Pike had only needed a few days inside the Pergamum to know that the hazard wasn’t its proximity to the nearby Ionite Nebula, rife with Lurian pirates. The Pergamum was simply too harsh a place for ships that weren’t built for it. Enterprise was up to the challenge. Pike had been able to scout a handful of target worlds for closer study before the war news came.
It was just a brief repeating text message sent in the open on an extremely low-frequency subspace channel, the only one where signals could even occasionally penetrate the clouds. From the time code, Pike could tell Starfleet had first started broadcasting it earlier—months earlier, mere days after he had entered the nebula. That made it easier for him to decide that the part about staying in the Pergamum might no longer be operative.
Maybe it was a fig leaf, but he didn’t care. Shenzhou was gone. If the best of us are falling already, he’d told Number One in the turbolift, we’re needed.
And he wouldn’t spare the horses. An orderly departure would have meant taking days to go around the Acheron Formation—the river-to-hell–named gauntlet of space chemistry bounding the Sol-facing end of the Pergamum. The Federation might not have days to spare.
“Lambda in ten seconds,” Raden said. He looked back. “Still time to change course, Captain, and find a cleaner lane.”
“Always appreciate hearing the options, Mister Raden,” Pike said. “Brace yourselves.”
Another cloud, another shipquake, worse than before. Ahead, Pike watched his tireless first officer, Commander Una, keeping an eye on the vessel’s condition from the bridge control station. “Shields holding,” Number One called out. “Hull integrity nominal.”
“Burro” Schmidt would laugh, Pike thought. My “shortcut” might take longer than his did. But his crew wouldn’t let that happen. Between the bridge officers, main engineering, and Spock, Enterprise was constantly reshaping her shields to find the best angle of attack—even as the cloud formation threw surprises at them.
“This is a bad patch,” Raden said, wiping sweat from his large forehead lobes.
He wasn’t alone in his concern this time. Una glanced back at the captain. It was as close to “Are you sure you want to keep doing this?” as his closest advisor was likely to get before the crew.
“Steady as she goes.”
Five minutes later, an interstitial void allowed a brief respite—and time to explain briefly to the bridge crew the reason for their sudden return. It mattered that they felt the same urgency he did. A couple had friends and classmates impacted by the Klingon attacks, and everyone knew Shenzhou from their shared Sirsa III adventure the year before. Scientist Connolly, he thought, was about ready to transfer to security then and there.
Pike hadn’t made an announcement shipwide, though, and he wasn’t going to now. Michael Burnham was aboard Shenzhou. He knew Spock had a familial connection to her; it wasn’t the sort of news to learn over the public address system.
“New region approaching,” Amin said.
Raden looked at her. “I thought we were just up to Mu.”
“No, I meant new as new. Not the letter, as in—”
“Never mind,” Pike said. With another opaque wave growing in the viewscreen, levity had found its limit.
“Dense but narrow.” Connolly studied his readings. “Shouldn’t be so bad on the other side.”
Pike blanched at the sight. “Are you willing to swear there’s another side to it?”
“Spock is reshaping shields for maximum efficiency,” Number One reported.
Well, I wanted to do this, Pike thought. “Here we go again.”
Enterprise pierced the blackness. There were some light shakes, but the starship found a corridor with easier going. Pike breathed a sigh of relief on behalf of everyone. “Well, that one wasn’t so—”
A shock wave struck the ship, pitching Enterprise forward, stern over bow, and throwing several crewmembers from their seats. Artificial gravity and inertial dampers could accommodate for a lot of jolts, but not that one. Alarms screamed on the bridge as the tumbling continued.
Pike, thrown forward, had wound up between Raden and Amin, knocking both of them from their chairs. The helmsman hung onto the console and worked control after control, trying to restore the ship to an even pitch. Several moments later, Enterprise was stable again.
“Full stop.” Pike looked around. “Everybody okay?”
Connolly stood up from where he had been thrown backward against the command well railing. “Lucky this fence was here.”
His helmsman and navigator reclaiming their seats, Pike climbed back into his chair. “What the hell was that?”
Number One had been working the problem already. “There was a concussive force in our wake.”
Raden frowned. “What would do that?”
Connolly studied his readouts. He spoke tentatively. “The shape of the blast—” he began, before pausing.
Pike faced him. “Come on, what do you think?”
“Maybe I’m still dizzy. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it looked like . . . a photon torpedo blast, detonated somewhere in the soup behind us.” He looked at Pike. “But I know better.”
A torpedo? All eyes darted to Commander Nhan at tactical, their new head of security. Until now, the long-haired Barzan woman had little to do at her station but to hang on. “Most of our sensors were directed forward,” Nhan said, “just like our shields.” Nobody argued the wisdom in that. “But I didn’t see anything aft. We haven’t seen anyone for weeks. Just probes.”
“And half of them ours,” Pike said. Old and spent, from previous surveys. “How could a torpedo hit us that hard?”
“It’s the medium,” Connolly said. “All that debris hit us like a tsunami. And we couldn’t have gotten a visual if we’d wanted one. Not in that morass.”
“Check the logs anyway,” Pike ordered. “We must have gotten a reading from something.”
Nhan set to it.
“Damage reports coming in,” Una said. “Whatever it was, we weren’t shielded aft.”
Pike frowned. He had someplace to be. He looked to the engineering station, and the Tellarite lieutenant who served as departmental second officer. “Jallow, will we still have warp drive when we exit?”
Jallow worked his interface furiously. “I don’t know, sir. I’m checking for reports now.”
Una’s eyes narrowed as she turned to face Pike. “Should we stop, Captain?”
Always trying to save me from myself. “No,” he said, standing. “You have the conn. Resume course as soon as impulse power and engines allow.” He made for the turbolift. “I just remembered we have a superstar belowdecks.”
She looked quizzical. “Captain?”
“Our new chief engineer. Maybe he can rub his two Cochrane Medals of Excellence together and get us home before the war ends.”
2
* * *
Warship Deathstrike
Pergamum Nebula
“Vauss, you are a true imbecile. There is no prevarication about you; you are every bit as stupid as you appear.” Gripping his lieutenant by the throat, Baladon crushed him against the bulkhead. “Were it not for the lie Mother tells of our kinship, you would find yourself floating with the jetsam outside.”
Vauss struggled against his massive older brother’s hold. He attempted to speak, without success. Hulking and yellowish gray, Lurians had faces that normally looked like shriveled pieces of fruit. His had turned nearly fluorescent.
“What’s that?” the gravel-voiced Baladon asked, baring his teeth. “You wish to admit your first mistake, surviving childhood?”
Back at a control station, Baladon’s navigator—also a brother—mumbled without much interest. “He’s choking. Or something.”
“Hmph.”
Baladon had attempted to strangle his siblings many times before; he usually knew when Vauss was about to expire. It wasn’t easy to kill a Lurian. Their bodies were stuffed with redundant organs, as if evolution had predicted just ho
w stupid some of Baladon’s relatives would later be. Someone who might drink used reactor coolant on a dare could use a spare stomach or two.
Baladon brought his head centimeters from his brother’s face and glared into his bulging yellow eyes. “We had one photon torpedo, Vauss. And you wasted it.”
“Nrfflmph,” Vauss replied.
Baladon decided to take that as an apology and released his hold. Vauss fell to the deck, gasping.
“The detonation was too soon. You cost us Enterprise.”
“Not . . . me,” Vauss muttered between wheezes. He pointed. “Blame Jeld! Ship . . . too far.”
The navigator, younger brother to the two of them, snapped back, “Clouds too thick.”
“Ship too far. I said get close!”
“We’d be in their galley!”
Galley. The word, and its suggestion of food, calmed them all. Baladon knew this was normal for Lurians, and indeed offered their society what stability it had. It was also the longest word many of his relatives knew.
Baladon turned from his brother and stalked about Deathstrike’s dilapidated bridge. “There is no need to argue,” he said, adopting his most leaderly tone as he plopped down in his command chair. “You are all equally incompetent. You function together as parts of a machine that does absolutely nothing. When the end comes, I will be able to say with pride: each crewmember aboard brought me to it.”
Several on the bridge erupted in self-congratulatory cheers. Baladon closed his eyes and groaned.
It was not true, as a spacers’ joke went, that in the land of the Lurians, the one who knew how to operate an automatic door was king. Many leaders Baladon had known would’ve failed that test. It was why he had left. Born into a family of privateers, he had the requisite brutality—but also a gift for words. That set him apart from most Lurians, who kept their thoughts to themselves—when they had them. His smart-sounding talk attracting attention, Baladon had promised great wealth to warrior families that would join him in his piratic exploits outside the Ionite Nebula. The nearby Pergamum, as stolen Starfleet charts called it, was larger and mostly unknown, easy to sell as a vast realm of plunder and profit.
He’d misjudged on two counts. The recruits that he’d hoped would be sharper than his relatives turned out to be equally useless, barely able to operate a starship at all. And they wasted his precious black-market ammunition on the few targets they’d found. Those pickings were meager, indeed, because conditions in the Pergamum were far harsher than in their home nebula. They hadn’t seen as much as a workpod in weeks—
—until Enterprise appeared. The frozen image of the starship still remained on the screen on the starboard wall, taunting them for their failure. Deathstrike’s surveillance drones had spotted her days before; building stealth probes for use in nebulae was one thing Lurians were good at. Baladon had stalked the Starfleet vessel, using the clouds to cover his approach. And then, just as Enterprise lingered near a colossal planet known in records as Susquatane, the starship turned and rocketed for the nebular boundary.
“No one saw us,” Jeld said. “We had a clear shot.”
“Don’t start,” replied Vauss, rubbing his neck. “And it was just one torpedo.” That was the other long word Vauss knew. He gestured to the Enterprise image. “What could it do to that?”
“The same thing we always do,” Baladon growled. “Strike the unshielded aft—then send over the boarding pods. They couldn’t have more than a couple hundred people over there. We have that many belowdecks, eager to kill on command.”
“They want food,” Jeld said. “So do I.”
Baladon didn’t want to hear it—but he was hearing something. Yellow eyes shifted. “What is that sound?”
“Rogall is beeping,” Vauss said, pointing to the comm station—or, more precisely, the corpse slumped over it and bleeding out. The comm operator had announced during the earlier pursuit that he was going to hail Enterprise to ask the Starfleet ship to slow down. He’d gotten his hand to the send control when Baladon relieved him of his duties. The leader’s knife still protruded from the unfortunate Lurian’s back.
“What is it?”
“Message,” Vauss said after shoving the corpse to one side. He read aloud from what sounded like an intercept: “Alert. Hos . . . til . . .”
“Hostilities,” Baladon said.
“. . . opened with Klingon Empire . . .”
After the interminable wait while Vauss finished reading the entire message, Baladon punched his hand with his fist. “That explains it! Why they were in haste to leave the nebula—and why they were willing to take the worst route possible.”
Jeld frowned. “Then they won’t come back.”
“They aren’t out yet—which means we still have a chance.” Baladon regarded the image on the wall and rubbed his hairless chin. “A Starfleet ship fancier than any we’ve ever seen. I ask you, Vauss—what might that be worth to the Klingons?”
“Klingons like fancy ships?”
“No, my good dolt. If we’ve never seen anything like this Enterprise before, it’s a lock that they haven’t. If we bring that ship to them—or even just a shuttle, a sickbay couch, a serving spoon—it might be worth more to them than it would be to us!”
“How much?”
“Fortune will tell.” Baladon cracked his knuckles. “Follow the Enterprise, brothers. This time, we’re going to get it right.”
And if not, he thought, I’m soon to be an only child!
3
* * *
U.S.S. Enterprise
Pergamum Nebula
“Captain!” Avedis Galadjian nearly vaulted the computer console he was working at when he noticed Pike’s arrival in main engineering. “Welcome!”
“Lieutenant Commander.”
“Doctor is fine.” The human in red seized the captain’s hand and shook it vigorously. “I so rarely see you here. It’s an exciting day, and we’re delighted to have you.”
“Thank you, Doctor—but we still don’t do handshakes.”
“How foolish of me.” Bald with a finely coiffed gray goatee and beard, the sixtyish Galadjian released Pike’s hand. “That is a pity, but needs of the service.”
“Right.” At least he wasn’t saluting anymore, Pike thought. “We’re nearly through the Acheron Formation. What’s your status?”
“Excellent! It has gone very well.”
I’d have won the pool on that answer, Pike thought. Galadjian’s first name meant “good news” in his native language, and that had quickly become his nickname. The captain surveyed the junior engineers bustling about at their assignments. “I don’t suppose you noticed the shaking down here?” As if on cue, Enterprise, moving again, shuddered around them. “Like that?”
“Of course I felt it. Very exciting.”
“Was the excitement in any way concerning?”
Galadjian walked toward one of the engineering displays before turning, apparently having had a flash of insight. “You see, Captain Pike,” he said, gesturing with his hands, “the calculations for the creation of a magnetodynamic envelope in which a vessel, V, travels through a medium, M, without harm to occupant O are a simple mathematical matter. What is unusual in this case is that I am inside the problem myself.”
“You’re O.”
“Doctor O. But yes. My presence makes me more than a mere observer in this system. And that is a hazard. If I were to allow my feelings as a sentient being to enter into my thinking, it might influence my calculations and introduce error.”
“Or give us a less bumpy ride.”
“Ah, but the tolerance levels of our occupants have already been taken into account, and our journey has been entirely within prescribed parameters.”
That’s a relief, Pike thought. “How about that big bump earlier?”
“Big bump?” Galadjian looked at him attentively. “Perhaps some clarification.”
“When the ship went pinwheeling. You must have noticed that.”
G
aladjian nodded. “Again, very exciting. There are no moments like this back home at the institute.”
“Lieutenant Connolly seems to think it might have been caused by a photon torpedo.”
“A photon—” Galadjian repeated. His head tilted forty-five degrees. Dark eyes stared into space for a moment, as if the new information needed to be submitted through internal channels only the engineer could see. “That is a remarkable possibility,” he said after a few moments. “We will turn to our good and trusty friend, the sensor logs.”
“Commander Nhan has already started collating data.”
“Magnificent! I will see if I have anything to add.” As Galadjian headed to a far terminal, several engineers stepped from their stations to join him.
Pike braced himself against a bulkhead and waited—and looked again at the busy officers about. He saw nothing unusual: if Enterprise’s rough transit was posing a crisis, there was little trace of it. This was an experienced team—
—save one. Even the ensigns had been in Starfleet longer than Galadjian.
The problem with Enterprise being a showcase for Starfleet was that the coveted chief engineer’s post had become something of a revolving door. People came and went, often taking personnel with them; sometimes they even came back. Kursley, Marvick, Grace, Burnstein—even Transporter Chief Pitcairn briefly had filled the top slot for a mission. Caitlin Barry had been the most recent chief engineer to depart, taking several assistants on a leave of absence before the Pergamum mission to advise Starfleet’s shipyards about the Constitution class. Now, with a war on, Pike had no idea whether they’d return. He hoped they would. One of the junior officers Barry had taken, Scott, had seemed pretty bright.
The Enterprise War Page 2