“This has gone far enough,” SCIS Special Agent in Charge Luis Hamer said. If he had been annoyed at Mallory before, now he was furious. “You’re letting them steal a starship!”
“I’m letting them borrow it.”
“Why?!”
Mallory didn’t reply, and eventually Hamer seemed to realize he wouldn’t for a very good reason.
The answer was classified.
The lead flight controller from Spacedock contacted Mallory again. His voice came from the deskscreen that now showed the Enterprise aligned with Spacedock’s main doors.
“This is it, Mr. Mallory. Are you sure we should open the doors?”
Mallory knew what a gamble this was. But he had also read the preliminary report from the experts on his steering committee.
They had suggested a plan that would give Starfleet a different way to confront the general’s threat. The cost would be high, but not as high as sending security forces to slaughter children.
Mallory didn’t know whether or not the tactic would work. But to him, what was transpiring in Spacedock right now was the dry run.
Project Echion would go forward or would be rejected, based on what happened when he gave his next order.
“This is Mallory at Starfleet Command,” he said into his communicator. “Open the doors. Let’s see what happens.”
47
“They’re opening the doors.” Kirk stared at the image on the viewscreen as if in a dream.
The Enterprise slipped forward, under the control of Spacedock’s tractor beams.
“They still have thirty seconds to realize their mistake,” Spock pointed out.
“Thank you for those encouraging words.”
Kirk was still standing beside the center chair, and though he glanced at it from time to time, he made no move to sit in it.
Then the thirty seconds had passed, and all the viewscreen showed was space and stars.
“Um, what do we do now?” Del Mar asked.
“Spock,” Kirk said, “can you get a heading from your tracker?”
Spock opened the Vulcan medallion and placed it on the helm console. He read off coordinates from the display and Del Mar entered them. “This isn’t looking good,” she said, worried.
“Where’s he going?” Kirk asked.
“Out of the main traffic lanes. I’d say he was getting ready to go to—oh no. He did.”
Kirk tried to see what Del Mar had seen on the medallion’s display, but the display was blank.
“It would appear that Griffyn has gone to warp,” Spock announced.
Kirk asked a question he already knew the answer to. “Anyone know how to start a warp engine?”
“I know it takes about a day,” Naderi said. “Um, if the dilithium crystals are already installed. Which ours aren’t. Because they’re still in the vault.”
Kirk gave the plebe a tight smile. “I can only come up with one thing to do,” he told his erstwhile crew.
“Go back?” Del Mar asked.
Kirk shook his head, insulted. “No. Set a course to follow Griffyn’s initial heading. Maybe…maybe his warp engine will blow or something and we can catch up.” He looked toward the engineering station. “Hey, Naderi. We do have full impulse, right?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Aye?” Kirk repeated, then let it go. “Just give the helm and navigation all the power you can give them.”
Naderi seemed not to know how to reply, so he just nodded once, forcefully, and went back to his board.
“Course laid in,” Del Mar said. Then she added, “No! Wait…wait…” She readjusted her board settings. “Okay…okay, that’s right. Now the course is laid in.”
Kirk waved his hand forward. “Then…uh, full speed ahead, Mr. Spock.”
They all froze in place as a strange rumbling filled the bridge, but then the stars on the viewscreen shifted to the side as the ship changed heading and began to accelerate.
“Pursuing at one-half impulse,” Spock called out.
Kirk leaned against the chair. There was nothing to do now except wait to be caught.
Then he heard a distinctive chime again, and saw Spock pick up the medallion.
“Fascinating,” the Vulcan said.
“What is?” Kirk asked.
“The tracker is working again.”
Kirk felt the thrill of exhilaration. “He dropped out of warp?”
Spock nodded as he studied the medallion’s display. “And he appears to have entered orbit of Neptune.”
Kirk did the math swiftly. “Average distance to Neptune is…what? Four point one, four point two billion kilometers?”
Del Mar entered something on her board. “Right now, the nav database shows it at four billion, two million, eight hundred thousand…and the rest just keeps changing.”
“Okay,” Kirk said, “at half impulse, that puts us there in…just under five hours. Let’s go. Lay in a course. Full speed. Whatever it takes.”
With those stirring words, the Enterprise raced for Neptune.
“Neptune?” Hamer repeated. “Why Neptune?”
Mallory checked a data readout on his deskscreen. “That’s where Griffyn’s ship is.”
Hamer looked over Mallory’s shoulder. “All that material he stole during the past year, and he’s taken it to Neptune?”
“It can’t be his final destination,” Mallory said. “He could be refueling at Triton Station, checking to see if he’s being pursued, or…he’s identified another source of dilithium.”
“Are there any warp facilities in near-Neptune space?”
Mallory input more search strings, read out the results. “Two ships have been lost at Neptune, but decades ago. They both burned up in the upper atmosphere. If any wreckage survived, it looks like Griffyn would have to retrieve it from the bottom of eighteen thousand kilometers of nitrogen, water, and ice—at pressures that would have fractured any dilithium crystals within days.”
“Has anything crashed on the moons?”
Mallory checked. Neptune had nine classic moons and twenty-seven moonlets. There had been a few crash landings and failed launches from them over the years, but according to Starfleet records, no significant wrecks remained unsalvaged. “Nothing.”
He tapped the control that turned off the screen and stood up from his desk.
“What now?” Hamer asked.
“I’d say Kirk and Spock have the right idea,” Mallory answered. “We’re going to Neptune.”
48
“I don’t think I can do this,” Del Mar said.
On the main viewscreen, Kirk saw the blue dot of Neptune growing perceptibly larger. “That’s a planet,” he said. “This is a starship. Isn’t there an automated setting for standard orbit?”
“Not for Neptune.”
Spock turned from the helm. “It is not a standard planet. Its magnetosphere is dramatically misaligned to its axis of rotation, resulting in severe electromagnetic distortions for the instruments of orbiting vehicles. It has four rings and more than thirty moons and moonlets, even the least of which could cause considerable damage to this vessel.”
Kirk didn’t want to hear about obstacles. “There’s got to be some way to figure out how to orbit it.”
“There is,” Spock said. “Four years of advanced astro-navigation studies.”
Neptune was growing ever larger. Now Kirk could make out delicate white swirls of clouds against a soft background haze of sky blue. The planet looked welcoming, though intellectually he knew the temperature of that appealing blue haze was more than 200 Celsius degrees below zero.
“We didn’t come all this way just to do a flyby,” Kirk said. All he could think was that if Griffyn knew how to orbit this planet, then—The idea came to him that fast. “Stretch! Use the ship’s sensors to find Griffyn’s ship, then match his orbit!”
Spock looked around the bridge, saw what he was looking for. “I will need to use the science station.”
“Go,” Kirk said, and
as Spock got up from the helm, Kirk took his place.
Neptune filled almost half the viewscreen now. Del Mar gave Kirk a hopeful smile. “I got us here. Now it’s up to you.”
Kirk checked the layout of the controls. They were nothing like the flyers he had flown.
Del Mar seemed to realize what was happening. “Any of those look familiar?”
Kirk laced his fingers, cracked his knuckles. “Lots of computers on this ship. How hard can it be?”
Del Mar’s faint smile remained frozen in place as Kirk took the Enterprise off her programmed flight path and began to fly her manually.
Griffyn sat back in the command chair of the Random Wave, enjoying the shoulder rub Dala was giving him, ignoring Matthew.
Matthew, with a bandaged broken nose from Sam Kirk’s attack, sat in tense disgrace at the sensor control station, under no illusion what the general’s reaction would be to his failure.
When Matthew had reported to Griffyn after his humiliating defeat, Griffyn had arranged to have Matthew and his two bloodied soldiers beamed directly up to the Random Wave. But when Matthew had stepped off the transporter platform, his two soldiers were no longer with him. At Griffyn’s order, their matter streams had not been collected—instead, they had simply been beamed into nothingness, their disassociated molecules becoming an expanding cloud that rapidly faded from sight.
Griffyn relished the peace and quiet that kind of punishment brought to his ship. He doubted anyone would be complaining for weeks to come.
For now, then, the only sound on the small ship’s flight deck was the occasional ping from the navigational shields and sensor array, as various particles of ring and moon debris were contacted in the orbital path. The contacts were so infrequent and small, to Griffyn the sound was like the white noise of running water. He found it quite soothing.
Until a loud buzz jerked him upright. “What was that?!”
“Collision alarm,” Matthew said. His fingers flew over his input board. “I don’t get it. It’s some kind of meteoroid.”
“Avoid it!” Griffyn said.
“The auto system’s been trying,” Matthew told him. “But it keeps changing course to…” He looked over at Griffyn. “It keeps changing course.”
“On-screen!”
And there it was.
The Starship Enterprise.
Closing erratically, but closing all the same.
On the Enterprise, the collision alarms sounded.
“Too close! Too close!” Del Mar said.
Kirk adjusted the ship’s rate of descent. He had wanted to bring her in at a slightly higher orbit directly behind and above Griffyn’s vessel. He had heard that proximity sensors usually had the weakest coverage in that area—not in a Starfleet vessel, of course, but civilian ships were another matter. “Are the shields up?” Kirk called out.
“Yeah! Got ’em!” Naderi answered.
Kirk risked looking up from his board for a few seconds to see what was on the screen.
The half-crescent shape of Griffyn’s ship was ahead, and it was slowly listing into a 360-degree roll.
“Why’s he rolling like that?” Kirk asked.
“He is not,” Spock said from the science station. “We are.”
“I want to know why the sensors didn’t see that coming,” Griffyn demanded.
Matthew worked furiously, checked all the sensor settings. “They did! They did! But Griffyn, look at the readings—there’s no crew on that thing! There’s no warp engine! The power signature’s flat! I can’t even tell if it has shields!” He looked up at Griffyn like a fearful child expecting to be beaten. “So many readings are below the threshold, the sensors didn’t recognize it as a ship!”
Griffyn glared at the viewscreen. “It’s a Starfleet starship! How can the sensors not recognize that?!”
In the middle of the commotion, Dala remained by the command chair, leaning on one elbow that rested on the chair’s tall back. “I wonder why it’s rolling like that.”
Then a signal chime sounded.
“We’re being hailed,” Matthew said.
Griffyn snapped his fingers, and Dala ran to the comm station to answer.
A deep voice growled out of the flight deck’s speakers. “Unidentified civilian cruiser, this is the, uh, captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise. You are in, uh, restricted Starfleet space. Drop your shields and prepare to be taken in tow.”
Griffyn put both hands to his head in absolute fury. “How?!” He slapped Matthew across the side of his head. “We were on full alert and—”
“Shh!” Dala hissed. “Listen!”
The flight deck speakers were still picking up the transmission from the Enterprise, only now the captain’s gruff voice was missing from the mix. Instead, someone who sounded more familiar said, “I think they bought it. Are their shields down yet?”
And someone else said, “Which one of these is the tractor control?”
And someone else said, “Can the tractor beam work through our shields, or do we have to shut down, too?”
And the oh-so-familiar voice of Griffyn’s little admiral said, “Oh, crap. Guys, this is still on.”
Click. The transmission ended.
Griffyn couldn’t contain his relief or his shout of triumph.
“Maybe they didn’t hear the rest of it,” Zee said.
Kirk, Spock, Naderi, and Del Mar stared at her accusingly. Finnegan still lay mute and motionless on the upper deck.
“I didn’t do it on purpose!” Zee protested. “I want to get him as much as you do!”
Kirk raised his hands like a referee sending fighters back into their corners. “It’s okay. He’s not responding. He probably turned off his—”
Griffyn’s gleeful voice boomed over the bridge speakers. “Captain Jimmy of the U.S.S. Enterprise, I don’t know how you managed to steal a starship, but I’ve got to thank you for delivering it to me.”
“He heard it,” Zee said dejectedly.
“If you can figure out how to use your sensors, you might want to check our weapons status.”
Kirk looked at Spock. The Vulcan was waving his hands over the optical switches, changing the displays above the science station until a schematic of Griffyn’s ship appeared with flashing red lights at the weapons nodes. The Vulcan couldn’t hide his apprehension. “Two phase cannons. Old-fashioned, but powered up and effective.”
“That should’ve been enough time,” Griffyn continued. “So now that you see what you’re up against, play it smart, Jimmy. Drop your shields and prepare to be boarded. Or wait for us to shoot your bridge full of holes, and then prepare to be boarded.”
“What’s our weapons status?” Kirk asked Del Mar.
The plebe moved to the helm seat Kirk had vacated. “Fully charged phaser banks!”
“Phasers?! That’s state of the art!” Naderi said excitedly.
“Can you fire them?” Kirk asked.
Del Mar nodded. “In simulations.”
“Let’s see how good they were. Fire a warning shot…across their bow!” Kirk glanced over at Spock. “Always wanted to say that.”
Del Mar made adjustments to her board, pressed a large control, and a powerful capacitor discharge echoed in the bridge.
At the same instant, a flare of scintillating light burst from the viewscreen as a shaft of phased energy hit Griffyn’s ship dead center!
“I said across the bow!”
Del Mar spun around and shrugged apologetically. “I told you I’ve never fired these things!”
Kirk looked back to the viewscreen—Griffyn’s ship was missing. “Where’d he go?!”
“He has dropped below us,” Spock said calmly, “and now is rising behind us. Ah, he is on an attack run.”
“Shields!”
“They’re already on!” Naderi told Kirk.
“Those are navigation shields,” Spock pointed out. “We will need protection from weapons fire.”
Naderi looked as if he was in pain. “I…I hav
en’t had that class yet.”
“Stretch—find the shield controls!” Kirk shouted, then he launched himself back to the helm station, reached over Del Mar, who sank into her chair, and jammed all the controls to port.
“Fire!” Griffyn shouted.
Matthew hit the controls, and just as a pulse of phase-cannon fire shot into the range of the viewscreen, the Enterprise spun out of sight.
“What?!”
Then the Random Wave’s collision warning sirens screamed as the viewscreen was blocked by a rapidly moving warp nacelle that was completing its roll and—
Above the peaceful blue clouds of Neptune, the small half-crescent of the Random Wave spun away from the collision like a badminton bird slammed by a baseball bat.
Both vessels were traveling at almost the same orbital velocities, so the overall force of the impact didn’t overwhelm their shields and structural integrity fields.
But from both ships, gouts of transtator current flared from shattered conduits, and streamers of venting atmospheric gases made crazy pinwheel patterns that slowly and silently expanded, like smoke plumes on an ancient battlefield.
The Random Wave was the first to steady its orientation, through hundreds of computer-controlled bursts from its reaction control system. It came about again to charge at its enemy: the still spinning Enterprise.
Another alarm pinged on the bridge, and Kirk turned to Spock and asked which one it was this time.
“Weapons lock,” Spock said. “We are being targeted.”
“Fire phasers!” Kirk told Del Mar. “And this time—miss!”
“Fire!” Griffyn ordered, and a heartbeat later, the Enterprise’s phaser blast hit his ship’s primary sensor array, and the viewscreen went dark as the flight deck controls arced with seething energy.
“Direct hit!” Del Mar exclaimed. “Sorry,” she added.
And then the bridge of the Enterprise shuddered as the ship absorbed a phase-cannon blast.
“How’s she doing?” Kirk asked Zee. The midshipman had gone to engineering so Naderi could go to the shields station.
Collision Course Page 32