Instead, Kirk had thrown himself into his work patrolling the border, settling into a comfortable routine aboard the Sacagawea. He’d occupied his downtime on the starbase with reading, chess, sparring in the gym, and occasional amiable but casual dalliances with various women, such as the sweetly lovely paramedic Monika Tatsumi, the passionate and spiritual geologist Tina Sanchez, and the Hannibal’s second officer, a tall, dark, and stunning Makusian lieutenant commander named Nijen Danehl. Contrary to Gary Mitchell’s gibes, there had been only one blonde in the bunch, a JAG lieutenant named Areel Shaw—and she had been the one to pursue him, not the other way around. He’d been hesitant at first, but the ambitious attorney had proven highly effective at arguing her case.
“Thank you all for coming.” Captain Wesley’s voice broke Kirk out of his momentary reverie. The Beowulf’s captain took his seat at the head of the table. “As you’re all aware, we’re responding to a border incursion by a fleet of ships on course for the Adelphous system, which houses a Federation colony of over two million inhabitants on its fourth planet. Long-range scans have not provided an identification of the incoming ships, but we know there are nine of them and they’re quite large.”
“But we’re heading for the Klingon border,” Gupta said. “We sure they aren’t some new kind of Klingon ship?”
“Their energy signatures and profiles don’t match any known variant of Klingon starship technology,” Wesley answered. “What’s more, I was just briefed by Starfleet Intelligence. Their long-range scans and signal intercepts, backtracking along the intruders’ course, show evidence of a battle between these ships and Klingon forces on the outskirts of the Qalras system, an imperial mining colony some two parsecs from the border. It looks like the Klingons repelled them from entering the system, but at considerable cost. A transmission fragment we managed to decrypt called them ‘demons.’ They may not have managed to defeat the Klingons, but they certainly spooked them.”
“And now these ‘demons’ have picked Adelphous as their Plan B,” Baek conjectured.
“Possibly,” Wesley replied. “We don’t yet know their motives, but we know their capabilities, and we know they’ve ignored warnings from our border marker buoys. We must treat this as a hostile incursion, until and unless we manage to achieve communication with the intruders and determine otherwise.”
“Could this be some Klingon trick?” Kirk mused. “Maybe we were supposed to see evidence of a battle, to give the Klingons deniability for breaking the truce. Even if these are some other species, they may be doing the Klingons’ bidding. We’ve seen before that at least some Klingons are capable of that kind of deviousness.”
“Up to a point, perhaps,” Captain T’Saren replied. “But one of the key doctrines of Klingon philosophy is ‘Always face your enemy.’ Even when employing a deceptive stratagem, Klingons prefer to do so themselves rather than hide, as they would perceive it, behind a proxy. When Klingons have attempted espionage in Federation space, they have employed Klingon agents surgically altered to appear human, rather than co-opting Federation citizens as intelligence assets.”
Wesley raised a hand. “We can sort out their goals and agendas later. Right now, we need to devise a plan for our initial confrontation. We’ll be heavily outnumbered and outpowered. Starbase 24 is sending an additional three ships as reinforcements, led by the Potemkin. But they’ll be two hours behind us. We have those two hours to either establish peaceful contact . . . or do what we can to hold the line and stop them from reaching Adelphous IV.”
U.S.S. Sacagawea
First contact missions had always given Jim Kirk a special thrill. The opportunity for new discovery, the chance to learn about a species and culture previously unknown to the Federation, fulfilled the dreams of the explorer in him—even as the potential risk and the prospect of hostility fired the caution of the soldier in him. Of all the missions Starfleet undertook, none was so fraught with possibility and peril, so potentially important to the future of entire civilizations.
In his years of Starfleet service, Kirk had been involved in his share of first contacts, particularly during the Vulcanian Expedition—the vernacular nickname that the press and public had somehow adopted for an eight-month joint survey of deep space by the Vulcan Expeditionary Group and Starfleet, in which Kirk had participated as first officer of the Eagle. The first contacts he had been involved with during that probe—both clandestine ones with pre-warp civilizations like the Xarakans and the Habardians and overt ones with starfaring peoples like the Alraki and the Escherites—were among the most cherished highlights of his career so far. But the impending encounter with the fleet of mystery ships would be Kirk’s first such mission as a captain. He regretted that it might turn out to be a hostile one.
Of course, it was Robert Wesley who was in overall command of the mission, and even though the older captain had risen through the ranks as a tactical officer and distinguished himself in battles from Donatu V to Omega Leonis, Kirk was confident that he would do everything possible to find a peaceful resolution before resorting to combat. Indeed, as the Starfleet task force drew closer to the oncoming alien fleet, Wesley transmitted a general hail, which was heard on the Sacagawea’s bridge through the open channel among all five ships.
“Attention, unidentified vessels. This is Captain Robert Wesley of the U.S.S. Beowulf, speaking on behalf of the United Federation of Planets. You have been notified that the space you have recently entered is the territory of the Federation. The star system toward which you are heading, which we call Adelphous, is home to a Federation colony. We ask that you identify yourselves and explain your purpose in approaching the Adelphous system.”
Silence. After a few moments, Kirk looked over his shoulder toward the communications officer. “Ensign Moravec, any reaction?”
The young man shook his head. “Nothing, Captain.”
After the silence from the alien fleet had dragged on for a sufficient time, Wesley’s voice resumed. “Once again: You have intruded on Federation territory. If you do not identify yourselves and explain your purpose in approaching the Adelphous system, we will be forced to conclude that your intentions are hostile, in which case we will react accordingly. We do not wish to engage in conflict if it can be avoided. Our purpose is to protect the lives of the Federation’s citizens. But if you do not halt your approach and explain your presence in our territory, you will leave us no choice but to take defensive action.”
The ships continued to ignore Wesley’s hails. “All vessels, raise shields,” the senior captain ordered. “Weapons on standby. Once in range, the Beowulf will attempt a warning shot. Stand ready to maneuver.”
Per proper chain of command, Kirk repeated the instructions to his bridge crew. “Shields up, phasers on standby. Lieutenant Yu, can you show us what we’re facing?”
“Coming into sensor range now, Captain,” Elena Yu reported. “One moment.” She finessed the science station’s controls for a few more seconds, then sent an image to the main viewer.
The nine oncoming ships were massive cylinders, nearly as wide as they were long. They appeared to have hollow cores running clear through them, inside which were delicate-looking lattices supporting piercingly bright energy sources of some kind. Their exterior surfaces were covered in hexagonal plates of a dark yellow-brown material. The ships came in at least three different sizes, with the largest one in the lead.
“Ships range in size from roughly one to one-point-six kilometers,” Yu reported. “Hull composition is largely tritanium alloys and high-performance crystalline ceramics. The heat signatures suggest considerable power output. I can’t get any clear readings on interior conditions or biosigns through the shielding.”
“No warp nacelles,” Mehran Egdor observed from his place by the command chair. “Is that central lattice some kind of warp assembly?”
“Stand by.” Yu worked her controls to redirect her scans. “I am picking up intense gravimetric distortions from those central energy sour
ces.” She shook her head in bewilderment. “The spectral readings I’m getting off those things . . . they’re consistent with the radiation emitted by matter falling into a microsingularity.”
Mitchell turned to stare at Yu in disbelief. “A miniature black hole? We’ve detected, what, a handful of those in centuries of looking? And they have nine of them?”
“Eighteen. Each ship has two of equal mass, one fore and one aft. The consistency . . . they couldn’t have just harvested them. They must have manufactured them, or at least regulated their growth.”
“What kind of weapons could a thing like that power?” Azadeh Khorasani mused from the helm.
Mitchell reacted to an alarm. “Sir, they’re neutralizing warp!”
Khorasani sighed. “I had to ask. Something tells me they aren’t surrendering.”
As usual, her tactical instincts proved sound. Immediately after the Beowulf fired its warning shot at the lead cylinder ship, the alien fleet split off into four groups of two or three, veering onto multiple different trajectories. “They’re trying to make an end run around us,” Wesley announced. “Break formation and intercept before they can return to warp. Sacagawea, stick with Leonov.”
That last order made sense; the Hermes-class scout and the Miranda-class frigate were two of the smallest ships in the task force. Kirk was grateful for the backup, though he wasn’t sure a Vulcan like T’Saren was the best partner to have in a combat situation.
“Interesting that they had to break warp to change course,” Egdor observed. “Vulcan ringships tend to have limited maneuverability at warp, and these ships have a similar configuration. That could be an advantage for us.”
“Unless they stay at impulse,” Kirk reminded him. “Which is what we’ve been ordered to ensure.”
In moments, the two ships had placed themselves in the path of their chosen pair of cylinder ships. Kirk followed T’Saren’s lead in dropping out of warp and firing another pair of warning shots across the much larger vessels’ prows. The reaction was unexpected. For a moment, it looked like debris was flying outward from the ships in all directions. “Did we . . . hit them somehow?” Mitchell wondered.
“No, it’s too uniform,” Khorasani said.
“It’s the armor plating,” Kirk realized, even as the pieces began to slow. “It’s . . . expanding.”
While Kirk was reminded of a blowfish inflating itself in response to a threat, the reality was not quite the same. The armor plates retained their size, but increased their separation from one another. They stopped about a hundred meters out from each ship’s hull, settling into an ovoid configuration fully surrounding each vessel, and began to rotate. “They’re suspended in a powerful electromagnetic field,” Elena Yu reported. “Flux-pinned in place like a maglev train above its superconducting track.”
“It’s like an ablative deflector shield,” Egdor realized. “The plates absorb hits and the ship is insulated from the damage. Remarkable.”
“I could get a shot in through the gaps, no problem,” Khorasani said. “Just give me a few more moments to correct for the pattern.”
“The field is surging,” Yu announced. “Something’s cha—whoa, incoming!”
A moment later, the ship rocked under a massive hit. Kirk clutched the arms of his command chair as the lights flickered and the shield circuits audibly strained. “What hit us?” the captain cried once the noise subsided.
Yu turned to face him, alarm in her youthful eyes. “One of the armor plates, sir. It’s massive, dense, and the field accelerated it so sharply I could barely detect its approach.”
“Shields are down eighteen percent, Jim,” Mitchell reported. “From just one hit.”
“The Leonov is taking fire too,” Ensign Moravec reported. “If . . . you can call it fire.”
“Close enough,” Kirk said. “They’re lobbing cannonballs at us.”
Egdor shook his head. “It seems almost primitive—but also very sophisticated.”
“Kinetic energy’s as deadly as any other kind,” Khorasani observed. “Just ask the dinosaurs.”
“Another incoming!” Mitchell cried, and Kirk braced himself. After the thunder and the rocking, Mitchell cursed under his breath. “Shields at seventy-one percent.”
Kirk had had enough. “Khorasani, fire at will on the attacker.”
“My pleasure, Captain!” Bionic fingers caressed her targeting scope as she unleashed her counterattack.
“Yu, see if you can identify any external field emitters she can target,” Egdor said.
“Aye, sir.”
“Damn it!” Khorasani cried. “The rotation pattern keeps changing. Only one shot got through, and only for a second before a plate intercepted it. Not enough to do more than scratch the paint.”
The ship rocked from another blow. “Missed that one,” Mitchell growled. “It came in from the side. With their field control, they can throw them at us on arced courses.”
Kirk furrowed his brow. “Yu, what happens to the plates that hit us?”
“They partially disintegrate at the striking edge, but otherwise they seem largely intact. About what you’d expect if you dropped a paving tile on its corner. They then rejoin the shielding array.”
“And how much damage are they taking from the phaser hits?”
Once Khorasani had let off a few more shots, the science officer had an answer. “Comparable. A few hits or maybe ten seconds’ sustained fire could destroy one of the plates.”
“So we could wear them down,” Mitchell said. “But not if they break our shields down first. We’re at sixty-three percent.” Another blow nearly knocked the navigator out of his seat.
Egdor was clutching the side rail to stay on his feet. “Our shields are designed with energy weapons and radiation in mind. This is more like being hit by meteoroids.”
Kirk stared at him. “That’s it! The navigational deflector. It’s designed for deflecting solid matter coming in at relativistic speeds.”
“From ahead, yes. Can the dish pivot fast enough to intercept them?”
“I suggest you take that up with Engineer Desai,” Kirk told him. Nodding, Egdor stepped over to the engineering station to consult with the chief engineer below.
Captain T’Saren’s voice came over the dedicated command-channel speaker on Kirk’s chair arm. “Captain Kirk, I have been monitoring your situation. Fall back while you assess the deflector dish option. As the Miranda class has no dish system, our shields and tractor emitters are already configured for meteoroid deflection and are better able to cope with these attacks.”
Kirk observed the Leonov on the viewscreen for a few moments. “It looks like you’re still taking heavy fire from both ships,” he said.
“And returning it. We are also more heavily armed than you.” Indeed, phaser beams and torpedoes were flying out of the Leonov’s weapons pod, slowly but systematically eroding the cylinder ships’ whirling armor arrays. “You will not aid us effectively if you fail to optimize your own safety in the process.”
Kirk’s pride rebelled, but his reason and discipline were stronger. “Acknowledged, Captain. Khorasani, pull us back out of their attack range.”
A general hail came in as the Sacagawea fell back. “Wesley to all ships. Be advised the hostiles can fire intense, focused plasma beams from their singularity drives. We lost a phaser array and a whole weapons crew to it, and that was a glancing blow. It blew through our portside shields like they were crepe paper. Whatever you do, don’t let them bring their prows to bear on you. Stay away from the central axis.”
“Acknowledged, Beowulf,” came Captain Baek’s voice. “Those support frames for the singularities look like a weak spot, though. Any luck targeting them?”
“We’d have to put ourselves in the line of fire. It’s too risky.”
“What about transporters?” Captain Gupta asked from the Sau Lan Wu “They don’t have conventional shields. If we could identify their bridges, send in boarding parties . . .”
T’Saren replied, “Their hull composition resists sensors, Sau Lan Wu. We have failed to refine our scans sufficiently to allow a target lock or even determine interior environmental conditions. No doubt a transporter beam would be similarly refracted and scattered.”
“Then beam away pieces of the singularity frames,” Gupta countered. “Shut them down, or blow them up.”
Kirk and his bridge crew looked up at that in surprise. Few starfarers ever acknowledged the fact that a transporter beam was essentially a highly efficient disintegration beam, potentially a devastating weapon if one simply omitted the rematerialization phase. Or if one selectively beamed away the shielding on an enemy’s engine core, or merely beamed their crew into space. That avoidance wasn’t just because deflector shields negated the risk, since shields could fall in battle. Rather, the weaponization of transporters was an almost universal taboo, much as with chemical or biological weapons. The technique was at once too dangerous and too cruel, a line that no one wanted to cross because of the floodgates it would open. Transporters had too many beneficial uses for anyone to risk getting them outlawed. So for a Starfleet captain to suggest crossing that line was startling.
“We aren’t there yet, Vishakha,” Wesley replied firmly.
“Besides,” T’Saren countered, “the singularity radiation and gravimetric distortion would prohibit a transporter lock in any case.”
“Okay, okay,” Gupta said. “Sorry I brought it up. I’ve taken casualties too. I just want to make them pay.”
“Understood, Captain,” said Wesley. “But let’s settle for making them stop.”
Over the next few minutes, while Kirk watched the Leonov continue the battle, Egdor and Desai worked out a way to step up the power and speed of the rotational actuator on the deflector dish, though they couldn’t guarantee it would last for long before burning out. Meanwhile, the Beowulf and the Sau Lan Wu continued to hold their own, chipping away at the enemy’s shields, but it was slow going. “We just dodged another plasma beam,” Wesley announced. “It looks like they need about five minutes to recharge. That’s a small mercy.”
The Captain's Oath Page 9