• • •
The Tholian ships moved in swift, dashing motions akin to the way that fish would dart beneath the surface of a river, making it difficult for any weapons system or gunner to draw a bead on them. Shimmering crimson power grids on their trilobed hulls bled excess energy out into the darkness as they shed velocity, slowing to make a combat approach.
The formation dithered, then parted. Two ships rolled together into a new element, bringing their needle prows to bear on the Peliar warship. They moved front on, presenting the smallest possible target aspect to their opponent. The third vessel broke away in a hard power turn that became a spiraling course toward the slow-moving bulk of the star-freighter. Bubbles of glittering light briefly shimmered around both the Peliar craft as their crews put up their deflector shields, but the Tholians moved in undaunted.
There was no pause in their actions, no hint of hesitation. Weapons grids drew power from within and the prefire arrays of their particle beam cannons were readied. One way or another, conflict was coming to the skies above the sanctuary planet.
• • •
“Attention, intruder vessels.” The screeching tone of the alien voice was like scraping two pieces of broken glass across each other, and the dissonant sound set Saru’s teeth on edge. “You have made no credible attempt to depart this area. Therefore, your craft have been designated as enemy combatants and will be treated as such. In the interest of amity, the Tholian Assembly will allow you to surrender unharmed. Depower all weapons, shields, and drive systems. Do it now.”
The iridescent holograph of the alien being shimmered in the middle of the command deck as if being viewed through a heat haze. Saru recalled a xenobiology briefing suggesting that the interior temperature of Tholian craft was kept at several hundred degrees, and he tried to imagine what kind of life could have evolved to live at that extreme.
“We’re not going to be doing any of that,” said Nathal.
“It is as we expected,” replied the Tholian.
Saru was startled; he hadn’t realized that the transmission was live, expecting to get another self-contained statement as they had before. He took a step forward, a flash of hope stirring in him. If the Tholian was talking with them, then they were not fighting, and if they were not fighting, there was still a slim chance to stop this from escalating. “We have no wish for battle, but what you ask is unreasonable. Our presence here is in no way a threat to your species or its territories!”
“Untrue,” came the harsh rejoinder. “Your presence alone is the threat.”
“You’re wasting your breath, Kelpien,” said Vetch. “I said the same thing to them when they came to our colony, and received the same answers. They’re not interested in compromise.”
“Why not?” Saru looked back at the hologram, his mind racing. “Why are you doing this? Do you really wish to provoke an interstellar conflict?”
“The provocation is yours,” grated the Tholian. “We observe and evaluate. You build bases from which to conduct espionage operations against the Assembly.”
“It’s talking about the Gorlan colony planet,” said Weeton. “They think we had something to do with that?”
“You establish military alliances that imperil our borders,” continued the hologram. “We react to protect ourselves.”
“You mean the discussions with the Federation?” Hekan shot Saru a look. “How are they aware . . . ?”
“We observe and evaluate,” repeated the Tholian.
Saru raised his hands in an unconscious gesture of appeasement. “You are mistaken. The Gorlans are not part of the United Federation of Planets, and we have no part in their colonial missions. They, like the beings of Peliar Zel and your species, are our neighbors. We seek only to coexist in peace.”
“You are not like us,” said the Tholian, and Saru could not deny the edge of menace in the words. “Carbon-based forms are inherently inferior. Inherently dangerous. You will be removed.” The hologram dissipated, and in the next second Madoh was shouting out in alarm.
“They’ve opened fire!”
• • •
Bright shocks of coruscating light stabbed from the prows of the Tholian craft and lanced through a cluster of Peliar drones, puncturing their deflectors and reducing them to shrapnel. The attacker triad blasted past the defensive line erected by the warship without slowing, even as the remainder of the drone squadron reacted and tried to waylay them.
The Tholian spinners continued to power ahead on their attack vectors, ignoring the smaller automated craft in favor of the two larger targets. The battle pair moved as if an invisible tether were connecting both vessels, vectoring into a twisting barrel roll that brought them hurtling down toward the ship’s flat, curved hull. Particle guns on the surface of the Peliar ship opened up, spewing jags of crimson fire into the path of the dart-like attackers, but they hit nothing but dead vacuum.
The agile Tholians suddenly broke formation and fired at the carrier’s fuselage, cracking sectors of the shields and striking hard secondary hits that overloaded plasma conduits and liquefied hull metal into scattered gobs of flash-melted tritanium.
The drone force, acting on its networked commands, swarmed back toward its parent vessel, driven by preprogrammed directives that compelled them to protect their mothership. Controllers on board the carrier worked to retask them, but it was too late. A window of vulnerability had opened over the transport ship, and the remaining Tholian spinner shot toward it, becoming a hurled dagger.
• • •
“Incoming!” called Saru, watching the shape of the silver attacker grow larger on the main monitor.
In comparison to the transport ship, the Tholian craft was small, but the power curves it exhibited showed a deadly energy-to-mass ratio. Its internal systems were keyed to weapons functionality. Where the transport was built to shift vast amounts of cargo across star systems, the Tholian craft was constructed around the lethal particle cannon that ran the length of its core. It was, in every sense of the term, a gunship.
All around him, figures scrambled to man the command deck’s empty stations—Peliar, Gorlan, and Starfleet alike—but there were not enough of them to operate all of the giant vessel’s complex systems.
Saru saw the danger as it unfolded. Too few to run the ship, too slow to get away, too weak to put up a real fight. For all his earlier thoughts of defiance, the Kelpien wondered if at last he had gone too far for his own good.
“Thrusters!” Nathal called to him. “Roll the ship, Saru!”
“Yes!” He saw the commander’s intention, and his long fingers raced over the panel in front of him, bringing up the attitude control matrix. He fired the huge ship’s clusters of ion jets in bursts of blue fire, and the view on the screen shifted.
Turning a hulk as big as the star-freighter was a difficult proposition at any time, and there was no way they would be able to avoid getting hit by the nimble spinner vectoring in on them. But rolling the vessel along the length of its primary axis would mean that incoming fire could not concentrate in any single location.
A streamer of brilliant flame connected the tip of the Tholian ship with the Peliar transport, and the huge vessel’s shields buckled as gigawatts of destructive power poured into them.
Under Saru’s deft control, the freighter spun, turning away from the crippling blow and spreading the incoming attack over a wider area. Flash-burn overspill from the particle beam drew an ugly scar of carbon scoring across the hull plates.
“Take the brunt of it on the forward section,” ordered Nathal. She didn’t need to explain that any hits aft of that part of the ship risked puncturing the cargo modules packed with terrified Gorlan refugees.
“I can’t connect . . .” said Weeton. He called out to Hekan. “What’s wrong with the targeting grids on these plasma turrets? Every time I try to draw a bead on that Tholian, the shots go wide!”
Hekan stabbed a finger at a vacant podium near where Weeton was standing. “The stabil
izer system is out of harmony. Someone man that station, help him!”
“Which one of us?” Vetch took a half step away from his own panel, then faltered. “Should I, I don’t know—”
The deck quaked as the Tholian attacker followed up its initial assault with a salvo of torpedo shots, and Vetch was thrown to the floor. Saru hung on to his own podium for dear life, but he couldn’t miss the flash of orange discharge on one of the secondary viewscreens.
The torpedoes punched through the shields and struck one of the transport’s warp nacelles. Saru gasped as the entire engine pod was ripped free of its support pylon, tumbling away end over end into the ship’s impulse wake, to collide with an escort drone that had been racing to catch up with them.
“There’s not enough of us to adequately operate this vessel under combat conditions,” he said flatly, tearing his communicator from his belt. Saru flicked it open and spoke into the pickup. “Yashae, Subin! Get up to the command deck, on the double! Bring anyone you can!”
“Negative, Lieutenant, we have problems of our own!” replied the Vok’sha. “That last hit blew out an EPS relay down here, we have fires in the corridor. I’m getting everyone out of the compartment, sir . . .” There was a pause, and Saru heard the distant crunch of twisting metal. “We’ll get to you if we can.”
“Understood, Chief,” he said. “If all else fails, fall back to the Yang and detach. We will attempt to do our best up here.”
Saru looked up as Madoh drew his own communication device. “You need people? I can bring them!”
“Do it,” said Saru, and he shot Nathal a look, heading off her complaint before she could voice it. “We don’t have time to be choosy, Commander.”
The Peliar woman scowled, and she resembled her father’s severe bearing. “It won’t matter if we can’t work together.”
“Something is happening!” called Vetch. “The other two Tholians, they’re falling back.”
“He’s right,” said Weeton. “Lieutenant, the sensors are reading very strong energy surges aboard each ship. A new pattern. Something we haven’t seen before.”
• • •
In careful lockstep, the two spinners harrying the Peliar warship veered off and looped around as the bulk of the drone flotilla came powering across the dark toward them. Pulse bursts jetted from cannon maws on the automated craft as the escorts tried to lay down a wall of fire. The machine intelligences inside the drones networked with one another over their subspace links, coordinating their counterattack to place the maximum amount of lethality across the path of the Tholians.
The memory banks carried by the drones were filled with thousands of hours of long-range sensor scans, predictive models, and espionage data based on what Peliar Zel knew of the forces of Tholia—but for all that, what the drones lacked was the ability of a nonsynthetic intellect, the insight to make a choice that was truly random, truly unexpected.
Against reason, the Tholian two-ship formation turned toward the incoming fire and threaded the gaps in the salvo as bright glittering needles passing through the weft of spun cloth. The collective network of the drones detected the unusual energy pattern building up in both ships but could not recognize it. No scans or records of such a pattern existed in Peliar records.
The reason for that was a simple one. No ship from Peliar Zel had ever survived the weapon the Tholians were about to deploy.
The effect burst from the hulls of the two spinners in a crackling wave front, coruscating blue lightning expanding outward in milliseconds until it spread wide enough to pass through the drone force.
Each drone touched by the passing of the twin-lobed wave suffered the same catastrophic overload sequence. First, their meager deflectors collapsed, then their power systems were swamped by an incredible flood of energy that blasted through their surge protectors. The high-intensity energy-dampening field emitted by the Tholians faded after only a few thousand meters, but the drones had gathered so closely that the effect was devastating.
Thruster grids died and weapons arrays went dark, but the forward momentum of the Peliar escorts was unchecked, and the drones became a cloud of uncontrolled missiles. Several of the robotic craft collided with one another, some tumbling away into the gravity well of the planet below, others pitching into crash courses with their mothership, forcing the gunners on the carrier to destroy their own craft or risk a deadly impact. Most of the affected drones obliterated each other in short-lived fireballs, gutting the offensive capacity of the larger Peliar warship in less than a minute.
The use of the weapon was like the Tholians themselves. Ruthless, precise, and unyielding.
The most immediate threat to them neutered, the two spinners reversed their course and shot back toward the warship, once more weaving side to side as they passed smoothly through the expanding debris field their attack had created. Crimson beams flashed from the sharp prows of each ship, combining their fire to impact the same points on the carrier’s outer hull.
Plates of metal across the exterior of the sickle-shaped craft boiled off in gaseous jets of sun-hot plasma, and a violent shuddering racked the Peliar warship as vital systems were burned out.
The warship’s gunners had no way of knowing how long the energy-dampener weapon’s recharge cycle would take, only that if their vessel was rendered inert, then the Tholians would be free to cut them apart at their leisure—or worse, build one of their strange energy “webs” around the carrier and drag it back into their domain.
The Peliar crew fought with the terrified desperation of those facing an enemy they knew only through rumor and half-truths. Beam salvos cut the dark orbital space, slicing through vacuum as they tried to find their targets. With the melee happening in such close quarters, it was inevitable that some shot would make the mark, and a particle beam turret on the aft ventral quarter of the warship scored a direct hit that shredded part of the spinner’s crystalline hull. Superheated atmospheric gases vented from the breach, and the craft veered off again. Its companion sought out the cannon that had landed the strike and melted it into blackened slag with a high-intensity burst of power.
The Tholians attacking the warship extended away and regrouped. Less than a kilometer distant, the third craft in their triad continued its savage assault on the bigger, slower star-freighter.
• • •
A storm of plasma bolts rained upward toward the twisting, turning shape of the Tholian spinner, but none of them connected with their attacker, and Saru felt his heart sink as the alien craft began to mimic the transport ship’s roll-and-lurch escape course. Each hit from the Tholian’s main gun was a hammer blow, making the decks tremble and the screens hanging from the ceiling flicker and fade.
Warning displays hinted at the unfolding horror taking place belowdecks and down in the cargo pods. Several levels of the forward module were torn open and naked to space, and there were sporadic damage readings trickling in from the container units to the aft. Sections of those modules were holed and losing life-support.
How many dead already? The horrible question made Saru sick as he contemplated it. All those civilians back there. The old and the young. Ejah.
He shook off the thought. There was no time to dwell on that. The Kelpien frantically tried to divide his attention between the control console in front of him and a secondary drive station to his right. It was hard work, dealing with a non-Starfleet interface and two sets of outputs, some of them in conflict, others in accord. Saru released a low gasp of exasperation as the ship rocked again and his head snapped up. He looked toward Weeton, and the ensign appeared every bit as beleaguered as Saru felt, trying to take in too much information at once, and run a cargo vessel never designed for combat through a deadly battle scenario.
There are too few of us up here. Half of the control podiums were unmanned, while Nathal, Hekan, and the others dashed from one to another, attempting to do the work of a full bridge crew. And we are failing.
That cold inevitability that alw
ays lurked in the back of Saru’s thoughts crept forward. The sense of the coming of death, the fear that never left him, it was welling up. An old memory came with the sensation.
Saru remembered being a young child, cowering in a cave, still stiff legged and ropy of limb. He remembered seeing the fear in his mind’s eye like a dark, glutinous mass of oil. Rising up to cover him, smother him. Until there was nothing left of the Kelpien called Saru, no intellect or reason or persona. The fear would drown him and fill every corner of his being. Then there would be nothing left but a terrified, quaking animal. He would be consumed.
His long fingers tightened into fists.
I. Will. Not. Submit.
Now, as he had then, he pushed back with all the strength he could muster, struggling to free himself from the inexorable gravity of the terror. If he could just stop himself from giving in to the burning fear for a second more, for ten seconds more, a minute, then he could hold it back.
I am afraid, he told himself. But it shall not rule me.
“I can’t hit him!” said Weeton, cursing under his breath. “Somebody give me a push on lateral control, and do it quickly!”
Vetch dithered over his panel. “Which one is that?”
“Red keypad, rotate through ninety degrees,” Hekan called out from across the compartment.
“Red . . . ?” The Gorlan speaker faltered. He was out of his depth and he knew it. “I do not—”
“That one!” snarled Madoh, lurching over from the console he was using, stabbing a finger at the panel in front of Vetch.
“Too late,” said the ensign, and he swore again as the ship weathered another shuddering impact. “That thing out there is going to carve us up like a turkey!”
“That would not be optimal,” Saru replied, burying his darker emotions. The fear would come back—it always did—but not in this second, not in this minute. He would not allow it.
The Kelpien gripped the edges of the lectern-like podium in front of him and sucked in a breath over his tongue. The sense organs in the roof of his mouth tasted burnt plastic, perspiration, and the tang of ozone.
Star Trek: Discovery: Fear Itself Page 22
