Christopher L. Bennett - Star Trek: Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock

CIVILIAN SHIP, THEVERITY,REPORTED LOST ON STARDATE 43021.5. A SATURDAY.

Were sure its a displacement? Not a time dilation event?

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

Active?

Nearly closed. Starship on the scene scanned itlooks like a cosmic-string Kerr loop, probably triggered by the fighting near Regulus.

Twenty-two days after the battle?

Twenty-two light-days out. Didnt open until the radiation surge hit it.

A chill ran through Dulmur. If the disruption originated in the present, it couldve caused an alteration downtime.

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

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 So all we have to worry about is thirty-eight people who have to adjust to being fifteen years out of date.

And two months and four days, Lucsly inevitably added.

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

Lucsly nodded. TDDll have its work cut out.

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

OTHERSTAR TREKNOVELS
BY CHRISTOPHER L. BENNETT

Star Trek: Ex Machina

Star Trek: TitanOrions Hounds

Star Trek: The Next GenerationThe Buried Age

Places of Exile (from Star Trek: Myriad Universes
Infinitys Prism )

Star Trek: The Next GenerationGreater Than the Sum

Star Trek: TitanOver a Torrent Sea

Short Fiction

Aftermath (from Star Trek Corps of Engineers:
Aftermath )

... Loved I Not Honor More (from Star Trek:
Deep Space NineProphecy and Change )

Brief Candle (from Star Trek: VoyagerDistant Shores )

As Others See Us (from Star Trek: Constellations )

The Darkness Drops Again (from Star Trek:
Mere Anarchy )

Friends with the Sparrows (from Star Trek:
The Next GenerationThe Skys the Limit )

Empathy (from Star Trek: Shards and Shadows )

More Novels

X-Men: Watchers on the Walls

Spider-Man: Drowned in Thunder

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To my father
(19332010 CE)

Time is a companion who goes with us
on the journey and reminds us to cherish
every moment, because theyll never come again.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that
the distinction between past, present, and future
is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Albert Einstein (1955 CE)

People assume that time is a strict progression of
cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear,
non-subjective viewpoint, its more like a big ball of
wibbly-wobbly... timey-wimey... stuff.

Steven Moffat (2007 CE)

I

March 10, 2381 Common Era, Gregorian Calendar A Tuesday

Department of Temporal Investigations Branch Office
San Francisco, North Am, Earth
18:32 UTC

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

Great, thought Marion Dulmur. Just great. A veteran DTI agent had suffered a breakdown after a particularly stressful mission, taken a researcher hostage at phaserpoint, and turned the San Francisco office into a siege zone... yet he couldnt resist making a lame time-related pun. I hate those.

Outwardly, Dulmur kept his cool. Poor Rani Mohindras life hung by a thread right now. George Faunt was a good agent, a man Dulmur had worked alongside for years. But he wasnt the first to be overwhelmed by the existential crises this job forced a person to confront day in and day out. Just take it easy, George, Dulmur said as gently as his gravelly voice would allow. Just relax, take a deep breath, and think about this for a minute. He winced, but it was too late to call it back.

A minute? Faunt barked a hysterical laugh, and Mohindra jerked and whimpered in his grip. How many minutes of my life have I given to this job? Six million, five hundred and thirtyno, twenty-seven thousand, seven hundred and, what?

Thirty-two, Dulmur filled in despite himself, and Faunt caught him doing the calculation. You know, dont you? Down to the millisecond! This job, this jobthey train you to pretend time is this rigid, exacting thing, to break it all down into precise durations and dates... but its just a distraction, Dulmur! The truth is that time is chaos, its meaningless. All we are is random quantum fluctuations that can collapse into the cosmic foam just like that! He punctuated it by jamming the phaser harder into Mohindras cheek. She closed her eyes and her lips moved in prayer.

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

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