“Subspace scans show both the Heinlein and the Kon-Tiki scrambling up from Altair VI to intercept the incoming bogeys,” Thayer said, her expression a study in intensity. Her eyes never broke contact with the tactical console’s dynamic displays.
“Heinlein reports engaging one of the bogeys,” Valerian reported from the comm station, her right hand holding her earpiece in place as she listened to developments that could only be followed in real time via the subspace bands, given the light-minute or so that still separated Columbia from the unfolding battle.
On the main viewer, the artificially polarized white light of Altair turned blue, while the background stars elongated into glowing cerulean spears. When Akagi dropped Columbia out of warp moments later, restoring the universe to its normal palette of shapes and colors, the blue-green orb of Altair VI looked close enough to reach out and touch.
And as Columbia quickly decelerated into a tight, three-hundred-klick orbit above the planet’s surface, a rapidly expanding conflagration suddenly hove into view from just beyond the terminator.
Something had detonated, leaving a gigantic, silent orange fireball in orbit. As if in answer to Hernandez’s subvocalized prayers, the bulbous shapes of the Heinlein and the Kon-Tiki, both of them Starfleet Daedalus-class vessels, emerged from the fiery debris field, heading in different directions.
“The fireball is what’s left of one of the Romulan attackers,” elRashad confirmed, his hands moving in a blur across his scanner controls. “I’m not reading enough mass to account for them both.”
Hernandez’s brow furrowed. “So where’s the other one?”
The Kon-Tiki’s ungainly rolling turn toward the planet’s atmosphere, coupled with Columbia’s continued forward motion, drew Hernandez’s gaze deeper into Altair VI’s expanding dayside and answered her question before any of her crew could.
In the distance, just above the ninety-degree-canted horizon, a telltale streak of fire gave away the presence of the last Romulan fighter craft, which was now on an almost meteor-fast entry trajectory. Racing toward the intruder from above was another pair of spacecraft, a local welcoming committee, judging from the familiar configurations.
“Kon-Tiki confirms that one Romulan vessel is still coming in,” said Valerian. “Despite having taken at least one direct hit.”
“Let’s hope that one hit crippled the Romulan at least. Is she making a controlled descent?” Fletcher asked.
“I can’t tell from these readings,” el-Rashad said. “But it probably doesn’t matter either way. The hostile craft is on a direct heading for the Altair VI outpost, and the only things possibly standing in her way are a couple of local DY-500-class ships making steep descent maneuvers from orbit. Based on the numbers I’m seeing, a ground collision looks just about certain.”
“We can’t let that happen,” Hernandez said, quickly doing the tactical math in her head. Since those DY-500s were most likely armed with nothing stronger than navigational lasers, there was no point in expecting them to intervene successfully. “Go after the bogey, Reiko.”
“Aye, Captain.”
As Lieutenant Akagi busied herself at the conn, Fletcher leaned in close and spoke almost directly into the captain’s ear. “Erika, Columbia wasn’t designed to enter planetary atmosphere any more than those DY-500s or Daedalus ships were.”
“I know, Veronica,” Hernandez answered just as quietly. She gestured toward the forward viewer, upon which a green-brown landscape, highlighted by the red-orange of a hull superheaded by reentry friction, hurtled ever nearer. “But the outpost down there wasn’t designed to withstand a hot ballistic encounter with a spaceship. And since Columbia is the most fleet-footed vessel here, it’s up to us to step into the breach no matter what the owner’s manual says.”
“Understood,” Fletcher said with a sober nod that she leavened with a wry grin. “But you may have just voided the warranty on this beast. I intend to hide someplace safe when Karl Graylock reads you the riot act about this afterward.”
Hernandez returned her XO’s grin. If there is an afterward, I’ll gladly accept whatever punishment our chief engineer deems appropriate.
Aloud, she said, “Lieutenant Akagi, estimated time to intercept?”
“About thirty-two seconds, Captain,” the pilot said. “That only leaves another five seconds or so to take out the bogey before it slams into the outpost.”
Which means that the outpost is probably finished no matter what, unless we blow that Romulan out of the sky right now, Hernandez thought. She was well aware that a metallic debris cloud moving at terminal velocity could devastate an even larger area of the planet’s surface than could an unchecked collision—unless the detonation that created it took place sufficiently high in Altair VI’s fortunately substantial mesosphere.
“Kalil, what’s my safety margin?” she asked the science officer.
“Another ten seconds,” came el-Rashad’s crisp response. “Perhaps fifteen, if the local atmospheric variables are kind.”
Rising from her chair, Hernandez said, “Lieutenant Thayer, target phase cannons. Ensign Valerian, warn those DY-500s not to get too close. I don’t want anybody getting caught in the blowback.”
“Weapons lock is balky, Captain,” Thayer said. “Atmospheric distortions.”
Hernandez nodded in her weapons officer’s direction. “Understood. Aim manually. We’re running out of time here.”
“Aye, Captain,” Thayer said, beads of sweat coalescing on her forehead. “No pressure.”
“Both DY-500 craft have acknowledged our wave-off request, Captain,” said Valerian. “They’re steering clear.”
“Target is still descending in terminal trajectory, nearing minimum safe detonation altitude,” el-Rashad said. “And I’m reading a live nuclear warhead arming aboard the bogey!”
“Confirmed,” Valerian said.
“So this isn’t just an inert meteor falling on the outpost’s head,” Fletcher said.
Hernandez breathed a curse. “Of course not. That would be easy.” It made sense that the Romulan ships would carry nukes; they had probably used them to initiate the cascade of node failures in Altair’s warp-field detection grid that had caught Columbia’s attention in the first place.
The ship rumbled and shuddered beneath the captain’s boots, interrupting her reverie.
“Try and keep her level, will you, Akagi?” Thayer said. “You’re screwing up my manual target lock.”
“Sorry,” Akagi said, her face creased with concentration as her fingers moved in a blur across the flight control console.
“Target has passed minimum safe detonation altitude,” el-Rashad said.
“Lieutenant Thayer,” Hernandez said, injecting calm into her voice with pure force of will. “Are you ready to fire or not? We’re not gonna have any time for do-overs.”
“My manual target lock keeps drifting,” the weapons officer said. “Damn!”
The jumble of green-brown ground and dark ocean below was beginning to look uncomfortably close. Hernandez could actually see one of the Darro-Miller outpost’s larger seaside domes, right on the approaching daylit horizon.
“Hull temperature approaching critical,” el-Rashad said. “If we don’t detonate this thing right now, nothing we do later will make any difference.”
“Thayer?” Hernandez said, hoping the messiness of the real world would provide more favorable circumstances than el-Rashad’s pure math would suggest. She was well aware that the chaotic behavior of Altair VI’s thicker lower atmospheric layers could interfere with electronic targeting systems. But she also knew that this very same chaos could also help to neutralize any debris field created even at this low altitude.
“Outer hull temp has just passed twenty-five hundred degrees Celsius,” el-Rashad reported. “Approaching spec thermal limits.”
“Target locked,” Thayer said as Altair’s thick atmosphere rumbled and shook the ship again.
“Fire!” Hernandez said.
&n
bsp; On the main viewscreen, the salvo from the forward phase cannons was nearly lost in the incendiary glow coming from the overheated hull. Through that tunnel of fire, all that Hernandez could see was the glowing point of light of the descending bogey and the shadows cast by the settlement structures and the nearby fields of ancient Altairian ruins, both of which still appeared to lie several hundred klicks distant.
A seeming eternity later, the bogey erupted in a gout of fire, which immediately blossomed into an orange sphere of thermonuclear destruction that encompassed the entire viewscreen.
“Akagi, take us clear!” Hernandez cried, getting back into her captain’s chair and hanging onto its arms for dear life as Columbia’s bridge tilted while the inertial compensators struggled to catch up to the pilot’s lightning maneuver. Everyone else on the bridge likewise anchored themselves to chairs and railings as best they could until the ship had leveled out.
Hernandez turned toward the main science station. “Outpost status, Mister el-Rashad?” she asked.
The science officer wore a grim expression of concentration as he consulted his scanner and console displays.
“No signal traffic from the surface,” Valerian said.
Hernandez slammed her fist on the arm of her chair.
“That might not mean anything, Captain,” Fletcher said gently. “The nuke aboard that bogey detonated at one-hundred and thirty-two klicks above the planet’s surface. But the blast cloud is still spreading upward and outward. It could ionize the atmosphere quite a bit before it finally dissipates. And that doesn’t even take the detonation’s electromagnetic pulse into account.”
Hernandez stood and approached el-Rashad’s science station. “Kalil, can you scan through the ionization effects?”
“Working on it, Captain,” said el-Rashad. After another seeming eternity, the science officer looked up from his scanner and smiled. “All of the Altair VI outpost’s structures appear to be intact. The prevailing winds are carrying the fallout and other remnants of the blast away from the outpost.”
Hernandez returned to her chair and sagged into it as Lieutenant Akagi shepherded Columbia back up into a safe standard orbit, whereupon Valerian announced that the outpost’s chief administrator was hailing Columbia, in order to discuss her ad hoc plan to throw a victory celebration before Columbia’s eventual departure. Meanwhile, Fletcher and el-Rashad delivered their reports on all the damage the ship had sustained, which turned out to be minimal except for some minor thermal damage to the ventral hull plating and the impulseengine power relays.
So the folks down there want to throw us a victory party, Hernandez thought. Even though what she had just endured felt far more like a catastrophic near miss—a disaster avoided as much by luck as by skill—than the work of a conquering hero. The colonists’ relief was understandable, but the fact remained that the Romulans had nearly caught everybody by surprise, including Columbia.
If they did it once, they can do it again.
Just as Hernandez directed her exec to politely decline the hospitality of the colony’s leadership, Lieutenant Graylock’s hard-edged Teutonic voice came over the bridge comm system.
“Engineering to bridge.”
“Hernandez here.” She allowed a small smile to escape onto her lips. “What’s new down in the engine room, Karl?”
“Captain, I’d like to meet with you at your earliest opportunity to discuss the proper care and feeding of this ehemals schön schiff—this once beautiful ship.”
Preferably in a meeting room that’s been thoroughly soundproofed, Hernandez thought.
“Let me make a deal with you, Lieutenant,” she said aloud. “I’ll agree to take an entire remedial engineering course from you—once you and Lieutenant Commander el-Rashad figure out exactly how the Romulans managed to penetrate the Altair system far enough to do as much damage as they did.”
THIRTY
Place de la Concorde
Paris, France, Earth
ON DAYS LIKE TODAY, Prime Minister Nathan Samuels found himself wishing that he had never entered politics. A lowly clerical job inside some nice, quiet bank looked very appealing right now.
As the impromptu meeting unfolded before and around the massive hardwood desk that dominated the prime minister’s main-office-cum-reception space, Starfleet’s Sam Gardner took the floor momentarily while assorted high-ranking Starfleet and MACO officers, along with key officeholders in the United Earth government’s parliamentary and executive branches, listened attentively.
“We might as well have built a fortress out of rice paper and cotton candy,” the admiral said as he leaned forward on one of the office’s antique straight-backed chairs. Through the window behind him, Samuels could see the towering stone spire of the Obelisk of Luxor casting its long, late-afternoon shadow alongside the Seine River in Paris’s eighth arrondissement. “We have to face an unpleasant reality: the Vulcan early warning systems just don’t work worth a damn.”
“I’m not sure that’s entirely true,” said Minister Lydia Littlejohn, one of the up-and-coming members of United Earth’s preeminent legislative body, who had taken a seat on the low couch that abutted the office’s south wall. “Altair VI evidently received enough advance warning to prevent the Romulans from actually reaching the settlements there. The Darro-Miller dome came through the crisis without so much as a scratch.”
“If you’ll permit me to make a blunt observation, Madame Minister,” said MACO General Hayes as he slowly paced along the west wall of the spacious office, “Altair VI escaped Romulan conquest only by the skin of its ass.”
Appearing considerably more relaxed than either the general looked or Samuels felt, Interior Minister Haroun el-Rashid crossed an ankle over a knee on the same low sofa upon which Minister Littlejohn sat, alongside a worried looking Admiral Black. “But you can’t argue with results,” el-Rashid said. “Whatever the folks at Altair VI were doing seemed to work for them. Maybe we ought to study that and replicate it.”
“Whatever early warning Altair received was no thanks to the Vulcans’ warpfield detectors,” said Captain Eric Stillwell, who stood beside the couch, his arms folded.
Thomas Vanderbilt, the prime minister’s defense secretary, chimed in from his chair to the immediate right of Samuels’s desk. “I’m afraid I have to agree. If one of Starfleet’s NX-class starships hadn’t been close at hand, Altair VI would have been another rout.”
“It sounds as though my defense advisers are all in agreement that Altair owes its survival to little more than dumb luck,” Samuels said, shaking his head. He was beginning to feel a lancing pain behind his eyes. “Wonderful.”
“Maybe sometimes it’s better to be lucky than to be good,” Minister el-Rashid said with a shrug.
Admiral Black shook his head. “I’ll always take whatever luck I can get, Minister. Like the luck that has protected Earth ships from getting hit hard by that Romulan hijack-weapon over the past few months. But luck is no substitute for solid long-term strategy and flexible, adaptable tactics.”
“I have to agree with that assessment, Admiral,” said Secretary Vanderbilt.
“As do I,” Samuels said. The Andorians and the Tellarites had indeed taken the brunt of the Romulans’ remote-control attacks lately, although the reasons for that remained inexplicable, stumping humanity’s finest tactical minds. “I’m gratified to see that no one here needs to be warned how dangerous it can be to develop an overreliance on luck.”
“Unfortunately, Mister Prime Minister, luck has been our most reliable tool all too often lately,” General Casey said. “If we had more ships available to enable us to distribute our forces across Coalition space, this conflict would suddenly be less about luck and more about skill.”
“We’re working as hard and as fast as we can to achieve tactical parity with the Romulans,” Black said. “But these things don’t happen overnight.”
“Then we still have a fundamental problem,” said Casey. “We need as many fast ships as St
arfleet can build—otherwise our troops won’t be able to reach the war’s hot spots in time to do anyone any good. Semper invictus becomes a joke when Starfleet’s motto seems to be Nunquam adventus.”
Samuels tried to let the general’s bitter, counterproductive joke sail right past him. Nunquam adventus meant “Never arrived.”
Black’s eyes were hard as daggers as he replied to the blunt-spoken MACO leader. “Our NX-class shipbuilding efforts are already running round the clock at multiple sites,” he said.
“One of which the Romulans have already destroyed at enormous cost to us,” Gardner said, poker-faced. “We’re still scrambling to recover from that.”
Casey glared back at both the admirals. “So what Starfleet is really saying is that we’re stuck with having to rely on luck. And that’s to bolster a defensive strategy that’s a loser in the long run anyway. We have to keep rolling the dice, hoping that one of our far-too-rare NX-class ships will happen to be near enough to a Romulan target to get there in time to mount a defense. I trust you are aware that you lost Discovery three weeks ago.”
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise) Page 27