A Matter of Time, Part 03
A MATTER OF TIME
by Soledad
For disclaimer, rating, etc., see the Introduction.
The real name of canon!Daniels is from the Memory Beta website, so it is semi-canon, at the very least. I added a bit to his personal background, mostly because there's so very little of it in canon.
The specifics of the Wells-class timeship are taken from the Ex Astris Scientia website, the rest of the technobabble from the Memory Alpha Wiki. The original Relativity and her crew are Voyager canon, from the similarly titled episode.
Berlingoff Rasmussen is also a canon character, from the TNG-episode "A Matter of Time". His final fate was, of course, different from what I've come up with here. The details about him are taken from the Star Trek Encyclopaedia by Denise and Mike Okuda.
Chapter 03 - Future Perfect
The place in the 31st century where the Doctor takes Ianto to be trained for his crucially important task is a beautiful, ringed planet that would put Saturn to shame. Only that it is an Earth-like world with a solid surface, of course, and the rings consist of the shattered remain of its erstwhile moons.
"They had an erratic orbit and eventually collided," the Doctor explains dismissively. "It happened several hundred thousand years before the planet would be colonized; they were lifeless rocks anyway. But it was a spectacular view for certain."
Ianto doesn't ask how the Doctor would know that. Knowing him from hearsay as Ianto does, the Time Lord has probably visited the sector at that long-gone time, just to enjoy the spectacle. After hall, won't he take Rose Tyler to watch the destruction of Earth's entire system, soon?
If that didn't give the term "catastrophe tourism" a whole new meaning…
The centre of the Federation Temporal Agency is situated in the main city of the planet, the name of which Ianto never learns; nor that of the city, for that matter. All he knows is that they are somewhere on the other end of the galaxy, presumably. Not that it matters. He's here to learn what he needs to bring his mission to success, not to become familiar with the place itself.
He's assigned to the assistant director of the Agency, a male genetic hybrid meant Timot Danlen, who declares to be "mostly human". Later Ianto learns that cross-breeding between humans and various alien species will become commonplace in the 31st century and starts wondering what other DNA besides human Jack might carry in his genetic profile. That would explain things that mere cultural differences between his time and Ianto's could not.
If Ianto was still concerned that he'd have to cooperate with Jack's infamous Time Agency, his first glimpse of Danlen puts his concerns to rest. The man's bleak face persuades him more than any promises of the doctor ever could that the organization he's about to join has nothing to do with Jack and John Hart's bunch. Danlen is incredibly dull, and whatever Jack and John Hart might have been as Time Agents, they certainly weren't dull.
Couldn't have faked it for their lives.
From the lounge of the Agency building there's a spectacular view of the central square of the city, with what Danlen calls the Federation Monument in its centre. On the other side of the square stands the Central Library: a multi-storeyed building that houses all the digital information the Agency has collected since it came into existence. Ianto's heartbeat quickens at the thought of so much knowledge but he also knows that his access would be limited at best.
Still, he enjoys his time in the city of the future very much. Futurama, as he nicknames it after that silly animated series, since he's never told is actual name, is a colourful conglomerate of different styles in architecture - though all buildings tend to be very tall - fashion… and people. Despite it being a human colony - mostly - it is populated by dozens, perhaps hundreds of alien species coexisting with the human majority… and that's without counting the hybrids. The city alone has over a million inhabitants (almost ten per cent of them trainees like Ianto himself) and they are said to be several other cities elsewhere on the planet.
Ianto never gets to see them. Like other time-travellers, he's confined to the capital to prevent him from learning things he isn't supposed to know. He doesn't really mind. The capital is an amazing place; and besides, he's got a great deal of learning to do, which fill out his time more than adequately.
The Agency trainees all wear a uniform: a jumpsuit of some metallic-looking, dark blue jumpsuit with a high collar and bizarrely formed shoulder patches. It looks bloody uncomfortable - but, surprisingly enough, it isn't. On the contrary, it feels like a second skin, soft and form-fitting; it takes Ianto weeks not to feel naked in public, and he can't shake the thought how much Jack would love this place.
A personal communicator is integrated into the shoulder patches, and a broche on the high collar indicates the date up to which each trainee is allowed to know things. Everybody in the capital seems to know those symbols, and they deal with the trainees accordingly. People obviously take the preservation of the timeline very seriously here.
Ianto is even told that a transponder and a tracing device have been subcutaneously injected into each trainee, so that the Agency can intervene quickly and effectively, should that person find his way to places they aren't supposed to be. Knowing what consequences the butterfly effect can have - though certainly different ones than human writers of the 19th and 20th century imagined - Ianto can only agree with such measures.
The Doctor leaves as soon as he's dropped Ianto off, promising to pick him up as soon as his training is finished. But Ianto is so busy with his studies, with exploring the city and with meeting people that he doesn't have the time to feel lonely. And while Timot Danlen may be a dull person, he's a very good teacher who really knows his stuff.
Ianto is fairly sure that he'll never forget the moment in which his mentor first activated the temporal observatory in his presence: a small, hand-held device that operates by projecting a holographic representation of the timestream, allowing the agents to supervise various activities being carried out by time travellers. Having worked for Torchwood has made him quite unflappable, but being surrounded by the 3D representation of the fourth dimension is something even he was awed by, and he suspects that he will be, until his last breath.
But he learns to work with it; to interpret the incredible things he gets to see. He learns to locate himself in the timestream compared with the actual time he's come from and with the century he'll be sent to. He also learns that the adversaries he will have to stop come from an earlier century than the one he is habiting now.
"They can't manifest themselves physically in the past," Danlen explains. "They can only partially materialize, to deliver information."
"Won't I be running into the same problem?" Ianto asks, because frankly, he cannot imagine time travel being possible without the TARDIS, and even the Doctor often enough ends up somewhere - or somewhen - else than intended.
Another possibility would be a Vortex manipulator, but those haven't been developed yet and won't be for another two thousand years, give or take a few decades.
Danlen gives him a bland smile. "Don't worry. In the years that followed we eventually perfected the process."
"It still sounds dangerous," Ianto says and his mentor nods in agreement.
"It is. Which is why, when time travel was first developed, it didn't take long for people to realize that laws had to be made. All the species who had the technology agreed it would only be used for research."
"But it wasn't, was it?" Ianto asks; though it isn't really a question.
The mere fact that Jack's Time Agency - which, according to the (admittedly rare) hints from Jack and even John Hart, was, or rather would be, a ruthless bunch of people - needed to be formed, is proof for that.
Danlen nods grimly. "Unfortunately, it wasn't. The timestream is full of groups of archaeologists, coming from all times, who observe the past using the proper procedures, set forth in the Temporal Accord."
"The what?"
"You'll learn about it later, in great detail. What you must know is that there are factions that ignore those procedures, and we have reason to believe that the 22nd century is a front in what we call the Temporal Cold War. What happens there could affect millennia to come. It's imperative to find out a particular agent from the opposite side and to find out who he's working for and what they're trying to do."
"And this agent," Ianto begins, "is he human? Or one of those Klingon people?"
Danlen shakes his head. "No. He belongs to a semi-reptilian species called the Suliban - a species that are on roughly the same level of technological development as humans, back in the 22nd century. Only that a certain group of them, who call themselves the Cabal, have been given genetic enhancements that go well beyond the medical knowledge they are supposed to possess."
"So you suppose they've got some help from the future?" Ianto guesses.
"We know they have," Danlen replies grimly. "They have been staging attacks within the Klingon Empire... making it appear that one faction is attacking another. There is a certain Klingon courier named Klaang who was bringing proof of this to his High Council. Without that proof, the Empire could be thrown into chaos, which would dangerously change the balance of power in the 22nd century.
"Is that the ultimate goal of the Suliban?" Ianto tries to digest all the information dumped into his lap in record time.
Daniels shakes his head again. "The Cabal doesn't make decisions on its own. They're simply soldiers fighting in the Temporal Cold War. What we need to find out is who they get their instructions from. And for that, the Klingon courier, lying injured in the sickbay of the ship you'll be infiltrating, must reach his homeworld in one piece."
"Geez, thanks," Ianto mutters sarcastically. "No pressure at all, then. Just like in old times at Torchwood!"
"What the Doctor told us shows that you're fairly good at fighting impossible odds," Danlen replies calmly. "And you won't be alone. Now, why don't we try to improve your skills at using the temporal observatory? There's more than a little room for further improvement yet."
All these things - especially training with the observatory - are shocking and exciting and surprising. But all that is nothing compared with the experience of his first actual time travel. The Relativity NCV-474439 H - the eighth vessel by that name - is the oldest and most famous of the Temporal Agency's remaining timeships, and she's like nothing Ianto has ever seen before.
She's most definitely nothing like the TARDIS, either.
Her predecessor, a Wells-class vessel, was commissioned at the University of Copernicus, under the command of a certain Captain Braxton (whose final fate is still somewhat of an embarrassment for the Agency and therefore not spoken of). That model was already equipped with powerful sensors, capable of scanning through space-time, and with a temporal transporter capable of beaming any to individual virtually any point in space or time.
Within limits, of course. Like all technology, it, too, had its range beyond which it couldn't operate.
The current Relativity has been built in the early 30th century and is very similar to her predecessor, if the archive holopictures are any indication.
"She's a bit more user-friendly, that's all," her commanding officer, a resolute, no-nonsense woman named Lois Ducane, explains. "This particular area of temporal technology hasn't been developed much further, as we've found more efficient ways of personal travel. She's still a real beauty, though - and one tough old lady at that."
Captain Ducane is related to Danlen from afar, which is probably why she's agreed to allow Ianto to go on a mission with them. One of her ancestors was the executive officer of the previous Relativity and managed to save a crucially important mission when the ill-remembered Captain Braxton went mad due to temporal psychosis.
Or will go mad, seen from Ianto's temporal POV. He finds it increasingly difficult to use the correct tenses. But Jack's got used to it, so he hopes that - given enough time (no pun intended) - he will, too. Eventually.
Captain Ducane is very proud of her ancestry - and of her vessel. A pride that, Ianto finds, is entirely justified.
The Relativity doesn't seem to have much in common with the enormous, twin-nacelled Starfleet vessels Ianto has, in theory, become familiar with. She's small - merely 193 metres long and has only 9 decks - smooth and streamlined and looks more like the futuristic version of a submarine. While capable of faster-than-light travel the same way 22nd century Earth ships are.
Only considerably faster. The Enterprise, which Ianto is supposed to infiltrate, can reach warp factor 5 and hold it for a short time. The maximum travelling velocity of the Relativity is warp factor 9.9798… which is the highest speed any Starfleet vessel has ever reached.
"By the 24th century, infinite velocity has been designed as warp factor 10," Captain Ducane explains. "It was considered to be unattainable by conventional means. Because of this, extremely high warp factors are indicated with fractional values between 9 and 10."
"Has the warp 10 barrier been ever broken?" Ianto asks.
He's never been very good at physics, but working for Torchwood and travelling with the Doctor, even for a short while, has taught him that there's nothing absolute in the universe. Or in any other universe, for that matter.
"It has been tried… with various levels of success," Captain Ducane replies with a shrug. "Different attempts to build a functional transwarp drive have been - or, from your temporal POV, will be - made in the 23rd and 24th century. However, none of those engines actually reached infinite velocity; they just got closer to it than the traditional warp drive."
"Is such a thing possible at all?"
"In theory, yes. Theoretically, should anyone be able to break the warp 10 barrier, they'd be present at all points of the universe at the same time."
Ianto shakes his head in bewilderment.
"That's beyond my comprehension. Why were those tests abandoned, though? I mean from where you're standing, you guys have had at least seven centuries to perfect that drive."
"And we would have," Captain Ducane agrees, "had it not been discovered that the effect causes hyper-evolution in the human body."
Ianto gives her a blank look. "Meaning what?"
"Meaning that the test persons turned into mindless amphibian creatures and started breeding like crazy," Danlen, who's also present at this discussion, answers dryly.
Ianto decides he doesn't need to know the gory details and drops the topic at once.
But the Relativity is still a marvel. She may not have the sentience and the ability of interdimensional travel like the TARDIS, but where the looks are considered, she'd definitely be the winner. A fact that Ianto definitely isn't going to tell the Doctor, but facts are facts.
Unlike the cluttered control room of the TARDIS, the bridge of the Relativity is large and airy, consisting of clean, elegantly curved lines, and part of its ceiling is made of transparent aluminium, through which one can see the cosmos outside like from an observation dome. The dominating colour is blue, followed by beiges and greys and silver highlights, and all the touch-screens and displays and viewscreens show three-dimensional holographic images.
The ship operates with a skeleton crew of twenty that, at first sight, seems to wear identical black uniforms. In the right light, however, one can make out the difference between dark maroon, charcoal grey and midnight blue - with the corresponding, asymmetrical shoulder patches - depending on which department the individual crewmembers belong.
The crew is mostly human - at least they look human, though Ianto's certain that some of them have got alien genes included in their genetic make-up, just like Danlen - save the helmsman, who looks like a bipedal dinosaur, complete with a bonecrest parting his bare skull. Unless it's a female, of course. It's impossible to tell by their looks alone.
The sight makes Ianto miss Myfanwy, though. He never learned what's become of their pet pterodactyl after the destruction of the Hub, and he seriously doubts he ever will.
Captain Ducane entrusts Ianto to her executive officer, a young, vaguely Asian-looking bloke whose unusually pale skin and slightly pointed ears suggest a few Vulcanoid ancestors. Green Vulcan blood makes even hybrids look very pale; and he has the detached, somewhat aloof manner Vulcans are known for.
Ianto would like to know how it's come to the cross-breeding between humans and other species (and, more importantly, when). Given their different biochemistry, it couldn't have been easy to produce offspring to begin with, let alone fertile offspring, as it's unlikely they'd have chosen to breed barren hybrids. I wouldn't be logical, and though Ianto's knowledge of Vulcans is theoretical at best, he knows they wouldn't do anything that couldn't be justified by logical means.
But there's not time to satisfy his curiosity, not at the moment anyway. The Relativity is about to depart on a mission and he needs to play close attention to how such missions are handled.
They go back - or, from Ianto's personal POV, forward - to the 24th century to retrieve a rogue time traveller - a human one - and his stolen equipment belonging to yet another time period.
"The man's name is Berlingoff Rasmussen," the Relativity's executive officer explains. "He likes to call himself Professor Rasmussen, claiming to be a historian from the 26th century."
"But he isn't, is he?" Ianto guesses.
The lieutenant shakes his head.
"No; in truth he's a 22nd century con artist from New Jersey and had stolen his time travel pod from an actual 26th century researcher."
"What for?" Ianto asks, feeling bad news to come.
The lieutenant shrugs.
"He was apparently hoping to steal artefacts of 24th century technology. His plan was to return to the 22nd century, where he used to be a less than successful inventor, and then grow wealthy by claiming to have invented those devices."
"And where is he now?" Ianto asks.
"In the brig of the Enterprise - D, the 5th successor of your future ship," the lieutenant explains. "Captain Picard's managed to reveal his true identity in time and is about to have him taken under custody to Starbase 214 where, he finds, Rasmussen would be helpful in some legitimate historical research."
"That's not such a bad idea, actually," Ianto comments.
"Under normal circumstances it wouldn't be," the lieutenant allows. "But in the light of the current situation back in the 22nd century, considering the drastic changes that are taking place at this very moment, we simply cannot afford to let him talk about his own time."
"Because what he remembers might differ from what history knows about it in the 24th century," Ianto guesses.
The lieutenant gives him an appraising look. "Very good. We'll make an able temporal agent of you yet."
Ianto pulls a face. "Joy. Just what've been dreamed of since my early childhood. Speaking of which, what's happened to the stolen time travel pod?"
"Such pods had a timed return mechanism," the lieutenant explains. "Captain Picard had Rasmussen held at gunpoint until the pod returned to the 26th century automatically."
"That's good, isn't it?" Ianto doesn't really understand what the problem is.
"Yes and no," the lieutenant replies with a sigh. "We still have to pick it up and take it back to the 22nd century, so that its original traveller can board it again and return to his own time."
"We're going to the 26th century?" Ianto is getting excited.
What little he's heard about that time period shows that it was - will be - a time of great discoveries and expansion. For Earth and mankind above all else.
"You won't be able to leave the ship," the lieutenant warns him. "In that period, people don't have the failsafes to protect the timeline as we do."
Ianto nods. "I know. It's still exciting, even watched on the viewscreens. What about Rasmussen, though? Are we taking him back to the 22nd century?"
The lieutenant shakes his head. "No, he's learned too much about the 24th century already; and he can't be trusted to handle that knowledge in a responsible manner."
"What are we doing with him, then?" Ianto asks. "You said we can't leave him in the 24th century, either."
"True," the lieutenant agrees. "Which is why we're bringing him back here. Our historians can use his memories to help restore the timeline - and you can discuss 22nd century trivia with him. That might prove useful."
"I'm fairly sure he'll be lying through his teeth," Ianto comments dryly," and we won't be able to tell when he's lying, unless you have one of those alien lie detector chairs that make the heads of eighty per cent of the species they're used on explode."
"No need for that," the lieutenant replies. "We've got something better: telepaths."
"Actually, I find that a lot worse," Ianto says grimly. "But it's your show."
"You're right; it is," the lieutenant replies. "And as you'll see, we're quite efficient at dealing with such things."
Within two days, the mission is completed. Ianto isn't allowed to leave the Relativity, either in the 24th or in the 26th century, but Captain Ducane takes him with her to the 22nd century to pick up the stranded 26th century historian. They reach Earth barely a minute after Rasmussen had stolen the time travel pod and replace it within its traveller noticing that it was gone in the first place.
Afterwards Ianto has indeed long discussions with Rasmussen. Not so much for the information; although, of course, the man can tell him minute details of 22nd century life not even the Temporal Agency is familiar with. The truth is, Rasmussen reminds him of Jack - of the young, mortal Jack he never knew. The one who'd conned his way through space and time - until he met the Doctor.
Not that Rasmussen would have anything in common with Jack. Not beyond being a con man, that is. And still, Ianto can't help liking him… at least a little bit.
"He may be a con man, but he isn't an idiot," he tells Danlen. "He can think fast on his feet and use his knowledge for the greatest effect. He'll be definitely wasted here."
Danlen nods. "I know. We'll try to re-train him; put him through rehabilitation and all that. If we succeed, we might even reintegrate him into his own time - he might come in handy for you. It depends on him."
A few weeks later, though, the conversations with Rasmussen end, as Ianto finishes his training in the 31st century. He's learned everything he could. It's time for him to begin with his mission.
He has made no closer friends in Futurama - all trainees are encouraged not to, as they'll have to leave eventually - so it's only his mentor he needs to say good-bye to when the Doctor arrives to pick him up.
"How long has it been for you?" he asks the Time Lord
"A little more than two years," the Doctor replies. "I've met your Toshiko - what an extraordinary young woman. I greatly enjoyed having her as a travelling companion- It's such a shame that she's lost for mankind."
He doesn't mention Jack, so Ianto calculates that for him it's after the Slitheen invasion in yet before the London Blitz. Ianto has to agree with him where Tosh is considered, though.
"Yes, it is," he says. "But she told us in her recoded message that she'd loved her life and her work, and that is, at least, some comfort. I wish I had left my sister a message like that - even though it would have been a lie."
"No use to cry over spilt milk now," the Doctor says in a surprisingly compassionate manner. "You have a mission to complete; probably the most important one of your life. Are you ready?"
"As ready as I'll ever be," Ianto shrugs.
"Very well, then," the Doctor ushers him into the TARDIS. "Let's go. The target is the 22nd century, the year 2151, Earth's orbital spacedock - the starship Enterprise."
He runs around the control console, pushing buttons and throwing levers like a maniac, and the TARDIS dematerializes with the usual loud, grinding noise.
~TBC~