by Dave Stern
“I realize that.” The general sat back in his chair. “It’s the best I can do for now. If you won’t agree to help us on those terms, I’ll find another way to get that message to the Guild.”
The captain frowned. His gut was telling him that Makandros was on the level, but still…his head wanted a concrete show of the general’s good faith before committing to any course of action.
“How about my missing crewmen? Will you begin a search for them now?”
Makandros nodded. “We can try.”
“All of them besides Tucker and Hoshi were at Rava for a few days.”
Makandros nodded. “There may be a record of where they were taken. We can look.”
“Good.”
“And your other crewmen were…”
Archer gave him the whole list.
“Anyone else?”
No, the captain was about to say.
And suddenly realized that in all the rush and excitement of today’s events—today’s discoveries—he’d forgotten that there was someone else missing. Someone else close to him who he had last seen aboard Enterprise, and hadn’t heard a word about since.
“Yes, there was someone. Actually, not someone. My dog.”
“Dog?” Makandros said the word as if he’d never heard it before. “What is that?”
“An animal—a companion. My companion.” Archer described Porthos.
Briatt rolled her eyes. “That animal.”
“Now, Colonel,” Makandros said. “Just because you don’t like—”
“Wait a minute,” Archer said. “You know where he is?”
“Of course.” Makandros turned to one of the guards and spoke in Denari. The guard nodded and left the room. “A very clever creature, your—dog, was it?”
“Dog. Yes.”
“And its name is Porthos. A shame.”
“Why?”
“I had gotten used to calling it something else.”
“You had—”
The door opened, admitting the guard who’d just left the room…
And a small, brown creature who barked once and jumped into the captain’s lap.
“Porthos!”
Archer broke into the first honest-to-goodness smile he’d worn in weeks.
“Hey, boy. Hey.”
The captain scratched behind the dog’s ears. Porthos wagged his tail and licked Archer’s face. Normally, the captain didn’t like that. Didn’t let him do it without a stern warning.
Not now.
“He’s happy to see you,” Makandros said.
“Yes,” Archer nodded, suddenly at a loss for words.
The dog barked once more, and then jumped out of Archer’s lap and strode, head high, around the table to where Makandros sat, hand outstretched with something in it. A biscuit. Archer recognized it as being from the stash he kept aboard Enterprise for Porthos.
At least he’s not going to get sick anytime soon, the captain reflected.
Porthos took the biscuit and started munching happily.
Makandros started scratching behind the dog’s ears.
“He’s happy to see you, too,” Archer said.
“That’s right.”
The general looked up. The two men shared a smile.
“I’ve found,” Makandros said, continuing to scratch, “your dog tends to be an excellent judge of character, Captain.”
Archer nodded. “Funny. That’s just what I was going to say.”
Nine
“O’CONNELL?” Brodesser’s voice was pitched soft and low, so as not to wake Hoshi. “No. O’Connell was in that first group of five.”
“The first ones Sadir shot,” Trip said. He shifted position in his seat, but didn’t open his eyes. The burst of energy that had carried him through the day was gone. He was running on fumes now, resting while he could. If he hoped to make it through the next twenty-four hours, he’d need to husband every last bit of his strength.
“That’s right.” Brodesser’s voice came from his left, where the professor sat, technically on watch—though there was little for him to do, with the cloak engaged and the autopilot on.
Behind Trip and to his right, Hoshi slept on, oblivious. Trip listened to her breathing a moment, and then nodded, satisfied. Whatever fumes she’d been running on had dissipated just after they’d emerged from the Belt, and she’d virtually collapsed in her seat, falling right asleep. Her breathing then had been shallow, and somewhat rapid. Trip had hoped it would even out on its own, which it seemed to have done. For the moment, at least. She was sleeping like a baby.
Despite his exhaustion, Trip hadn’t been able to follow suit. For one thing, he was too keyed up. His intuition was right, he knew it—they were going to find Enterprise at Kota. That was one reason. There was also a nagging ache in his right leg—not the calf, where he’d been getting all the cramps, but in the upper thigh. Stiffness, he decided. He’d been unable to get comfortable. He debated taking one of Trant’s painkillers but decided he would save them for when he was really hurting.
“Makin was killed then too,” the professor continued. “Her, Dubrow, Ferrara…”
“So who’s left?” he asked. “If we’re right about all this—if the Daedalus crew is aboard Enterprise—who’s running engineering? Who’s piloting the ship?”
“Piloting? Westerberg. Engineering—there’s Fitzgerald. Al-Bashir. Yee.” Brodesser paused a moment, then ran off a half-dozen more names.
All at once, Trip realized there was one very prominent one missing from his list.
“What about Cooney?”
“Cooney. I don’t know.” He could almost hear the frown in the professor’s voice. “He worked at Kota for a while, then they moved him. An incident with one of the guards.” Brodesser paused. “He was not the most…tractable of workers.”
Trip had no trouble imagining that. This universe’s Cooney, from what the professor had told him already, had a lot in common with the engineer he remembered from his own. A man who marched to his own drummer, and anyone who got in the way had best step aside or get hurt.
If Cooney was on board Enterprise…well, Trip couldn’t help but think that would be a good thing.
He and the professor had been talking over what they planned to do at Kota for the past half hour. Now, Trip tried to picture the base in his mind as Brodesser had described it to him.
Kota had started as a small research facility—the Denari people’s first tentative steps into the galaxy beyond their solar system, two years before Daedalus’s arrival—built on a small, lifeless moon, which circled a gas giant the size of Saturn. When Sadir had captured the Starfleet vessel and her technology, he’d turned the research station into a factory, where he churned out the weapons and ships that enabled him to seize power.
Over the years, Kota had grown even bigger, grown to encompass mining facilities, living quarters, and weapons research labs. Above the base, in geostationary orbit, Sadir had built a mammoth orbital platform, constructed in the shape of a cross, with massive hangars—ship-building facilities, each one big enough to hold a half-dozen Enterprise s—dangling from each arm.
Trip’s gut told him they’d find Enterprise inside one of those hangars, but whether they found it there or in orbit, their strategy was basically the same: bring the cloaked cell-ship alongside a hangar, use the EVA suits Kairn had given them to board through a side airlock. Go right for the engineering deck.
That was where the Daedalus crew was supposed to come in. And yet…
Despite the professor’s reassuring words (“They’ve been prisoners for fifteen years, Trip—they’ll jump at the chance to escape”), Trip frankly was worried about how those people would react. So much time spent cowering in a cell…it tended to beat the fight out of you. What if they refused to help? Even worse, what if they turned him and Brodesser over to the Denari?
Trip was working out a plan B in his head to cover that eventuality when the console beeped.
“Dropping out of wa
rp,” Brodesser said. “Coming up on Kota Base.”
Trip opened his eyes. He’d dimmed ship’s lights to let Hoshi sleep. Now he leaned forward over his console to bring them back up.
Then Brodesser’s console beeped again, several times in succession.
Trip turned to the professor, who was frowning.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I’m not sure I’m reading this right,” Brodesser replied. “Could you—”
A brilliant white light flared in front of them.
The cell-ship shuddered, and dropped like a stone.
Trip’s stomach heaved. He barely managed to stay in his seat. He heard a thump behind him and realized Hoshi hadn’t.
“Commander!” she yelled. “What—?”
Trip hit the cabin lights.
“Some kind of pulse weapon hit directly above us,” Brodesser said, reading his console. “No structural damage. Some disruption of higher-level computer functions—”
“I can see that,” Trip said. “The autopilot’s out.”
“Warp drive as well,” Brodesser said.
Trip switched over to manual control and tried to steady the ship.
“Professor, tell me who’s out there. Who’s shooting at us?”
“No one is shooting at us, Trip. I remind you we’re cloaked. We appear to have wandered into the middle of someone else’s fight. I count two dozen small ships—a few larger ones—all coming under attack from emplacements on the moon’s surface and the orbital platform—”
Light exploded near them again. Again, the cell-ship shook.
“I suggest we wander back out again,” Brodesser finished.
“That’s what I’m tryin’ to do,” Trip said. He was having a hell of a time getting control of the ship, though. They were wobbling like a wounded duck.
They stabilized.
“Is Enterprise out there?” Hoshi asked.
“Not picking it up, no.” The professor frowned. “Hmmm.”
“What is it?” Trip prompted.
Brodesser shook his head. “That blast that almost hit us—it must have been a wildly errant shot. I can trace the energy signature for it back to the orbital platform, but the ships who might have been its target…there are none near us.”
“Bad aim, I guess,” Trip said, as he started to plot a course around the main battle. “See if you can pick up any com chatter out there, Hoshi. Find out what this is about.”
“I can tell you what it’s about,” Brodesser said. “The war. They’re fighting for control of the weapons facilities here.”
“Maybe over Enterprise, too,” Trip added.
Brodesser nodded. “Yes. That would make sense.”
It would also make their task much more difficult, Trip realized. The ship, if it wasn’t involved in active fighting, was going to be heavily guarded.
From the look on Brodesser’s face, he realized the same thing.
“We might need a new plan,” the professor said.
Trip nodded. The cell-ship shuddered under his control again—stopped almost dead, then started forward once more.
“Commander?” Hoshi asked from behind him. “What was that?”
“Not sure.”
“Let me check,” Brodesser said.
Out of the corner of his eye, Trip saw the professor’s hands flying across the Suliban-built console.
“I think I’ve found our problem,” he said a few seconds later. “The cloak.”
“What about the cloak?”
“It’s failing.”
“What?”
Trip brought up a diagnostic screen on his own console, and saw immediately the professor was right. The cloak was damaged; the field projector itself was down to ten percent of nominal output. It must have been hit during that first blast.
“It’s stealing power from other ship’s systems to maintain function,” Brodesser continued. “That’s why the engines are failing—”
The lights flickered.
“—and so on,” the professor finished.
The console beeped.
“Two of the smaller ships have just spotted us, and locked on weapons,” Brodesser said.
“And we’re being hailed,” Hoshi said. “Don’t think they know for certain we’re here, but…”
Trip tried to punch the cloak back in again. The display indicator flickered, then held.
Weapons exploded on either side of them.
Trip’s console beeped.
He looked down and saw that the oxygen content of the ship’s atmosphere was dropping. The cloak was stealing power from life support, too.
“How far off is that orbital platform?”
Brodesser shook his head. “At the rate we’re losing power now, we won’t make it.”
“Commander?” Hoshi asked. “What should we do?”
Trip looked down at the console.
Out the viewscreen at the ships tracking them.
Back at the console.
“I’m thinking,” he said.
Ten
T’POL CONFIRMED what the Stinger’s computer was telling them now. What Makandros had told them earlier. The Guild ships were hiding in the middle of one of the densest portions of the asteroid belt—scattered among rocks containing large concentrations of the heavier minerals. Enemy vessels picking up their readings would be inclined to dismiss them as sensor ghosts—echoes of the rocks around them. Anyone not knowing what to look for, that is.
Archer had a complete set of readings at his disposal to match sensor data against—spectrograms and other telemetry from previous Guild/DEF encounters. Makandros had also given them a list of the Guild fleet’s most likely hiding places this morning, right before the Stinger launched.
They’d struck gold the first time, to use mining terminology.
The Stinger had approached the hidden fleet at half impulse for the last hour, transmitting messages of friendship and truce. There was no response yet, but—
“I can isolate sensor signatures now, sir,” T’Pol said.
“Go ahead.”
“On the viewscreen.” She punched a button on her console, and the screen in front of them filled with a map of the Belt. She punched another control, and the image zoomed in. Individual asteroids came into focus—a concentrated field of them, white dots on the black screen.
“Our position is at the zero axis,” T’Pol said. Archer noted the grid lines superimposed over the image, and nodded. That put them just shy of a grouping of a dozen or so of the white dots. Half of those were blinking.
“The flashing markers indicate ship locations. We are most interested in this one here, the one now blinking red.”
She touched another button on her console, and the dot furthest to Archer’s left—the largest of them, the captain noted—changed color.
“Telemetry from that location indicates it is most probably Eclipse.”
“Can we have a look at it?”
“Yes, sir. One minute.”
It took closer to thirty seconds, if the captain was any judge of time, before T’Pol straightened again.
“On-screen now,” she said.
The map of space disappeared, and the screen went to black for a second.
Then it came alive again, filled with the image of what was one of the oldest spaceships Archer had ever seen.
He couldn’t help the snort of distaste that escaped his lips.
“My God. It’s a bucket of bolts.”
“Sir?”
“A piece of junk.” Archer shook his head. “It looks like it could fall apart any second.”
T’Pol frowned. “May I remind you, Captain, this is a computer-generated image, based on the telemetry we are receiving. It is not a hundred percent accurate depiction of the Guild ship.”
“It’s close enough, though. Unbelievable.” Why on Earth would Makandros want to join forces with the crew of this ship?
From what he’d seen of the general’s forces, they were light-yea
rs ahead of the Guild in terms of technology. Admittedly, much of that advantage derived from the Starfleet technology they’d stolen, but what they’d done with it…
The little trick that had allowed them to seize control of the Stinger while Archer was at its helm was a perfect example. A trick that Makandros had finally explained last night to the captain, after Archer had seen all of his crew settled into more comfortable, but still guarded, quarters.
“That,” Makandros had said, smiling. He and Archer were walking through the one corridor of the ship the captain had seen. Porthos, wagging his tail, followed behind. Without being obvious about it, the general was keeping the vast majority of his ship and crew hidden, and thus limiting Archer’s knowledge about both. The captain had noticed. He thought he knew why as well: if his mission to the Guild failed, Makandros wanted to limit the damage Archer could do.
It didn’t make Archer feel any better, but no doubt he would have done the same in the general’s position.
“Yes, that,” the captain replied. “How did you do it?”
“The initial idea came from Kota—it’s one of our weapons facilities, not a person,” Makandros said, at Archer’s questioning look. “I can’t claim credit for it.”
“But—”
“But…” Makandros smiled. “Kota suggested we implement software revisions to allow the computer on one ship to control another. Should harm come to its occupants, we could at least salvage the vessel. From there, it seemed to me a short step to linking an entire attack group together, to one central computer. Coordinate ship movement at a level of precision no man could hope to achieve.”
“I see.”
“That’s how we took control of your Stinger. Simple, really.” Makandros shrugged. “We’ve never actually used the system to its fullest capabilities. Though when we first picked up your ship—Enterprise—on our scanners, I thought we might need to. We even planned our approach with that eventuality in mind, though it proved unnecessary, as you know.”
Archer smiled thinly. “I expect that if Enterprise hadn’t been crippled, we might have been able to see how man matched up against machine.”
“Well, I suppose we’ll never know, will we?”