New Chicago, Mars
Brooks wasn’t naïve enough to believe that Alexandre Picard’s interest in her was purely professional, and he confirmed her suspicion by insisting on walking her back to her rented hovercar once the cometary “fireworks display” had ended. She decided she’d give him the benefit of the doubt and consider him a chivalrous gentleman—particularly after he’d helped her get into the small cockpit and finished bidding her a warm adieu.
“Until tomorrow,” he said, then turned and walked away, his boots leaving deep tracks in the powdery regolith.
Guided by the car’s onboard GPS system, it took Brooks only ten minutes to make the trip back to the New Chicago dome. Inside, her helmet and cockpit both open to the dome’s brisk shirtsleeve environment, it took nearly twice that long to reach the central core, where her hotel was located.
Brooks decided to stop at the nearly deserted hotel bar before turning in for the evening. She quietly nursed a glass of cherry mash whiskey mixed with carbonated water pumped from Margaritifer Terra. A dozen or so other hotel guests—many of whom also appeared to have just returned from the terraforming fireworks—slowly drifted away to their rooms in the lower levels.
It wasn’t until the place was almost entirely empty of other patrons that she noticed the dark, muscular man quietly staring at her from across the bar. She nearly sprayed her drink on the barmaid, and the man grinned. Brooks had no doubt that her expression was a dopey one. How long had he been watching her, his presence camouflaged by an uncharacteristic civilian suit?
“Travis?”
He rose from his stool and strode toward her, taking the seat next to hers. Setting the pint of amber beer he was carrying down on the bartop, he said, “Gannet. It’s good to see you again.”
“It’s been too long,” she said, admiring the stylish cut of his brown linen jacket. “Did you come to Mars on official Starfleet business?”
He shook his head. “My sister Rebecca and her husband both have planetology professorships at Endurance University. This is the first time I’ve seen either of them in years.”
She smiled, knowing how important family was to space boomers—especially to those who had experienced the loss of nearly every immediate family member, as Travis Mayweather had after the mysterious disappearance of the E.C.S. Horizon more than five years ago.
“Were you out watching the fireworks display with the rest of the tourists?” Brooks said, eager to steer the conversation toward less sensitive matters.
He nodded. “Wouldn’t have missed it. But why are you here? I thought you were mostly covering the Earthside beat these days.”
She didn’t feel much like exploring that topic either. With a shrug, she said, “Stories of my grounding have been greatly exaggerated. I still get out to the Great Red Wilderness every once in a while. Besides, isn’t it weirder to find you this close to Earth?”
Travis’s smile fell in on itself. “Well, lately Starfleet seems to have developed some funny ideas about whether it’s better to fight ’em out there or back here, near the home fires. Ours is not to reason why.”
“Strange that I missed seeing you out there at the fireworks display,” Brooks said. “Must be losing my touch.”
“I’m going to be here on shore leave for the next three days, so I thought it’d be best just to blend in with the tourists and the locals.”
“I understand.” She nodded. There was little point in reminding every random stranger of the ever-tightening noose that the Romulans seemed to have placed around humanity’s home system during recent months.
She decided to avoid doing the same thing to Travis by asking an innocuous question. “The last time I checked, you were convalesing aboard the Republic,” she said. “Intrepid class. NCC-415.”
He looked impressed and paused to sip his beer before replying. “That’s some pretty detailed research. But it’s a little out of date now. For the past couple of months I’ve been serving on the Roosevelt. Daedalus class. NCC-217.” As he set the beer glass down, a wistful sadness crossed his face. “But it looks like that tour will be finished soon.”
She hadn’t expected to hear that. “Are you staying in Starfleet?”
“For the duration,” he said. It took her a moment to realize that he was talking about the war. “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, especially now. And even if I wanted to leave, where would I go?”
She nodded, unable to think what to say to that. “I understand,” she said at length, awkwardly finding her voice.
“What brought you to Mars, Gannet?” he said.
“I’m covering the terraforming project. In fact, I have an appointment tomorrow to fly out to the place tonight’s fireworks display came from. It’s part of my research.”
“Damn. The Lovell will be picking me up to take me back to the Roosevelt when my shore leave here is finished. I thought for a minute we might have more time than just this evening to catch up with each other.”
The very same thought had just crossed her mind. Then she considered the prospect of sharing a potentially lengthy and unchaperoned shuttle ride with a certain suave francophone named Alexandre Robert Picard.
It would be awkward, to say the least, if he were to reveal an ulterior motive while cooped up with her in a small Kuiper belt–bound spacecraft.
“Maybe we can arrange to spend a little extra time together,” she said.
Leaning toward him, she began laying out an ad hoc itinerary for tomorrow morning.
Monday, May 3, 2160
Sol 50 of Martian Month of Libra/Sol 210, 107 Z.C.
Bradbury Spaceport, Mars
“Damn,” Brooks said, glancing again at the chronometer on her wrist. “I hope we won’t have to suit up before we get aboard Picard’s shuttle.”
She led the way off the pressurized tube train, and Travis fell into step alongside her, moving at a leisurely pace, apparently in no particular hurry. They crossed the pressed-regolith surface of the train platform, which was host to a noticeably sparse population of both arrivals and departures. As they moved past the platform to the broad spaceport transit lounge, Brooks decided that there was nothing particularly remarkable about this; the omnipresent threat of a Romulan attack on the home front had evidently made interplanetary travel a low priority.
Through the transparent aluminum windows on the lounge’s far end, Brooks spied a small, squat, well-used spacecraft that conformed to her notion of what a Dytallix-Bremco shuttle ought to look like.
Then she caught sight of one Alexandre Robert Picard, who was sitting in the transit lounge’s carpeted waiting area and seemed to be studying his boots intently. Why wasn’t he in his ship now, going over his preflight checklists, or performing whatever other rituals pilots always undertook just before setting out on a long interplanetary flight?
Picard looked up and waved as she and Travis approached him. “Mister Picard,” she said, shaking his hand.
“Please. Call me Alexandre.” As Picard turned to shake hands with Travis, she noted a look of disappointment in the francophone’s blue eyes.
“This is Travis Mayweather,” she said. “He’s an old friend.”
The two men exchanged murmured greetings. Travis smiled, but Picard maintained a stony, pensive expression. He was obviously preoccupied by something. What’s the matter, Alexandre? she thought. Afraid of a little competition?
“I hope my bringing Travis along on this little junket won’t pose a problem, Alexandre,” she said.
Picard seemed to jolt slightly, as though he had just come to realize what his discomfiture looked like. “No, of course not. But a problem of a different nature has arisen.”
“What kind of problem?” Brooks asked.
“I can’t raise Iceberg Fourteen on any of the subspace channels,” he said.
“I take it that’s the name of the Kuiper belt comet-processing station we’re visiting today,” Brooks said.
Picard nodded. “My shuttle is loaded with a cargo o
f technical equipment bound for Iceberg Fourteen today.”
“What’s the equipment for?” Travis asked.
“To enable the crew to make the final adjustments to the impulse thruster packs they’ve attached to a series of large, icy comet fragments. The engineering team is getting ready to alter the trajectories of the fragments so that we can move them ‘downhill’ through the solar gravity well and get them safely to their destinations at the Martian polar caps and Earth’s Sahara Desert.”
“Strange,” Travis said. “Having the comm go dead just as they’re getting ready to bring down multiple heavy inner-system-bound payloads.”
“Exactly, Mister Mayweather,” Picard said. “I just hope that everyone is safe up there—and that whatever has gone wrong won’t create significant further delays.”
“What about the other Iceberg stations out in the Kuiper belt?” Brooks asked, her curiosity roused slightly more than her fear. “Have any of them fallen off the grid besides number fourteen?”
Picard shook his head. “Not so far. But none of them has succeeded in raising Iceberg Fourteen either.”
Brooks sighed in frustration. “So what do we do?”
“Until I can ascertain exactly what has gone wrong,” Picard said, spreading his hands in a gesture of helplessness, “I’m afraid I must cancel our trip up to Iceberg Fourteen. Or at least postpone it.”
Only now did Brooks understand the source of Picard’s disappointment. But she had a tougher time understanding his failure to act.
“Why don’t we get your shuttle under way, Alexandre?” she said. “Why not find out for ourselves what’s going on up at Icebeg Fourteen?”
Picard shook his head, a move that catapulted a few strands of his wavy brown hair forward. “The company rules are very explicit, as are the governing regulations and laws. We must wait until we receive official clearance from both the United Earth Bureau of Extraterrestrial Resource Extraction and from the Martian Colonies’ Terraforming Authority.”
Brooks muttered a pungent curse. “Of course,” she said. “It makes perfect sense. Red planet, red tape.”
Brooks noticed then that Travis had withdrawn a small device from his jacket pocket. Although he wasn’t in uniform, he had evidently brought at least some of his Starfleet equipment with him.
With a practiced flip of his wrist, the communicator’s antenna grid opened. A birdlike electronic chirp signaled that it was operational and ready to receive and transmit.
“I just might know somebody who can cut through some of that red tape,” he said.
Enterprise NX-01
Kuiper belt
“There’s still no answer to our hails, Captain,” Hoshi said from the comm station.
Archer watched as the image on the viewer slowly increased in apparent size. Flanked by a pair of enormous-looking comet fragments and shrouded in the Sol system’s outer darkness, Iceberg Fourteen reminded him of one of the forbidding-looking iron platforms whose sole purpose was to pump petroleum out of the ground on Earth during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
It also reminded him, absurdly, of a haunted house. An abandoned structure that might contain some frightening secrets.
“Strange,” he said. “Silence on all the comm bands. No power readings, right down to life support. Even the exterior running lights are down. T’Pol, have you found any life signs yet?”
“Negative, Captain. However, it is possible that some of the comet materials in the station’s processing facilities are obscuring our sensors. I will continue scanning.”
“Malcolm,” Archer said, “this facility is way off the beaten track, at least in terms of the local neighborhood. In my book, that makes it more vulnerable than most targets to a Romulan peripheral sneak attack.”
“Not only that, Captain,” Malcolm said. “All of the Iceberg stations are in the business of catapulting heavy things sunward. Which could make any and all of them a potential weapon the Romulans could use against us.”
It was a grim thought, and Archer couldn’t deny its validity. The Romulans had yet to try this tactic in the Sol system. But elsewhere—including Draylax, Galorndon Core, and Coridan—they had already demonstrated a marked affinity for pounding their adversaries with superballistic missiles.
“What kind of security does Iceberg Fourteen have in place?” Archer asked, addressing no one in particular.
“Two squads of MACOs,” Malcolm said. “That’s a total of sixteen troopers. And all nineteen of the Iceberg stations throughout the Kuiper belt receive regular patrol visits from one of the ships in Starfleet’s Daedalus-class fleet—the Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The Roosevelt, Archer thought. Travis’s ship, at least for the moment. Archer had reluctantly granted his erstwhile helmsman’s transfer request shortly after the Kobayashi Maru debacle; however, he had kept abreast of Lieutenant Mayweather’s career since then.
“Captain, I have widened my scanning radius,” T’Pol said. “I’m now picking up debris.”
“The remains of a ship?”
“Confirmed. The wreckage is consistent with a Daedalus-class configuration.”
“I’m picking up escape pod beacons,” Hoshi reported.
Almost as though some ship that’s hiding deep in the Kuiper belt had been jamming their signals, Archer thought. Until just now.
“Ensign Leydon, intercept those escape pods,” he said.
“Aye, Captain.”
The deck plating shifted slightly but noticeably under Archer’s boots as the ship responded. Iceberg Fourteen dropped away into the void, and in a matter of minutes Ensign Leydon reported that Enterprise was coming within grappler range of the nearest of the Roosevelt’s escape pods.
“Bring ’em aboard, Ensign,” Archer told the helmswoman.
“Aye, Captain.”
Turning his chair toward the comm station, Archer said, “Hoshi, can you raise any of the escape pods?”
The comm officer entered several commands, then shook her head.
“I’m not certain this is such a good idea,” said Malcolm. “I’m picking up some strange readings from that escape pod.”
Archer approached the tactical station. “Life signs?”
“I’m not sure, Captain. It’s all a jumble. As though someone is deliberately trying to jam—”
“Launching grapplers,” Leydon interrupted.
Grappler One was a clean miss, but the second found its target and held it tightly in its magnetic grasp. Archer watched the image of the tethered escape pod’s battered surface as the grappler cable drew it inexorably toward Enterprise’s launch bays.
“I’m picking up a sharply rising energy curve coming from inside the escape pod!” Malcolm said. “It may be a Romulan nuclear device.”
“Confirmed,” T’Pol said. “And I have just noticed a similar reading coming from Iceberg Fourteen.”
“Malcolm, polarize the hull plating,” Archer said.
“My console has picked it up, too,” Leydon said. “Iceberg Fourteen has just launched two large objects, both moving at high impulse speed on steep downsystem trajectories.”
“Those inbound comet fragments,” Archer said, suddenly fully cognizant of the trap that was springing shut all around him—and Earth. “Ensign Leydon, release that escape pod and put some distance between it and us.”
Leydon wasted no time executing the commands. The pod and grappler cable both vanished from the screen as the vibration pattern in the deck plating shifted subtly, indicating a change in velocity.
That same instant, the viewer emitted a momentary blinding flash and went abruptly dead. The shock wave arrived a split second later, upending Archer’s vestibular system as the ship’s grav plating and inertial dampers struggled to null out the rolling and bucking of the deck. Darkness engulfed the bridge momentarily, replaced several heartbeats later by the dull red glow of the emergency lighting.
“Romulan atomic warhead, Captain,” Malcolm said.
Archer no
dded. He wiped something wet from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. It appeared to be blood, and a twinge of pain confirmed that he’d bitten his tongue during the explosion.
“Report.”
“We seem to have surfed on the shock wave instead of being vaporized by it. Looks like we managed to put maybe fifty klicks between us and the device before it detonated,” Malcolm said.
“Unfortunately,” Leydon said, “the warp drive is down. The impulse engines took a beating as well.”
“And we still have to catch up to those comet fragments,” Archer said.
“We’ll have to make at least one-quarter impulse to have a chance of doing that,” Leydon said.
“Then do it,” Archer said. “If the Romulans have booby-trapped them like that escape pod…” He trailed off, the implications of his thought being more than clear.
“I would call that a safe assumption, Captain,” said T’Pol.
Archer nodded. “Then we can’t afford to let them get any closer to Earth, or to the Martian Colonies. Intercept course, Ensign Leydon.”
Now all I have to do is figure out what we’re going to do, he thought, if and when we do catch up to those giant ice balls.
New Chicago, Mars
The great curvature of the city’s transparent aluminum outer dome caught the rays of the setting sun. Though the orange orb looked attenuated by Earth standards, the atmosphere stretched and pulled its light into multicolored taffy. Between the dome and the sun, a narrow ribbon of chondritic debris, metallic fragments, and water vapor drifted lazily in the upper atmosphere, forming an elliptical ring that by now probably circled the entire planet.
Thanks to the combined efforts of Enterprise and the ground-based verteron array, that ribbon of rubble was all that remained of the Romulan assault against Mars.
“I hope what happened today will wake up Prime Minister Samuels once and for all,” Gannet Brooks said as she watched the lingering light show. “Earth can’t expect to defeat the Romulans over the long haul without taking a few risks.”
“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” said Travis, who stood beside her, his gaze locked on the vista that was all that remained of the closest call Mars had survived since humans had begun thinking of it as a second homeworld. “But I don’t think I’m going to hold my breath.”
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War Page 22
