31
* * *
Troop Module Aloga-One
Near Little Hope
“Now listen up, people! This isn’t your standard exfiltration.”
It wasn’t a standard mission, either, Spock knew. Carrier Aloga’s Opmaster Sperrin had taken Kormagan’s place aboard Aloga-One as ranking officer, meaning he was addressing Gold Squad in person. His words were being broadcast not just to the other squads aboard the ship, but also to those aboard the other four troop carriers.
“We’re not going to be able to fire our docking ports into Enterprise’s hull,” Sperrin continued. “We’ve got an operative here who says it won’t work. The hull’s too damn thick. So it’ll be laser torches to the hatches if his entry codes don’t work.”
Spock said nothing. He had asked Kormagan to keep his name out of it. It had been a long time since he had seen Connolly or any of the other Enterprise officers; if the wavemaster had told the truth about all the abductees being alive, Spock thought it was likely that they had all been moved into support roles. But he wished his involvement to remain secret, just in case. If any of his fellow officers listening heard his name, they might cause a disturbance, demanding to see him and interfering with the operation.
The significant shame involved in hijacking Enterprise did not enter into it.
Sperrin continued his briefing. “Little Hope is a Class-Twelve gaseous zone—forming star systems slammed into one another and failed, leaving a lot of junk. Gas, debris, brown dwarfs. Our bet is that Enterprise will make for the fragment clusters and use them for cover. We’ll let them.”
The opmaster looked to Spock. When he did not react, Sperrin continued. “There are hatches on the outside of Enterprise’s hull. Once her shields are punctured, you will jet to the hull and lock on magnetically. We’ve loaded you with enough jetpack fuel to launch you to the next galaxy.”
“So don’t get shot at,” interjected the Gold Squad subaltern, a harsh veteran of many campaigns. The other members of Spock’s squad laughed.
“Always there with the good advice, Goldsub.” Sperrin continued undeterred. “There’s debris all over Little Hope. If for some reason you get cut loose and can’t communicate, try to get to something with a surface. Your armor can keep you fed, watered, and breathing for three or four months, but you’ll last a little longer if you’re someplace where it’s got resources to draw upon. I’m not saying we’ll come back and look for you right away, but you won’t be an immediate casualty.”
Sperrin announced that Enterprise was expected any time—and that several troop modules would be deploying in advance of its arrival. “This is a big one,” the opmaster announced. “Do it right—for K’davu!”
Having signed off, Sperrin looked to Spock. “Did I forget anything?”
“You did not tell them where the hatches were.”
“We found those in the imagery from the earlier encounter. They matched up with what you told us.”
“I know my starship.” Spock had known already that the Boundless had images of Enterprise; there was no point in lying about the hatches. It suited him to appear cooperative.
“You know how to activate your own torch?”
“Affirm,” Spock said, using the Boundless’s term.
Sperrin stared at him. “All right, then,” he finally said. “I’m here to keep an eye on you, but you sound committed.”
“He’s a good soldier,” Goldsub piped in. “Smart. Doesn’t shoot at much, but he’s gotten us out of some jams. If we find some more Vulcans, send them my way.”
In fact, Spock had yet to commit fully to his next steps. He lacked information. He knew he would apprise Pike and Enterprise of the situation, as quickly as possible, once he encountered them. But what happened next would depend on the starship’s chances against the Boundless.
If Enterprise looked a match for Kormagan’s forces, it might be able to demand release of the other twenty-nine officers, once Spock made contact and explained where they likely were. That was the best case. The intermediate case was of more concern: Enterprise might be forced to flee. In that event, Spock would have condemned his fellow abductees to whatever punishment Kormagan sought to deliver. Still, that saved one hundred seventy-three lives at the cost of just thirty—thirty whose fates might already have been sealed on Susquatane.
If crushing Boundless superiority forced him to actually follow through on Kormagan’s plan, he would see that the Enterprise crew and the other captives safely departed the nebula. And then, instead of assisting in the theft of the ship’s secrets, he would scuttle it, with himself aboard. That would at least partially satisfy Kormagan, by keeping Enterprise from the Rengru—and it would free the maximum number of people.
That left only the worst case—that Kormagan was lying, and had no intention of freeing his crewmates once captured. He had not sensed any prevarication in her, yet it seemed wrong to ascribe a code of honor to a people who kidnapped others and forced them to fight their wars. For that reason, he had used his collaboration with her, days earlier, to plant a small seedling, one with the potential to avert the encounter entirely. It was the longest of longshots—
A klaxon sounded, dashing that last hope once and for all. “Stations!” Sperrin called out. Spock knew why. One of the probes placed as bait was approaching Little Hope, with the indication that Enterprise was following. He touched the laser torch in his gear and steeled himself. He would have to go through with this, one way or another.
U.S.S. Enterprise
Pergamum Nebula
On the day Enterprise’s original one-year mission to the Pergamum was to have ended, Pike had finally caught the break he’d been waiting for.
Courier 5, found days earlier, had not even tried to self-destruct, making the harvesting of its data core easier. It had pointed the way to a sixth probe, whose trail they had already picked up. And Courier 6 seemed to be going somewhere in a hurry. It was not a behavior they had seen in the other probes; Nhan inferred that it was likely about to report in to Essfive. So Enterprise was cutting through the plasmic seas again, tsakat protocol in operation and all hands on high alert.
“What do we make of this region it’s headed for?” Pike asked from his command chair. “Ensign?”
Colt answered from the supplementary navigation station on the starboard side of the bridge. “It’s a nebular rift. It appears from the probe’s records that it once had been a cluster of evaporating gaseous globules,” Colt said. “EGGs, as they say.”
Just a little late for Easter, Pike thought. I wonder if that’s the basket my lost eggs are in.
The formations swept up dust and hatched protostars—when they weren’t crowded and colliding into one another. That appeared to have happened here, Colt said. “The result is kind of a muddle. A patch with less radiation, but more widely distributed debris.”
“Do the probe records have a name for the rift?”
“Sovital,” Colt said, placing the stresses as in the word nominal. “Actually, it sounds a lot better pronounced this way: So vital.”
“The place you describe sounds neither nominal nor vital.”
“Odd coincidence,” Nicola said from the comm station. “The spelling’s likely solid, but I haven’t loaded all the audio from the primer into our systems yet.”
That had been another break: Courier 5 had been found to have a language primer aboard, attached to one of the messages it was carrying. It connected its creators’ language to Lurian and Antaran, among others—and Starfleet Standard English, which Pike assumed the attackers had found in the Lurians’ databases. It made sense that pirates would want to understand languages as an aid to future boarding operations.
It had also given Enterprise’s enemies a proper name. If the primer could be trusted, Essfive called itself the Boundless. Pike found that a little amusing. For all their destructive power, the name sounded like posturing by common thugs.
“So-Vital sounds like a good pronunciation t
o me,” Amin said, adjusting her records on the region. “Like it’s a pleasant place—or an important one.”
“Yeah, a nice contrast from Pergamum and Acheron,” Raden said. “I’m just glad we haven’t found any place called Hellmouth.”
“Okay, okay.” Pike put up his hands. “Any other information?”
“Dates,” Colt said. “One is when the probe last visited. It’s recent, as you’d assume from the mail route. The other date appears to be older. Possibly a date of discovery, or of the last time the Boundless visited the place.”
Pike nodded. They had figured out the attackers’ time system by studying a revived probe’s processing unit in action. “What’s the older date for Sovital?”
“It’s in 2236.”
Pike froze. It was a year he would never forget—the time of the tunnel collapse that had taken the life of Evan Hondo. And it was also something else. In another of the eerie coincidences—how many had there been?—that he had discovered in the aftermath of his most jarring mission, Pike had learned that 2236 was the year of another disaster.
It was when S.S. Columbia had crashed on Talos IV.
The ship that had carried Vina.
The exact date of the crash had never been discovered; only the time of the disappearance, eighteen years before Pike’s visit to the planet. But the specific number seemed designed to get his attention, and it put him on edge. “Colt, the name of the region. How’d their English transliteration spell it?”
Surprised at the request, Colt complied. “S-O-V-I-T-A-L.”
His hands fell to his sides as he felt his heart begin to race.
Colt looked concerned. “Captain?”
He mouthed his response three times to himself, before repeating the letters to her, anagrammed: “T-A-L-O-S-I-V.”
Raden blinked. “Talos IV?”
“We’re nowhere near Talos,” Amin said. “And this is a nebular rift, not a planet.”
“A region tagged with the year of Columbia’s crash,” Pike said.
“Huh,” Colt said. Of the others on the bridge, she alone had been aboard during the Talos IV incident. “That’s spooky.”
“It’s more than spooky,” Pike said, standing up. He crossed to her station and looked at the map display. There, he found the name of the place they were headed for located on Courier 5’s onboard map—and with his finger, traced the letters in his chosen order.
Colt fixed her eyes on him. She’d known what he had gone through on the planet—and since. “Captain, you heard Nicola. Their translations might be wrong about what the letters represent.”
“Why do we have them at all?” Pike looked abruptly to his right, to the science station. “Dietrich, didn’t you say Courier 5 didn’t even try to self-destruct?”
“Correct. And the files were unencrypted. That was new.”
“This probe didn’t try to self-destruct because the Boundless wanted us to find it, see their maps, and follow it to Sovital. Maybe they even wanted us to read the word, because the surface meaning is inviting in our language. Maybe not.” He looked not at Dietrich, but at her chair. “But if you wanted to send a message about a place that only the crew of U.S.S. Enterprise would understand, what would the name Talos IV tell you?”
“Keep away,” several people said in unison.
“That place was named by Spock.” Pike hurried to his chair. “Doctor, disengage the tsakat. Full stop, shields up. Red alert!”
32
* * *
U.S.S. Enterprise
Pergamum Nebula
“Captain,” Colt said cautiously, “with the tsakat protocol disengaged, I could go down and relieve Number One behind the deflector dish. She could take my place up here. If you needed her.”
“A sound idea,” Raden said. “Er—if you approve, Captain.”
They think the old man has cracked, Pike thought as he looked around. But I’m not an old man—and I’m not losing one more person to another ambush. “Request partially denied,” he said. “We are going to be using the protocol—but I will be sending you down there, Ensign. I need a hand that knows the ropes, and who knows what I’m planning here.”
“Sir?”
“We’re going to put the warp drive through its paces,” Pike said. He stood and faced the mass of clouds on the main viewscreen. “I don’t care how you pronounce the place. It’s a trap—a box canyon. We’re supposed to follow Courier 6 into there. I’ll bet the Boundless have those battleships hiding in the clouds on every side but the one we’re going into.”
Nhan’s brow furrowed as she looked at him. “Sensors aren’t reading anything.”
“I just said they wouldn’t be where we are. Where’s Courier 6?”
Nhan consulted her readings—and her eyes went wide. “It’s slowed down. Happened when we stopped.”
“It thinks we lost track of it,” Pike said. He pointed to the main viewer. “It’s a damn Judas goat, leading us to the slaughter.”
“Which is why you mentioned the warp drive,” Amin said. “Should I plot a course away from here?”
“No. We’re going in.”
His response stunned the bridge crew. Nhan produced words first. “We’re what?”
Pike stalked around the command well. “We’ve been chasing these people for months.” He looked to Galadjian. “Doctor, the tsakat protocol works best at low speeds, so we’ve been sticking to warp two and below. Will it still protect us if we go faster?”
“Its efficiency will be much reduced. I would not advise it for very long.” Galadjian’s mouth was dry. “Captain, I am not sure that I understand—”
“Our friends out there beat us once by limiting our mobility. We won’t be making that mistake again.” Pike faced his security chief. “Nhan, you’ve been working on what would happen if we encountered Essfive—I mean, the Boundless—again. What’s your tactic?”
“A right to the jaw. With one hand tied behind our back,” she said, “in case our people are aboard any of the ships.”
“Can you disable them without making a kill?”
“If I can get past their shields? Oh, yeah. They’re fast, but all that armament is hiding some nice big, flabby impulse engines. Just get me behind them.”
Pike spun back to Amin. “You’ve got Courier 5’s internal maps on the region, correct?”
“Sovital? Yes.”
“Forget that name. We’re calling it Hellmouth now—make the change.” Amin did so as Pike continued. “Can we go to warp just this side of the region, heading for the clouds on the other side—winding up, say, no more than twenty kilometers deep?”
Raden considered it. “We’d want the tsakat operating, considering the medium—”
“Can you do it?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Great,” Pike said. “Can you do it a few dozen times?”
Raden’s mouth hung open. Across the bridge, Nhan smiled broadly. “Damn!”
The two at the helm station looked baffled until Pike laid out the rest of his plan. “I think it’ll work,” Raden said. “But there’s no regs on something like this.”
“Perhaps we are writing one now,” Galadjian said, staring at his console.
“Okay,” Pike said. “Colt, go fill Commander Una in. Dietrich, I need instant scans of the clouds each time we come out of warp—for Nhan’s targeting, and for future jumps. And scan the hell out of anyone we encounter. We couldn’t detect specific life signs before, but we weren’t really trying. It’d also be nice to make sure they’re our hostiles from Susquatane. Got all that?”
“Yes, Captain.” It was a lot for an ensign elevated to the bridge, but she seemed game.
The communications officer spoke up. “What do you need from me, Captain?”
“I want to record a hail for as soon as we see anyone. Keep it repeating—in our language and theirs.”
“What message?”
Pike grinned.
Combat Module Carrier 539-Aloga
Little Ho
pe Boundary Region
Kormagan had managed several fleet actions in her long career, but never one so important—and rarely had she done anything significant without Sperrin at her side. But she had known Dreston, the captain of her lead carrier, for the better part of a century, and they spoke the same language when it came to managing the movements of dozens of vessels at once. He knew what things Kormagan would and wouldn’t be able to see in the strategic chamber; he wouldn’t tell her anything she didn’t need to know.
“The probe reads Enterprise as approaching the cloud boundary,” Dreston said, his voice transmitting to her from the bridge. “At its current speed, it will enter the stellar graveyard in two minutes.”
“Excellent. Where’s the probe?”
“Plotting it for you now. It has fully entered Little Hope, and is heading for the brown dwarf star indicated before you.”
Good enough, Kormagan thought. It really didn’t matter where the probe went, or how long Enterprise followed it. Wherever the Starfleet vessel went within the ruined region, it would find skies filled with Boundless troop modules. The carriers, fifteen in all, would enter the fray, preventing Enterprise from leaving Little Hope—and eventually battering down her shields. Then whatever troop modules were closest would take the prize.
Her bet was on Aloga-One to execute the first boarding, and not just because it was her usual troop module to command. Sperrin knew what he was doing, and had Spock along. Hopefully, the latter’s presence would make Enterprise surrender quickly. Her wave would follow her orders to limit the loss of lives, but she wasn’t as sure of her allies. They’d do harm not from intent, but out of inexperience or ineptitude.
“We have the first reading from the carrier nearest Enterprise’s point of entry. Five-Five-Two-Krall reports—”
The Enterprise War Page 16