But security and secrecy had been tight, and Starfleet was taking every step to make certain that no leaks occurred.
Except that she had one. He hadn’t been in contact for several days, but he was on the inside.
And she had just gotten a message from him.
“Come on, Nash, pick up,” she said to herself, hearing the chimes in her earpiece. She stole a quick glance in the direction of Gannet Brooks, who stood with several of the others; Brooks always seemed to scoop just about everybody when it came to Starfleet-related news, but so far today she had been mum. And Keisha had been working her own contact for weeks now, setting him in place. It was amazing the kind of loyalty that good sex could inspire—and the sob story she’d given him about having a relative serving aboard the still-missing Columbia hadn’t hurt either.
Finally, just as she was about to try another editor at the sub-net, Nash McEvoy picked up his comlink.
“What is it, Naquase?” he asked breathlessly, as though he’d just entered his office at a flat-out run.
She toggled the headpiece vidcam she wore, activating it even as she turned her back to face the rest of the press gaggle. She didn’t want them to see the “on” light on the headset.
“I promised you I’d scoop your girl,” she said, subvocalizing into her throat mic. “And I recorded your promises. So don’t even think about trying to back away from our deal.”
“This had better be big, or else you just torched your bridge while you were still standing on it,” McEvoy said, hiding none of his testiness.
“Oh, it’s big, all right,” Keisha said, holding the datapad up to where the camera’s eye—and Nash—could see it.
Thursday, July 24, 2155
Grangeburg, Alabama
Albert Tucker balanced the four plates of waffles in both hands as he exited the kitchen. He had picked the strawberries in their patch of the communal garden at sunrise, then sliced them thinly in order to add them to the multigrain batter. He knew how much his dad loved strawberry waffles, and he and Mom visited so rarely these days that Bert wanted to make certain they both had a good time.
“All right, Dad, here’s your favorite,” he said, entering the dining room.
Seated at the table were his father, Charles, and his mother, Elaine, while Bert’s husband, Miguel, stood nearby. They all looked stunned and grief-stricken.
What now? Bert thought. They had already lost Bert’s sister in a Xindi attack on Earth, and his brother, Trip, had been killed on the Starship Enterprise only a few months back. Today everyone in the room bore the same signature of tragedy he’d seen on both of those other terrible occasions.
“What is it, Mike?” he asked, holding the shifting stack of plates like an inexpert juggler.
Miguel pointed to the nearby wall-mounted flatscreen, which he often left turned on as a soundless visual wallpaper. Though the sound was muted as usual, he could see the silent news anchor mouthing words, the screen split between him and a stern-looking uniformed Starfleet official.
Bert watched as his father took his mother’s hand. “Say goodnight, Gracie,” said Dad, incorporating his nickname for Mom into what was doubtless some sort of obscure, centuries-old pop-culture reference calculated to cheer her up.
It didn’t seem to be working, however; Mom’s misting eyes remained riveted to the image on the screen, which Bert finally began looking at closely.
Crawling across the screen’s bottom, in large white capital letters superimposed onto a red stripe, was a single ill-omened phrase.
The stack of plates left Bert’s nerveless fingers in time-dilated slow motion, smashing on the floor with the same silence as the screen’s three endlessly marching words:
COALITION DECLARES WAR!
FIFTY-ONE
Friday, July 25, 2155
Enterprise NX-01, Gamma Hydra sector,
near Sataghni
EVERY TIME CAPTAIN ARCHER and Commander T’Pol were off the bridge, Travis Mayweather’s mind took him to the worst places imaginable. It wasn’t significantly better for him when they were on the bridge—Enterprise had been mostly stopped dead in space, undergoing a number of in-place emergency repairs and systems diagnostics ever since the Tezel-Oroko confrontation and the Kobayashi Maru disaster—but at least having command staff in place on the bridge meant that they weren’t sequestered away exchanging secret messages with Starfleet Command.
Malcolm Reed and Hoshi Sato had both tried to reassure him that even if Starfleet was calling with news, it wasn’t necessarily related to the disappearance of the Horizon. That hadn’t helped. He already knew that; the specter of impending war had been haunting the ship like all of Charles Dickens’s Christmas spirits wrapped into one.
He knew that things were bad everywhere. Columbia hadn’t been heard from in days either, ever since she had gone to Alpha Centauri. And rumors were floating around that the Romulans had managed to get control of other kinds of ships besides those of the Klingons. But if those rumors were true, nobody had confirmed them yet.
But Columbia wasn’t the Horizon. Mayweather’s family wasn’t on Columbia. Paul, Mom, where are you? he thought for perhaps the three-thousandth time in the last few hours, his slightly shaking fingers manipulating the controls as he checked and double-checked sensor readings to the limits of Enterprise’s resolution.
Mayweather knew from his conversation with the Kobayashi Maru’s first mate—the man whom he had trusted to deliver his letters to his family and friends aboard the Horizon—that the Mayweather family’s freighter was supposed to have met the Maru in the Coalition side of the Gamma Hydra sector. But the Horizon hadn’t made her scheduled rendezvous, according to every port of call he had managed to contact. Nobody had heard from the Horizon for over ten days; it was as if she just dropped off the edge of the star maps.
He couldn’t believe that his family and their crew would allow themselves to fall prey to some stupid deep-space accident, which meant that somebody had to be responsible for their disappearance. They were too tough and clever to become the victims of garden-variety space pirates. And given the recent wave of remote-control attacks that had caused so much grief across Coalition space lately, the Romulans seemed to be the best suspects.
Mayweather scowled down at his controls for several minutes, trying not to allow himself to return to the depths of his personal darkness. He hadn’t been able to sleep for days, and could barely eat. But he knew he needed to keep his focus strong. He needed to concentrate on his duties, to lose himself in them, now more than ever before. Come on, Travis, keep it together and concentrate. He could almost hear his mother alternately admonishing and encouraging him, just as she had all through his life. He would have given anything to hear her speak to him again, even if it was only to scold him for leaving his quarters looking like an explosive decompression accident.
He heard the door to Captain Archer’s ready room slide open, and turned his head to see Commander T’Pol exiting the room, with Captain Archer a few paces behind her. The Vulcan woman appeared even more dour than usual, but she didn’t look in Mayweather’s direction, perhaps deliberately so. Whatever was going on at the moment, Mayweather thought it likely that it had nothing to do with either him or the fate of the Horizon.
Captain Archer, however, glanced his way as he stepped onto the bridge, then looked away again a moment later, seeming to survey the bridge. Mayweather was glad his back had been turned to the captain over most of the last three days; he hadn’t agreed with Archer’s decision to leave the Kobayashi Maru defenseless when he’d ordered Enterprise to withdraw.
I would have found a way, he thought. There’s always a solution, and turning and running isn’t it. Leaving helpless people behind to die can’t be the solution.
It didn’t help that the Kobayashi Maru was a freighter, like the Horizon, or that Mayweather had made casual friends with the Maru’s first mate, Arturo Stiles, when Enterprise’s crew had helped the fuel hauler with her repairs last week
near Altair VI.
Captain Archer just left them to die.
As he sat at the helm of Archer’s ship, Mayweather’s mind wandered, not for the first time, back to the question that bothered him the most: Would Archer have abandoned the Horizon as callously as he had the Kobayashi Maru?
And with that gnawing question remaining unanswered, he wondered whether he could ever again really have faith in his captain’s decisions.
Archer looked out across his bridge as he exited his ready room behind T’Pol. The first crew member’s eyes he caught were those of Travis Mayweather. The helmsman had seemed distraught for days, understandably concerned about what had become of his family after their vessel had seemingly disappeared. Archer had tried to learn anything he could about the freighter’s whereabouts, but had run into dead ends everywhere he’d looked. He had even reached out to the shadowy Agent Harris to see if the man in black knew anything, aware that even by asking him, he was taking on a debt that would have to be repaid someday, probably in blood. Unfortunately, the spymaster had failed to furnish any hard information, or even conjectures that Archer hadn’t already considered.
Archer’s gaze moved across the rest of the bridge, taking in each of his officers. D.O. was there, once again pulling a double shift, and Hoshi Sato looked over from her station, a look of expectation on her face; since she was in charge of monitoring the subspace bands, she would know when something very big was happening, usually before even he did. Ensigns Malvoy and Prince turned from their posts, and even the MACO guards he had assigned to bridge watch swiveled their heads to look toward him. Malcolm Reed was the last to lift his gaze from his console’s displays, where he appeared to have been running computations or battle simulations.
If Reed was as clued in to what was about to happen as Hoshi appeared to be, Archer was confident he was already creating some entirely new battle tactics.
All across the bridge, the air seemed charged with tension and anticipation. The entire crew had been on pins and needles over the last thirty-six hours, ever since the incident at Tezel-Oroko and the destruction of the Kobayashi Maru. The reports now circulating through the interstellar media and Earth’s newsnets, combined with Starfleet memos and general scuttlebutt, had ratcheted up shipboard anxiety levels to an almost unbearable peak.
The turbolift doors opened, and Doctor Phlox exited onto the bridge, his wide-eyed expression of surprise undimmed. Archer had asked him to come up, so that Archer could address his senior staff all at once. Their simultaneous presence called attention to the gaping hole he still felt inside because of the absence of Trip.
Archer continued surveying his bridge, and seeing the expectancy of those who had looked up to him for so long, he wondered how they really felt about him now. He knew that some of them must have resented the decision he had made regarding the Kobayashi Maru; though it did little to expiate the guilt he felt when he considered what had become of the Maru, he still drew comfort from the knowledge that his crew and his ship had remained intact solely because of what he had done that day. He clung to that, particularly when he thought he glimpsed an accusatory glare, or overheard a snippet of conversation that would suddenly break off as he entered the galley or stepped out of his ready room or his quarters.
If ever a crew needed an inspiring speech from its captain, now was the time. But Jonathan Archer found that he could muster neither the words nor the thoughts necessary to rally his people to face the challenges that lay ahead. There were no trumpets to sound, no cry of “Charge” to yell, no steed to ride up and down the ranks of his troops, no saber to thrust into the air as he tried to brace them for what was coming.
Now the heading for Enterprise, for Starfleet, for the Coalition, and for mankind itself, was about to change drastically.
Archer spread his hands wide and hesitated for a moment, catching his breath and steadying his voice.
“It’s begun.”
EPILOGUE ONE
Tuesday, July 22, 2155
The Depths of Tezel-Oroko’s Kuiper Belt
TUCKER AWOKE GRADUALLY, feeling something hot on his cheek. A swipe of his hand brought some relief, but also sent pain coursing through his system. As soon as the burning stopped in one area, however, he felt two other inflammations ignite the nerves of his skin.
Opening his eyes warily, he saw the reason why. His body was crumpled on the floor, underneath a console on the deck of Sopek’s Romulan bird-of-prey. The console itself was throwing an intermittent shower of electrical sparks in various directions; some of them had landed on his face, causing his minute but painful burns.
His hearing began to return along with his equilibrium as he sat up gingerly, wondering when he would be rendered unconscious again. His last memory was of pushing the Romulan ship’s throttle hard to starboard, directing the helm right toward one of the nearest icy cometary bodies of Tezel-Oroko’s Kuiper belt, and he’d felt the blow to his skull. He could recall nothing more.
Looks like I missed all the fun, Trip thought, wincing as he made a halting attempt to stand. The ship must have collided with one of those icebergs. He thought for a moment of holovids he’d seen re-creating the seagoing Titanic disaster of the early twentieth century, and developed a ludicrous mental picture of a dinner jacket–clad Romulan string sextet playing below decks.
All around him on the dimly lit bridge were the unconscious—or perhaps deceased—bodies of Sopek’s crew. Sopek himself was crumpled against a far wall, a splash of green above his head that was smeared down to the spot toward which his face was turned.
Trip limped over to one of the instrument panels that still seemed to be in working order and attempted to read the gauges he saw there. The main ship’s systems appeared to be completely down, so he knew that sensors were useless, but the artificial gravity and life-support systems were still functional, if only at one-third efficiency.
If he hadn’t been in such pain, Trip supposed he might have chuckled at the irony of the situation; the arrenhe’hwiua telecapture system he’d learned about that the Romulans were using to hijack ships apparently left the imprisoned crews similarly barely alive, though not in control of their vessels. Unfortunately, that system apparently hadn’t been installed on Sopek’s ship, so he had no chance to destroy it now. But Trip realized with a start that he could at least stop this ship from causing any further trouble.
From what he knew of the layout of the upper decks of this particular type of Romulan vessel, the second level had two escape pods. He prayed that at least one of them would be operational before he began to enter commands manually into the redundant auxiliary system.
He heard a sound behind him and saw one of the female bridge crew members sitting up, a disruptor pistol clutched in one shaky hand.
“Get away from those controls,” the young Romulan said, her words slurred slightly as she appeared to have bitten partially through her lip during the impact.
Trip’s eyes flicked to the side, and he saw another disruptor lying on the deck near where he had gotten up. Why didn’t I pick that up before? he asked himself silently. As he dove for the weapon, he heard the sizzle of an energy blast go past his falling body, connecting with part of the metal framework of the bridge. His attacker didn’t seem overly concerned about hitting the sparking control systems; Trip reasoned that either she’d expected the equipment to be able to take it, or else she was just in shock and not thinking clearly.
Hitting the deck hard, he snatched up the disruptor and aimed it quickly in the general direction of his attacker, squeezing off two quick blasts. By the time he blinked, he saw the Romulan woman sliding downward against the wall, a gaping hole burnt through the right half of her head. Trip turned away quickly; the blast may have cauterized the wounds, but that hadn’t stopped some of the remnants of the insides of the woman’s skull from dislodging with a wet plop. He closed his eyes for a moment, concentrating on keeping his suddenly buoyant gorge from rising any higher.
Holding the disr
uptor protectively in one hand now, Trip continued entering the string of commands the woman had interrupted. As he finished, he heard another member of the bridge crew coming to, noting that this man’s back was to Trip.
I don’t want to do this, Trip thought, though he knew the situation was inescapable. What made killing the crew with a disruptor any worse than rigging their ship to explode after he escaped? They had planned to kill not only everyone who’d been aboard the freighter he had seen earlier, but also the crew of Enterprise, and God only knew who else to boot. Besides, if I don’t kill them, then they’ll chase and kill me, not to mention a whole pile of others.
He pulled the trigger, shooting the Romulan down before he could finish getting up. His unarmed foe slumped facedown on the deck, dead. Despite his repeated efforts to convince himself that this was necessary, Trip felt ill.
Time to go, he thought as his fingers entered the final commands into the override system. Stepping over the bodies on the deck, he neared the hatchway and ladder that led to the secondary level—the turbolift, or its Romulan equivalent, was down—and opened it.
Before he made his descent, he moved quickly over to Sopek’s body, kneeling beside it to feel for a pulse. The man’s respiration was shallow, but Trip could tell that he was still alive, if only barely. Of all the people on this ship, he might be useful to keep around, Trip thought, though he knew what he was doing was dangerous in the extreme.
Grabbing Sopek’s collar, he dragged the man’s limp body over to the hatch, then clambered down the ladder to the secondary deck below. Reaching up, he pulled the Romulan down the hatch, awkwardly catching the heavy man against his upper torso as the body toppled onto him like an extremely heavy rag doll.
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