the infirmary and were taking him to the archives as well.

But after 2.3 minutes’ work, Lucsly discovered a problem. “These circuits are more damaged than we thought. We can’t rig a time delay.”

Daiyar looked over the circuits to verify the issue for herself. “Can we set up a workaround?”

The Vault rumbled around them, and Lucsly briefly felt woozy. The subspace oscillations were beginning to grow intense enough to be felt in normal spacetime. “Not in the time we have left,” he replied.

“Someone will have to activate it manually,” Andos said.

“I’ll do it,” Lucsly volunteered before she could offer herself.

“No, Lucsly. The Department needs you.”

“The Department has never been without you, Director.”

“It got along fine when I was just a lowly researcher.”

“Enough nobility,” Daiyar interposed. “Have you forgotten I’m immune to tetryon radiation? I’m the obvious choice.”

“No,” Kvolan interjected. “We can’t trust her.”

Another rumble shook the Vault, and the walls seemed to ripple in Lucsly’s view. The gravimetric distortions were becoming visible. “I’m in the same trap as all of you,” Daiyar pointed out.

“You’ve made it clear that you care only for your own agenda.”

“Which I cannot fulfill if I’m torn from reality itself. Believe me, our interests currently align.”

“She’s right,” Lucsly said. “In fact, it simplifies things if we don’t need to rig an automatic control. You two get to the archives. Daiyar and I will finish up here.”

Kvolan glowered, but he allowed Andos to draw him away. Now it was just Lucsly and his antagonist, and they worked smoothly side by side to complete the device. “What about you?” he asked, unable to resist. “Assuming we get out of this, will you continue to pursue your goal as relentlessly?”

She kept her eyes on her work. “You will no doubt have me in custody. My goals will have to wait awhile.”

“You don’t seem to have a problem with waiting. You really don’t come from this time, do you?”

“You’ve already deduced much about who I am. By your own rules, you’re not allowed to ask for more.”

“Unless I have reason to believe your activities pose a threat to the timeline.”

Now she turned to face him, and the intensity in her eyes silenced him. “The same old party line—defend an arbitrary standard of ‘correct’ history at all costs, no matter who has to suffer. Can’t you see the injustice of it?”

“Every timeline has injustices. Changing it just creates new ones. And makes you responsible for them.”

She held his gaze for one more moment, saying nothing. Then a larger ripple trembled through the chamber, almost knocking them off their feet. “Argue with me later, Lucsly. I can finish up here. You just get to safety.”

He hesitated. “You know you’re under arrest, right?”

She shrugged. “Where can I go?”

Daiyar had a point. Even if the time lock were successfully deactivated, the residual subspace interference would probably prevent any of the working spacetime travel devices in the Vault from functioning properly for a while, if the tetryon surge didn’t blow them out altogether. Still, it took a major leap of faith for Lucsly to turn his back on the mysterious Tomika woman and run for the command bunker. He hated leaving transgressors at large. He looked forward to questioning Daiyar at length once she was safely in Department custody.

But first he had to survive the next few moments. The distortion waves were becoming more pronounced, disorienting him as he ran. He stumbled as the gravity began to shift beneath him. A powerful gravity surge slammed him to the floor . . . and then he felt as though the floor had dropped out from under him. As his weight failed to return, he realized that the gravity plating must have failed, overloaded by the subspace pulse. He carefully pushed to his feet and tried to move forward as best he could in Eris’s natural one-twelfth of a g. Once he figured out how to push forward with his feet rather than up, he made very good time down the corridor, but he almost overshot the bunker and had to grab the door frame to halt himself. The wall trembled and rippled beneath his hand. His hand rippled along with it. “Daiyar, activate now!” he cried.

“Are you secure?”

“Yes!” he lied, not wanting to argue. He pulled himself into the command bunker and kicked across the room to the archive doorway, where Andos waited for him. He only hoped the accelerator field would take longer to build up than it would take him to cross the room.

It seemed to take an eternity to reach Andos’s outstretched hands. No doubt the subspace distortion was altering his perception of time. Finally, Lucsly grabbed Andos’s hand and she pulled him inside. There was barely room for him between her massive frame and the doorway. Even as the door started to slide shut, he saw a spherical front of blue light racing through the bunker.

Then time and space seemed to stretch out from him in all directions, leaving him frozen in a dark void, unable to sense his own body, unable to focus on a thought . . .

0946 UTC, March 28, 2385

As Lucsly’s awareness returned, he registered the sound of a voice coming from a speaker: “. . . Come in! Repeat, this is the U.S.S. Everett calling the DTI Vault, do you read?”

He traded a look with Andos, as best he could in the tight space. “Real time. It worked.”

“Yes.” She turned back to the others, crowded together in the maintenance shafts. “Is everyone all right?”

As the others sounded off, Lucsly’s thoughts turned to the one person who was not among them. “Daiyar.” He struck the door control. As soon as the gap was wide enough, he slipped out and hastened from the command bunker as best he could in Eridian gravity, leaving it to Andos to respond to Captain Alisov.

When he reached Aisle D, the Tomika woman was nowhere to be seen. Clearly she had survived the radiation surge and was still mobile—but where had she gone? After a second’s thought, he raced for the observation gallery.

He found her there, next to the pile of artifacts the raiders had attempted to steal. But she held only one item in her slender hands: the time drive from Bay H26. He drew his phaser nonetheless. “Put it down, Daiyar. That drive isn’t functional anyway. It’s missing a key component.”

“For now,” she told Lucsly. “But I know where to find a suitable replacement.”

“You know there’s nowhere you can go. Your escape ship is gone, Starfleet is in orbit, and I doubt a transporter beam could get through the subspace interference at this point even if you had any allies in range.”

She looked disappointed in him. “Over the last hour or so, I learned not to underestimate you, Agent Lucsly. I’d think you would have learned to extend me the same courtesy.”

“I have. That’s why I hope I can convince you to abandon your plans to alter history. It always creates more problems than it solves.”

“Would it help if I told you the Federation’s past would not be affected? That its long-term future might even be protected?”

“You have no way of knowing the impact your actions will have on history.”

She sighed. “I know far more about the shape of possible histories than you could imagine, Agent Lucsly.”

“How?” he asked skeptically.

Daiyar triggered a control on her wrist and smiled wistfully. “Because it used to be my job to know.”

A high-pitched multitonal whine filled the chamber. A sphere of azure light surrounded her, its energy patterns roiling like a billowing fog. When the light and sound faded, both Daiyar and the time drive were gone.

And Lucsly knew who she was.

Epilogue

1233 UTC, March 28, 2385

U.S.S. Everett NCC-72392

Dulmur leaned back in his seat at Everett’s conference-room table and shook his head. “Why would an Aegis agent want to raid our Vault for a time machine? They can already beam through time.” Or indeed anywhere in space. As far as Everett had been able to track it, Daiyar’s transporter beam must have originated from hundreds of light-years away in the direction of the Gum Nebula.

“I doubt she was acting on Aegis business,” Lucsly replied from the adjacent seat, having positioned himself on Dulmur’s immediate right out of old habit. “The Aegis prefers to keep its operations clandestine and nonviolent. And the vast resources at its disposal leave no need to resort to hiring mercenaries.”

“So you think she’s a rogue operative?”

“We’ve seen Aegis operatives rebelling against the organization before—notably the group of renegades that hijacked the U.S.S. Pacific in 2290. Like Daiyar, they had access to Aegis transporters despite their rogue status. A security leak the Aegis has apparently not managed to plug in ninety-five years.”

“So why the raid?” Dulmur asked. “Why not just beam into the Vault and walk away with the time drive?”

“My guess?” Lucsly replied. “To conceal the true nature of the theft. As far as history would record, as far as the Aegis would know, the time drive would be just one of many artifacts stolen by Vomnin nationalists. Daiyar used Kvolan and his cause as protective camouflage for her own activities, to keep the Aegis or anyone else from knowing what she was up to.”

“And why that device in particular? What’s it got that an Aegis temporal transporter hasn’t got?”

Doctor Warain fielded that one. “There’s no way to be sure . . . but it’s from very far in the future, and there are elements of its functioning I can’t begin to understand. But from what I can determine, the principle on which it operates would be untraceable to our science. There’d be no way to track it to its destination, no way to follow her through time. Maybe it’s just as untraceable to the Aegis.”

Director Andos leaned forward. “So why go to all this trouble to hide herself from the Aegis? Merely to keep them from halting her attempt to change history? Or to leave the Aegis unprepared for an act targeted at their own history?”

“No way to know,” Lucsly said. “Until we find her.”

“Is that even possible?” Dulmur asked. “Sure, we know there was no temporal displacement to her beam-out, so she’s still in the present for now. But she’s got one hell of a head start on us. And an untraceable time machine.”

“She’s got an incomplete time machine. And we know what part is missing.”

Warain nodded. “That’s a component I can understand. You can probably narrow down a list of places where she could obtain a replacement in this time.”

Andos turned to Dulmur. “Director, you get your team on that while we do the same on our end.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Meanwhile, I’ll try to notify the Aegis that they have a rogue agent. I doubt they’ll be very responsive, though. They’ll probably advise that we leave this matter to them.”

“Not a chance,” Lucsly said. “We let her get away with a device that was in DTI custody. That means that whatever she does next is our responsibility.”

Dulmur frowned. “I wonder, though. If she was trying to hide her theft from uptime history, then she’s failed. It’ll be on record that this isn’t a Vomnin attempt to alter their own past. So wouldn’t that stop her from being able to do . . . whatever she was planning to do?”

“You didn’t meet her,” Lucsly said. “She was absolutely driven. Haunted. I’d say obsessed if she hadn’t been so rational about it. The failure of her decoy plan is a setback, but it won’t stop her. We just have to hope it’ll slow her down enough to let us catch her.”

“And what do you plan to do when you find her?” Dulmur asked, throwing his old partner a skeptical look. “She kind of kicked your butt the last time.”

“She took me by surprise. Next time we meet, I’ll have had time to prepare.”

Dulmur thought it over. He had rarely seen Lucsly this driven. He would have called it obsessed if—well. Maybe he needed someone to provide a counterbalance. “All right,” he said, “but I want you to do it as part of my team.”

Lucsly blinked. “What?”

“With your permission, Director. My people on Denobula have been working this case for nearly nine months. We’ve already done extensive digging into Daiyar’s past. We didn’t find much, but now that we know she’s Aegis, we might see something we missed before. It’d make sense if Lucsly combined what he learned through firsthand observation with what we learned through months of legwork.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Andos said. “That is, if it’s all right with you, Agent Lucsly.”

“It’s a sensible proposal,” Lucsly said. “I have no objection.”

Dulmur hadn’t expected more from his old partner. But he recognized—or allowed himself to imagine—a pleased tone in Lucsly’s voice.

When the briefing ended and the others left, the two ex-partners lingered in Everett’s observation lounge. Dulmur turned to gaze out at the snow-white surface of Eris, still looking deceptively pristine in the wake of all that had happened. “Hell of a mess down there,” he said.

“Mm-hm,” Lucsly agreed. “Now that the location has been compromised, we may have to relocate the Vault.”

“Another star system?”

“Probably not. Sol is still the best-defended system in the Federation. And there are thousands of ice dwarfs like Eris out here on the fringes. Even after centuries in space, most of them have never even been visited by living beings. Setting up multiple vaults throughout the scattered disk or the Oort cloud, with plenty of decoys, might be the best way to protect against future raids.”

“Hm.” Dulmur was silent for a moment. “And would they all have time locks?”

“It seemed to be an effective countermeasure.”

“Are you kidding? It was hell for the rest of us. Having to sit and watch you get slower and slower, having to wait months to see if our information helped you. And it wouldn’t have been much of a countermeasure if Daiyar’s pulse had worked. Or if it had torn you all apart on a subspace level.”

“On the contrary. Destroying the Vault’s entire contents on a subspace level would have kept them out of dangerous hands for good.”

Dulmur stared at him. He’d almost forgotten how relentless Lucsly’s dedication was. The younger man sighed. “Well, anyway. It’ll be nice working with you again, partner.”

“From my perspective, we last worked together five weeks and four days ago.”

“For me it’s been ten months to the day. And it hasn’t been a lot of fun.”

Lucsly frowned at him. “Don’t tell me you asked to work with me again because you missed me. We both agreed that moving on with your career was the right decision.”

Dulmur smiled. “Oh, we’re definitely agreed on that. Moving to Denobula was the best thing that ever happened to me. And for your information, pal, I haven’t been lonely without you. Or didn’t you notice?” he asked, holding up his left hand.

The taller man looked puzzled. “Notice what?”

“The ring!” Dulmur grinned. “I’m engaged! I’ve been dating the Denobulan Science Ministry liaison, and she asked me to marry her. We haven’t set the date yet because, well, I didn’t want you to miss the wedding.”

“Hm.” Lucsly blinked, taking several moments to let that sink in. “I would not have anticipated that.”

“Well, it just goes to show,” Dulmur said. “A lot can happen in ninety minutes.”

Acknowledgments and Notes

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 & Robert Hewitt Wolfe. Voyager’s bout with temporal reflections was seen in Star Trek: Voyager: “Parallax” Teleplay by Brannon Braga. Story by Jim Trombetta. The “time pocket” subspace field devices are from Star Trek: The Next Generation “Timescape.” Written by Brannon Braga. The Bozeman’s displacement in time is from Star Trek: The Next Generation “Cause and Effect” Written by 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 hijacking of the Pacific is also from “The Peacekeeper.” The black stone “prism” artifact was created by Kirsten Beyer in Star Trek: Voyager—The Eternal Tide.

The Vomnin species, the Consortium, the Pa’haquel, and the general situation within the Gum Nebula were established in my 2006 novel Star Trek: Titan—Orion’s Hounds. I established the Vomnin Confederacy in Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations—Watching the Clock five years later. In fact, I simply misremembered the name of the Vomnin state; but Orion’s Hounds did indicate that the Vomnin species had more than one interstellar nation, making it easy enough to fix my mistake.

For more information on stepwells, see “India’s Forgotten Stepwells” by Victoria Lautman at http://www.archdaily.com/395363/india-s-forgotten-stepwells/. Thanks to Laura Resnick for the Facebook post that brought the article to my attention exactly when I needed a description for the Denobulan branch office.

The math underlying the time lock is a geometric progression—a series in which you add successive terms that change by a consistent ratio each time. The formula for that is:

a(1−r m)

1−r
where a is the first term in the series, r is the constant by which each term is multiplied to give the next term, and m is the number of iterations. This gives the total quantity after m iterations. In this case, I assumed that time slowed by a factor of 2 every 6 minutes (which gave me the best ratio of internal to external time), so a = 6 and r = 2. This means the denominator is −1, so the formula simplifies to –6(1−2m) = 6(2m−1). The elapsed time inside is a times m, the number of minutes per iteration times the number of iterations. So when m = 1, 6 minutes have passed both inside and outside; when m = 2, 12 minutes have passed inside and 18 outside; and so on. That means the slowdown doesn’t begin until the first 6 minutes have already passed, so I’m actually calculating from 1546 UTC as the starting point, with the time lock kicking in at 1552 UTC.

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 Star Trek: Enterprise—Rise of the Federation series, so far including A Choice of Futures, Tower of Babel, Uncertain Logic, and Live by the Code. His shorter works include stories in the anniversary anthologies Constellations, The Sky’s the Limit, Prophecy and Change, and Distant Shores, as well as the DTI novella The Collectors. 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 and several novelettes in Analog and other science fiction magazines, several of which have been compiled in the e-book collection Hub Space: Tales from the Greater Galaxy. More information and annotations, plus the author’s blog, can be found at christopherlbennett.wordpress.com.

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ISBN 978-1-5011-2334-4

Table of Contents

- Dedication
- Historian’s Note
- Epigraph
- Chapter I
- Chapter II
- Chapter III
- Chapter IV
- Chapter V
- Chapter VI
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Copyright