Her expression darkened, her cheeks flushing with what he recognized as anger, though it was restrained as tightly as the superheated plasma in a warp nacelle.
“I lost a couple of old classmates on Tarod IX,” she said. “What’s your point?”
“I’m not trying to compare my grief to anybody else’s,” he said, raising a placating hand.
She appeared more or less satisfied by that, and seemed to stand down. “And I want to get out there and stop the Romulans just as much as you do. But we have Elena to think about.”
I am thinking about Elena, he thought as he prepared to toss his final card onto the table.
“So we both want to take the fight to those bastards,” he said. “I just can’t put it aside any longer, Selma. Not since Deneva. I have to go back out there.”
Now that the words were out at last, like so many slow-motion meteors painting the sky with lingering traceries of fire, he braced himself for her reaction. This time it was going to turn out differently. Unlike all the previous occasions when they’d had precisely the same argument—right after the attacks on Alpha Centauri, Calder II, Tarod IX, and the Kobayashi Maru—he had his talking points lined up, prepared and polished like rows of dress boots. This time he was ready to argue that the best way to safeguard Elena’s future would be to do everything possible to turn back the Romulan tide.
Then Selma put him almost entirely off balance by failing to object. Instead she merely gazed silently into his eyes for a seeming eternity.
Very quietly, she said, “All right, Nelson.”
“Come again?” he asked, unable to keep the confusion and suspicion out of his voice. This was exactly the sort of rhetorical jujitsu that always seemed to give her the crucial edge in any argument.
“I said, ‘All right.’ I can see that your mind is made up.”
He blinked in incredulity. “You’re going to let me go? Just like that? You’ll stay behind and look after Elena?”
She put a hand flat against his chest. “Not so fast, Sergeant. I want to go just as badly as you do, remember?”
“But we can’t both go,” he said, his confusion only deepening. “Like you said, we have Elena to think about. We’ve been imposing on the Marvicks way too much for child care as it is.”
Nodding, she said, “Right. And who said anything about both of us going? You just said that one of us has to go and fight, and I said ‘All right’ to that.”
It finally came to him what she was suggesting. “I outrank you, Corporal Guitierrez.”
Elena grew restless again, prompting Selma to reach up and take her down from his shoulders. “Not while we’re both retired and wearing civvies, Sergeant Kemper,” she said.
Because his hands were now freed by Elena’s sudden departure from his shoulders, Nelson Kemper shoved them both into the pockets of his khaki trousers, as was his wont when he was waxing thoughtful.
“Now we just have to find a fair way to decide which one of us stays home, and which one of us rides out to slay the dragon,” Selma said. Elena threw her arms around her mother’s neck, almost as though she understood the uncertainty that lay ahead.
Kemper absently rubbed his thumb over the slightly serrated edge of the silver disk he kept in the depths of his left pocket. He had begun carrying the ancient dollar coin as a sort of good luck talisman on the day Elena was born.
“Call heads or tails,” he said as he took out the coin.
Then he sent it spinning into the air with a practiced flick of his thumb.
TWENTY-FOUR
Thursday, November 6, 2155
Enterprise, near the Kappa Fornacis system
DESPERATE FOR SOME SURCEASE from the turmoil in her belly, Ensign Elrene Leydon sat in the crew mess, her eyes glued to the wide observation windows. Beyond the layers of transparent aluminum the stars had taken on a bluish tinge, the ship’s relentless superluminal motion stretching them into elongated strands of sapphire brilliance.
“Try not to let the motion sickness get to you,” said the starship’s chief communications officer. “I felt the same way right before my first bridge shift started.”
Leydon tried to contain her surprise, but failed utterly. “How could you tell I was feeling motion sickness?”
Ensign Hoshi Sato flashed a grin that contained no trace of mockery. “For one thing, you’re the greenest-looking non-Vulcan I’ve ever seen. Second, you just came aboard with the new crew rotation we took on during the Archon rendezvous, and I know that the Academy’s high warp simulations don’t really do justice to warp-five flight. And lastly, you’re squeezing that coffee cup hard enough to turn a carbon composite into diamond.”
Suddenly hyperconscious of her fidgeting hands, Leydon set the cup down on the table between them. Folding her hands in her lap, she decided to devote her concentration to satisfying the curiosity Sato had piqued.
“Are you telling me that you felt like you were about to puke a few minutes before you did your first bridge duty?”
Sato nodded as she pushed her now-empty breakfast plate to one side. “Uh-huh. Incidentally, I discovered back then that staring out the windows while the ship is at warp only makes it worse.”
Leydon thought that sounded counterintuitive, raised as she’d been on tales of the ancient ocean fleets of the United States at the height of its global power and prestige. In those days, green sailors could anchor both their sea legs and bellies by staring out at the vast blue horizon—at least according to the lore handed down from her greatgrandfather, who had served aboard CVN-65, the U.S. Navy’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, better known as the U.S.S. Enterprise.
Leydon turned her chair slightly, hoping to prevent the stars from continuing to draw her attention. Leaning conspiratorially toward Sato, she lowered her voice and said, “But why should you have ever gotten that nervous? I mean, you were handpicked by Captain Archer himself.”
Despite some the mean-spirited Kobayashi Maru scuttlebutt concerning Archer that she had heard among some of her recently graduated Starfleet Academy peers—and, astonishingly, even among some veteran members of Enterprise’s crew—Leydon’s image of the captain remained untarnished. Whatever hard decision circumstance might have forced on him out at Gamma Hydra, Jonathan Beckett Archer remained a hero in her eyes. Without Archer, the Xindi sneak attack that had killed her mother would have been followed by carnage on a scale that the captain’s craven detractors probably couldn’t even imagine.
“You’re right,” Sato said. “Captain Archer did handpick me to be a part of his senior officer corps, right before Enterprise left spacedock for that first voyage to Qo’noS. But being handpicked isn’t all that comforting when you’re about to strike out into the unknown.” She paused to take a swallow from her own coffee cup, then added soberly, “And I think that you are living proof of that.”
Once again Leydon felt stunned, just as surely as if the com officer had drawn and fired a phase pistol. “What are you talking about?”
“Just this,” Sato said, her grin amping up again. “What makes you think that you were any less handpicked than I was? You don’t really think that either Captain Archer or Commander T’Pol would choose just anybody to be Mayweather’s permanent replacement behind the helm, do you?”
Sato’s revelation nearly knocked Leydon out of her chair. Travis Mayweather’s contributions to the resolution of the Xindi affair were already well known; he was already on his way to becoming a larger-than-life heroic figure in the annals of midshipman folklore, and his recent sudden departure from Archer’s crew to take the helm of the newly launched Starship Discovery NX-04 was therefore both a perplexing surprise and a source of endless barstool speculation.
And on top of all of that had come the knowledge that Commander T’Pol—whose entire race was not renowned for either tact or tolerance of human foibles—had had a direct hand in her selection. Despite Sato’s obviously encouraging intentions, Leydon’s guts felt no less queasy than they had before. An
d her first-ever shift on the bridge, her shaking hands guiding the stick and rudder of the very ship that had faced down the Xindi and was even now rushing home to defend Earth from perhaps an even worse threat, was due to start in less than ten minutes.
Elrene Leydon slumped backward slightly as she struggled to find her breath. “Maybe I should go back to staring at the stars.”
Four hours into her shift at the helm, Leydon had managed to keep her stomach battened down and her hands steady. Both of those things had proved far easier to do after the ship had come out of warp on the farthest fringes of Deneva’s solar system. If Captain Archer had noticed anything amiss in her performance, he had refrained from mentioning it.
Archer’s voice came from behind her, startling her slightly. “Any sign of Romulans?”
Before Leydon could offer a clumsy response about the subspace navigational sensors showing clear, she heard the senior officers stationed aft of her begin to make their own crisp verbal reports.
“I am picking up nothing other than the expected icy and chondritic system-periphery bodies, Captain,” Commander T’Pol said. “The long-range sensor scans of the inner system detect no large-scale spaceflight activities near Deneva, nor evidence of patrols farther out.”
“Tactical is clear so far,” said Lieutenant Malcolm Reed. “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t Romulan ships lurking about the system, watching us from behind the cover of some comet or asteroid.”
“True enough,” the captain said. “They can’t have put all their resources into consolidating what they’ve taken on the surface of Deneva. But I want to find out exactly what happened here before we resume our original heading toward home. We need to learn everything we can about the current strength of the Romulan force that’s taken the planet. Not to mention how the hell they managed to get through the warp-detection grid in the first place.”
“There is very little we can learn with any certainty about Deneva’s surface at such an extreme distance,” T’Pol said in tones colored by neither frustration nor disappointment. “Even with the long-range sensors adjusted to their maximum resolution.”
“Commander T’Pol is right, Captain,” Reed said, prompting Leydon to turn to see the look of concern etched on the Englishman’s craggy face. “And the longer we stay even this close to Deneva, the greater the chance that the Romulans will pounce on Enterprise with that starship-hijacking weapon of theirs.”
Archer looked unhappy, but seemed to take his tactical officer’s words under advisement. Turning toward his exec, he said only, “T’Pol?”
The frostily elegant Vulcan woman nodded, and remained seated behind her science station’s scanner. “I must agree with Mister Reed. We should not linger here any longer than necessary without other armed vessels to assist us in fending off an unexpected Romulan attack.”
A sharp staccato beeping commenced at that moment, and it took Leydon a full second to realize that it was coming from her navigation board. A heartbeat later she had found both the source of the alarm and, thankfully, her ability to speak.
“Captain, our subspace navigation beam is detecting a small metallic object, dead ahead,” she said, feeling as though she’d been caught with her pants down, and on her first day on the job, no less. Concentrate on the task at hand, she told herself. Then hands trained on a dozen flight simulators moved automatically. And almost before she realized she had done it, she had manually entered the slight course correction necessary to avert the possibility of a catastrophic multiwarp-speed collision.
“Analysis!” Archer said. Leydon turned long enough to see that he was sitting ramrod straight in the seat at the bridge’s center, and appeared to have taken no notice of her greenhorn’s lapse.
“It is a small duranium-encased object,” T’Pol said as she looked intently into the scanner display on her console. “Approximately half a cubic meter in size, massing at approximately twenty-seven kilograms. It no longer poses any collision danger.”
Leydon grinned to herself.
“Could it be some sort of mine?” Archer said.
“Tactical sensors read negative for explosives, fissiles, or antimatter,” Reed said. “I read electronic circuitry of some kind inside the casing. It might be a log buoy from one of the ships that was lost here last month. But I’d still recommend handling it carefully.”
“Noted,” Archer said. “Let’s beam it aboard and have a look.”
“The device already appears to have sustained some damage,” T’Pol said. “The transporter could cause further damage to whatever electronics are inside it.”
“Or maybe trigger a disguised weapon,” Reed said.
Leydon watched Archer stroke his chin thoughtfully as he stared at the starfield displayed on the forward viewer—without appearing the least bit seasick as a consequence.
Archer turned toward Leydon and addressed her directly. “I have another baptism of fire for you, Ensign.”
“Sir?” Leydon said, swallowing hard.
“Activate the grapple-retrieval system, Mister Leydon. If jostling this thing makes it go ‘kaboom,’ then we’ll probably know about it before you drag the thing aboard.”
She nodded mutely, then transferred as much attention and energy as she could muster to the console before her.
And tried like hell to ignore the ever-so-slight tremor in her hands.
“Well, it’s definitely Tellarite,” Malcolm Reed said. He listened to his voice as it echoed across Launch Bay 1, which he had evacuated as a precaution just before Ensign Leydon had finished grappling the charred and pitted metal object aboard.
Very carefully, Hoshi Sato reached across the worktable on which the device sat and drew a small data module from inside its open duranium cover. Fortunately, the component hadn’t sustained enough damage to prevent its successful connection to a small adaptor unit that relayed its contents to a nearby viewscreen.
After watching the blunt Tellarite script scroll past for a few moments, Sato said, “It’s the log buoy from the Miracht.”
“What happened to them?” Reed wanted to know, his anxiety levels rising very quickly; after all, the Miracht was supposed to be one of the most advanced, powerful vessels in Tellar’s fleet. Regardless, he held out the hope of learning something useful from the buoy—something that might help Earth fend off the Romulan threat.
“The captain seems to have been in a serious hurry to get this buoy launched, so whatever happened must have hit them pretty fast. It’s possible that all this exterior damage was caused after launch by whatever attacked the Miracht, but that’s all just speculation on my part.”
Reed’s spirits fell. “So we still don’t have any hard information. Just guesses.”
Sato’s eyes widened. “Not entirely. I’m seeing a pattern here. Right at the end of the flight recording, each of the Miracht’s vital systems spontaneously shut down, one by one.”
“As though somebody was turning each of them off, by remote control,” Reed said.
Sato nodded. “The Romulan hijacking weapon.”
“I’d bet on it,” Reed said. “I’ll tell the captain.”
Although he hated what he was thinking right now, Reed hoped for the sake of his whole species that the Miracht’s commander had had sufficient time to destroy his vessel before the Romulans managed to seize the prize of the Tellarite navy.
And that Enterprise reached her homeworld before the Romulans forced the very same horrible choice upon Captain Archer.
• • •
Once Enterprise was under way, Jonathan Archer left T’Pol in charge of the bridge and withdrew to his ready room.
He sat behind his desk and wasted no time composing and sending a quick dispatch to Admiral Gardner at Starfleet Command. Without a pause, he then opened up one of the special secure Coalition diplomatic comm channels. A few seconds later, a hirsute female humanoid with porcine features regarded him with undisguised suspicion from across the gulf of parsecs that separated them.
“I need to speak with Ambassador Gral immediately,” Archer said. “About the Miracht.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Day Eleven, Month of Khuti
D’caernu’mneani system, Ahiuan sector
Imperial Romulan Annexed Space
ACCORDING TO THE NAV COMPUTER back aboard the Bird-of-Prey Dhivael, D’caernu’mneani—“great eye of red” in ancient High Rihannsu—was the name of the bloated red giant star toward which Commander T’Voras and his attack wing now moved at the agonizingly torpid pace of less than half of luminal speed.
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise) Page 23