by David Mack
A few seconds later, Valerian replied, “Channel open.”
“Bridge to engineering,” Hernandez said. “Report.”
After a few moments of sputtering static on the line, Lieutenant Karl Graylock, the Austrian-born chief engineer, responded, “Minor damage down here, Captain. Main power’s still online, but I don’t have any working controls.”
Hernandez sharpened the edge in her voice to mask her deepening concern. “What hit us, Karl?”
“Nothing from outside,” Graylock said. “The last set of readings I saw before we went dark looked like a cascade failure, starting in the communication systems.”
Fletcher cut in, “The intercepted message, Captain. It could’ve been a Trojan horse, a way to slip a computer virus past our defenses.”
“If it was,” Hernandez said, “how long to fix it?”
“We’ll have to shut down the whole ship,” Graylock said. “Power up the main computer with a portable generator, wipe its command protocols, and restore from the protected backup.”
“I didn’t ask for a checklist, Karl, I asked how long.”
His disgruntled sigh carried clearly over the comm. “Three, maybe four hours if we—”
The overhead lights snapped back to full brightness, and every console on the bridge surged back to life. The thrumming of the impulse engines resounded through the bulkheads and deck plates. The bridge officers all checked their consoles.
Fletcher looked more confused than she had before. “We have full power, Captain, but still no command inputs.”
Turning in a circle, Hernandez asked, “Is anyone’s console responding?” The officers all shook their heads in dismay. Then the resonant pulsing of the engines returned, and the starscape on the main viewer stretched into a tunnel of drifting streaks. “Engineering,” Hernandez snapped, “what’s going on?”
“No idea, sir,” Graylock shouted back, sounding profoundly disturbed by the situation. “Speed increasing. Warp three … warp four … warp five, Captain!”
Thayer recoiled from her console as if it were demonically possessed. “Torpedo launchers powering up, sir!” Staring in horror at the panel, she added, “We’re targeting the convoy!”
“Karl, shut down main power!” Hernandez shouted. “Hurry!”
From the helm, Akagi called out, “We’re on an intercept course for the convoy, Captain.”
Hernandez sensed what was happening, felt it like a cold twist in her gut. It was all unfolding so quickly, and she felt as if she were drugged, too slow to do anything to stop it.
Thayer was pressed against the bulkhead behind her console, mute with shock. Fletcher scrambled over from the engineering station to monitor the tactical console. Her voice trembled with dismay. “Weapons locked, Captain.”
Cut off from the ship’s command systems, Hernandez didn’t have the option of overloading the Columbia’s warp reactor—not that it would have changed the outcome of this one-sided slaughter. It would have denied the Romulans the pleasure of using her ship as their weapon, but then there would be nothing to stop them from destroying the convoy anyway.
This was the Romulans’ way of rubbing salt in the wound of the Columbia’s defeat. The insult added to the injury.
Fletcher’s voice was flat and emotionless. “We’re firing.”
The shrieks of electromagnetically propelled torpedoes leaving the ship reverberated in the deathly silence of the bridge.
On the main viewscreen, images of the defenseless civilian vessels in the convoy were replaced by the spreading red-orange fire blossoms of antimatter-fueled explosions. In less than ten seconds, the entire convoy was destroyed, reduced to a cloud of sparking debris and superheated gases.
Then the lights flickered again and went dark, followed by the bridge consoles. The ship became as quiet as the grave. Hernandez choked back the urge to vomit. Anger and adrenaline left her shaking with impotent fury. Hundreds of men and women had been lost in the convoy, and the last thing they had known before they died was that it was the Columbia that killed them.
“I don’t get it,” Valerian murmured. “We were disabled. The Romulans could’ve destroyed the convoy. Why use us to do it?”
“Because they could, Sidra,” Fletcher said to Valerian. “This is a trial run for how they’ll attack the rest of the fleet. We’re just the guinea pigs.”
Graylock’s voice crackled over the intraship emergency comm. “Engineering to bridge!”
“Go ahead,” Hernandez said.
“Captain, I think we’ve got a shot at getting out of this with our skins, but it’ll be tight.”
Hernandez forced herself into a semblance of composure and looked around at the rest of the bridge crew. “Stations.” Everyone stepped quickly and quietly to their consoles. She returned to her chair. “What’s the plan, Karl?”
“When the Romulans powered us up for the attack on the convoy, they left a residual charge in the warp nacelles. We can trigger a manual release and make a half-second warp jump.”
El-Rashad sounded dubious. “I think they’d notice that.”
“I’ve got Biggs and Pierce venting plasma through the impulse manifold, and the MACOs are pushing a photonic warhead out of the launch bay. If we detonate the warhead and trigger the jump at exactly the same moment, it should look like we self-destructed.”
“If anyone has a better plan,” Hernandez announced, “let’s hear it.” Silence reigned. “Make it fast, Karl. It won’t be long before th—” Explosions hammered the Columbia. The deck pitched wildly as sparks fountained from behind bridge panels. A sharp tang of smoke from burnt wiring filled the air. Within seconds, the only light on the bridge came from the irregular flashes of EPS-powered displays bursting into flames and showering the crew with stinging motes of shattered glass.
Then a bone-jarring concussion launched Hernandez up and backward through the shadows. She hit the aft bulkhead like dead weight and felt as if her consciousness had been knocked free of her body. Sinking into a different, deeper kind of darkness, she could only hope that the last explosion she’d heard was the one meant to save the Columbia and not one sent to destroy it.
2381
3
Commander Christine Vale sat in the captain’s chair of the Star-ship Titan, stared at the main viewer, and let her thoughts drift in the endless darkness beyond the stars.
A soft murmur of daily routines surrounded her, enveloped her in its familiar cadence of synthetic tones and hushed voices. Titan was more than two thousand light-years past the Vela OB2 Association, a dense cluster of new stars that had proved rich in spaceborne life-forms and other wonders. Now the ship was deep into a vast expanse of space that was unmapped and appeared to be unpopulated and untraveled, as well. For the past few weeks, intensive scans for subspace signal traffic had turned up naught but the scratch of cosmic background radiation. This far from the Vela cluster, cosmozoan activity was sparse, and there had been no sign of other starships within a range of twenty-five light-years since leaving the OB2 Association.
Vale saw a certain majesty in that lonely space; it was like a mirror for her soul. Several months earlier, she and a handful of her shipmates had become stranded during a mission to a planet called Orisha. Experiments conducted by the planet’s denizens had produced dangerous temporal anomalies that destroyed the U.S.S. Charon, a Luna-class vessel like Titan, and they had almost claimed Titan, as well.
Jaza Najem, Titan’s senior science officer—and, for a brief time, Vale’s lover—had sacrificed himself to protect the ship and its crew; as a result, he had been forced to live out his life in Orisha’s past, permanently exiled to history.
It was still hard for Vale to believe that Najem, a man she’d once loved, and who then became her trusted friend, had been dead now for centuries. He was dead when I met him.
Months had passed, and her grief still cut like a sword in her side. She had resisted talking with the counselors at first, but she’d consented to a handful of session
s with Dr. Huilan after the captain had made it an order. Not that any of it had done any good. She had been “unwilling to commit to therapy,” according to Huilan. Vale chose to think of it in simpler terms: She just didn’t want to talk about it.
Shaking off the torpor of her maudlin mood, she got up from the center seat and made a slow tour of the bridge. She took light steps, and the carpeting on the deck muffled her footfalls. A peek over flight controller Aili Lavena’s shoulder confirmed that Titan was continuing on its last course while Lieutenant Commander Melora Pazlar—who had succeeded Jaza as Titan’s senior science officer—continued a detailed star-mapping operation.
A glance at the console of senior operations officer Sariel Rager showed a steady stream of astrocartographic data flooding in and being steadily processed, logged, and filed.
All was quiet at the engineering station, which was manned by Ensign Torvig Bu-kar-nguv, a cybernetically enhanced Choblik. His narrow head was barely visible above the console. The meter-tall biped—to Vale, he resembled a cross between a large, flightless bird and a shorn sheep—used his bionic arms and hands to work the console’s controls with delicate precision. At the same time, he made adjustments on the wall panel behind him by means of the bionic manus at the end of his long, agile tail.
Vale quickly lost track of the dozens of systems that Torvig was modifying. “What has you so busy, Ensign?”
The expression on his ovine face switched from one of focused curiosity to petrified innocence. “I’m upgrading the power-distribution efficiency of the internal EPS network.”
As usual, the specificity of his answer left Vale very little room to insert any small talk. This time, she decided not to try. “Very well,” she said. “Carry on, Ensign.”
“Thank you, sir,” Torvig replied. His face became a mask of contentment as he resumed working. Vale admired his singularity of focus. He had come aboard the previous year to complete his senior-year work study for Starfleet Academy, and along with fellow cadet Zurin Dakal, had stayed on after his long-distance graduation, as a regular member of Titan’s crew.
Ranul Keru, the chief of security, was next on Vale’s circuit of the bridge. A bear of a man, the dark-bearded Trill loomed quietly over his console. He looked up and favored Vale with a sly look as she obtrusively leaned over to see what was on his screen. It was a plan for an unannounced security-division drill, a simulated intruder alert. Looking closer, she noted its details with amusement. “A dikironium cloud creature?” She accused him with a raised eyebrow. “That’s just mean, Keru.”
“It’s my job,” he said with devilish glee.
“Let me know if any of us survive,” she said, moving on.
Commander Tuvok didn’t look up as Vale neared the tactical console, but there was something about his demeanor that felt unusual to her. Her curiosity aroused, she stepped behind him and eyed his console readouts. All she saw was a series of long-range sensor reports, all saying the same thing: no contacts. It was the most placid tactical profile she had seen in decades.
She turned to the brown-skinned Vulcan and lowered her voice to a discreet whisper. “Want to show me what you were really working on?”
He didn’t say anything at first. Then he responded with a hesitant glance from the corner of his eye, coupled with a tired grimace. He tapped a few commands into his console, and the serene lineup of empty scans was replaced by a complex set of fleet-deployment grids and battle scenarios.
Vale paged through them and asked, “Core system defenses?”
“Yes,” Tuvok said, keeping his own voice hushed like hers.
He had prepared dozens of tactical profiles analyzing the recent attacks by the Borg into Federation space. In some of the scenarios, he was assessing strategic and tactical flaws in Starfleet’s responses; in others, he had focused on isolating possible breaches in the Federation’s perimeter defenses that the Borg might be exploiting.
She singled out one of interest. “Projecting possible next targets?”
“Unfortunately … no,” Tuvok said.
It took her a moment to infer his meaning. “There have been more attacks.”
“Yes,” Tuvok said. Then he called up a recent, classified news dispatch from Starfleet Command. “This arrived ten minutes ago. Five ships destroyed by the Borg in the Onias Sector, in separate engagements.” Tuvok lowered his eyes. “I did not wish to alarm the crew, so I refrained from announcing its arrival. I had intended to finish my analysis and brief you in writing a few minutes from now, for the sake of discretion.”
“Probably for the best,” Vale said. Messages from home had become less frequent since Titan left the Vela cluster, and the horrifying news of recent weeks had left many of its crew fearful for their families and loved ones in the Federation. She nodded once. “Carry on.”
Vale returned to work, but over the relaxed air of her daily routine had been cast a pall of unspoken anxiety. It was the first time since Titan’s departure from known space that she wished she could suspend its mission of galactic exploration. Though Titan was devoted to peaceful scientific inquiry, it was also a state-of-the-art Federation starship, and its captain was a formidable combatant.
Starfleet doesn’t need another map of another empty sector. Vale slumped back into the captain’s chair. It needs every ship it can get, on the front line, right now. But there was no way Titan’s crew could be there. It would take them months to get home—and if the Borg threat was as serious as it appeared, Titan’s return would come far too late to make any difference. So let’s just keep running into the night, Vale fumed. And hope we still have homes to go back to when it’s over. She stared at the viewscreen and struggled to bury her ire and frustration in that cold, endless void beyond the stars.
* * *
Xin Ra-Havreii stood on the narrow platform inside the stellar cartography holotank and admired Melora Pazlar from afar. The slender, blond Elaysian woman hovered in the center of the zero-gravity environment, several meters from the end of the platform, manipulating holographic constructs with easy grace.
“You should come up,” she said to Ra-Havreii.
He smiled. “I like the view just fine from here.”
Pazlar reached out with her left hand, palm open, and selected the floating image of a geology department report that detailed the results of the ship’s most recent planetary survey. Bending her arm, she pulled the image toward her, enlarging it in the process. “The new interface is a blast,” she said as she paged through the report with small flicks of her fingers.
“I’m glad you like it,” Ra-Havreii said. He had designed a sweeping upgrade to the holotank’s user interface after Pazlar’s promotion to senior science officer. Her uniform had been modified with a complex network of embedded nanosensors, which extended from the soles of her boots to the tips of a pair of tight-fitting black gloves. A clear liquid matrix applied directly to her eyes enabled her to trigger functions inside the holotank with a mere glance. He had transformed this high-tech chamber from a workspace into Pazlar’s personal sanctum sanctorum.
She paused in her labors and tossed another flustered grin at the white-haired Efrosian chief engineer. “So, what brings you up from engineering? Worried I’d broken it already?”
“No, I just wanted to see how it works, now that we’re out of the test phase,” he said. “Trial runs and normal operations can be very different experiences.” With a note of melancholy, he added, “A lesson I learned the hard way.”
In fact, the reason he was there was that he’d wanted to see her in action. Watching her use the new system was a delight for Ra-Havreii, who envisioned the fetching science officer as a conductor directing a symphony of data and light.
A sweep of her arm whirled the room’s rings of data screens in one direction and spun its backdrop of nebulae and stars in another. “Everything’s so easy in here,” she said. “It makes me hate to leave.” In a more conspiratorial tone she added, “Between you and me, I cringe every time the ca
ptain calls a staff meeting, because it means putting the armor back on.”
Outside the stellar cartography lab, Pazlar, a native of a low-gravity planet, had to wear a custom-made powered exoskeleton in order to walk or stand in Titan’s standard one-g environment. Her armature worked well enough, but it was cumbersome, and when its power reserves dwindled she was forced to use a mechanized wheelchair instead. Even with those devices, her body was exceptionally fragile, in any environment.
At first, Ra-Havreii had pondered ways to improve Pazlar’s ability to move through the ship. Then he’d decided that a more elegant solution would be to bring the ship to her.
“What would you say,” he remarked with a dramatic flair, “if I told you that you could go anywhere on the ship, any time you want, without ever putting that pile of metal on again?”
With a languid flourish, she dispelled all her work screens and left herself surrounded by a vista of stars. Crossing her arms with deliberate slowness, she turned in place until she had fixed all her attention on Ra-Havreii. “This, I have to hear.”
He waved his hand casually at the galactic panorama. “Am I still welcome in your weightless domain?” She responded with a mock glare that he took as an invitation. In a carefree motion he stepped onto the flat, circular platform at the end of the ramp, and then with a gentle push he launched himself into the zero-gravity area. Having spent years as a starship designer and construction manager, he knew from experience exactly how much force to apply to position himself beside Pazlar. His long white hair and snowy moustache, however, drifted around his face like seaweed buffeted by deep currents.
“Computer,” he said, “integrate Ra-Havreii interface modification Melora Four.”
“Modification ready,” the feminine computer voice said.
He glanced sideways at Pazlar. “I hope you won’t think it too forward of me to have named it in your honor.”
“I’ll let you know when I see what it is,” she said.