If not for my consanguinity with the current praetor, T’Met thought, I might suffer just such a fate. She was uncomfortably aware that praetors came and went, as did political favor. Regardless of how secure she might feel now, no one could guarantee that she wouldn’t someday share Khazara’s misfortune—being busted down to the rank of centurion and then forced, either literally or figuratively, to fall upon her Honor Blade. She could only hope that Khazara’s sacrifice would rehabilitate him in the eyes of history, thereby allowing some measure of prestige and honor to accrue to the family he was about to leave behind. Such things weren’t all that uncommon, as was attested by the recent prominence of the family of the late Commander Chulak, who had defied imminent defeat at the Battle of Galorn’don Cor by sacrificing not only his own life but also the lives of his subordinates.
“Thank you, Subcommander,” T’Met said. “Acknowledge Khazara’s message. Let’s send him on his way.”
Though she knew it amounted to little more than primitive superstition, T’Met felt certain that no good could come from speaking with Khazara, even to the extent of merely saying farewell, or wishing him Jolan’tru. She decided it was best to treat him as though he were already dead.
Her executive officer paused, as if to study her. Keeping her face blank, she silently wondered how much he knew about her personal relationship with the doomed centurion.
Genorex tapped several commands into his console. “Khazara has initiated launch countdown.”
“Lock onto his telemetry and display it,” T’Met said. If she was to be a party to the Dray’laxu’s mass suicide, then the least she could do was watch as death descended upon its hapless victims.
Genorex counted down. “Rhi. Mne. Sei. Kre.
“Hwi.”
The command deck shuddered slightly as a bright streak lanced across the forward viewer, arcing in a long ellipse toward the still-distant blue crescent. T’Met knew that Khazara’s little vessel was still moving at subluminal speed in order to avoid setting off whatever active warp-field sensors the Dray’laxu had planted about the periphery of their system.
The image of far-off Dray’lax, generated by the Terrh’ Dhael’s long-range passive sensors, wavered and vanished, replaced by the imagery that was streaming in over the subspace bands via the telemetry link with Khazara’s scout vessel.
Because the scout needed to fly subluminally to minimize the chance of detection and interception, the image of Dray’lax remained stubbornly tiny for a seeming eternity. T’Met decided this was no matter. She would sit in her command chair, patiently awaiting the fall of the hammer of death, for as long as it took.
To his credit, Genorex, who continued working the ops console throughout Khazara’s flight down the Dray’lax system’s deep gravity well, appeared to be doing likewise.
Ever so slowly, T’Met’s patience was rewarded. The crescent grew steadily until it was recognizable as a disk, and finally a far-off semishadowed blue sphere. She glanced at the telemetry readout on the arm of her chair, and the figures that scrolled across it confirmed that Khazara was nearing his optimal range for switching to superluminal flight. According to the mission profile, his chances of being intercepted or interdicted at that distance were essentially nil.
“Khazara has signaled his readiness to cross the vastam threshold,” Genorex said.
“Acknowledged,” T’Met said, nodding.
The image on the main viewer showed the last thing Khazara would ever see. Once he brought his craft up to full speed, the little vessel would cross the remaining distance between it and Dray’lax in the space of a few heartbeats. Though the ship crashing into that world would be small—its mass negligible in comparison with that of the planet—the amount of energy released by the impact would be almost unimaginable, even without factoring in the violence that the ship’s ruptured antimatter pods would unleash.
T’Met leaned forward expectantly. Dray’lax seemed to distort slightly, as though she was viewing it through a weirdly curved lens. Then the planet rushed toward her, vanishing into an oceanic hash of static as Khazara’s ship rammed it at a maximum speed of avaihh mne, or approximately sixty-four times the speed of light.
The static on the screen dispersed as the viewer resumed its earlier mode, displaying the imagery yielded by the longrange sensors. A tiny blue-green crescent remained stubbornly in place, as though Khazara’s vessel had never left the Terrh’Dhael’s hangar bay. But despite the evidence of her eyes, T’Met knew that Dray’lax was already experiencing destruction on a planetary scale. She decided to wait until the light generated by those fiery death agonies reached the system’s edge, where her vessel waited quietly for the end of Dray’lax, and of Khazara.
Jolan’tru, Khazara, T’Met thought. My love.
She settled back into her chair and resumed her vigil.
TWENTY-THREE
Sunday, May 2, 2160
Sol 49 of Martian Month of Libra/Sol 209 of Year 107 Z.C. (Zubrin Calendar)
Outside New Chicago, Mars
AFTER STOPPING TO CHECK the indicators on the glove of her environment suit, Gannet Brooks prepared to enjoy a spectacle that she could never see back home on Earth. Thanks to the nearness of the horizon, the city lights and those of the nearby ground vehicles and hovercars that had brought everyone out here would provide no serious competition for the pyrotechnics that soon were to illuminate the star-bedecked Martian night sky. She was part of a sparse, thinly spread crowd of perhaps a hundred—a claustrophobic multitude by local standards. She looked upward at the distant stars of other worlds, several of which she had once seen from a much closer vantage.
Years ago. When she’d still been allowed to cover the war. Before Nash McEvoy clipped my reportorial wings, she thought.
She watched the slow, celestial pageant. Brooks understood the futility of dwelling on her bitter resentment of having been summarily pulled back from the Earth-Romulan War’s front lines. But under the current circumstances—which amounted to a paradoxical yet very real sense of isolation in the presence of so many others—she found she could do little else. Though the wound was years old, it still felt far too fresh.
Maybe I’ll feel better once the fireworks start, she thought.
Redoubling her efforts to focus on her comparatively mundane current assignment, Brooks planted her feet widely in an effort to stave off the vertigo that the sky and the weak Martian gravity sometimes conspired to engender in nonnatives. Once she felt reasonably certain she wasn’t about to topple onto her back, she set her eyeballs to the task of searching the heavens for any sign of anomalous motion. Initially she saw only the stars she expected to see, as apparently immobile as chunks of white chocolate baked into a tray of brownies. The stars were arranged in the familiar groupings her father had taught her during her childhood: Cygnus and Cassiopeia both slowly pinwheeled almost directly overhead, near Aquila, which lay in the northeastern sky, while Ophiuchus looked on from the west and the Big Dipper drifted lazily above the southern horizon.
She was grateful that Epsilon Indi lay below the horizon and thus out of her sight. That fact, of course, did nothing to ameliorate the shocking knowledge of what the Romulans had done to that system’s sole inhabited planet. Draylax had lost a billion or more people in minutes, and the death toll continued to mount as the fires and volcanism spread. The Draylaxian civilization might never recover. It was Coridan all over again.
The starscape before her differed hardly at all from those fondly remembered evenings of stargazing, a fact that was glaringly evident despite the visual impediment of her helmet visor. In fact, she felt some surprise that the starscape didn’t look any brighter or sharper than it did through the still relatively tenuous, if steadily thickening, Martian atmosphere. The clarity of the Martian night was something she had expected to wax poetic about in the piece Nash McEvoy, her editor at Newstime, had sent her here to research. Instead, she was already all but certain that after another century or two of sustained terrafo
rming, the only difference between watching the sky from here and from, say, Scottsdale, Arizona, would be the heft of the local gravity.
Then Brooks saw a flicker of motion in the western sky. She turned her head toward it, and it immediately vanished. She was about to give up when the apparent movement just as suddenly reappeared. This time the motion was connected to a clearly visible object.
A point of light, a single pinprick among countless others, had separated itself from the distant backdrop of westerly fixed stars. She wondered if she’d caught a glimpse of either Phobos or Deimos, the two moons of Mars. She decided it couldn’t be Deimos, the outer moon, because that body always rose in the east. And she dismissed the inner moon Phobos as a possibility when she noted that the point of light seemed to be growing steadily, as though it were approaching the planet. But she still couldn’t be absolutely sure that this was the leading edge of the spectacle the crowd had come to see.
It might be a passing ship, Brooks thought. Enterprise is supposed to be in the neighborhood, shoring up the local defenses now that the Romulans can attack us from their forward base on Tau Ceti. Recalling that fact triggered a bittersweet cascade of memories of Travis Mayweather. How long had it been since she had seen him in person, or at least spoken with him across the gulf of light-years that nearly always separated them? Too long, she supposed. Or perhaps not nearly long enough. She knew that he had transferred off Enterprise years ago, though she wasn’t sure where he was supposed to be serving at the moment. For all she knew, Travis might have joined the war’s ever-expanding list of casualties.
The approaching object morphed into what could only be described as an incoming missile. Brooks kept imagining the Romulans using the Martian terraforming program as a means of concealing a sneak attack. After all, what better Trojan horse could one ask for than a kilometer-long, potato-shaped collection of ice and dust that originated in the depths of the Sol system’s dark and frigid Kuiper belt?
Putting aside that unsettling—and arguably paranoid—notion, she decided that she was observing precisely what she and everyone else who had gathered here this evening had come to see: the making of Martian climatological history. Its terminal disintegration abetted by a tracery of ruby fire from the ground-based verteron array near Sagan Station in the northern lowlands, the plummeting comet fragment left a superheated, ionized wake across the southeastern horizon as the Martian atmosphere converted much of the object’s kinetic energy into heat. The brightly glowing mass descended quickly out of sight before exploding in a nimbus of golden-orange brilliance that momentarily drove even bright Spica, Beta Virginis, and Porrima from view. Fortunately, the horizon itself protected the impact’s audience from the violence of this energetic exchange.
Though she couldn’t safely get close enough to see the process in detail, Brooks knew that the core constituents of the comet fragment—primarily water and various organic compounds, such as carbon and nitrogen—had already appreciably increased Mars’s global supply of much-needed volatiles. At the same time, the impact, and those that were soon to follow, would release large quantities of the surface and subsurface volatiles that already lay frozen in the planet’s uninhabited and forbidding south polar region. As she stood watching, a great column of particulate and gaseous ejecta rose into the sky, glowing with the heat of the impact that created it and from the sunlit regions beyond the horizon. Time passed with great elasticity, but she noticed it only after she felt the rumbling vibrations beneath her boots; the planet’s cold and ancient crust was reverberating gently in response to the distant collision.
Brooks noticed a new sound beyond the hiss of her breathing and the faint whirr of her suit’s internal ventilation fans. After a few breathless heartbeats, she identified it as the applause of the crowd of which she was a part. She joined in, smiling at this confirmation that what she’d just seen was in fact not a Romulan attack, but rather a spectacular baby step in the ongoing process of transforming a world that had endured untold eons of utter desolation into another green and lush Earth—a scaled-down, low-gravity Earth located right next door to the original.
“We have plenty more where that one came from,” said a suit-muffled voice that suddenly began speaking directly behind her.
Brooks jumped, then cursed herself for her skittishness; such sudden moves on the part of those reared on Earth tended to become exaggerated—often comically so—in Mars’s one-third-g environment. In spite of the care she had taken earlier to avoid experiencing vertigo and its unfortunate consequences, she found herself being drawn inexorably into a slow-motion backward pratfall.
Her fall suddenly arrested itself. Strong arms were holding her up. As her boot treads dug into the regolith, she saw another suited figure, standing close enough to her that she could see his blue eyes clearly through his visor. A fortyish man with a strong aquiline face, framed in dark brown hair.
“Excusez-moi,” said the man. His accent, Brooks noted, very much matched his apology. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“I’m not startled,” Brooks said as she tested her footing. Now that she was no longer trying to stare straight up into the sky, she felt reasonably confident that she wasn’t about to tip over again. “You can let go of me now.”
“Pardon,” he said as he released her. He took a careful step backward, evidently pausing only to satisfy himself that she wasn’t about to fall again. “I don’t usually grab strange women this way.”
She took a moment to appraise him. He was of medium height. Apart from the pleasant smile, he seemed unremarkable. Then she noticed the twin insignia patches on his right arm. The dytallix-bremco logo was emblazoned on one; blue horizon, framing an artist’s image of a warmer, wetter version of the Red Planet, adorned the other.
Before she could open her mouth to speak, another streak of fire cast a few more moments of brilliance across the great star-flecked canopy overhead.
Still smiling, the man spoke again. “As I said, there are plenty more where that one came from.”
“I suppose you ought to know,” she said, pointing at his patches. “You seem to have some expertise in the field.”
His smile broadened. “Very observant of you. Of course, I should expect no less from a Newstime reporter.” He pointed at the press pass, emblazoned with the distinctive angular logo of the Solarcorp News Service, that was attached with a lanyard to her right sleeve.
“You’re not so bad at the fine art of noticing things yourself, Mister…” She trailed off, by way of prompting him.
“Forgive me. My name is Picard. Alexandre Robert Picard. I work as an engineering consultant for the Dytallix-Barsoom Resource Extraction and Mining Corporation, as well as for the ongoing Mars terraforming operations that the Martian Colonies government runs out of Sagan Station.” He extended his gloved right hand.
“Gannet Brooks.” She shook the proffered hand.
His eyes widened. “I thought you looked familiar. I followed your war reportage religiously. It’s a pity we haven’t received more of it over the past few years.”
Don’t get me started, please, she thought, not wanting to rehash the ignominious end of her war correspondent work. She said, “I’m covering the home front for the most part these days. Specifically the big environmental remediation projects of the inner system—particularly the ones that depend on hauling volatiles down from Kuiper belt, like the Green Sahara project—”
“And Blue Horizon,” Picard said, nodding. “Well, I suppose this is destiny.”
Brooks suppressed a chuckle. “I wish I had a UE credit for every time I’ve heard that line.”
A look of horror crossed his face, and she couldn’t quite make up her mind about his sincerity. “Oh, I wasn’t using a line, I promise you. I was merely thinking…” He trailed off, as though woolgathering.
“Thinking what?” she said, curious in spite of herself. He seemed almost to be blushing.
Picard shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. “How differen
tly the Green Sahara people must have to handle the inbound comet fragments than we do here. I mean, we can just drop them on the south pole because we have no large settlements there yet.”
You silver-tongued devil, Brooks thought. She said, “You’re right. Africa is a good deal more crowded than that, even in the Sahara. I imagine the Green Sahara people have to be a little more careful getting their, ah, deliveries down to the ground. Come to think of it, I wonder how they manage it.”
Picard shrugged. “I suppose they attach impulse boosters and guidance packages to the comet fragments to bring each one in for a ‘soft landing.’ But that end of things isn’t my main area of expertise. These days, I spend most of my time on the other end of the supply chain, as it were.”
“Meaning?”
“The source of the comet fragments that we occasionally send in for ‘hard landings’ in the south polar region,” he said. “In fact, I’m taking a shuttle out above the ice line tomorrow.”
“Ice line?”
“Sorry. That’s engineerspeak for the cold outer edges of the Sol system. I’m headed out tomorrow to visit a platform that’s orbiting in the Kuiper belt. I’m consulting with a team there that’s in charge of redirecting volatile-rich objects intended for use in the inner system—specifically Green Sahara on Earth and Blue Horizon here on Mars. We make the bulk of our Mars deliveries this time of year, during the relatively calm months that immediately precede the global dust storm season.”
Brooks grinned. “Do you think you might have room to bring a passenger along tomorrow?”
“Certainly,” Picard said, his earlier warm smile returning as they began programming their suits to exchange personal contact information.
Then they watched, from a safe distance, as seven more comet fragments slammed into the Martian polar hinterlands, each one tossing up its own great plume of glowing gas while shaking the small, rapidly changing red world beneath their feet.
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War Page 21