Serpents Among the Ruins

by David R. George III

  Harriman returned her gaze, but said nothing.

  “You didn’t…Starfleet wasn’t trying to develop a first-strike potential, was it?” she asked, her voice dropping low. The notion of Starfleet designing a technology for the purpose of launching an unprovoked attack against anybody seemed completely antithetical to everything for which the Federation stood.

  Harriman continued to look at her, opening his mouth once, then again, without saying anything. He appeared to be struggling to find a response—which probably answered her question, Sulu thought. But then Harriman said, “Honestly, Demora, no. The goal of hyperwarp drive was never, for one second, to allow us the capability of striking the Romulans or Klingons first. Never.”

  Sulu peered at the captain—at her friend—and knew that he had just told her the truth. She felt relieved and foolish. “I…I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “It’s all right,” Harriman said, moving across the room over to where she stood by her desk. “I know that these are difficult times for all of us.”

  Sulu gazed up at Harriman, and felt guilty not only for having questioned his motives, but also for forgetting how much he’d been through lately. His father, still critically injured, and still refusing to see him…“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I know you’re making the best choices that you possibly can.”

  “I’m trying,” he said. “Believe me.”

  “I do,” she said, but something else bothered her. She moved back around her desk and sat down there. “Do you know the nature of the technological leap that’s supposed to make hyperwarp possible?” she asked.

  “Demora,” Harriman said, taking a seat across the desk from her, “I can’t talk about it.”

  “That’s all right,” Sulu said. “Because I can. I was monitoring the Universe during its test run. When their crew began the hyperwarp reaction, the Enterprise’s sensors detected a distinctive waveform. At first, I thought it must be emanating from another ship in the area, but I pinpointed the source as the Universe itself. There was no question.”

  “I see,” Harriman said noncommittally.

  “John, if the use of cloaking technology is at the heart of hyperwarp drive, and if we give the Romulans and Klingons the drive specifications, then isn’t it possible—isn’t it likely—that with their decades of experience in cloaking technology, they’ll be able to perfect hyperwarp before we do?” The possibility, clearly real, did more than concern her; it frightened her.

  Harriman looked silently at her for a long time. Sulu waited, and as she did, she noticed something. Where over the past few days she had sensed great sadness in Harriman—for the crew of Universe, for the grief the Enterprise crew felt, and for his injured father—she now saw something…less than that. Something less, coupled with a resolve that she did not entirely understand. When Harriman at last spoke, he said only, “I don’t think the Romulans or the Klingons will develop hyperwarp before we do.” He gave no reason for his opinion, something not like him. As the Enterprise bridge crew could so well attest, the captain often answered their questions even in the middle of a crisis. His silence now seemed unusual, and she suddenly got the feeling that there was something that he was not telling her. But Sulu had been Harriman’s executive officer for ten years now, and she’d served with him for eight years prior to that, and in all of that time, he’d never given her a reason to mistrust him.

  “Okay,” she said, although in truth, she hadn’t been this scared in a long time—maybe not since she had been a child, since her mother had been stricken ill.

  “Okay.” Harriman stood up and started for the door. Before he got there, Sulu called after him.

  “John,” she said. When he turned back toward her, she said, “I know that the admiral…your father…I know he said he won’t see you, but…maybe you should visit him anyway.” Sulu did not know how she would have handled her mother’s death had she not been able to spend time with her in those last days—and to say goodbye to her.

  “Yeah,” Harriman said, nodding slowly. “I’ve been thinking about that myself. I’ve decided that I will go see—”

  “Bridge to Captain Harriman,” the voice of Lieutenant Commander Linojj interrupted him.

  Harriman walked back to over to Sulu’s desk and touched a control there. “This is the captain,” he said. “Go ahead, Commander.”

  “Captain,” Linojj said, “you’re receiving a priority message from Starfleet Command.”

  Harriman glanced at Sulu before responding. “I’m in Commander Sulu’s quarters,” he said. “Pipe it down here.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Harriman out.” He thumbed the channel closed as Sulu reached up and spun the computer interface monitor around so that it faced him. He operated the controls, and after just a few seconds, she saw the light of the display reflected on his face. “Admiral Sinclair-Alexander,” he said. If Starfleet’s commander in chief was contacting Harriman directly, Sulu thought, then it must have to do with the Romulan-Klingon situation.

  “Captain,” Sulu heard Sinclair-Alexander say. “The Federation president just received word from Romulus.” Her manner was nothing but professional. “Enterprise has been granted permission to deliver the two Federation envoys to Space Station Algeron, where you and they will meet with Romulan Ambassador Gell Kamemor.”

  “We’ll leave KR-3 immediately, Admiral,” Harriman said. “At maximum warp.”

  “When you reach the Neutral Zone,” Sinclair-Alexander continued, “you will rendezvous with a Romulan vessel, which will escort you while you’re in Romulan space.” Sulu knew what the admiral would say next, even before she said it. “It will be their flagship, Tomed.”

  “Acknowledged,” Harriman said. Sulu saw no reaction on his face to the news that Enterprise would be in such close proximity to Admiral Vokar’s ship.

  “Good luck, John,” Sinclair-Alexander said. Harriman nodded once. “Sinclair-Alexander out.” The light from the display reflecting on Harriman’s face vanished as the communication ended. The captain worked the controls again, and then said, “Harriman to bridge.”

  “Bridge,” came the immediate response. “Linojj here.”

  “Commander, contact Admiral Mentir and inform him that Enterprise will be departing KR-3 immediately,” he said.

  “Then set course for Romulan space station Algeron, maximum warp.”

  “Sir?” Linojj said, obviously surprised by the orders.

  “Do it, Xintal,” Harriman said. “I’m on my way to the bridge now. I’ll explain when I get there.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “Harriman out.” He closed the channel with a touch to a control, then stood up and looked at Sulu. “Don’t worry,” he told her, and while his manner seemed serious, he also sounded extremely confident. And as Sulu had done for a long time now, she chose to trust that strength and surety.

  As Harriman headed for the door, Sulu’s mind drifted to Tomed and to its commanding officer, Admiral Vokar. She knew that Captain Harriman had endured several tense encounters with the admiral through the years, most recently on the world of the Koltaari. She also knew that the admiral had a personal animus for the captain, stemming back to their first meeting, many years ago.

  Before he reached the door, Harriman stopped and looked back over his shoulder at Sulu. He looked as though he would say something, but then he continued out of her quarters, on his way to the bridge—and to the Romulan Neutral Zone, she knew, and another encounter with an old enemy.

  Minus Five: History

  Lieutenant John Harriman feverishly worked the helm, hurling the wounded Starfleet vessel into further evasive maneuvers. He threw his leg against the side of the astrogation console, trying to keep himself in his chair as the inertial dampers adjusted late to the ship’s rapid change in attitude. The incessant whine of the impulse engines filled the Hunley bridge as the demands on them increased. Smoke stung Harriman’s eyes, and he smelled the acrid scent of melting fiber op
tics and scorched metal, even as the desperate gasp of a fire-suppression canister sputtered somewhere behind him.

  “Fire at will!” Captain Linneus yelled, his commanding voice cutting through the uproar.

  “Unloading port torpedo bay,” Lieutenant Grinager called from the tactical station, her tone steady despite the chaos of the situation. Harriman looked to the main viewscreen, its aspect locked on the enemy vessel and following it across the sky. A sweep of bright red projectiles streaked away from Hunley, and he realized that the ship must be in trouble for the captain and security chief to be attacking like this, spending their munitions in such a scatter-shot manner. They clearly hoped for a chance hit that might just allow Hunley to limp away to safety, even if that would mean abandoning S.S. Dakota, the freighter they’d come here to assist.

  On the viewer, the Romulan ship swooped and dived, its crew obviously seeking to evade the photon torpedoes sent after them. The Ventarix-class battle cruiser—squat and long-necked, composed primarily of straight lines and edges, but with a bulbous projection at the fore end of the thin neck—belonged to a new squadron of vessels upgrading the Klingon-designed D7 heavies that the Romulans had been using for the last decade or so. Harriman looked down at his console as he brought Hunley around, then glanced back up to see one of the photon torpedoes land on its target. He felt momentarily elated, but the reprieve was transitory: a bright flash of blue pinpoints concentrated along the area of impact told him that the Romulan ship’s shields had protected against the full force of the detonation.

  Narrowly eluding the remaining torpedoes, the Romulan vessel arced into a wide turn and rounded back toward Hunley.“Evasive!” the captain cried, but Harriman had never stopped piloting the ship. He alternately watched the viewscreen and his readouts as he hove Hunley about, searching for an escape. Energy signatures marched across the helm display and told him that the Romulan vessel had fired its weapons again.

  Hunley rolled to starboard at one-eighth the speed of light, too slow to avoid the disruptor salvo. Two of the bolts—two out of a spread of a dozen, Harriman saw on his panel—two of the bolts were going to find their marks. Trailing the intermittent blue fiber of its laser-assisted propulsion as though it had dripped from the Romulan ship’s weapons bank, the first bolt struck the top of the saucer section forward of the bridge. Hunley shuddered violently, and Harriman had to fight to stay in his chair.

  “Deflector grid is down,” Grinager yelled, her voice competing with the increasing drone of the impulse engines.“Firing all phase—” she started, and then the second disruptor bolt pounded into Hunley. A massive explosion rocked the bridge, followed closely by the sounds of tearing metal and wind—

  Wind?

  In the next instant, Harriman flew upward. His knees struck the bottom of the helm station, reducing his momentum for just a second, and he grabbed instinctively for the nearest surface. His hand found purchase on the astrogation console, his fingers squeezing the thin metal hood surrounding it, but the rest of his body continued up, as did seemingly everything else on the bridge. The chair in which he’d been sitting glanced off his back as it rushed by him. Harriman seemed to dangle upside down, and when he looked up past his feet, he saw the chair tumbling end over end out into space, the stars a terrifying backdrop—the disruptor bolt had sheared off the roof of Hunley’s bridge.

  Air rushed past Harriman, trying to carry him out into the void. The sounds of the swift currents filled his ears, and he could hear nothing else. He felt his hand cramping as he clung desperately to the astrogator hood.

  And then Harriman witnessed the unthinkable: Captain Linneus soared through Hunley’s gaping wound and out into space. For what must have been only a fraction of a second, but which felt longer, Harriman saw Linneus’s face: his eyes wide, his mouth open in a silent scream, his profound terror unmistakable. And then the captain was gone, his figure disappearing quickly as it receded into the darkness.

  Harriman’s fingers slipped along the surface of the astrogator hood, and he clenched his hand tightly, as though attempting to punch a new handhold in the metal. He tried to reach his other arm down and grab on to something else, but he felt his fingers slide again along the hood, until finally his closed fist held nothing. Harriman sailed upward. His heart leaped in his chest, and he opened his mouth to scream. He shot toward the stars, and toward the cold, hard vacuum that separated them.

  Harriman struck something. The unexpected impact came along his right side, and then he plummeted back to the decking. He landed in the open space between the command chair and the helm and navigation consoles, bringing his arms up in time to protect his head. He crashed down on his left side, his shoulder giving way with a loud snap. The breath was forced from his lungs as pain flowed through his body like an electric current. He gasped, trying to inhale.

  There was no air.

  The wind had stopped, he realized, the atmosphere of Hunley’s bridge now entirely gone, blown out into space. Gulping wildly as he suffocated, Harriman rolled off of his injured left side and onto his back. The stars stared down at him through the hull breach, and then they began to wink out one after another as something moved in front of them. He recognized the form of the Romulan vessel as it passed, and he could even read the rounded, runelike block characters on its hull: Daami. As he lay dying, he unaccountably recalled the Romulan-language courses he’d taken during his time at the Academy.

  In just a few seconds, the Romulan vessel had gone from view, leaving only the unfeeling starscape above him. His vision began to fray at the edges. His lungs ached.

  Finally, darkness took him.

  Admiral Aventeer Vokar, master of the Romulan vessel Daami, stood at the front of his ship’s bridge, staring at the primary viewscreen there. On it, he saw the wounded form of the Starfleet vessel drifting undirected in space. The two warp nacelles on either side of its circular hull had gone dark, and its bridge had been demolished.

  Vokar smiled to himself. Hunley’s crew had come hereinto Romulan territory in response to the other vessel’s distress signal, and yet they hadn’t even been able to help themselves. He had seen to that. Daami’s crew had detected Dakota’s call for assistance—originating in Romulan space—and had moved immediately to intercept the supposedly civilian freighter. Daami had arrived on the scene after Hunley had, but not too late to take action.

  “Bring us about,” Vokar said, turning to face his bridge crew. “Let’s finish what we came here to do in the first place.” The crew’s acknowledgments crackled in the dim lighting, no doubt motivated by Vokar’s recent promotion in rank. But he had no intention of stopping or even slowing his progress through the hierarchy of the Imperial Fleet, and today he would demonstrate that to all by bringing the Empire another victory.

  He turned back to the viewscreen and watched as the crippled Hunley slipped away to starboard, Daami rounding onto its new heading. Both the Hunley and Dakota captains had claimed to know nothing of the recently modified Romulan borders, of the expanse of interstellar territory the praetor had claimed for the Empire. And Vokar supposed that had been the truth—the freighter had needed assistance after it had struck a perimeter mine—although the incursion might also have been an attempt at espionage by the deceitful Federation. Whichever the case, they would pay, either for their ignorance or for their treachery.

  On the screen, the image of Dakota slid into view. Vokar regarded the old, seemingly decrepit freighter with contempt. The damage it had sustained when it had struck the mine showed at the bow of its single warp nacelle, a jagged, blackened patch reaching a quarter of the way back along the engine structure. If the crew of the hoary vessel had been conducting an intelligence mission, Daami’s sensors had told Vokar, then they had been doing so with antiquated equipment. Unlike Hunley, the aged hulk provided Vokar no opportunity for spoils.

  “Ready disruptors,” Vokar said, calling back over his shoulder. Again, the crew responded sharply. He peered back at the viewscreen, at the de
fenseless Federation vessel in Daami’s path, and smiled to himself once more. He would vanquish the interlopers, and then he would collect Hunley and return to Romulus, where he would personally deliver his prize to the praetor.

  Consciousness returned to Harriman surreptitiously, surrounding him in its folds like warm water gradually and unexpectedly rising around him. He became aware by degrees, not knowing whether he had been out for a minute or an hour or a day. He only knew that he was not…was not—

  Not dead.

  Harriman opened his eyes. Above him, he saw the starscape still staring threateningly down on the Hunley bridge. But a blue haze flickered where the roof of the bridge had once been, and he realized that an emergency forcefield had automatically activated in order to close the breach. Likewise, environmental-crisis protocols must have pushed an atmosphere back into the resealed space.

  He moved his arms back so that he could prop himself up on his elbows, but his left shoulder wailed in pain. He felt tenderly along the silver uniform sleeve covering his injured arm, grateful not to find any bones projecting from beneath his flesh. Everything seemed to be intact, at least, though he had clearly suffered internal damage.

  Rolling onto his right side, Harriman pushed himself up and stood. Eerily quiet, the bridge sounded and looked wrong. Virtually everything that had not been somehow secured to the ship had vanished: chairs, handheld equipment, the smoke…and people. He tried to recall how many of the crew had been on the bridge when the Romulan ship had engaged them. Eight? Ten? There had been the captain and the first officer, the security chief, Anner’namin at navigation, Harriman himself at the helm…somebody at the sciences station…and one or two people had been working to quell whatever fires had broken out…

  However many of the crew had been on the bridge, now only two others besides himself remained: Lieutenant Grinager, lying near the tactical station, and a member of the crew he didn’t recognize, her body in a heap near the port-side turbolift. Harriman bounded up the two steps to the outer, raised portion of the bridge. As he approached the unfamiliar crewperson, he saw that she lay with her neck twisted at an unnatural angle—at an impossible angle for a human. Still, he kneeled beside her and reached two fingers out to the side of her neck, feeling for a pulse. He found none.