But rather than the Medusan transports, the Reliant was met at the border by the U.S.S. Potemkin. The Constitution-class starship’s captain, Hannah Schwarzschild, now appeared on the Reliant’s bridge viewscreen. “Something’s happened,” said Schwarzschild, a robust dark-haired woman who looked half her age. “Apparently the Naazh have somehow located the haven planet the Medusans had arranged for our passengers. The Medusans have redirected their ships to assist. I’m told the Enterprise and two other Starfleet ships are already on hand as well.” She shook her head. “Leave it to Jim Kirk to end up in the middle of things, am I right?”
“I couldn’t say,” Terrell responded. “The admiral’s path and mine have yet to cross.”
“I’m afraid they still won’t, Clark. At the same time the haven world was attacked, the Medusans reported that their homeworld was under attack as well.”
Captain Eren gasped in horror, multiple nostrils flaring on his eyeless blue face. “No! My home.”
Terrell traded a look of concern with Chekov. “No good deed goes unpunished,” the second officer said. “The Lords must have had their fill of the Medusans protecting the Spe—their targets.”
“Attack in what way?” Azem-Os asked. “More Naazh ships?”
“From what the Medusans say, they seem to be under direct invasion by the extradimensional aliens they call the Lords. The specifics were unclear, though.”
“One incorporeal race attacking another?” Nizhoni put in from the tactical station. “I can see how that would be hard to explain in our terms.”
“One thing’s clear enough,” the captain told her, rising from his chair. “We might be looking at the start of an interdimensional war. Let’s just hope it doesn’t spread beyond incorporeal species.”
“I fear the corporeal denizens of Medusa would be no safer,” Eren said. “If not our bodies, then our minds could be devastated. And I fear the Medusans would divide their energies to protect us, to their own detriment.”
“In that case,” Terrell said, “we need to get to Medusa and help if we can.”
“We barely even understand the nature of the combatants,” the Potemkin’s captain replied. “What can we possibly do to help?”
“At the moment, I’m not sure. But I’ve seen Starfleet crews go up against powers like this before, and they’ve generally managed to come through in the end.”
“Captain,” Eren said, wringing his blue-furred hands, “your compassion is moving, but you do not need to risk your ship, your crew. This … this is a conflict far larger than you or the Federation. It is beyond what you could cope with.”
Terrell stepped closer to face him, though the Reon-Ka had no eyes he could meet. “That may be true. The full scope of this fight is bigger than I or my crew can even grasp, let alone affect. I’ve been involved in a similar conflict once before. There wasn’t much I could do to change the bigger picture. But there were still ways I could help, with the immediate problems within my reach.”
He put a hand on Eren’s shoulder. “That’s all you can really ask of anyone—that they try to help as far as their hands can reach. If enough of us do that, it adds up.”
Eren bowed his head in gratitude. “Thank you, Captain Terrell. I and my crew are at your disposal.”
Schwarzschild sighed. “Unfortunately, we’re eleven hours away at the Potemkin’s best speed. We might be too late to do anything but pick up the pieces.”
Terrell perked up at that. “As it happens, Hannah, we’ve temporarily gotten an extra speed boost, courtesy of our passengers. We and the Charas will go to Medusa and deal with the Naazh attack. You catch up when you can.”
Schwarzschild’s eyebrows rose. “Those New Humans have no end of surprises. I guess that’s why the Naazh are so afraid of them.”
Oh, Hannah, Terrell thought. You have no idea.
U.S.S. Enterprise
While sensors showed only four relatively small Naazh ships in Ceto’s orbital space, they were as powerful as Spock had come to expect. They had struck hard and fast at the three Starfleet vessels, which had been in parallel forced orbits several hundred kilometers above the settlement, in order to remain in easy transporter and communication range. With no more New Human passengers aboard, the three ships were again reliant on the technological defenses Starfleet had devised against the Naazh.
Unfortunately, the Naazh had continued to upgrade their offensive capabilities, and all three vessels were struck hard. “Torpedo loading system is offline,” Lieutenant S’trakha reported from tactical.
“Switch to manual,” Spock instructed. Though slow and inefficient, the manual loading system might still suffice as a backup if the crew’s training had been adequate.
After another blow struck, S’trakha reported, “We’re losing warp power to phasers. Engaging auxiliary power.” That particular backup had been installed six years earlier on Kirk’s orders, shortly after the V’Ger incident. It would render the phasers thirty-four percent less potent, however.
“Asimov to Enterprise,” came Captain Blake’s voice. “We’ve taken heavy damage to the impulse engines, and our forced orbit’s starting to decay. We’ll have to thrust out into a natural orbit while we make repairs. We’ll keep supporting you with torpedoes as long as we can.”
“Acknowledged,” Spock replied. He effortlessly calculated how much RCS thrust the Asimov would require to increase its orbital velocity to cancel Ceto’s gravity at this altitude, as well as how quickly it would take the ship out of effective combat range.
He opened a preset channel on the armrest intercom. “Enterprise to Palmares. Captain nd’Omeshef, the Naazh appear to be focusing on a single critical system on each vessel.”
“I noticed, Captain Spock,” the Arkenite commander replied. “Our own shields are taking quite a pounding. Subspace dampers too.”
“Mister Sulu, move to support the Palmares,” Spock ordered. “Mister S’trakha, fire at will upon their attacker. We must prevent them from—”
“Too late, Spock!” cried nd’Omeshef. “Shields are breached.”
“A Naazh has appeared in the engine room!” Commander Vega cried over the open channel. “The warp core is under fire!”
“Initiate core shutdown. Prepare to eject antimatter bottles. Sound evacuation order.”
“Mister S’trakha?” Spock asked.
“No effect with phasers. Torpedoes still loading.”
The Palmares began to expel the antimatter bottles from the ventral side of its rear section, but it was too late. The explosion that erupted from the Soyuz-class starship’s engine section was smaller than it would have been if all its antimatter had been released, but more than adequate to tear its hull apart from the inside. The cool, calculating part of Spock recognized that even the release of the smaller amount of matter-antimatter plasma within the intermix chamber would have created enough heat to vaporize most of the surrounding engine room to plasma temperature, with the catastrophic thermal expansion propagating outward through the rest of the ship’s atmosphere and superstructure.
Spock had learned to embrace the portions of himself beyond that cool, calculating part. But it was the only part of his mind that he wanted to contemplate the death of the Palmares’s crew at this moment, until he had the luxury to deal with his emotional response. But he allowed himself a fleeting moment of relief that Christine Chapel had made dinner plans aboard the Enterprise this evening. Doing so had probably saved her life.
“Shield status, Mister S’trakha?” he asked, in order to focus the young lieutenant’s attention back onto his duties.
“Uh, holding, sir.”
“Captain Spock,” Sulu said from the helm, “we’re not under attack anymore. The Naazh ships have moved off.”
“Sir,” added Lieutenant Palur from the science station, “while we were … preoccupied, one of the Naazh ships seems to have placed something in forced orbit above the colony.”
“On screen,” Spock ordered.
The
object was a large crystal, much of it encased in what appeared to be the same pseudo-organic material as Naazh body and spacecraft armor. The exposed portion was conical and oriented toward the planet. “Looks like it could be a weapons platform,” Sulu observed. “The crystal tip is probably the emitter.”
“Targeting the settlement?” Spock asked.
Palur frowned. “Near there,” the Argelian said. “About twenty kilometers off. Maybe it’s misaligned?”
“Asimov to Enterprise,” Blake called over the still-open channel. “We’ve detected a second Naazh ship planting another orbital device matching the one you’re observing. Also aimed near but not directly at the settlement.”
Moments later, both ships were able to observe the placement of the third device as it happened—the Naazh ship generated a dimensional rift from which the satellite emerged, then moved on. Sulu looked up at Spock with concern. “This is starting to look like a pattern.”
“Indeed—perhaps a most unfortunate one.” Spock returned to his command chair and opened another channel. “Enterprise to Admiral Kirk.”
Ceto
“All right, Spock, keep me posted,” Kirk said into his communicator after Spock had filled him in on the situation in orbit. He pushed aside his grief at the loss of his old comrade nd’Omeshef and the nearly sixty others aboard the Palmares; he would need to maintain his focus if he wanted to limit the number of additional casualties that would join them over the next few hours. “Whatever they’re doing up there, it hasn’t stopped the Naazh from attacking down here.”
“Are you in imminent danger, Admiral?”
“We’ve retreated to the Aenar’s old cavern settlement,” Kirk said, looking around himself at the spacious enclosure—an almost spherical space carved from the living stone of the mountain, with the Aenar’s dwellings affixed to its walls like shelf fungi on the trunk of a tree. The Aenar had installed little in the way of illumination, but the hosts with active Spectres had transmuted portions of the cave walls and ceiling into luminescent materials, suffusing the cavern with an eerie blue glow that reduced the apparent difference between the frightened human and Aenar faces he surveyed. “The opening is defensible, and the strongest telekinetics in the group are holding them off.” For a moment he envied them, remembering the satisfaction he had felt on Platonius when his kironide-enabled telekinesis had let him put the sadistic Parmen in his place and save his crew from slavery. Then he remembered the days of nasty aftereffects from kironide poisoning and chelation therapy, and his envy evaporated into nausea.
“Are you expecting reinforcements from Medusa?” Spock asked.
“That’s what Kollos and Miranda are trying to find out right now. Leave it to us, Spock—you focus on the situation up there.”
“Acknowledged. Enterprise out.”
Kirk checked in with the defenders at the cave entrance. Led by Arsène Xiang, they had nearly finished transmuting a solid wall across the opening. “Takes less energy to maintain than psionic shields,” the gray-haired, Tang-armored New Human told Kirk.
“But will it hold?” Kirk asked, hearing the ongoing barrage of Naazh plasma fire striking its other side.
“It buys us time, Admiral,” Xiang replied gravely. “Hopefully enough time to figure out what to do next.”
Thanking the older man, Kirk moved on to the Aenar settlement’s main communications building, finding Miranda Jones and Jade Dinh emerging from the single-story structure. “Bad news, I’m afraid.” Jones spoke in the tones Kirk had come to recognize as Kollos’s, but with less enthusiasm than usual. “The Lords are mounting a simultaneous assault on Medusa. The homeworld can’t spare any defenders—we’ll have to make do with the forces on hand.”
The admiral grimaced. “Obviously what they intended. Cripple or destroy our ships in orbit, attack the homeworld so they can’t send help.”
“We’ve lost several of the Medusan ships in orbit too,” Dinh told him. “The rest, including Abioye’s, have gone to ground or retreated into space. The Naazh seem content to let them go as long as they don’t interfere with their satellite planting.”
Jones’s regal face took on a frown. “Do you believe the satellites are weapons?”
“When have we ever seen the Naazh whip up anything but weapons?” Kirk asked. “The question is, why mount both a ground assault and an orbital assault?”
“To keep us busy until they’re ready to fire?” Dinh proposed.
Kirk studied her. “Would active hosts like you be able to stop those satellites from the ground?”
“With the defenses they probably have, I doubt it.”
“Then something doesn’t add up yet, and it worries me.”
“I’m more worried at the lack of coordination,” Kollos/Jones said. “The Medusans aren’t experienced at combat, Jim. We’re a peaceful people as a rule, and when we have needed to defend ourselves … well, let’s just say we’ve managed to get by on our looks.”
Kirk nodded, remembering how Kollos had saved himself from a murderous Lawrence Marvick merely by allowing himself to be seen. It was a hell of a natural defense mechanism. “But that’s no use on the Naazh,” he said.
“Not with their Lords shielding them.”
“We still have Spectres on our side.”
Dinh shook her head. “The sleepers have always survived by flight and concealment. We’ve fought when cornered, like now—but our track record isn’t promising.”
Kirk stared at her choice of pronoun, and the silver-eyed science specialist smiled and nodded slightly to confirm his realization. Unlike Meihua Wu, and like Jones, she had fully accepted her Spectre as part of her identity.
Miranda’s hand touched his. “We need a general, Jim. Or rather, an admiral. An experienced military mind to direct our defense. Are you willing?”
Kirk hesitated only briefly. Part of the reason he had always resisted flag rank was that he never liked to sit back in safety while issuing orders that sent others into danger and death. He had always preferred to lead from the front lines.
But in a situation like this, with inexperienced defenders facing an assault on multiple fronts, there was a need for someone to stand back and survey the entire board while others did the work on the ground. That was an admiral’s place—and like it or not, he was an admiral now.
“All right,” Kirk said, moving into the communications shack. “First off, let’s get those ships back in the fight. If the Naazh are so protective of those satellites, we need to intensify our efforts to take them out …”
Nineteen
U.S.S. Reliant
Several of the Aenar had transported aboard the Charas with Captain Thelin, modifying its warp drive to let it keep pace with the Reliant’s Spectre-augmented speed. However, the two ships did not make it very deep into Medusan space before they came under attack from a trio of small but powerful Naazh ships. Chief DiFalco and the Aenar did their best to reinforce the ships’ shields against the Naazh’s weapons, but the Aenar’s pacifism meant they had trained to use their powers only for defense. The ships withstood the barrage of exotic weapons fire from the Spectre-enhanced vessels, but despite the best efforts of Beach and Nizhoni to make an end run around the Naazh, the enemy ships proved too fast and maneuverable to let them break past or get far enough from their bombardment to form a stable warp field.
Clark Terrell looked up at DiFalco, who stood behind the ensign at navigation as if tempted to reclaim her old Starfleet responsibilities. But the chief had a larger role to play now. “Any more tricks up your Spectres’ sleeves?” Terrell asked her.
She turned and shook her head, her silver eyes downcast. “There are steps we can take if we reach Medusa, in concert with its people. Out here, though, there’s little we can do.”
“Even with all the New Humans we have aboard?”
“New Humans with dormant Spectres, untrained in harnessing their powers. I’m afraid they can’t help.”
Terrell rose from the command chair an
d straightened his uniform jacket. “Well, maybe there’s something I can do. Mister Kyle, hail the Naazh vessels.”
The blond Englishman stared at him. “Sir?”
“You heard me, John.”
“They’ve never been willing to listen before, Captain,” DiFalco said with some heat.
“We’re still Starfleet, Chief. We have to try.”
“Ready, sir,” Kyle said.
Terrell cleared his throat. “Hostile vessels. This is Captain Clark Terrell of the U.S.S. Reliant. I’m a citizen of the United Federation of Planets—and I know that most or all of you are probably Federation citizens as well. You may have given yourself over to the incorporeal beings known as Lords, but I plead with you to remember your allegiance to the Federation and halt your attacks on your fellow citizens, and on our Medusan allies. Whatever grievances you have, surely your parents raised you better than to believe this kind of violence was the way to resolve them. Please respond so we can find an alternative.”
At first, the only response was more weapons fire. But after a few moments, Kyle reported with some surprise, “Reply coming in, sir.”
“On screen.”
The main viewer lit up with the image of a familiar set of blue-and-silver Naazh armor. “Captain Terrell. Still idealistic to a fault, I see.”
Terrell stared, recognizing the haughty tone of voice despite the filtering. “Haru Yamasaki, isn’t it? You’re a long way from Terebellum.”
The blue Naazh laughed, and after a moment, his helmet glowed, turned transparent, and vanished, revealing the former Terebellan security director’s prim, narrow face—and eyes with the same silver gleam as DiFalco’s. “I go where I’m needed to defend humanity.”
The Higher Frontier Page 28
