FORTY-EIGHT
The Depths of Tezel-Oroko’s Kuiper Belt
POWERLESS TO TAKE any direct action to stop the proceedings that were unfolding before him on the bird-of-prey’s bustling bridge, Trip sat with his back to the console where his captors had parked him. He watched in silence as Sopek finally gave the order that confirmed nearly all of Trip’s worst suspicions.
“The lead vessel has activated the arrenhe’hwiua telecapture system, Sublieutenant,” the turncoat captain said to the youthful male officer seated at the forward helm console. “Enterprise will come within the system’s operational range when she closes with the freighter to commence rescue operations. The attack force will reveal itself then, while bringing the device fully to bear against the Earth vessel.”
Trip watched. But he wasn’t watching helplessly.
Despite the slight shaking of his hands, no doubt caused by the close presence of both Sopek and his crew—not to mention the disruptor-packing two-legged watchdog posted near the turbolift doors—Trip hadn’t found it all that difficult to take surreptitious control of a couple of the ship’s more innocuous-looking systems.
The backup coolant valves that governed the dispersal of the life-support system’s waste heat had taken only a few short minutes to figure out. Using those bursts to create a corresponding pulsation within the adjacent tertiary subspace communications backup system—a little-noticed system that engaged automatically during signal-jamming operations—had taken even less time.
The trickiest part of the gambit had been trying to look casual while digging a finger deeply into his right ear in order to gently extract the small universal translation unit that the Adigeon plastic surgeons had concealed there.
Hate to lose either one of these things, Trip thought, remembering how difficult it had been to fix this one after it had temporarily failed a few weeks back. But I can get by with just the left one if I really need to.
Right now, what he really needed was to tap out a message on his improvised equivalent of a subspace telegraph. But any telegraph operator required the use of a telegraph key, of course, and Trip suspected that his ear-implant device would fit the bill nicely, given the right combination of skill and luck.
Pretending to stretch, he palmed the tiny, raisin-sized control mechanism, then allowed it to roll to a stop between his right thumb and forefinger. Relying both on his sense of touch and his memory of the repairs he’d already once been forced to make on the unit, he found the tiny actuator switch that controlled the receipt of inputs from the jaw-implanted bone conduction microphone that allowed him to “converse” with the device on a silent, subvocal level.
Too bad I can’t just use the subvocal interface directly over a voice-channel link, he thought as the little unit began automatically running up and down the local wireless interface frequencies, seeking a match with the console-accessible systems Trip had just seized. But I suppose you can’t have everything.
He could only hope that what he now had would prove to be enough—and that someone aboard Enterprise would notice that somebody here was sending them a signal, albeit an unorthodox one. Reasoning that his best chance to get Captain Archer’s attention quickly was to start with a familiar, easily recognizable message, Trip started by repeatedly sending the equivalent of the name “Lazarus,” the code name he had used months ago, while trying to send Enterprise advance word of the attack on Coridan. Memories of the Coridan disaster, which had claimed more than a billion lives despite his last-minute warnings, filled Trip with foreboding.
As did the realization that whether or not Captain Archer received and understood his transmissions in time to act on them, at least one ship and crew was all but certain to come to a terrible end today.
Unobtrusively squeezing the ear implant in his hand in a rhythmic but silent tattoo of dots and dashes, Trip began tapping out a message.
ARCHER, YOU ARE HEADED INTO A TRAP. ROMULAN SNEAK ATTACK COMING, BY REMOTE CONTROL. FREIGHTER NOT SAVABLE. TURN ENTERPRISE ABOUT IMMEDIATELY, MAX WARP.
As he finished the third iteration of his message, Trip made direct eye contact with Sopek. He wondered for an instant whether the turncoat captain suspected anything, or if he was merely trying to extract some perverse enjoyment out of Trip’s reactions to the coming disaster.
“Commander, what’s that in your hand?” Sopek said, confirming the former while not ruling out the latter. Turning his head, the captain nodded toward the hulking armed uhlan, who reacted by displaying the self-satisfied expression of a man who had finally been issued a license to do something very nasty—something he’d been forced very reluctantly to refrain from doing for far too long.
Oh, crap.
Before the uhlan managed to close half the distance that separated them, Trip jumped over the chest-high railing that stood between him and the sublieutenant whose hand guided the rudder. Taking advantage of the split second of surprise the maneuver had bought him, he shoved the helmsman out of his chair, sending the young man sprawling across the deck’s hard duranium gridwork. Then he grabbed the momentarily untended throttle and opened it up all the way.
As he slammed the portside lateral thrusters open, sending the bird-of-prey into a hard starboard turn, he grabbed the helm console with his free hand to prevent the heaving, cockeyed deck from throwing him off his feet. Trip turned his head to the left just in time to observe that Sopek had been neither fortunate nor skilled enough to do the same.
Focusing his attention on the central viewer at the front of the bridge, Trip watched as one of the dirty-gray ice bodies of Tezel-Oroko’s Kuiper belt drew inexorably closer, its shape visible mainly as a dim, distorted crescent of reflected stellar light.
Too bad Sopek’s damned telecapture doohickey isn’t on this ship, he thought. I’d mind dying a whole lot less if I knew I was taking that thing with me.
Then something blunt and heavy struck Trip very hard across the back of the head, casting him abruptly into darkness.
FORTY-NINE
Gamma Hydra sector, section ten
Enterprise NX-01
ARCHER WAS AFRAID he knew what Hoshi was going to say before she said it. “Sorry, Captain,” said the communications officer via the intercom unit on Archer’s ready-room desk. “The subspace modulations carrying that signal have just…stopped.”
“Thanks, Hoshi. Keep scanning for any follow-up transmissions.” He closed the channel before pushing the chair beneath him away from his compact desk. Looking up at T’Pol, he said, “Trip’s message stopped right in the middle of that last repetition.” A tight fist of worry clutched at his guts.
T’Pol stood tensely in the center of the small chamber, hands clasped behind her back.
“Did you understand the message, Captain?”
“I did,” Archer said, nodding. “I’ll admit I’m a bit rusty at Morse code, but evidently not much more rusty than whoever sent that message.”
Her head tilted slightly in evident curiosity. “Morse code?”
“An Earth communications code that’s even older than EM-based luminal-speed radio.” He took a moment to confirm the brief message’s exact verbatim contents with Hoshi via the intercom, and shared the information with T’Pol in the process. “What the hell do you suppose happened during that last repetition?” he said as his XO considered the message in silence.
The Vulcan woman raised an eyebrow, making Archer think that she might be wondering if his question had been purely rhetorical. “It would appear that Trip is no longer transmitting.”
“If it really was Trip transmitting,” Archer said.
Her reply was as devoid of doubt as the rocks outside the New Berlin lunar settlement were free of water. “It was. What do you intend to do about his warning?”
“I wish I knew,” Archer said. “I need a little bit more to go on to justify leaving a whole ship and crew out here to die—starting with why the transmission was cut off. Did the Romulans find out what he was doing? Or did he have to s
top transmitting in order to keep from being discovered?”
T’Pol shook her head, responding again with bedrock certainty. “He has been discovered, Captain. Trip is in extreme danger again.”
Archer allowed himself a puckish smile, despite the pain in his face and the distinct lack of humor in this situation. “Another Vulcan hunch, T’Pol?”
“An objective fact,” she said, an almost mournful expression lengthening her olive-toned face.
The shrill whistle of the intercom interrupted his search for a reply that might both encourage and convince her. “Captain, the Romulan vessel is on the move,” Reed said, sounding alarmed.
Archer hopped out of his chair and leaned on the reply button on his desk. “On my way.”
Leading the way through the hatchway that connected the ready room to the bridge, Archer wasted no time taking a seat in his command chair. The main viewer displayed a computer-enhanced image of the blast-damaged, almost completely unilluminated Kobayashi Maru as it continued its slow, unpowered tumble through the stygian void.
“I’ve dropped us out of warp, Captain,” Mayweather said. “Decelerating at impulse to match velocity with the Kobayashi Maru, at a current distance of just over eleven kilometers.”
“Sensors read approximately two hundred life signs, Captain,” said Hoshi. “Some of them very faint.”
Two hundred people, Archer thought. He couldn’t abide the idea of just leaving them out here to die, Romulan sneak-attack warnings or fire-breathing dragons notwithstanding. But if Trip’s message was to be believed, the Maru’s problem was an insoluble one, no matter what he tried to do about it.
“Position of the Romulan bird-of-prey?” Archer said.
“That’s strange,” said Malcolm, speaking from behind the captain’s chair at the aft tactical station. “The Romulan vessel seems to have moved directly into the path of one of the cometary bodies. There’s been a collision, but the ship appears to be intact.”
Archer looked away from T’Pol. I hope to hell she was wrong about Trip being aboard that ship, he thought, even though he knew that she had a singular habit of being right about such things.
“So the Romulan ship might still be able to direct an attack against us remotely,” Archer said.
“That’s possible,” Reed said. “It’s also possible that the Romulans have installed their remote-hijacking device aboard one or more of their captured Klingon vessels by now.”
“At least the communications jamming has stopped,” Hoshi said. “It coincided exactly with the moment that Romulan ship hit the iceberg. Whether or not it’s directing other ships, the bird-of-prey must have been the source of all the com interference.”
Nodding an acknowledgment to the com officer, Archer said, “Commence rescue operations on the Kobayashi Maru.” Though he was addressing the entire bridge crew, his gaze settled on T’Pol, who had begun working at her science console. “Once that job is done, we’ll investigate the crash of the Romulan ship.”
He approached T’Pol closely, and spoke in a volume intended for her ears alone. “Maybe the sneak-attack plans we were warned about crashed along with that Romulan ship.”
Looking more stricken than reassured, T’Pol merely glanced down at her console and said, “Both shuttlepods have launched, Captain. Lieutenant O’Neill is running the transporter.”
Archer nodded. Opening an intercom channel on the console adjacent to T’Pol’s, he said, “Archer to O’Neill. Report.”
“The system’s having some trouble establishing a positive lock on any of the survivors, Captain,” said D.O.; her tone suggested that she might soon give the finicky transporter’s control console a swift kick in the annular confinement circuits.
“What’s the problem, D.O.?”
“When isn’t this damned thing having problems, sir? My best guess is that the residual hull graviton flux from the mine the freighter hit is interfering with the transporter lock. We might need to find a way to disperse the remaining particles.”
“A low-yield photonic torpedo tuned to radiate anti-gravitons might do the trick,” Reed said.
Archer nodded. “Get on that with Mike, Malcolm. We’re going to need to get the transporter up and running ASAP. The shuttlepods might not be enough to rescue all the survivors before whatever’s left of their life-support system decides to give up the ghost.”
“Aye, sir,” Reed said just before his attention became riveted to one of his tactical displays. “Captain! I’m reading two incoming warp signatures. No, make that three. They’re dropping out of warp, and just about right on top of us.”
T’Pol hunkered over the hooded scanner built into her science console. “Configuration is Klingon,” she said, immediately switching from what Archer recognized as the depths of Vulcan grieving back to no-nonsense officer mode. “All three are D5-type battle cruisers.”
And if those ships really have Klingons behind the wheel, then I’m Dorothy Gale from Kansas, Archer thought, recalling both the evidence he’d gathered on Qo’noS and the mysterious warning about an imminent Romulan sneak attack.
Aloud, he said, “Tactical alert! Recall those shuttlepods.” A heartbeat later, the bridge lights dimmed.
“Polarizing the hull plating,” Reed said. “All weapon systems armed and tactical crews summoned to battle stations. Lieutenant Burch is preparing a photonic torpedo to disperse the graviton flux around the freighter.”
“Shuttlepods returning to launch bays,” Hoshi said.
“Give me a tactical display on the Klingon ships, Malcolm,” Archer said, returning to his seat.
The image of the mortally wounded fuel carrier vanished from the viewer, replaced by a computer-generated grid depicting the local region and all five ships that now maneuvered within it. The two white computer-generated icons that represented, respectively, Enterprise and the Kobayashi Maru were so close they almost touched at the viewscreen’s center, while the three outlying long-necked gray deltas that stood in for the approaching Klingon warships wasted no time deploying themselves in a loose triangle that encompassed most of the screen.
“They’re trying to surround us,” Archer said.
“And there’s a good chance we’ll never get away from them if they do,” Reed said in strictly matter-of-fact tones. “Their weapons tubes all read as hot. The nearest vessel is at ten thousand klicks and closing rapidly.”
“Are the shuttlepods docked yet?” Archer asked, scowling.
“Shuttlepod Two reports successful docking capture,” Hoshi said. “Shuttlepod One is making its final approach.”
“The nearest Klingon vessel is opening fire with its main disruptor,” said Mayweather.
The bridge rocked, but not nearly as hard as it might have had the gunner attacking them really meant business.
Archer turned toward Reed, who displayed a puzzled frown. “They should have hit us a hell of a lot harder than that.”
Archer shook his head. “They would have—if it really was the Klingons pushing the buttons on those ships.”
“And if they’re really Romulans, Captain?” T’Pol asked.
“If they’re Romulans, then they’ll want to capture more of their enemies’ ships,” Archer said. “The bastards will try every trick in the book to take Enterprise intact.”
“At least at first,” Reed said with a gallows grin. “Once they realize they can’t have her intact, they’d probably be inclined to make sure that nobody else can have her either. Present company included, of course.”
Archer nodded. “We’ll have to gamble on whether their patience will run out before time is up for the Kobayashi Maru’s survivors.”
“And on whether or not we can pull off a rescue and get out of here in one piece before both deadlines expire,” Reed said. “I recommend we don’t press our luck here, Captain. They might only be lobbing snowballs at us now, but we’re still outgunned and outnumbered three to one.”
“We should stay long enough to rescue as many of the survivor
s as possible, Captain,” said T’Pol. “That first shot bought us some time. The Romulans just showed us that destroying Enterprise is not their top priority.”
“Commander,” Reed said, his voice raised slightly, “if we start taking serious hits, even with our hull plating polarization activated, the warp drive could go down. And if that happens—”
“If that happens, Malcolm,” Archer interrupted, “then we’ll all have a whole lot less paperwork waiting for us after the mission.”
Reed nodded. “I suppose there’s always an upside to everything, sir.”
Archer grinned. “That’s the spirit, Malcolm. Let’s get those residual gravitons cleared out and beam as many of the survivors as we can off that ship.”
As Reed busied himself at his console, Hoshi said, “Shuttlepod One has just docked, Captain. Do you want to redeploy?”
Archer shook his head. “No. Let’s hedge our bets and leave ’em both docked, since we still might have to make a quick exit. There’s no way to know exactly when—”
The bridge was suddenly plunged into inky darkness, startling Archer into silence and prompting exclamations of alarm all around the bridge.
The surreal red glow of the emergency lights suffused the bridge a few frantic heartbeats later, turning the room into a colossal Hieronymus Bosch painting.
“What happened?” Archer asked as the main viewer rebooted, dropping the tactical display in favor of an image of the wounded Kobayashi Maru.
Reed consulted one of his now dimly glowing displays before answering. Owl-eyed, he said, “Enterprise’s life-support system has just failed. Complete shutdown.”
Hoshi’s translation of a mortally injured Klingon woman’s dying words whispered anew in Archer’s ear: “The first thing they did was…to use some remote means of seizing and deactivating each of our systems, one by one. They started with life-support…”
Over the fading echoes of that grim recollection, Archer recalled the warning message he’d received more recently: “ROMULAN SNEAK ATTACK COMING, BY REMOTE CONTROL.”
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