Extremely conscious of the disruptor-carrying uhlan who continued to eye him from the rear of the bridge, Trip moved away from his dead console and cautiously approached the central command chair upon which Ch’uihv/Sopek sat.
“Is this the freighter you mentioned?” Trip asked, trying to pitch his voice so that only the captain could hear him clearly. “The one that’s carrying the spy gear you said you wanted to help Earth and Vulcan set up at Tezel-Oroko?”
The other man only nodded before looking down at a small display screen built into the arm of his chair; whatever it showed lay just outside Trip’s immediate line of sight.
“Well, aren’t we going to rescue her?” Trip asked, scarcely able to contain his mounting impatience.
“Something tells me we might not have to, Commander,” Sopek said, still staring down at his hidden display.
A moment later, another human voice rose above the background hum of the bridge’s instruments. “Kobayashi Maru, this is Enterprise. Please confirm your position.”
Hoshi! Trip experienced the first real surge of hope he’d allowed himself to feel since he’d encountered T’Pol and Malcolm at Taugus III.
“Enterprise, our position is Gamma Hydra, section ten,” said the frightened man aboard the freighter. “Hull penetrated. Life-support systems failing. Can you assist us, Enterprise? Can you assist us?”
“Kobayashi Maru,” Hoshi said. “We’re on our way to you now. Please stand by. We’ll reach your coordinates in approximately twenty minutes.”
Trip craned his neck in an attempt to gauge the freighter’s position relative to Sopek’s vessel, making a few quick mental conversions and translations in the process.
He turned back toward Sopek quickly enough to prompt the uhlan to reach for his weapon. “We could reach the Kobayashi Maru and start a rescue operation nearly twice as quickly as Enterprise can.”
“We could indeed, Commander,” Sopek said, apparently unfazed by Trip’s accusatory tone.
Understanding was settling uncomfortably onto Trip’s consciousness, like a heavy, smothering blanket. “But that’s not what you’re planning to do, is it?” At the moment he didn’t care what the rest of the crew heard, and it seemed clear that neither did Sopek.
The other man shook his head. “Regrettably, no. We cannot afford to be too close to the freighter when Valdore’s people engage their arrenhe’hwiua telecapture system against it. It’s going to happen very soon.”
Trip scowled. “How the hell could you know so much about Valdore’s plans?”
Before Sopek could say so much as a word, the answer to Trip’s own question now seemed blindingly obvious to him: The only plausible way for this man to know as much as he did about sensitive military matters like the new Romulan starship-telecapture system—while apparently running a dissident group with impunity—would be if he had been secretly working for Valdore all along, allowing the admiral to use him to test the loyalty of underlings like Ehrehin and Terix.
This man could stand astride the twilight espionage worlds of both Vulcan and Romulus, posing as an enemy of the latter while discreetly pushing buttons on Admiral Valdore’s behalf.
An even simpler but far more chilling explanation for Sopek’s behavior toward him occurred to Trip then: What if this cruel son of a bitch is only keeping me alive to make me watch the bloodbath he’s really planning?
The only answer the other man offered to Trip’s question-cum-accusation was an enigmatic half-smile. The mannerism prompted Trip to wonder, not for the first time, whether this man had been born Vulcan or Romulan.
“Have a seat now, Commander,” Sopek said, his smile hardening into something akin to sharpened steel. “I don’t want you getting underfoot after the crew and I become preoccupied dealing with the arrenhe’hwiua system’s target.”
Trip nodded. Hyperconscious of the armed uhlan’s watchful eye, he slowly moved toward a nearby unattended console, one that lay even closer to Sopek than the dead panel to which he had been posted earlier. He wants to “deal with” the Romulan weapon’s target, Trip thought. He’s not here to help the Kobayashi Maru establish an Earth-Vulcan listening post. He’s here to stamp it out.
He wondered ruefully whether his suspicions were well founded, or if he had merely—finally—started to think like a Romulan.
“We are venting atmosphere rapidly, Enterprise!” said the increasingly frantic voice from the wounded freighter.
If Sopek really is secretly Valdore’s guy, Trip thought, then he might be the one who’s really running the telecapture gadget he seems to know so damned much about. And he would probably have to do it all from this ship.
“Enterprise!” the man on the Kobayashi Maru cried, barely outshouting the background deluge of static. “We have very little time left to us!”
The repetition of the name of the ship that had been his home for four years brought another horrifying realization in for a hard landing right on top of Trip’s soul: With the Kobayashi Maru so badly damaged, it made no sense to bring the Romulan Empire’s new starship-hi-jacking device to bear against her.
Enterprise, however, was quite another matter.
Trip sat on the chair beside the new console, staying directly in Sopek’s line of sight so as not to rouse any undue suspicion. Captain Archer wouldn’t let a whole field of gravitic mines keep him from trying to pull off a rescue operation, he thought. Especially if he knows about the Kobayashi Maru’s secret mission.
Trip didn’t want to do anything that might abort the rescue op Archer was sure to attempt. But he also knew that Earth could afford the loss of the Kobayashi Maru—including everyone and everything aboard her—far better than it could afford to allow one of her NX-class starships to fall into Romulan hands.
Gotta get a warning to Enterprise, he told himself as he discreetly activated the console’s main actuator.
“Don’t bother trying what I think you’re trying, Commander,” Sopek said from behind him. “That station is only a backup environmental-systems monitor. I put you at that particular station only to keep a somewhat closer eye on you—and so you wouldn’t succumb to the temptation to try to patch into our subspace transmitter.”
Trip allowed himself a few moments to read enough of the pictographs on the console displays to confirm what Sopek had just told him. Then he allowed his hands to fall limply to his sides.
Shit!
But there had to be some way to use the console to get a message out to his former captain. As bad as things had frequently gotten at times during his long sojourn in Romulan space, he had yet to find himself facing the truly insurmountable odds of a no-win situation.
Several agonizingly long minutes passed, like ice boulders slowly rolling down a hill in reluctant deference to Triton’s skimpy gravity. Once he realized that neither Sopek nor any of his increasingly busy crew seemed able or willing to invest much attention in him, he resumed his quiet exploration of the console before him. He made no attempt to move furtively, since that would probably attract more of the unwelcome attentions of the disruptor-toting guard whose eyes he could already feel drilling into the back of his head like laser-powered asteroid borers.
But he did try to hide his triumphant smile from view after the answer finally came to him.
FORTY-SEVEN
Enterprise NX-01,
Gamma Hydra sector
“LEAVING SECTION ELEVEN, CAPTAIN,” Mayweather said. “Entering section ten. Contact with the Kobayashi Maru on long-range navigational sensors.”
“Very good, Travis,” Archer said, wincing slightly as he leaned forward on his chair. Despite the lingering pain in his side, he found the movement hard to resist, as though by gaining a few additional centimeters of proximity to the main bridge viewer, he might make any lurking hull-breach hazards more apparent and avoidable. “Steady as she goes. And keep scanning for gravitic mines or anything else that might sink us.”
“The sensors are already tuned to maximum resolution enhancement
, Captain,” said T’Pol, most of her attention apparently riveted to the hooded scanner on her science station.
“Tactical systems are also running everything through a pretty fine sieve, Captain,” said Reed, who stood at the aft tactical array, entering commands and studying representations of power curves and marching columns of figures. “Phase cannons and photonic torpedoes are ready as well. I’ll be damned if I let anything bigger than a Ping-Pong ball get within ten thousand klicks of us.”
Despite his lingering mixed feelings about the unauthorized actions T’Pol and Reed had recently taken, Archer was nevertheless grateful for the restoration of the core of his alpha-watch crew. The entire bridge crew seemed keenly aware, as he was, that this far away from any human-inhabited world, rescue was a commodity that was strictly BYO—Bring Your Own. All Starfleet personnel, from midshipmen up through the admiralty, recognized this sobering fact.
But in the case of the vessel toward which Enterprise now hurtled, rescue was indeed on the way. The master and commander of the S.S. Kobayashi Maru has got to be the luckiest freighter captain in the history of maritime disasters, Archer thought.
Despite the remoteness of this region of space, Archer was already somewhat familiar with the portion of it that Enterprise had just entered; it lay well inside the boundaries of a not-yet-ratified “neutral zone” that Vulcan and Andoria had recently jointly proposed as a buffer zone between Coalition space and the vast unknown regions controlled by the mysterious Romulan Star Empire. None of the other Coalition member worlds, including Earth, had raised any serious objections to the idea.
Archer, however, harbored serious doubts that the Romulans would pay even the slightest attention to any such resolution. He was certain that they would go right on scrapping with the Klingons over the many resource-rich systems scattered across this swatch of what the stellar cartographers had dubbed the Milky Way’s Beta Quadrant. And that was to say nothing of their current plan to foment dissension and possibly even warfare between the Coalition’s member planets.
“The Kobayashi Maru should be coming within extreme visual range now, Captain,” T’Pol said.
“Graviton counts at the vessel’s coordinates are going through the roof,” said Reed.
“That would be consistent with the detonation of a gravitic mine,” T’Pol said crisply, in full Vulcan mode.
“Let’s have a look at her, T’Pol. Maximum magnification.”
The star-flecked darkness that lay ahead of Enterprise swiftly gave way to the grainy image of a badly battered freighter; the tapering shape was silhouetted only faintly in the dim reflected glow of one of the countless irregularly shaped ice bodies that made up the frigid halo of cometary debris that surrounded the dim and distant star Tezel and its co-orbital partner, the even dimmer gas-giant-protostar Oroko. Though the vessel’s long, narrow lines gave it only a superficial resemblance to a Klingon battle cruiser, Archer’s central nervous system found the similarity close enough to make his hackles rise.
“What’s our ETA, Travis?” Archer asked, finally succumbing to the urge to rise from his chair and begin pacing across the middle of the bridge.
“We’ll come within transporter range in about four minutes, Captain,” the helmsman said as he checked a nav display and entered a small course correction.
“The MACO and Starfleet emergency boarding teams are assembled and ready, Captain,” said T’Pol. “They’ve prepped the shuttlepods in both launch bays, and are standing by at the transporter pad.”
“Sickbay reports ready as well, Captain,” Hoshi said from her com station.
“Captain, I’m reading another vessel in orbit around one of this system’s Kuiper bodies,” Malcolm said, sounding alarmed.
Archer’s hackles stiffened even further. “What kind of vessel?”
“Her profile is consistent with that of a Romulan warship, Captain,” Reed said, sounding almost eager to get a closer look.
Romulans. Great. Swell. On the other hand, this could be an opportunity to gather whatever additional proof of Romulan aggression even the most skeptical Coalition representative might require. “Location?”
“About two million kilometers on the other side of the Kobayashi Maru.”
Well, they can’t do very much damage to either of us at that range, Archer thought. “Keep tabs on it, Malcolm. Let me know immediately if she starts moving.”
“Aye, sir.” Reed immediately set about entering a new series of commands into his tactical station.
“Hoshi, raise the Kobayashi Maru’s captain,” Archer said.
Hoshi’s fingers moved nimbly across her com console. “Opening a channel, Captain.”
“Captain Vance, this is Enterprise,” Archer said, raising his voice slightly for the benefit of the com system’s audio pickups. “We can begin transporting your survivors in two minutes.”
“—Archer, I never thought I’d be so glad to hear your voice again,” Vance said, all but shouting over a sibilant background wash of static. “Seems unlikely, doesn’t it?”
Archer let a small smile crease his lips, since he was certain that he knew a good deal more about the Kobayashi Maru’s mission than Vance would have preferred. “Probably about as likely as your ship sailing so far off the edge of the map, Captain.”
“Believe me, Captain Archer, the Maru would be navigating far safer waters right now had the Horizon showed up for our rendezvous when she was supposed to.”
Mayweather turned his chair so that he faced Archer, his eyes wide with concern.
Picking up on his helmsman’s obvious distress, Archer continued addressing Vance. “The Horizon? Are you referring to Paul Mayweather’s Earth Cargo Service freighter, Captain Vance?”
Another blast of static preceded Vance’s scratchy reply. “The same. We were supposed to transfer our, ah, cargo to her at Psi Octantis, which is a whole lot closer to the Coalition side of this sector. She never turned up there, so we’re making the delivery she was supposed—”
The tide of static rose abruptly, drowning out whatever Vance might have had to say next.
“Hoshi, can you clean that up?” Archer said, frowning.
Scowling down at her console, the youthful communications expert shook her head. “Sorry, Captain. There’s just too much external interference. It’s almost as though—”
“Almost as though somebody a little closer to her than we are is jamming her signals,” Archer said, interrupting. “That damned Romulan ship.”
“What could have happened to the Horizon?” Mayweather said, looking up from his helm seat; he was obviously rattled emotionally, though he seemed to be working hard to conceal that fact. “The booby trap that the Kobayashi Maru hit can’t have been the only one the Romulans or the Klingons left lying around in this sector. Maybe—”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Travis,” Archer said. He stepped toward the pilot and laid a hand gently on his shoulder. “I promise you we’ll get to the bottom of this, just as quickly as we can.”
Mayweather nodded, his dark eyes gleaming with both appreciation and worry. “Thank you, sir.”
Turning back toward Hoshi’s station, Archer said, “Why the hell would even the Romulans try to jam distress calls from a human freighter way out here in the boondocks?”
“It’s actually a modified Klingon freighter, Captain,” Malcolm said. “The Romulans might be taking over her systems with their new weapon, as part of another one of their territorial skirmishes against the Klingons.”
Or maybe they know full well that the Kobayashi Maru is filled with defenseless humans and they’re doing this just for the sheer sadistic hell of it, Archer thought. He knew he’d never forget how they’d tried to annihilate the civilization on Coridan Prime, even if he never succeeded in proving their involvement definitively. Maybe they’re trying to force us to fire some of the first shots in the new war we all know is coming.
“We’re receiving another incoming signal, Captain,” Hoshi said as she ex
amined the frequency and modulation graphs on her displays.
“From the Kobayashi Maru?” Archer said.
“No, sir. The point-source vector doesn’t match at all, and the signal seems to have bypassed the worst of the jamming effect.”
Archer’s eyebrows rose involuntarily as he approached her console to get a better look at the incoming message scrolling on her displays. “Starfleet Command?”
“No, sir. It’s in the wrong frequency range. And it’s in the lowest portions of the subspace bands, so low it’s hard to sort out from the cosmic subspace background noise.”
“Enhance that signal and pinpoint its source,” Archer said.
Hoshi swiftly tapped new instructions into her board, and her brow crumpled in puzzlement as she studied the new data that resulted. “Looks like it’s coming from the Romulan ship, Captain.”
“Audio?” Archer asked.
She shook her head. “No, only modulation pulses. It’s almost as though somebody on that ship is ‘tapping’ against the ship’s own signal-jamming protocols, using some other on-board system to create the ‘taps.’”
“The way you might bang out a Morse code message by rapping a monkey wrench against a pipe,” said Archer.
“Exactly.”
“Any idea who the sender is?” Archer said, although he already had a pretty good idea of the identity of whoever was wielding the “subspace monkey wrench” on the Romulan ship.
“Just the name ‘Lazarus,’ Captain—just like the message we received back in February. The name keeps repeating throughout the message.” He saw her eyes widen in evident recognition of the name, which he knew she had encountered once before not so very long ago.
“Pipe it to my ready room, Hoshi,” Archer said, then turned so that he faced both the main science console and the tactical station.
“Malcolm, you have the bridge. T’Pol, you’re with me.”
Then he was practically in a footrace with his first officer to discover whether or not “Lazarus” had returned from the dead yet again.
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