“I am reading some subspace signal activity among the hostile ships, sir,” the ensign replied. “It seems to be data exchange rather than audio, though, so there’s nothing I can interpret.”
“Maybe they can’t interpret our language,” Aaltonen suggested.
“They should be able to interpret someone standing in their path and firing warning shots,” Egdor said. “Their response last time was to attempt to go around us, then to fire on us when we wouldn’t let them. I’d say that was a fairly clear mutual communication.”
“More than that,” Huang said. “They’ve not only ignored our borders twice now—they’ve apparently devised some way to evade detection by border sensors and patrols. They’re actively working to circumvent our defenses.”
“Still, they don’t strike first,” Aaltonen pointed out. “They try evasion first, and only fight when that doesn’t work.”
“Either way, the message is the same,” Egdor told her. “They want something of ours—territory, resources, whatever—and they intend to take it, with utter disregard for our opinion in the matter. We are merely obstacles to them.”
“They’re deploying their armor plates,” Huang announced. Mikhail Goldanskii magnified the viewscreen image to show the scale armor of yellow-brown hexagonal plates expanding outward from the ships’ hulls and beginning to rotate.
“Phaser and deflector dish teams to high alert,” Egdor ordered. “Stand by for point defense.”
“Point defense teams report ready, sir,” Huang answered a moment later.
“Arm photon torpedoes and stand by.”
“Torpedoes armed, sir.”
“Aaltonen, try to get an internal scan. They don’t have conventional deflectors, but we couldn’t get a good enough sensor lock to send a boarding party over. Maybe a year and a half worth of sensor upgrades will make a difference.”
The science officer worked her controls. “No luck, sir. Their hulls are just too dense and refractory. They may not have deflectors, but they have something almost as good.”
“But a lot more massive,” Huang pointed out. “It could slow them down in a fight.” An alert sounded from his panel. “Incoming plate! Deploying deflector!”
The vessel shook under the first impact, a sharp, sudden shock that Egdor remembered, different from an energy weapon impact or even a torpedo hit. “Shields?” he asked.
“Holding,” Huang replied. “The retuning was effective. Clean miss on deflection.”
“Get better, fast.”
“Aye, sir.”
To Huang’s credit and that of his teams below, they managed to carry out Egdor’s admittedly vague order. The next few plates lobbed at the Kongo were either shattered by her phasers or batted away by her deflector beam. The Bardeezans had less success at deflection, sustaining several damaging hits, but they had the limited advantage of being smaller targets.
With the Kongo’s defenses holding, Egdor focused on eroding the intruders’ defenses, using torpedoes to chip away at the lead ship’s whirling bubble of armor plates and attempt to create a large enough opening to slip a torpedo through. He and Huang had discussed this strategy before the battle. The late Captain Baek had suggested that the support frames for the quantum singularities within the cylinder ships’ hollow cores could be their weak spots, and Starfleet Tactical had agreed; but there was no way to get a phaser lock on them without coming directly into their plasma beams’ line of fire, and that was deemed far too dangerous to risk. But if a torpedo were fired from the side, it could use its thrusters to curve in and damage the support framework, hopefully disrupting the ship’s power supply.
Soon, Huang smiled up at Egdor, who stood watching over his shoulder. “There’s a gap in the shield pattern.”
Egdor knew they would only have moments before the plates evened out their distribution. “Fire torpedo!”
Unfortunately, the plates did more than he expected. They reacted almost immediately to the incoming torpedo, shifting to take a direct hit and destroy it before it could penetrate the perimeter. The vessel had to sacrifice two plates for this, but the remaining distribution evened out quickly.
“Still, this may give us an option,” Huang said once the Bardeezans reported the same result from their own attempted missile barrage. “To concentrate for point defense on one side, the plates have to thin out on the opposite side. If we bracket a ship from both directions, attack on one side—”
“It might give the opposing ship a clear shot at the singularity framework,” Egdor finished for him. “It’s worth a try.”
Egdor had Goldanskii hail the lead Bardeezan ship on an encrypted channel, and between them they swiftly worked out the strategy. The Kongo closed on a cylinder ship obliquely from the front, firing torpedoes to force it to concentrate its shield plates to fore, while still staying clear of the direct line of fire of its plasma beam. Once the plates were sufficiently thinned out to aft, a Bardeezan ship flew past and fired a missile through the gap. “A hit!” Huang announced. “There’s damage to its aft support frame. Power fluctuations . . . Sir, its shield plates are scattering! It’s changing course . . . Sir, it’s in retreat.”
“Let it go,” Egdor said, returning to the command chair. “Stay focused on the active threats.”
The crew’s sense of satisfaction at defeating one of the attacking ships was short-lived. Something unexpected happened when one of the remaining four cylinder ships flew into the field of abandoned shield plates from the fleeing one. “It’s drawing the plates in around it,” Aaltonen reported. She magnified the viewer image, and Egdor watched in fascination as the salvaged plates began spinning in a second shield layer above the ship’s own. “That’s a handy way to restore a depleted supply.”
“But why keep them in a separate layer?” Egdor asked.
“What worries me more,” Huang said, “is that that isn’t the most badly depleted ship. But it’s heading toward the one that is.”
He projected a tactical plot on the helm console’s astrogator, directing Egdor’s attention toward another cylinder ship whose shield plates had been badly eroded by the combined attack of two Bardeezan defense ships. Even as they watched, one of the ships dodged a burst from its plasma beam. Egdor knew from the first battle that the beams took time to recharge, and the Bardeezans clearly remembered it too, bombarding the shield plate envelope more assertively now that they had several minutes without needing to worry about the beam weapon.
“Maybe it just picked up the plates because it was closer,” Aaltonen suggested, “and plans to transfer them.”
Two more cylinder ships were closing on the Kongo now, preventing it from going to the Bardeezans’ aid. Egdor and Huang focused on maintaining their phaser and deflector beams’ point defense and evading the enemy’s attempts to bring their prows to bear.
But soon Aaltonen called their attention back to the other segment of the battle. The bridge crew watched in shock as the ship with the double layer of shield plates suddenly expelled the outer layer—whose plates shot through space and wrapped around the lead Bardeezan ship like a net fired from a riot-control gun. The egg-shaped defense ship’s shield envelope flickered and flared as the heavy hexagonal plates clamped tightly against it.
“The plates’ tractor field is drawing them toward each other!” the Bardeezan captain reported on an open channel. “They’re compressing our shield envelope. Pressure’s increasing . . . circuits overloading . . . We need help! Target the plates, destroy them before—”
But it was already too late. The defense ship’s shields gave one last flare before giving way, and the hex plates snapped together almost instantly, crushing the ship between them. An instant later, it blew apart, sending the plates flying.
“Bozhe moi,” Goldanskii murmured.
Egdor clung to his discipline, following James Kirk’s example. “Stay focused on our own attackers.”
His warning was timely, for one of the two cylinder ships had taken advantage of the
distraction to bring its bow to bear on the Kongo. The viewscreen automatically switched to focus on this urgent threat, showing a ringlike shape whose center was already starting to flare with light. “Evasive action!” he called, and Huang started to swing the ship away.
The ship rocked, and Egdor clung to the chair arms, fearing the worst. But then the Kongo stabilized. “Glancing blow to our shields,” Aaltonen reported. “But it knocked them down to forty-three percent.”
Another, sharper impact came, one Egdor knew all too well. “More plates.”
“With our weakened shields . . .”
Egdor nodded. They would have to rely on the main deflector dish. “Keep our bow to the attacker,” he ordered Huang, but the helmsman was already doing so.
The deflector beam flung away the next few plate attacks, but Aaltonen stepped forward. “Sir, the second ship still hasn’t fired its beam weapon. If we’re stuck keeping our bow to the first one—”
“I know. They’re making it harder for us to dodge the beam. Do whatever you can to reinforce our shields.”
“It won’t be enough, sir.”
He spun the chair and skewered the slender, pale-haired lieutenant with his gaze. “Never let yourself believe that. Never stop striving.”
Eyes wide, the science officer bit her lip and nodded. “Aye, Commander. Thank you.”
He watched her turn back resolutely to her station, realizing she was little more than a girl. How do these officers keep getting so much younger?
But Egdor knew his order had been more for Aaltonen’s morale than anything else. The first cylinder ship’s aggressive barrage was pinning the Kongo down from the front, and the second ship was already swinging around to bring its beam weapon to bear. Unless somebody on this bridge had a brilliant idea within the next twenty seconds, they might not be here in thirty. And Egdor feared his well of ideas had run dry.
Just then, an alert sounded. “Another ship is coming out of warp!” called the navigator, Ensign zh’Nesierel.
“Sir, it’s hailing!” Goldanskii cried.
Just then, a barrage of phaser beams and torpedoes struck at the second cylinder ship’s halo of shield plates. The ship altered its rotation, attempting to bring its prow to bear on the new attacker, and Egdor felt a great surge of relief.
Goldanskii smiled and opened the channel. A strong, commanding voice came over the speakers. “This is Captain Christopher Pike of the U.S.S. Enterprise, calling the Kongo. Sorry we couldn’t get here sooner. This attack took Starfleet by surprise.”
“This is Commander Mehran Egdor, commanding the Kongo while Captain Chandra is on Bardeezi Prime. Believe me, Captain Pike, your timing was perfect.”
“Well, I’ve been doing this for a while now. Maybe I’m finally getting the hang of it. But you’re the one who knows these attackers, so I’ll follow your lead. Fill me in, Commander.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Egdor said, gratified by the man’s ready acceptance. “Since you have that ship’s attention, concentrate torpedo fire on its prow while we go in to aft and target its power systems. It’s worked once before.”
“Understood, Kongo.”
Once the maneuver was underway, Aaltonen asked, “Are we sure it’ll work a second time, sir? They’ll know what we’re trying.”
“I know. Be ready for surprises.”
Nonetheless, the pincer strategy went off much as before. While her fellow Constitution-class vessel bombarded the cylinder’s forward plate halo with torpedoes—while simultaneously using its phasers to fend off plate bombardment from the other cylinder ship—the Kongo swept around to its rear and put one of its last torpedoes through the thinnest point in the halo. A plasma beam lashed out to aft—so they fire both ways, Egdor noted—but the narrow, intense beam missed the torpedo and the Kongo alike, and the aft support frame took a palpable hit. The damaged cylinder ship thrust away to a safe distance, jettisoned its shield plates, and fled into warp.
“Captain Pike, concentrate fire on the other cylinder ship. Don’t let it retrieve the discarded armor plates—trust me on this.”
“We’re taking enough of a beating from the plates this ship is throwing at us already,” Pike replied, “even with the shields retuned. You sure there’s no talking to these people?”
“They’ve shown no interest in listening. They’re determined to get what they want, whatever it takes.”
“I know the type.”
Egdor turned to Aaltonen. “Status of the other two intruder ships?”
“The Bardeezans are keeping them busy, sir. One made an attempt to maneuver in this direction, but three defense ships are blockading it pretty relentlessly. After what happened to their friends, they’re not going to let it get anywhere near those loose plates.”
“It may not need to,” Pike warned. “My science officer’s been keeping an eye on the discards. Take a look for yourselves.”
Aaltonen double-checked. “They’ve drawn themselves together into a loose sphere. We thought they needed a mothership to direct them, but . . .”
“This is Lieutenant Commander Spock of the Enterprise. The gathered mass of armor plates is moving toward our target ship. This may be an emergency protocol to bring it in range of a mothership’s control.”
“Break off, Enterprise!” Egdor called. “They plan to encircle and compress your shield envelope. This is a critical threat!”
But it was too late. Before the Enterprise could move very far, the sphere of armor plates came under the control of the cylinder ship and flew after it at high speed. Moments later, the Enterprise was engulfed by the heavy hex plates, its deflector envelope iridescing under the strain.
“Phasers!” Pike called. “Try to pick some off if you can.”
“Huang,” said Egdor, “try to do the same from outside.”
But it was to little avail. The ablative plates wore away slowly even under point-blank phasers, and the Enterprise couldn’t risk setting off torpedoes right against its own hull. “Shield strain increasing,” announced Spock’s raised and urgent voice. “At this rate of depletion, we will be destroyed in eighty-seven seconds.”
“Kongo, it’s up to you,” Pike called.
Egdor moved up to Huang’s side. “Our only chance is to knock out that controlling ship.”
“It still has too many shield plates to penetrate,” the tactical officer said. “And we can’t do the pincer maneuver with one ship.”
The first officer firmed his resolve. “Maybe we can. If we use our last torpedoes to blow a hole in the shield aura, we can hit their power framework with full phasers.”
Huang stared up at him. “Sir, that would take a sustained burst. We’d have to put ourselves right in their beam’s line of fire, and they’ve had time to recharge!”
“It’s a risk we have to take, Lieutenant. We’re the Enterprise’s only chance.”
The human set his jaw and spoke quietly, heavily. “Yes, sir.”
Egdor returned to the command chair as the viewscreen image swung away from the ailing Enterprise and centered on the cylinder ship, circling around until it had foreshortened nearly to a thick O. “Fire when ready,” he ordered.
“Torpedoes away,” Huang announced. The dancing lights of three torpedoes’ thrusters converged on the whirling array of plates that rushed to meet them. When the flash of antimatter annihilation cleared, the Kongo’s vantage was now directly in line with the enemy ship’s axis, and the fragile-looking framework supporting its singularity drive was in clear view. “Firing phasers,” Huang reported, matching the action to the words. The beams struck out, and Huang sustained the fire as the ship flew toward its target.
“Beam weapon powering up!” Aaltonen warned.
“Maintain fire!” Egdor cried.
“It’s working!” Pike called. “They’ve dropped control of the plates to focus on you. We’re shaking free of the last of them. Now get out of there!”
“Helm, hard to—”
The screen filled wi
th blinding light. Egdor had enough time to reflect that, even if he never made it to captain’s rank, he had already commanded the most important mission of his life.
U.S.S. Enterprise
Christopher Pike stared sadly at the viewscreen, soaking in the cost of his ship’s survival. The two remaining intact cylinder ships had fled into warp with the damaged third in tow, having apparently decided to cut their losses. But they had struck a mortal blow before departing. The Kongo drifted in space, the dorsal hull of its saucer section bisected by a deep gouge, carved through it by the beam that had also blown off the aft end of its starboard nacelle.
Nothing remained of its bridge.
Spock stepped down beside Pike and handed him a data slate. “Final survivor census from the Kongo’s acting commander, sir. Forty-one dead, including the entire bridge crew. One hundred thirty-seven injured from impact shock, decompression trauma, radiation exposure, and other blast effects.” He raised a brow. “Captain Chandra is fortunate to have been off the ship when its bridge was destroyed.”
“Believe me, Mister Spock,” Pike answered, “he won’t see it that way.”
“An illogical sentiment, even from the standpoint of human emotion. The Kongo crew has suffered a significant loss, but the fact that their captain remains to lead them should facilitate their adjustment.”
Even after nearly a decade, Spock’s often self-conscious adherence to Vulcan detachment in the face of human emotion still bewildered Pike sometimes. The young science officer would make it easier on himself if he at least kept his opinions private. “Try not to be so dismissive of the importance of a first officer,” Pike answered sharply. “You may have the position permanently someday.” Spock had been filling the post quite efficiently while Pike’s regular first officer was on leave, his keen intellect and discipline allowing him to juggle the duties of both executive and science officer without compromising either. Pike expected he would make some captain a superb second-in-command before much longer.
“It was not my intention to dismiss the loss of Commander Egdor or his bridge crew, sir. I simply meant to point out that there are positives to the situation. Do humans not appreciate being ‘cheered up’ in times of emotional distress?”
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