He cursed the soulless Romulans who had engineered this situation.
Challenger
Dunsel stared in disbelief as the last of the explosions faded from the viewer. All four of the remaining Andorian fighter craft were gone, destroyed by General Shran’s own weaponry.
The combat-generated debris field suddenly vanished, replaced by the haunted, glowering visage of Shran himself.
“Captain, I have just been advised that our warp drive has sustained damage,” the general said, his eyes deep blue pools of pain. “We cannot pursue the hostile vessel effectively at impulse speeds. Can you intercept it before she reaches Andoria?”
Dunsel nodded, excusing himself just long enough to order Ensign Kaye at the helm to do precisely that. Turning back toward the screen, he said. “Can the Imperial Guard supply some support ships?”
Shran shook his head. “We are the support ships, it would seem, Captain. The Romulans are still blocking our subspace traffic to Andoria, so I cannot summon reinforcements using the usual protocols. My comm officer is trying to relay a message through what remains of the local warp-field detection nodes, but by the time it reaches Imperial Guard Command...” Though he didn’t finish his sentence, the general’s message could not have been any clearer.
We’re on our own, Dunsel thought.
Bird-of-Prey Dhivael
“Approaching the Andorsu homeworld, General,” ch’Narv reported. “Adjusting altitude to a standard strafing orbit.”
T’Voras savored the image of the blue-white ball of ice that turned serenely on the viewer before him, growing ever larger as the Dhivael optimized her orbit, balancing the minimum acceptable weapons impact with the maximum tolerable exospheric/atmospheric drag. He wished he could afford to take the time to properly admire his target, though there would be many opportunities to enjoy the system’s many scenic wonders after the Romulan banner had been unfurled here and a proper Imperial presence established.
Although Andoria was remote from its sun, the yellow-white star that illuminated the planet was very nearly as brilliant as Eisn, the home star of Romulus and Remus. Blue-white, largely glacial Andoria was actually the satellite of the system’s eighth planet, a massive and turbulent gas giant embroidered by an intricate array of gossamer rings. Regardless, Andoria’s size, mass, atmosphere, and surface gravity—and the fact that it was circled by a pair of moons of its own— made it a planet in every way that counted, at least as far as T’Voras was concerned.
“Locate the two target cities,” T’Voras said, putting aside his ruminations until he had concluded the business at hand. “Establish weapons locks.”
Looking up from his tactical scanner, ch’Narv said, “Incoming ship, General. It’s Ch’lenjer, the NX-class hevam vessel.”
An inspiration suddenly struck T’Voras. Why not share the glory of the coming kill—with the hevam Earthers?
“Lock the arrenhe’hwiua device on Ch’lenjer’s systems, ch’Narv.”
Challenger
Never before had Roy Dunsel felt such an intense sense of purpose.
“Lock phase cannons onto the Romulan ship,” he said as he studied the hawklike vessel that hung against the incongruously peaceful blue-white backdrop of Andoria’s northern hemisphere. “Full spread of photonic torpedoes.
“Fire.”
Rubin pressed the firing stud.
Nothing.
Static flooded the main viewer, which went dark an instant later. Meanwhile, the bridge lights flickered, dimmed, and shut off entirely. Red emergency lights, battery-powered backups, began casting their eerie, shadow-strewn glow a second or two afterward.
“What the hell?”
“Weapons systems are nonresponsive,” Hendricks said. “Life support has just failed as well.”
“Propulsion and navigation are gone, too,” Kaye said from behind the helm.
The bridge shook and rumbled at that moment, though not as severely as it might have under a salvo of enemy weapons fire.
“The Romulan ship has grabbed us somehow,” Rubin said in answer to Dunsel’s unspoken question. “It reads a lot like a Vulcan tractor beam. They’re pulling us fairly close to them.”
Of course, Dunsel thought. They want to take Challenger intact. “Ensign Hendricks,” he said. “Tell the MACOs to prepare to repel boarders. And get down to the armory and start passing out phase pistols and communicators to all Starfleet personnel.” Since the comm system currently was in no better shape than the rest of the ship’s hardware, Hendricks headed straight for one of the bridge stairwells to see to Dunsel’s orders in person.
The tactical console suddenly began glowing intensely. “Our primary weapons system has come back up, Captain,” Rubin said. “Our photonic torpedo launchers are locking onto targets on the surface, just like the Romulan ship seems to be doing. But I still have no control over anything.” His fingers stabbed at the buttons and touch pads, to no apparent effect.
God, no! Dunsel thought, studying the tactical panel over Rubin’s shoulder. Aloud, he said, “Cut the power.”
“The system won’t let me, sir. It’s locked me out!” Rubin banged a fist against the console, apparently causing more damage to himself than to anything else.
“Clever bastards,” Commander Granger said from the tactical officer’s other side. “Why should they attack Andoria solo, when they can force an ally to do it with them in tandem?”
Though dismayed, Dunsel wasn’t completely surprised by this development. He’d been briefed about the Romulan hijack-weapon, though he had always frankly doubted how such a thing could be possible. How could any highly invasive, communications-based weapon, no matter how sophisticated, simultaneously seize every system aboard one of Earth’s most advanced starships? Even now, it just didn’t seem possible. Eager to put that idea to the test, he pressed one of the glowing buttons on the right arm of his command chair and examined the backup digital display that came up in response.
With a grin born of gallows humor, he noted that at least one system seemed to remain beyond the Romulans’ reach, at least for the moment. This system had been installed only weeks earlier, during Challenger’s most recent repair layover at the Proxima Centauri yards. So far as he knew, Challenger was the only ship in the fleet to have received this particular systems upgrade; not even Columbia or Enterprise was so equipped.
Dunsel’s fear that the Romulans might figure out what he was doing in time to put a stop to it neatly canceled out his apprehension about what lay ahead. Buoyed by a renewed sense of purpose, Roy Dunsel pressed another button, then quickly began keying in a sequence of commands.
U.S.S. Yorktown
Still maintaining his vigil at the helm, Mayweather listened to the reports coming in from around the bridge with increasing frustration.
The nearly four minutes that still separated Yorktown from her sister ship and her attacker might as well have been an eternity.
“Challenger is flying in a tandem orbit with the Romulan carrier,” Albertson was saying. “Defenders are scrambling up from the surface, as well as from inner-planet bases and other points in the system, but that Romulan ship could devastate a huge swath of the planet’s surface in the meantime.”
“Why haven’t they done it already?” Mendez said. “Their weapons read hot.”
“Apparently,” Shosetsu said, “because the Romulans have been too busy seizing control of Challenger to do much of anything else yet.”
Like the Romulan ship, Challenger’s weapons tubes were reading hot, even at this distance.
They’re going to use Challenger as a weapon against Andoria, Mayweather thought, horrified. Captain Dunsel won’t be able to do anything except sit on his bridge and watch as his own ship does the Romulans’ dirty work for them. Mayweather wondered how it would feel to be in charge and yet be so helpless, so useless, against such an insidious enemy. Even his own frustrating inability to stop the Romulans had to be almost trivial in comparison.
Could that ha
ve been the way Captain Archer felt, he asked himself, when he was trying to decide whether or not to rescue the Kobayashi Maru?
Challenger
The bridge was silent as a tomb and very nearly as dark. Though his sweat-slickened hands shook more than a little, Dunsel typed in the penultimate code-sequence slowly and deliberately.
This procedure would be a lot easier if it could be done with voice commands. Maybe someone would take to heart his own suggestion to that effect, made in his hastily recorded final log entry, before Starfleet released version 2.0 of the software. If, of course, the log buoy had the good fortune to be blown clear of the ship intact instead of being destroyed outright in the coming conflagration.
Of course, it would be best if the first vessel to test out this new system also turned out to be the last, though Dunsel knew this was hardly likely.
The final command prompt came up on the tiny screen on the arm of the captain’s command chair. In response to Granger’s grim concurring nod, Dunsel typed in the final command string.
ZERO ZERO ZERO DESTRUCT ZERO.
He pressed “ENABLE.” The thirty-second countdown immediately commenced, marked in silence by the glowing figures that paraded solemnly across the command chair arm’s tiny electronic display.
The clock counted down to five, the point at which an abort was no longer possible.
Dunsel waited in the silent semidarkness with his crew, hoping that his last act would redeem the mood of utter helplessness and futility that had suffused his final log entry....
Bird-of-Prey Dhivael
“All weapons locked on both the industrial city of Laibok and the political capital at Laikan,” ch’Narv reported. “Both the Dhivael and the Ch’lenjer are ready to fire in concert.”
“Outstanding work, Lieutenant,” T’Voras said, his eyes riveted to the image of the planet that would soon bear his name forever. The captured hevam ship could not be seen at the moment; the tractors had brought her quite close to the Dhivael in order to enable the warship’s engineers to make the most detailed possible interior scans before the boarding teams were assembled and dispatched.
But there would be plenty of time to do all of that later in safety, once the hevam crew had been dispensed with. In the meantime, the Earth vessel had to remain close enough to inhibit any enemy effort to destroy her proprietary technology, yet far enough away to prevent the hevam ship’s guns—now firmly under Romulan control—from striking the Dhivael accidentally.
“Open fire with all tubes, ch’Narv.”
The tactical officer scowled at his console, which had just begun flashing with urgent, blood-green alarms. “Commander, I’m getting some strange energy readings from—”
Before the gunner could complete his sentence, the entire universe was suddenly suffused with a rush of heat and fire whose speed far outpaced either screams or nerve impulses.
An equally abrupt darkness followed at almost the same instant.
U.S.S. Yorktown
By the time Mayweather settled the ship into a standard orbit about Andoria, the debris and residual fire from the explosion had spread itself into a weirdly beautiful ring. At least half a dozen Andorian military vessels, ranging from small patrol ships all the way to large ships of war comparable to General Shran’s temporarily disabled Weytahn, had just turned up—too little, too late, to Mayweather’s mind—apparently to investigate the newly formed ring’s shimmering curvature.
Heedless of any observers, the still-spreading band of detritus was already well on its way to girdling Andoria completely, transforming that icy moon into a miniature of the multiringed gas giant it orbited, if only temporarily. Mayweather wondered idly if gravitational interactions with Andoria’s own two natural satellites—one of which had just loomed into view over Andoria’s western limb—would make the ring a permanent feature. Or had the hoop of orbiting shrapnel formed inside Andoria’s Roche limit, so close to the Andorian homeworld that local tidal forces would effectively doom it to an atmospheric death spiral in a matter of days or weeks?
“Any sign of Challenger?” Shosetsu said over Mayweather’s shoulder. “Or the Romulan ship?”
Mayweather turned to the side and saw Giannini shake her head ruefully at the science station. “Just debris, duranium fragments, and traces of polyalloy and plasteel. Gamma and delta ray counts are consistent with large-scale uncontrolled mutual annihilations of matter and antimatter.”
A double warp-core breach, Mayweather thought as he watched the tumbling, drifting debris on the viewer.
“It’s a miracle that the explosion didn’t rip away half the planet’s atmosphere, even this far from the surface,” Mendez said, awe and relief commingled in his expression.
“If Andoria’s magnetic field was only a little bit weaker, then that’s probably just what would have happened,” said Giannini. “They’re likely to have ion storms for weeks.”
Mayweather looked past the debris ring, focusing his attention instead on icy Andoria itself. Only now did he notice that the hazy atmosphere carried a subtle glow that had nothing to do with reflected sunlight; auroras of pink and aquamarine stretched from the polar regions almost to the equator, following Andoria’s magnetic field lines the way a Kaferian rosevine climbed an airponic trellis.
He could only hope that the Andorians would remember what Dunsel had done here once the auroras settled down and the ring dissipated.
“He blew his own ship to kingdom come,” Shosetsu said, as though he’d been reading Mayweather’s thoughts. “Who knows how many millions of Andorian lives he saved?”
“And not just today,” said Mendez. “Those Romulan bastards would have got their hands on an NX-class starship if Dunsel hadn’t pulled the pin on that new autodestruct system.”
Mayweather swallowed hard. He knew that the Yorktown now carried an identical autodestruct package, thanks to her most recent repair-and-upgrade layover at Proxima. And thanks to Captain Roy Dunsel, the autodestruct system had just received its first effective test in the field.
Would I have had the strength, Mayweather wondered, to make the same choice that Dunsel did?
Firstmoon, Fesoan Lor’veln Year 464
Wednesday, March 10, 2156
I.G.S. Weytahn
Nearly half a dayturn had passed since the Weytahn’s engineers finished getting the ship back under way, allowing her to resume her patrol of the home system’s remote defense infrastructure. Late in the ship’s night, Shran left the command deck in the capable hands of Subcommander Nras, whose need for the succor of duty Shran recognized as having become particularly acute since the death of his son, Skav. But even though Shran had retreated to the solitary darkness of his small, utilitarian cabin, the solace of sleep eluded him.
Instead, he welcomed the chorus of the slain for yet another visit. “Hello, my friends.”
Anitheras th’Lenthar separated himself from the silent, shadow-shrouded figures who crowded the corner—the ghosts of Keval, Tholos, Thon, Skav, Gareb, Talas, and all the rest—and approached the bed where Shran lay, wide awake. Speaking without speaking, his words sounding directly in Shran’s mind, the visitor said, “Jhamel, Vishri, and Shenar are concerned about you, Shran.”
Shran chuckled humorlessly as his elbow accidentally knocked a half-empty bottle of Fesoan grainwine from his bedside table to the floor. Ignoring the mess he knew was spreading across the floor, he replied aloud.
“How could you possibly know that, Theras? Or aren’t you still dead?”
Theras seemed to have a far stiffer spine now than he had had in life. “Of course I’m dead. That’s why you were able to take my place in the shelthreth, alongside my three lifemates. I know your feelings for Jhamel had always come first, but I still thought you were committed to the marriage group.”
“I am committed to the shelthreth,” Shran growled, though he was bitterly aware that he had never done right by either Shenar or Vishri. Having been nothing but supportive of his halting but sincere atte
mpts to embrace Aenar-Andorian pacifism, both Shenar and Vishri were unlikely to admit they agreed with Shran’s harsh self-assessment. Regardless, he believed that in their hearts they knew it to be true.
“Then prove it, Shran. Take some leave time and come home, if only to reassure Jhamel.”
Shran shook his head. “I can’t do that. Not now.”
“She needs to speak with you, Shran. She needs to know you are all right.”
“Perhaps being dead has kept you somewhat out of touch with current events, Theras. But Andoria has an enemy to fend off at the moment. We are at war. I cannot come home now.”
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise) Page 38