Despite the layers of distortion imposed by both distance and disaster, Archer immediately recognized the English-accented voice on the other end of the channel as that of Kojiro Vance, the flamboyant master of the S.S. Kobayashi Maru.
“Kobayashi Maru, this is Enterprise,” Hoshi said, her fingers entering commands at a brisk pace as she tried to isolate and enhance the tenuous subspace lifeline she had just reestablished. “Please confirm your position.”
“Enterprise, our position is Gamma Hydra, section ten. Hull penetrated. Life-support systems failing. Can you assist us, Enterprise? Can you assist us?”
“Hoshi, tell Captain Vance he won’t have to hang on for more than another twenty minutes, tops,” Archer said. “Enterprise isn’t going to let the Kobayashi Maru sink.”
Hoshi nodded. As she busied herself relaying his reassurances, Archer hoped he hadn’t just promised Vance the impossible.
FORTY-FIVE
Tuesday, July 22, 2155
Columbia NX-02, near the Alpha Centauri system
“THE NEW ARRIVALS are not answering our hails either, Captain,” said Ensign Sidra Valerian.
Now why doesn’t that surprise me? Hernandez thought as she leaned forward in her command chair. She barely succeeded in holding back a cough precipitated by the ozone-tinged air with which neither the bridge ventilation fans nor the fire-suppression system seemed quite able to cope.
Though many of the bridge consoles and monitors had been rendered inoperable during the last exchange of fire with the Vulcans, there was nothing wrong with the central viewer, which gave her a crystal-clear view of several of the ring-and-spear-shaped vessels of Earth’s former friends as they came about to begin what they no doubt intended to be their final concerted attack. Since the Vulcan reinforcements had arrived on the scene, Hernandez had lost count of just how many guns must be trained on Columbia’s vitals at the moment.
Talk about overkill, she thought. Leave it to the Vulcans to leave absolutely nothing to chance. These guys must be the original belt-and-suspenders personality types.
Hernandez turned toward Veronica Fletcher, who stood beside the command chair, her body as taut as a bowstring. “Recommendation, Commander?”
“I recommend we run like hell,” Columbia’s laconic first officer said.
“With all the battle damage she’s taken today, Commander, Columbia can barely limp, much less run,” said Lieutenant Commander el-Rashad, the Syrian science officer. “Even if we were five-by-five right now, I doubt we could outrun their slowest ship.”
Hernandez smacked the intercom on her chair with the side of her hand, opening a channel. “Hernandez to engineering.”
“Graylock here,” came the chief engineer’s Austrian-accented response. “I already know why you’re calling, Captain, so I must apologize in advance.”
Hernandez closed her eyes. “Go ahead and give me the bad news, Karl.”
“The warp core is still down, and the relays and energizers are completely fertiggemacht. I’m going to need several days, at least, to pick up the pieces.”
Hernandez thought she knew Graylock well enough not to have to question the man’s Teutonic pragmatism. Though she had seen him work miracles, Hernandez knew she couldn’t expect him to do the flat-out impossible.
“Do what you can, Karl. Hernandez out.” Probably for the very last time.
“I hope this sort of thing isn’t happening anywhere else in Coalition space right now,” Fletcher said, her voice pitched in that low “for-the-captain’s-ears-only” tone that she used when she didn’t want to exacerbate the anxieties of the rest of the bridge crew.
Amen to that, Hernandez thought.
“The new arrivals are powering up their weapons,” said Lieutenant Thayer, the young woman running the starboard weapons console. Though the console was still functioning, using it now struck Hernandez as hardly any less futile than trying to run any of the burned and melted instrument panels nearby.
“I’m detecting active weapons locks, Captain,” el-Rashad said, his voice rising to a pitch half an octave above its normal register. Up on the screen, the weapons tubes of each of the newly arrived Vulcan vessels exuded an extremely noticeable, menacing glow.
Hernandez swallowed. “Polarize the hull plating, Kiona,” she said to Thayer. “And launch the log buoy.”
Thayer scowled down at her console and shook her head. “Hull charging system is down, Captain. As is the buoy-jettison system.”
“Thanks for the epitaph, Kiona,” Hernandez said. She rose, turning so that she faced her officers en masse before adding, “It’s been an honor serving with you all.”
To their credit, every member of the bridge crew continued to maintain focus on his or her particular job, even as noises of enthusiastic agreement went around the room, punctuated by brief but obviously heartfelt, respectful glances cast at Hernandez.
No tears, she told herself firmly. No time for tears. No time for anything.
“The reinforcement vessels are opening fire,” el-Rashad said with a calm that befitted the man’s conviction that death was merely an anteroom to a far better place than the material world.
Wish I could bring myself to believe things like that, Hernandez thought as she turned back toward the screen and took her seat.
She was glad she’d somehow managed to resist the all but overwhelming urge to close her eyes before the end came.
The weapons tubes on each of the recently arrived Vulcan ships emitted brilliant globular flares that would have been blinding had the luminosity filters on Columbia’s external visual sensors not intervened to dim them. A pair of the Vulcan ships that had damaged Columbia earlier suddenly went ablaze, large areas of their hulls engulfed almost instantly by short-lived molecular fires, conflagrations fed both by the weapons of their attackers and the wounded vessels’ own escaping atmospheres.
Relief warred with an overwhelming sense of déjà vu as Hernandez realized what she was witnessing: The Vulcans are opening fire on their own ships!
“Didn’t we just see this exact same holovid last week at Draylax?” Fletcher said as she blew several thick strands of blond hair away from her eyes, perhaps in an effort to cover a loud, irrepressible sigh of relief.
“One time is an anomaly,” Hernandez said, nodding. She watched as the silent yet fiery pageant of ship-to-ship carnage continued before her stunned, horrified, fascinated eyes. “But twice…”
“But twice,” said Fletcher, finishing the captain’s thought out of long-honed practice, “is a conspiracy.”
And we’d damned well better flush out the Romulan snakes who are really behind the conspiracy, Hernandez thought, her backbone chilled as though it had somehow just become exposed to the hard vacuum that lay beyond the protective confines of Columbia’s outer hull. Or else we’re liable to see a hell of a lot more scenes just like this one all across Coalition space.
“Lifesign readings, Kalil?” she asked, turning toward el-Rashad’s station.
He shook his head. “None that I can pick up, Captain. But that can’t be right. The sensor array must be damaged.”
Hernandez turned back toward the helm. “Reiko, do we have maneuvering thrusters?”
“Barely,” said Lieutenant Reiko Akagi, the senior helm officer.
“What do you have in mind, Captain?” Fletcher said.
“I want to get a closer look at one of those crippled ships, Veronica. Jonathan Archer convinced me that the Romulans must have been behind the attack on Coridan, as well as most of the other weirdness that’s happened since then.”
The exec frowned as she mulled the matter over. “What’s in all this for the Romulans?”
“If they can convince Alpha Centauri and Earth that the Vulcan High Command can’t be trusted, they could split the Coalition right along its natural fault lines,” Hernandez said. A development like that would surely spread terror throughout several adjacent sectors, blunting any attempt to mount a serious organized resistance to a
Romulan conquest.
The bastards could overwhelm Earth, and have their flag flying over Starfleet Headquarters, Hernandez thought. That is, if they even use flags.
Not for the first time, she wondered what a real live Romulan actually looked like.
Fletcher nodded. “I suppose that would give an aggressive empire one less big, organized rival to worry about.”
“I want to get to the bottom of it,” Hernandez said. “One way or another.”
“I’m not sure we’ll get the chance,” el-Rashad said as he leaned over the hooded scanner unit built into his console. “I’m getting extremely erratic energy readings from some of those damaged vessels.”
“Warp-core overloads,” said Fletcher. “They must be doing it deliberately.”
Damn! Hernandez thought. She focused her gaze on the panoply of gutted and still-burning ships that now drifted across the central viewer. Several were still sustaining grievous, scorching phase-cannon hits, courtesy of the most recently arrived Vulcan vessels.
A few moments later, the fusillades ceased; the reinforcement vessels turned, their impulse engines flaring a brilliant Doppler red as they left their victims behind.
“I’m reading runaway reactor cores on all the damaged ships now,” el-Rashad said. “They’re going to start going off like a string of firecrackers in two, three minutes, tops.”
“Of course,” Hernandez said. The Romulans who must actually be piloting those ships need to cover their tracks, whatever it takes. They can’t afford to risk letting us discover anything that might vindicate the Vulcans.
“Back us away, Reiko,” Hernandez said, facing the helmsman. “Take us to a safe distance, best speed at impulse.” Turning toward the aft com console, she added, “Sidra, keep hailing the, ah, newcomers. Let them know we could use some assistance.”
The word “newcomers” felt increasingly awkward in Hernandez’s mouth, inasmuch as those ships had already put thousands of kilometers between their sterns and the flotilla to which they’d laid waste.
“Aye, Captain,” the communications officer said. “I’ve been repeating our hail ever since they arrived, but they’re still not responding. On top of that, our subspace transmitter is kind of…balky at the moment. Maybe the Vulcans just aren’t receiving us.”
“They’re going to warp,” Akagi said. A moment later, the retreating Vulcan vessels—which Hernandez assumed to be the only truly genuine articles Columbia had encountered today—vanished in a rapidly collapsing nimbus of light.
How very Vulcan of them, Hernandez thought. They’ll go to the trouble of saving your life, but they won’t stick around to ask if you need any help fixing your flat tires.
“I guess we can’t blame the Vulcans for not wanting to stay around to chat,” Fletcher said. “After all, it’s got to be embarrassing as hell when your ships go rogue and start attacking your allies.”
Hernandez nodded. The Vulcans must be at least as embarrassed about this as the Klingons were when the same thing happened to them at Draylax.
Sitting pensively in her command chair, she watched the viewer, upon which each of the hostile vessels exploded like distant eruptions of ball lightning, each blast separated from the next by only a few seconds.
And hoped with all her heart that the detonations didn’t symbolize the gradual self-immolation of the Coalition of Planets.
Valerian cried out from the com station. “Captain! I’m receiving something from Starfleet.”
Hernandez spun her chair hard in Valerian’s direction. “You’ve got the com system up and working again. Good work.”
“Reception is still iffy, Captain, and transmitting anything is out of the question until I can get the entire com system pulled out for an overhaul,” Valerian said, sounding apologetic.
“One thing at a time, Sidra,” Hernandez said. “What does Starfleet have to say?”
The com officer adjusted her earpiece, staring straight ahead as she concentrated, no doubt trying to focus past a great deal of static to make sense of what she was hearing. “There’s another attack just like this one in progress elsewhere in Coalition space, Captain. The target is the Earth outpost at Calder II.”
Unlike Alpha Centauri, which had sizable human populations and at least some defenses, Calder II was home only to a small, all but unprotected science station.
“Whose ships?”
“Vulcan ships again, Captain.”
Piloted by more Romulans, no doubt, Hernandez thought. Romulans who probably took over the very ships the Vulcan High Command assigned to discourage piracy in the Calder sector. Horror jolted her almost like an electrical shock as she projected what the attackers were almost certain to do next with their purloined fleet.
“I don’t get it,” Thayer said from the tactical console. “Why attack a small target like Calder II?”
“Isn’t it obvious, Lieutenant?” said Fletcher, her ashen face telling Hernandez that her exec was thinking along exactly the same lines as her captain. “It won’t take the Romulans long to wipe out a couple hundred scientists and their families. Then they’ll have the whole planet to use as a beachhead for attacking Vulcan, Alpha Centauri—”
Hernandez interrupted. “And Earth.”
Shi’Kahr, Vulcan
“I have just received word that the hijacked vessels attacking Alpha Centauri have all been neutralized, Minister,” said Minister Kuvak, desert sunlight streaming in from behind him through the partially open office door.
T’Pau, first minister of the recently reconstituted global civilian government now known as the Confederacy of Vulcan, nodded a silent acknowledgment to her silver-haired aide. She could sense from the tension in his posture that Kuvak had not yet finished delivering the latest news—and that what he had yet to report would prove even less pleasant than the tidings from Alpha Centauri.
“And what of the assault against Calder II?” T’Pau asked as she rose from behind her simple yet gracefully curved desk. Although Calder II’s scientific outpost was primarily populated, staffed, and administered by humans, the Vulcan government had taken a strong interest in the settlement for decades.
As the lower-ranking government minister took a moment to assemble his thoughts, T’Pau studiously avoided commenting upon his all-too-evident lack of composure.
“Starfleet’s forces may have arrived too late, First Minister,” the middle-aged Vulcan said a moment later. “As have ours, apparently. Early reports are sporadic, of course. But the hostiles may have already succeeded in establishing a military toehold at Calder.”
Hostiles, T’Pau thought. It is a fine euphemism.
T’Pau stood stock-still in the center of her office. The sparsely appointed stone-veneer walls, bare but for a single minimalist meditation tapestry, now seemed somehow too busy, too stimulating to look upon as she struggled to master her own rising fear and agitation.
“Summon all the senior enriov of the High Command,” she said. “And alert the entire High Assembly, as well as the Coalition Security Council.”
“I shall do so at once,” Kuvak said just before he disappeared through the same doorway he’d used to enter the office.
T’Pau continued to stand alone in the room’s center, feeling a bereft sense of desolation she hadn’t experienced since Syrran had died protecting Surak’s katra from the predations of Administrator V’Las, T’Pau’s ousted predecessor.
Surak had always believed that the logic of peace transcended all other considerations. T’Pau, however, was becoming bitterly aware that such logic often broke down when one was beset by uncompromising, rapacious hostiles such as those who had just attacked Alpha Centauri and Calder.
Especially when those hostiles were Romulans, misguided cousins of Surak’s children, bent on destroying everything that Vulcan and her allies had worked so hard to create.
FORTY-SIX
Gamma Hydra sector
THE MORE TIME HE SPENT on the busy bridge of Sopek’s bird-of-prey, the warier Trip felt
.
Why hasn’t the bastard just tossed me into a cell? Trip thought as he ran a hand slowly over the bridge console to which the Vulcan-Romulan double agent had posted him. Since the console was out of order—its lone functioning monitor displayed a blood-green pictogram proclaiming that it had been closed down temporarily for diagnostics and repair—Trip assumed that Sopek didn’t expect him to be able to do much harm here, right out in plain sight, no less.
But why is he letting me anywhere near any of this stuff, whether it’s working or not? It can’t be because he’s decided he trusts me all of a sudden.
Glancing toward the hulking armed uhlan who stood watching him from beside the nearest turbolift entrance, Trip realized that Sopek might have allowed him onto the bridge for reasons altogether unrelated to trust. The situation brought to mind a twentieth-century flatvid film, an organized-crime drama that he had seen with T’Pol on a long-ago Movie Night back aboard Enterprise, years ago and parsecs away. According to one of the gangsters portrayed in the film, it was best not only to keep one’s friends close, but also to keep one’s enemies closer.
Maybe Sopek even thinks there’s a chance I’ll volunteer to sign up with his own warp-seven engineering team if he holds me captive long enough.
The exclamation of a junior com officer interrupted Trip’s ruminations. “Commander Ch’uihv! I am picking up a subspace transmission from the vicinity of Tezel-Oroko.”
“Put it on audio, Sublieutenant,” said the bird-of-prey’s commander, whom Trip still had trouble thinking of by any name other than his Vulcan nom de guerre, Sopek.
A crackling rush of static heralded the panicked utterance of a deeply terrified-sounding human male. “—imperative! This is the Kobayashi Maru, nineteen periods out of Altair VI. We have struck a gravitic mine and have lost all power! Our hull is penetrated and we have sustained many casualties—”
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