“Magnesite’s not bad for deflecting radiation,” Ghalka said. “In this nebula, it could be good to have some around.”
“The fact remains it is inconveniently placed for this instrument.” Spock’s communicator beeped. He drew it from his belt. “Spock.”
“ Enterprise to landing party,” Nicola said. “The captain informs you that he and Commander Nhan have returned to the ship. Her relief, Ensign Gupta, has been transported to your camp.”
“Understood. We will return there shortly. Polar expedition out.”
Connolly leaned against their vehicle. “Kind of glad there’s only three seats in the scouter. I’m starting to like this idea of no red-shirt babysitters.”
“They are here for our protection,” Spock said.
“Protection from what?”
“Repeating myself would not be productive.” The Vulcan pointed behind him, to where several spars were deeply embedded in the distant snow. “Move each of the probes five hundred meters north. I will attempt new readings then.”
“We can walk that,” Connolly said.
“I’ll bring the power tools.” Ghalka slung a case over her shoulder. As she and Connolly began walking away into the night, she whispered, “Is he always this serious?”
Connolly smirked. “Your first tour, right?”
Spock heard them both as he donned his parka, but it was not worth a remark. Not when part of the reason he had sent them away was to exit the conversation. He wanted to focus on the work and another theory he had developed. A few quick taps on the geocorder brought up the seismometer screen. It was just possible that some of the errors he was seeing came from plate activity.
He stopped when he saw the readings. A quake had rocked the dayside of the planet scant minutes earlier. The instrument couldn’t say much about where the temblor had struck, just that it was far away—and not deep at all. Spock was beginning to consider the possibilities when another tremor was detected, also on the dayside but well apart. Its intensity was identical; it did not appear to be an aftershock.
Something is happening. Spock reached for his communicator.
U.S.S. Enterprise
Orbiting Susquatane
“We’re on it,” Pike replied to the hail. Spock and Connolly’s stand-in, Salvadora Dietrich, was checking the sensors. “What do you see, Ensign?”
“Same as Mister Spock,” the young woman said. “Two impacts, right at the surface. We’ll need to approach to see more.”
“Hail the expeditions.” Enterprise sat in a geosynchronous orbit above the planetside expeditions; the starship had occasionally left briefly to study a moon, but never strayed far. Nicola signaled when Pike was on with all of them. “Landing parties, this is the captain. We’re going to leave station to check something out,” he said. “Enterprise out.”
“Sun’s set on most of the camps,” Nhan said. “We’re leaving them in the dark.”
“We won’t be long,” Pike repeated. “Engage.”
Enterprise’s impulse engines hummed to life, their gentle push enough to send the ship cruising toward daylight. Dietrich began receiving more data almost instantly.
“There’s the vibrations,” she said. “Two quakes, fifteen hundred kilometers apart.”
Pike peered at the main viewer. Their dayside destination was under heavy cloud cover. “I don’t remember the map. What’s the surface like at those coordinates?”
“Open steppe and jungle plateau,” Una replied.
Pike’s eyes narrowed. Something was off with the clouds in those two spots. Oily smears on white, just starting to spread with the trade winds. “Are there . . . volcanoes in those locations?”
“Not that we’d recorded.” Una increased the main viewer magnification of the dayside. “How would two—?”
A bright flash appeared on screen, blazing brilliantly for a moment before Enterprise’s main viewer filter kicked in. “Another quake!” Dietrich announced.
“Fifteen hundred kilometers from both the other impacts,” Una said. She looked back to Pike. “A perfect triangle.”
Dietrich kept reading her scope. “Intense heat . . . radiation?”
As the third cloud formation grew an inky and angry black, Nhan shouted what they all had just realized. “They’re nuclear blasts!”
Troop Module Aloga-One
Approaching Susquatane
It was an old diversionary tactic, one Kormagan had learned back in the first wave she’d served with. The nukes her engineers had armed her stealth probes with weren’t likely to do much to Enterprise, which surely would have detected the threats before they got close. Baladon had told her that unlike Deathstrike, Enterprise was likely to have functioning shields.
But nothing would stop the weapons when directed at the ground—particularly when the starship was on the other side of the planet. It had only remained to see whether Enterprise would take the bait.
It had. The vessel from “Starfleet”—that was the odd word Baladon used—had abandoned Susquatane’s nightside. Kormagan had given the command then for her troop modules to emerge from the nebula. Twenty-four assault transports, just like hers, screamed toward the planet and its camps, unbeknownst to Enterprise’s crew.
Of course, the starship would try to return as soon as those occupants heard there was a threat. They would be stopped. Not by Kormagan, but by the capital ships of her flotilla: the combat module carriers. With their troop modules detached, the streamlined vessels that remained were nimble battleships, awaiting their cue in the nebula over the dayside. Kormagan looked at the synchronized timer on her helmet interface.
All right, carriers, you’re on.
And so was she. “Atmospheric entry in twenty seconds,” her navigator called out over her comm system.
She looked to her troops, lined up before their drop doors and ready to be deployed. “You know the objective,” she called out. “Every target you kill is like wasting one of your own people. They are your own people. So take care of our cargo.” She raised an armored fist. “For K’davu!”
“For K’davu!” the warriors shouted.
Kormagan gave her gear a last check and stepped into her own drop bay. The wavemaster always went with the strike teams; any other practice would be foolish. She shuddered to imagine any military so fearful that it would protect its superior officers like precious plants. No, she had to show her forces the way—and besides, she loved it.
She had ever since the first time she had put on armor and joined her fellow warriors. Different species, all given equal abilities and united for one great cause. Her kind had evolved to live in the desert, seldom entering the cold. Since donning armor, she’d fought in every clime imaginable—and she was about to set foot on an icecap.
“Starfleet,” Kormagan thought as air buffeted the ship. The word sounded so arrogant. They certainly think a lot of themselves. She would soon make up her own mind.
13
* * *
U.S.S. Enterprise
Over Susquatane’s Dayside
“Red alert. Shields up!”
As the siren blared and red lights flickered on the bridge, Pike leaned forward in his chair. “Information, people. Did those blasts originate on the ground, or did somebody bomb them from above?”
“Cannot determine, Captain.” Dietrich worked her console’s interface. “Checking the recording of the moment before the third detonation.”
Number One looked to Pike. “We haven’t seen sentient life, Captain. It can’t be a local disturbance.”
“I’m not waiting around to find out. Lieutenant Amin, plot us the fastest course to evac all six camps. Raden, punch it as soon as she’s ready.”
“Aye, sir.”
Behind Pike, the turbolift doors opened. Galadjian emerged and looked at the flashing lights, baffled. “So we are at red alert. Is there an error?”
“Glad you could join us, Doctor,” Pike said. He’d forgotten it was time for his chief engineer’s shift on
the bridge. “We have a situation. We’re going to need to do a lot of transporting.”
Galadjian’s eyes fixed on the main viewscreen—and nodded. “Oh, yes, the full withdrawal. As in the drill.”
“That’s the ticket. Number One, fill him in.” Galadjian gamely took his station.
Pike’s eyes narrowed. One blast might not have been noticed; indeed, it hadn’t been. Only Spock had noted the second. But the third, in defining a triangle near the equator, had made it glaringly obvious that whatever was happening there was a deliberate and unnatural act.
Too obvious—certain to draw Enterprise’s attention. What was special about that spot?
At once, he knew. He stood and walked behind the navigator. “Jamila, those blast coordinates. Invert them and overlay atop your new course.”
“Invert them?”
“Latitude and longitude.”
Amin caught Pike’s drift—and in a moment, Pike saw what he was afraid of. The triangle of blasts was centered on a point exactly on the other side of Susquatane from the geographic center of all Enterprise’s camps.
“We’ve been fished in!” Pike turned back toward his chair. “Raden, get us moving. Don’t wait for—”
Enterprise shook. Pike pitched sideways, nearly losing his footing. “Was that—?”
“Nuclear blast!” Nhan yelled. “Not antimatter. Same as on the planet.”
“Torpedo? Mine?” Pike asked as he found his seat.
“New contact,” Una called out. “One vessel, one-five-seven mark one.” Before she could say anything else, another blast rocked the bridge, this one producing a flash visible on the viewscreen. “Correction, two vessels. Second contact, one-two-two mark four. Both closing fast.”
“Shift power to shields and keep making for the nightside. Nhan, prepare to return fire.”
Number One checked her readings. “Captain, they entered the Susquatane nebular pocket from the innermost cloud band.”
“Third vessel,” Nhan said. “No, five!”
Pike asked what everyone was thinking. “Are they Klingons?”
Susquatane
Polar Expedition Site
“—on our way,” Pike said over cascading waves of static. “Return to your camp and await—”
Spock adjusted the comm unit on the snow scouter to no avail. Just like his handheld communicator, it was receiving nothing but interference. This was no atmospheric phenomenon, connected to the cloud formations. They were being jammed.
Spock looked to the north. Connolly and Ghalka were half a kilometer away, repositioning one of the sensor spikes. Out of earshot, certainly. He climbed fully into the driver’s seat of the scouter and activated the engine.
It was then that he saw it—bright lights blazing down across the night sky, touching off a sonic boom that arrived quickly. They were vessels, several times longer than shuttles, with engines both aft and beneath. One soared over Connolly and Ghalka’s location, to hover a few dozen meters beyond. A series of flaps sprang open down the long side, disgorging airborne passengers.
Not passengers, Spock saw as he neared: jetpack-wearing warriors, clad completely in armor. Their propulsion units fired, carrying them the final few meters to the surface. Billowing snow raised a cloud as they touched down, but Spock did not need to see them to guess their intention.
He tried his transmitter again. “Enterprise, we are under attack!” But he could hear nothing as the low whine of the racing scouter was lost in the thunder of another transport heading his way. No, not one, but two—descending perilously close to the ground on either side of him and preventing him from going any way but forward. Spock dared not look back, but he surmised there was a fourth one trailing behind.
Spock remembered a term Pike had used: he was being corralled.
Ahead, he saw Ghalka and Connolly running in his direction, pursued by troopers who had landed. In between them and the snow scouter was one of several exposed patches of ice. Spock saw his opportunity. He raced for the frozen surface and activated the emergency brakes the instant he reached it, turning the control yoke hard to port as he did so. The snow scouter spun wildly, causing the transports hemming him in to bank farther away in response. Arriving at the far side fully a meter off the ground, Spock reactivated the engines and regained control just in time for the vehicle to slam into the snow between his fellow officers and the advancing troops. Spock spun the scouter backward, its runners digging in and throwing sheets of ice crystals in the direction of the newcomers.
The scouter vaulted forward, grinding to a stop beside Connolly and Ghalka. Their weapons were out, their faces flushed. “Klingons!” Connolly shouted.
Spock had no basis upon which to agree or disagree. He had never known Klingons to wear armor of this kind, but it was hardly the time to wonder about attire. The make of the transports was also new to him. The two that had closed off his escape did so again, settling in front and releasing troops of their own. Spock saw a fourth transport even farther to the south, closing on the camp. After Ensign Gupta, he thought.
“Board quickly,” he barely needed to say, as Ghalka and Connolly were in the process of doing so. But a sonic shriek threw them right back off. Spock, his ears ringing, hung on—and then went sideways as more intense sound waves struck the vehicle, flipping it.
On his shoulder and half buried in the snow, Spock looked at the advancing intruders marching deliberately toward him. Except for one whose armor appeared battered and worn, they all looked alike. He found his phaser, set to stun, and fired—only to see the blast dissipate off some invisible personnel barrier protecting the armored figures. His second shot was joined by a third of higher intensity from the other side of the overturned snow scouter; it had clearly come from Ghalka or Connolly and a phaser that had been set to kill. It likewise had no effect.
The arrivals from behind joined a perimeter, surrounded the Starfleet officers and advanced. “Wrap them up,” he heard someone say in words he could understand. Spock got to his feet—
—and fell backward as a transparent substance struck him hard, enveloping him. Webbing, clearly designed to incapacitate personnel—and which tightened around Spock as he struggled to free himself. Beyond the snow scouter, he heard a loud chuff of air, followed by another—probably, he surmised, the same sort of weapon being used on his comrades.
Struggling for breath inside the cocoon, Spock beheld one of his attackers, looming over him. He could not see through the bulky armored figure’s opaque headgear, but he had already calculated that they were not Klingons for one simple reason.
They had not killed him.
Spock knew that could change.
14
* * *
U.S.S. Enterprise
Over Susquatane’s Dayside
This is a bullfight, Pike thought. And we’re the bull.
He’d only seen archival video of the ancient activity, long considered barbaric—but was aware of the tactics involved. A matador attempted to control the movements of an enraged bovine, assisted by lancers on foot and horseback. An escalating series of pokes and prods reduced the great animal, concluding with the tercio de muerte—the “part of death.”
The vessels assaulting Enterprise had neither hailed nor responded, but it was clear to Pike that they were working in tandem with one another, effectively controlling the direction and movements of his starship. First through their torpedoes—the source, he now knew, of the initial strikes against his shields—and later through disruptor fire as they closed in on Enterprise. Every time Pike tried to make for the nightside, some new attacker intervened.
“Shields at ninety-one percent,” Una announced. “And holding.”
“Kid stuff,” Pike said. Nuclear blasts? Where were the antimatter weapons? Did they even have them?
He found out. A shining spark sailed through the space before them, almost like a phosphorescent shell in an ancient war—until it exploded, hammering Enterprise’s forward shields and deflecting the
starship’s progress.
“Evasive maneuvers,” he called out. “Oh-nine-oh mark one!”
“Antimatter reaction,” Nhan said. “That’s the real stuff.”
Damn it. Pike pounded his armrest with his fist. “They’re just toying with us. Nhan, are you having any luck?”
“I’m firing away, Captain. They’ve got shields too—and we can’t focus on one for more than a few seconds the way they’re buzzing around.”
One of the nearer attack vessels came more clearly into view. A long prism, close to Enterprise’s length stem to stern; it didn’t appear Klingon. The thing looked vaguely like a bomb-shaped frozen confection Pike had enjoyed on Mojave afternoons as a kid—and the bomb connection was apt. Perfectly pentagonal in lateral cross section, its five edges were festooned with weapons arrays running the length of the vehicle. Fixed disruptor cannons, ball turrets, and what appeared to be torpedo launch tubes. Between the rows of death, the faces of the vessel were barren, except for what appeared to be multiple docking clamps and airlocks.
“Are they battleships or carriers?” he asked aloud—only to have his words muted by another antimatter detonation off Enterprise’s bow.
“Directing power to shields,” Galadjian said. The researcher was shaken, but holding up. “These have not been direct hits.”
“Maybe that’s the idea,” Pike said. They’d known from the beginning of the mission that pirates might be in the nebula; had they accidentally found, at Susquatane, their hideaway? It was possible there might not be a tercio de muerte—but that wasn’t something he was going to take a chance on.
“Recording analysis complete,” Dietrich said from the science station. “The nukes we thought were volcanoes were delivered by probe-sized vessels. We saw the last one go in.”
“That’s about six crises ago,” Raden snapped.
“Stow that, mister.” Pike still thought the blasts occurred to attract attention—and not to target Enterprise or its people directly—but a weapon was a weapon. He looked back to Dietrich. “Feed the visual to Nhan. Get a tactical analysis. If we’ve got two kinds of hostiles running around out there, I want to know.”
The Enterprise War Page 7