Just as he could see in T’Pau’s new understated strategic vision reason to harbor grave doubts about its potential for success.
He began to move in deliberate fashion toward the entrance to the center of the compound, through which he had to pass in order to depart for the nearby Andorian diplomatic compound. His feet felt leaden, as though the gravity had just increased by half.
Soval contemplated the many difficulties that lay ahead, not least of which would be the task of persuading the Andorian and Tellarite delegations not to exacerbate the Romulan situation by pitting their spacefleets against the enemy’s new remote-hijacking weapon. He could only hope that neither world would choose to interpret the Coalition’s founding document—specifically its mutual defense provisions—as some manner of suicide pact.
Just as he could only hope that T’Pau’s “alternative strategic plan” wouldn’t inflict permanent damage to the Coalition alliance—and to whatever unrealized promise it might yet hold for the long-term prospects of galactic peace.
NINE
Gamma Hydra sector, near Tezel-Oroko
IT WAS THE THIRD TIME, by Trip’s count, that Ych’a had bluntly asked him exactly what he’d been up to during his months-long sojourn behind Romulan lines. He had ducked the question entirely the first two times in an effort to avoid dividing his concentration; the unfamiliar Vulcan control console before him had demanded his full attention from the time he and the V’Shar agent had run the little auxiliary vessel’s preflight checklist back aboard the Kiri-kin-tha.
Now that the icy comet fragment finally loomed before the Vulcan workpod as a mass of dull gray shadow made visible through the wide forward window only by the little vessel’s forward beacons, Trip felt even less inclined than before to deal with any distractions.
Apparently resigned to receiving no response to her questions, Ych’a said, “Your mission must have involved the Romulan Star Empire’s ongoing initiative to create its own warp-seven-capable stardrive.”
Still trying to operate the thruster verniers with as much delicacy as he could summon, Trip struggled to appear neither impressed nor worried by her perspicacity. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder how much Ych’a actually knew and how much she was merely speculating.
“Why do you say that?” he said, finally allowing himself to indulge his own curiosity, at least a little.
Her reply was so smooth as to seem almost practiced. “Because the Romulans are currently on a par with Earth, at least in terms of space-warp technology. That places your species in a perilous and vulnerable mutual balance of power. The sudden introduction of a high-warp engine to either side would alter that balance irrevocably—and more than likely fatally for whichever society lagged behind.”
“I’d say that’s pretty freakin’ logical,” he said as noncommittally as possible, his gaze still riveted to the contours of the rapidly approaching ice body, as revealed by the searchlights, while his hands busied themselves at the console before him. “Now it’s my turn to pry. Why are you out here in the Gamma Hydra sector? And why are you keeping the Kiri-kin-tha out here on a long snipe hunt when you and I both know that Captain T’Vran has a lot of other stops to make?”
Out of his peripheral vision he saw her gesture toward the cometary body, whose edges had already outgrown the forward window’s limits. A gently curving glint of metal on the surface, now at most a single klick away, seemed to confirm the duranium signature the freighter’s sensors had picked up.
“I am here to search for survivors,” she said. “Such a search can take a good deal of time, as I’m sure you’re aware.”
“Finding survivors would take a fair amount of time,” he said, nodding, “not to mention finding whatever high-tech gear my old pal Sopek’s ship might have been smuggling. Or maybe you’re really here to make sure that whatever gadgetry the V’Shar paid the Kobayashi Maru to haul to the covert Vulcan listening post on the edge of Romulan space doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.”
Hands like mine, he thought, already very familiar with Vulcan’s long-term efforts to “moderate” and “manage” Earth’s initiatives to spread out into the galaxy. After all, Earth’s unanticipated acquisition of Vulcan technology could not only tip the balance of power between Earth and Romulus, but it also had the potential to change fundamentally the dynamic of Vulcan’s historic “elder brother” relationship with Earth.
Ych’a’s stony silence, along with her sudden minute interest in the console before her, told Trip that his dart had landed very near the bull’s-eye.
What a relief it’s going to be to put all this cloak-and-dagger bullshit behind me, he thought, returning his full attention to his deceleration and landing procedures. Once this pointy-eared Mata Hari gets this one last spy mission out of me.
“The computer has locked onto the duranium signature,” Ych’a said as she studied a graphic display on her console. “Although it appears to be at least partially buried in surface ice, its sensor profile remains consistent with that of an extremely small auxiliary spacecraft. Most likely a larger vessel’s emergency escape pod.”
“Yeah, but is it one of ours or one of theirs?” Trip asked, pausing to glance at his own console, which now was displaying the same definitive yet not quite crystal-clear graphic Ych’a had just been analyzing.
“It is impossible to tell at the moment,” she said. “My hails have received no response.”
“Well, let’s hope we find a friend waiting for us down there who can’t talk to us,” Trip said. “Instead of an enemy who won’t.”
“We shall know which it is in fairly short order,” she said. “The object is now less than half a mat’drih away, and we are closing rapidly.”
He nodded, now dividing his attention only between the indicators on his console and the pockmarked icescape that was rushing headlong toward the window. “About five-hundred meters, then. Do you want to do the honors, or should I?”
“You have given me no reason to doubt your piloting abilities as yet, Commander Tucker,” she said.
There’s always a first time, he thought as he entered a quick sequence of commands into his panel. The view of the ice body changed, revealing a horizon that faded into the blackness of space as he positioned the little ship’s belly level with what he was quickly coming to think of as the ground below.
Ych’a counted down with a nerve-wracking calmness until the workpod—which had not been designed for such maneuvers—came to a stop with a single teeth-rattling wunk.
“We’re down,” Trip said, just barely resisting the urge to heave a sigh of relief.
The tension that had gradually ratcheted up during the descent finally slackened its hold on both his spine and bowels as Trip’s body realized that he had successfully cheated Isaac Newton yet again.
“Well done, Commander,” Ych’a said. “You set us down approximately point-zero-eight mat’drih from the object. Your knowledge of Vulcan technology is indeed impressive.”
“I’m a quick study,” Trip said as the hull’s last lingering reverberations slowly damped out and the console before him confirmed that the pod had neither suffered damage nor lost any atmosphere, despite the roughness of the landing. “It comes in handy when you have to improvise. Like when you have to perform a search and rescue mission in a little auxiliary pod that’s probably not rated for any duties that are much more hazardous than going outside the Kiri-kin-tha to inspect her paint job.”
Ych’a nodded somberly as she started to remove the seat restraints that crisscrossed her thin Vulcan environmental suit, the twin of Trip’s own attire except for its smaller size and rounder contours. “That has not escaped my notice, Commander,” she said, apparently unfazed by the abruptness of Trip’s stop.
That is why she brought me along on this mission, after all, he reminded himself as he extricated himself from his own restraints and rose from his seat. She needed to test me a bit. See what I’m really made of. He didn’t doubt that the V’Shar agent posses
sed sufficient ability as a small-craft pilot to have landed the pod ably enough herself, and perhaps even with a good deal more finesse than he had mustered.
Ych’a wasted no time turning to a nearby equipment rack and retrieving what they both needed in order to exit the pod safely. She handed him a helmet that felt considerably lighter than it appeared, even though his inner ear and the heft of his own limbs confirmed that the little vessel’s gravity plating was still set at an approximately Vulcan-normal value. He took a pair of supple synthetic-fiber gloves out of his helmet before donning his headgear, and put on the gloves once he’d locked the helmet firmly into place on his suit’s polyalloy neck-ring.
Already completely outfitted in her EVA gear, Ych’a leaned over her console momentarily and pressed a toggle. A moment later, she shook her head in Trip’s direction, her slightly bulbous helmet exaggerated the motion.
“Whoever is in that pod still is not answering hails,” she said.
Trip leaned over his own console and initiated a final scan of the nearby target object, whose interior remained stubbornly obscure.
Doubting he’d get any argument from Ych’a, he said, “Maybe we’d better bring a couple of phase pistols along with the first-aid kit. Just in case.”
As far as the man knew, his life might have begun mere days earlier, or perhaps even hours. It was rather difficult, after all, to gauge the passage of time from the inside of what was essentially a small sterile room, in the absence of a sun or moons or any illumination save the dull green radiance of the little compartment’s emergency lights, its handful of faintly glowing instrument panels, and the few unblinking, uncaring stars that he could see through one of the room’s three tiny windows.
And it was even more difficult to reckon time, the man thought, when one hadn’t the faintest knowledge of the reason for his imprisonment, or why a forehead wound that he could not recall having acquired persistently seeped bright green blood, even after he had bandaged it.
He wished he could at least remember his own name. And why a dead man had shared this cramped space with him. Immediately after he had first awakened in this hellish place, he had risen from the padded chair on which he’d found himself recumbent and discovered the corpse, which lay slumped in a pool of congealing emerald-hued blood in another of the small chamber’s three couchlike chairs.
He had immediately decided that the dead man must have been a soldier of some sort, judging by his torn and scorched martial maroon-and-gray tunic, trousers, and boots, all of which suggested some manner of uniform, as did the holstered sidearm. Bolstering this perception further was his own clothing, which bore a close resemblance to the garments on the corpse in the chair, right down to the pistol on his hip.
Where have I seen a soldier before? he had wondered, immediately suspicious of the certainty he had felt, especially in such a patently uncertain environment. All he knew for certain beyond the similarities between his clothing and accoutrements and those of the corpse, had come via the dully reflective surface of one of the metal walls, which had revealed that he and the dead man bore a superficial physical resemblance to one another—both men had dark, bowl-cut hair, upswept eyebrows, and conspicuously pointed ears.
He wondered if his forehead injury might have caused the yawning chasm in his memory. He couldn’t be sure, and knew he had to face the possibility that he might never be sure, at least not to the degree to which he’d believed that the dead man, and by extension he himself, had been military men. He only knew that he had spent his first several hours of consciousness in the little room’s chill semidarkness— perhaps as much as a full dayturn—watching the corpse through the steam that rose from his own breath. He felt almost as though he was observing some solemn funerary rite, though he could access no conscious memories of any such custom.
Was this man a close comrade in arms? he thought, tormented by his inability to remember such fundamental things. Did he rescue me from whatever caused my injury? Perhaps the dead man had dragged him unconscious into this small chamber for his own safety before succumbing to his own wounds.
Which might mean that this room was no mere room, but rather a shelter or bunker of some kind. He knew it couldn’t be an underground chamber, otherwise the stars he could see through one of the tiny windows wouldn’t have been visible.
A lifeboat, perhaps.
Maybe I’m marooned somewhere in deep space, he thought, awed by the notion that he might be very, very far from whatever world he and his dead companion had called home. Perhaps the gravity beneath my feet is really being generated by hidden machinery and a power cell, and not by a world.
On the plus side, quite soon after awakening, he had found the uncomfortably cool, silent-as-death chamber—or lifeboat—to be well stocked with various provisions. A series of easily opened lockers beneath the wall consoles had yielded a generous supply of water containers, several changes of clothing, a quartet of what appeared to be pressurized suits, and a medical kit, as well as a large stack of sealed, metal-foil envelopes, each of them filled with a brown puttylike material that proved edible, if unappealing. He reasoned that these were emergency rations of some sort, and wondered if the supply of potables, which the death of the soldier in the other chair had effectively doubled, would outlast the hidden batteries that maintained the atmosphere and chill ambient temperature against the airless, glacial cold he sensed lying in wait for him in the star-scattered darkness outside. He knew those batteries could not last indefinitely, any more than his limited stockpiles of food and water could.
After having considered these vexing issues for perhaps the thousandth time, the man looked down at his own clothing, which was nearly as charred and distressed as the garments on the corpse.
Was I really serving in some sort of military unit? he thought, looking back over at the dead man. Could he and I have been fighting in a war before we both ended up here?
If the answer to that question proved to be “yes,” then he knew he might be vulnerable to far more immediate perils than cold, starvation, or vacuum. An armed enemy or enemies attired in distinctive uniforms of their own might even now be stalking him. Such adversaries might decide to make short work of him, were they to find him and his dead compatriot in their present attire.
Rather than be a target, he shed his uniform, replacing it with one of the unadorned olive-drab jumpsuits he had found in the locker near the food and water stockpiles. Once he had completed his wardrobe change, he placed his old garments in a neat pile on the far side of the room, away from any of the consoles.
Standing in the room’s center, he raised the pistol he had formerly kept in a hip holster and pointed it at the stack of clothing, his thumb pressing control studs as if the nerves, muscles, and tendons that drove it possessed memories of their own. Let’s see what this weapon can do, he thought just before he opened fire.
Several heartbeats later he stood stock-still, marveling at the film of fine ash on the floor that had replaced his target. Another quick blast had reduced the ashes, essentially, to their constituent atoms.
He turned toward the dead man in the chair. The corpse’s uniform had to follow the first one into oblivion. And on top of that, a dead body couldn’t simply be left where it was indefinitely.
Who was he, really? he thought, wrestling down a sense of deep regret. My best friend? A sibling?
“Rest easy, whoever you were,” he said as he raised his weapon again and took careful aim so as not to hit anything but the corpse and the chair beneath it. “And return to the cosmos.”
After four squeezes of the trigger, the grim task was done. He was alone. And as heartbeats stretched into eternities, he was slowly becoming convinced that there might be no enemy stalking him after all. He even began to entertain the notion that he might be the only sentient creature alive in the universe, and that his erstwhile corpse-companion had merely been a figment of his imagination.
THUMP.
The sound abruptly snapped him back to
reality.
Not alone, he thought, trying to parse the sound, which had come from outside.
But outside, the infinite space that lay beyond the chamber’s metal walls had appeared to be nothing but airless emptiness. He remembered, from some dark and hidden well of memory, that a vacuum could not conduct sound.
Just as he remembered that hull metal could.
THUMP.
He moved swiftly toward one of the walls and found the control panel where he had discovered a set of illumination controls. Holding his pistol at the ready with one hand, he killed the ship’s interior lighting with the other.
Darkness enfolded him a half-heartbeat after he noticed a quick, furtive movement through an ostensibly empty window.
Something is out there. He clutched the pistol in a two-handed grip as he approached the wall that harbored a man-high oval that he had come to think of as a sealed hatch. A series of faint clanks, bumps, and reverberations seemed to be coming from the hatch’s other side. He wondered if he had sufficient time to don one of the chamber’s four pressure suits before whatever was outside succeeded in prying its way in. Galvanized into action, he began moving purposefully through the darkness toward the garment storage locker.
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise) Page 12