by David Mack
“Helm,” Vale said, “take us just inside the debris ring, but plot us a clean warp vector into the upper atmosphere of the fourth planet.”
Her order drew a sharp look from Sarai. “A warp-hop inside a star system? Into an atmosphere? Are you crazy?”
“We can’t get away, and we can’t survive a stand-up fight. You got a better idea?”
Riker moved to stand between Vale and Sarai. “It can work,” he told Sarai. “If we engage the metaphasic shielding protocol just before we jump, we can vanish inside the gas giant.” To Vale he added, “But we’ll need to cover the jump.”
Sarai abandoned her objections and stood to tell Tuvok, “After we’re inside the debris ring, on my order deploy half a dozen quantum torpedoes set for manual detonation. Link their triggers and the metaphasic shield change to Lavena’s execution of a high-warp microjump.” Tuvok acknowledged with a dip of his chin and set to work. The first officer faced Vale. “If we get the timing on this wrong by even a microsecond—”
“Instant death. What else is new?”
“Rerouting all phaser power into the shield generators,” Keru said.
At ops, Rager answered, “Reconfiguring shields for metaphasic mode.”
Alerts warbled on Tuvok’s console. “Husnock armada is locking weapons.”
“Release torpedoes,” Sarai said. “Helm, stand by . . .”
“They’re firing,” Tuvok said.
Vale snapped, “Jump!”
Lavena tapped the helm to engage the warp drive for a tenth of a second. Thunder rocked the Titan and knocked out the emergency lights and main viewscreen.
Dim red lights slowly rekindled along the bulkheads. Static from cosmic background radiation faded up on the viewscreen. When the noise diminished, all that Vale could see were psychedelic swirls of color and clouds pulsing with intermittent bursts of red lightning. She sat up in her chair to project an air of authority and requested in a calm voice, “Helm, status.”
Lavena adjusted her breathing mask, then checked her console’s readouts. “We’re inside the gas giant’s upper atmosphere, Captain. Adrift but intact.”
From tactical, Tuvok added, “Metaphasic shields are weak but holding steady.”
Shocked and still struggling to process what had just transpired, Vale had to remind herself to breathe in, then exhale. “Number One . . . get me damage and casualty reports, plus engineering’s repair estimate, as soon as you’re able.” She stood and straightened the tunic of her uniform. “I’ll be in my ready room. You have the conn, Commander.”
Vale withdrew to her sanctum, hoping each step of the way that none of her officers could see the fear in her eyes—or feel the utter despair that had taken hold of her heart.
There was a fine line between showing support to a starship captain and appearing to second-guess one. It was a tightrope William Riker had walked many times as a first officer, but the balancing act had become more precarious now that he held an admiral’s rank. He had to take care not to let his concern for Vale undermine her command authority. Responsibility for the mission’s outcome would ultimately rest with him, but the Titan was now her ship and crew, not his.
Riker did his best not to draw attention or make eye contact with Titan’s bridge officers as he approached the ready room door. He hesitated to press the visitor signal, unsure of what to say should Vale refuse to invite him in—or, for that matter, what to say if she bade him enter.
Sensing that his delay might draw more attention than his actions, he pressed the visitor signal and waited. A moment later he heard Vale via the door’s control panel speaker: “Come.”
The door slid open, and he entered the ready room to find Vale seated at her desk, her chair facing away from the door. She was reclined and staring out the viewport at the swirling gases of the gas giant’s atmosphere, which every few seconds flashed with lightning. Riker waited for the door to close before he spoke. “Christine . . . are you all right?”
Vale sighed. “What do you think?” She swiveled her chair to face him. He saw shock in her slack expression and heard despair in her voice. “We had a plan, Will. I thought we’d outsmart them. Take them down the way we always do.” She set her elbows on her desk, folded her hands together, and rested her forehead on them, like a penitent in prayer. “But it unraveled so fast. Sarai told me to retreat, but I froze. I gave the order, but then the Wasp and the Canterbury were gone before I knew what happened.” She looked up at Riker; her eyes brimmed with tears of rage. “And I don’t understand why. The Wasp could’ve escaped with slipstream, left us behind. I gave the retreat order. Why didn’t they save themselves?”
“Would you have left them? Or if you were commanding the Wasp, and I told you to leave me . . . would you have abandoned me to the Breen?”
She shook her head, then closed her eyes. “I don’t know. But I can’t stop thinking about all the lives that were just lost under my command.”
“Not just yours.” Riker sat in one of the guest chairs across from her. “I set your mission parameters. I could’ve pulled the plug on this op, and I didn’t. This is on me too.”
The air around Vale and Riker turned leaden with grief and regret. “I get sick to my stomach every time I have to write a condolence letter for a life lost on my watch,” she confessed. “There’s never a good way to tell people that someone they loved is gone forever. No way to phrase the news so that it doesn’t hurt, so that the loss of a child, sibling, parent, or spouse doesn’t leave permanent holes in their lives. Now I need to write hundreds of condolence letters, one for each person who died on the Wasp and the Canterbury. How am I supposed to do that? A form letter feels lazy and disrespectful, but how do I craft over five hundred personal notes of sorrow and regret without driving myself mad?”
“You don’t. I do.” He stifled her protest with a raised hand. “You had operational command of the fleet, but this mission was conducted under my flag. The loss of those lives is mine to answer for, not yours. As is the ultimate success or failure of the mission.”
“So is it over? Are we cutting our losses? Or doubling down?”
It was a hard question. Riker wasn’t sure there was a right answer, but he had to gauge Vale’s state of mind. “You tell me, Captain. Can the Titan press on? Or is it time to fall back?”
“I don’t know.” She picked up a padd and stared at it with great intensity, as if it held the secrets of life and death. “We’ve got lots of damage. Most of it reparable within a few hours.” She paged through the data on the padd. “No fatalities, but plenty of injured. Most of them walking wounded.” Exhaustion seemed to overtake her, and she set the padd on her desk. “But we’ve lost both our escort ships. And even with them we weren’t able to put up much of a fight.” She fixed Riker with a look. “I read your reports of the Delta Rana IV mission. The Husnock’s weapons didn’t do this much damage to the Enterprise-D.”
“We weren’t facing a real Husnock ship,” Riker said, “just a Douwd’s illusion of one.”
Vale nodded. “You think Kevin Uxbridge pulled his punches.”
“He didn’t want to destroy us. He just wanted us to go away.” Riker felt Vale’s burden of dread begin to weigh upon him. “One thing’s for certain: the Breen won’t pull their punches when they get those ships back to populated space. And judging from the beating we’ve just taken, I have to wonder if there’s anyone or anything that can stop them now.”
His grim speculation seemed to spur Vale from her chair. She stood and paced behind her desk. Then she stopped, pushed a tangle of her multicolored tresses from her face, and turned toward Riker. “We had a good plan for disrupting the Breen’s control over their fleet,” she said. “We just ran out of time to implement it.”
“You mean Pazlar’s idea—hacking into their telepresence frequency.”
“Exactly. It’s a viable tactic. We can’t beat the Breen’s ghost armada in a stand-up fight, but if we can deprive the Breen of control over the armada using steal
th tactics—”
“Then we’d be looking at a relatively fair fight with the Breen.”
A nod from Vale, then a frown. “But I have no idea how to get us close enough to pull this off without them blowing us to bits. And if they find a way to break through our signal-jamming, we’ll be as good as dead.” She regarded him with a plaintive look. “So, what’s the word, Admiral? Fold our cards or go all in?”
“That’s your call, Captain. Do you think your ship and your crew are up to this?”
He felt as if he could see her inner struggle play out behind her eyes, and in the corners of her mouth, and the creases of her brow. It was a battle of fear versus hope, doubt against daring. For several seconds Riker had no idea what choice Vale would make; he knew only that whatever she decided, he would back her every step of the way.
Finally, she straightened her posture and tapped her combadge. “Attention, all senior officers. This is the captain. Meet me in the observation lounge in thirty minutes. Vale out.” When the channel closed, she added to Riker, “That includes you, as well, sir.”
He smiled. “Understood. May I ask what you’ve decided?”
“You may.” She returned to her chair. “Come hell or high water, I’m going to find a way to make the Breen pay for what they’ve done here.” She called up a holographic interface to the ship’s computer and began drafting what Riker recognized as a tactical briefing memo. “Now, sir, if you’ll excuse me for a few minutes, I need to write a new battle plan.”
No matter how many times Thot Tren’s officers told him there was nothing left of the Titan to find, he told them, “Look again.” He wasn’t asking for much. A scrap of hull. A bit of organic matter from a Federation species. Traces of any substance in the debris ring that could be connected without doubt to a Federation starship. His crew had been scouring the last known position of the Titan for over an hour without finding so much as a speck of its dust.
True, he had seen the ship vanish in the detonation of a Husnock munition, one whose blast had vaporized every hunk of rock in a hundred-kilometer radius. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that the Titan and its crew had likewise been rendered into vapor and free radicals. But possibility was not nearly so comforting a thing as certainty, and he wanted to know that this last impediment to his mission had been dealt with—because the nagging suspicion that the Starfleet vessel might still be lurking somewhere close by, plotting to interfere once more, threatened to sour the sweet taste of victory Tren felt he had earned.
He caught Vang by one arm as he tried to slip past behind Tren. “Anything yet?”
“No, sir. We’ve exhausted the primary sensor array.”
“Have Bol and Choy work together,” Tren said. “Try to boost the main sensor array by running subharmonic amplification scans with the auxiliary sensors. We might yet recover trace genetic material we could link to a species known to be part of the Titan’s crew.”
The first officer looked at the weapons and operations officers, then tilted his head to beckon Tren away from the rest of the command deck personnel. “Sir, we’ve run every sensor protocol we can at least twice. We have analyzed our sensor logs of the last torpedo detonation using all the forensic tools available to us. There is no evidence to suggest the Titan survived the explosion. Based on the destruction wrought by the torpedo, the most reasonable conclusion is that their ship has been disintegrated. I respectfully suggest we terminate the search.”
“I want facts, not suppositions,” Tren said. “If the Titan was destroyed, we should be able to find something, no matter how scant.”
“Not if the initial blast scattered all debris and trace material far beyond the detonation point,” Vang said. “Bol has run several sims of the blast effect. They support this theory—as does the absence of any trace evidence from the asteroids that were also disintegrated.”
Tren looked at the emptiness of space on the main viewscreen. He wanted to believe the mission was clear to proceed, but he also knew the risk of exposing its final phase if anyone happened to be watching. We’ve come too far to lose everything when our greatest victory is finally at hand. He looked at Vang. “Humor me. Assume the Titan survived that attack and escaped. Where could they be?”
“If their shields survived? They could be inside the atmosphere of the fourth planet, or even in the upper corona of the system’s star.” Vang stepped over to a companel and called up the armada’s ordnance manifest. “We took possession of six antistellar munitions from the factory. Assuming we’re willing to sacrifice two of them, we could obliterate the star and the planet right now. If the Titan is sheltering in either one, they would be destroyed for sure.” He stepped closer and lowered the volume of his helmet’s vocoder. “Of course, we would have no way of confirming its presence or destruction in either case, and we would have to explain to Domo Pran why we wasted two-thirds of our most powerful munitions on noncritical targets.”
Vang was, of course, correct in his caution. Expending two ASMs for no verifiable reason would be almost certain to draw the ire of the domo, who would be within his rights to expel Tren from the ranks of the thotaru for unauthorized use of Confederate Militia resources.
Sometimes, Tren realized, certainty was simply an impossibility.
“Very well,” he said. “If the Titan still exists, it’s likely heavily damaged and in hiding, and therefore poses no serious threat to the completion of our operation. Is the fleet ready to go?”
“Yes, sir,” Vang said.
Tren ordered the signals officer, “Get me a channel to the Tarcza.”
“Channel open,” Sevv said.
“Spara, this is Thot Tren.”
“Go ahead, sir.”
“I’m about to deploy the armada. You and the Tarcza are to remain here with your Husnock escorts to defend the munitions plant. Do you have any questions before we depart?”
“None, sir.”
“Then night and silence protect you until we return. Kulak out.” Turning to Sevv, Tren added, “Now a channel to the Sulica.” A nod from Sevv confirmed the channel was ready. “Kran, this is Thot Tren. I want you and the Sulica to lead our Husnock armada home to the Confederacy. Make sure to skirt Federation space and stay in neutral interstellar territory.”
“Understood,” Kran said. “Does this mean you’ll be completing the mission alone?”
“It does. But our victory will mean nothing unless you get the armada home.”
“We’ll see it done, sir. May darkness bring you fortune.”
“And may shadow be your guide. Kulak out.” Tren faced the viewscreen and dared to savor a moment of optimism. “Helm, set a new course. Bearing two-one-eight, mark seventeen. Maximum warp, engage when ready.” To the rest of his command team he said, “Look sharp, comrades. The final phase of our mission has begun. And when it’s complete . . . the rest of the galaxy will learn what it is to fear the Breen.”
Twenty-five
* * *
Outside the windows of the Titan’s observation lounge, the smoky veil of the gas giant’s upper atmosphere faded away as the starship returned to space. A passive sensor probe launched several minutes earlier had returned having found no sign of the Breen or their hijacked armada in this star system. Encouraged by that news, Vale had ordered her ship into orbit, where their remaining repairs could proceed with a minimum of complication.
She sat at the head of the conference table, with Admiral Riker on her left and Sarai on her right. The three of them watched the ship’s other senior officers arrive and claim open seats around the table. Tuvok and Keru were the first through the door, followed by Pazlar. Next in was Doctor Ree. The Pahkwa-thanh physician opted to stand off to one side, since none of the room’s chairs were suited to his long-tailed reptilian physiology. The last two to arrive, just seconds ahead of the scheduled start of the meeting, were Counselor Troi and Doctor Ra-Havreii. Out of necessity, Vale had left the bridge in the capable hands of operations officer Sariel Rager, with
Lavena designated as her second.
Once everyone was seated, Vale proceeded to business. “I’m sure you all know why I’ve called you here. We’ve taken a serious beating by the Breen’s new Husnock toys—”
“You can say that again,” Ra-Havreii grumbled.
“—and we need to regroup,” Vale continued, “and devise a new strategy for stopping them from bringing those nightmares home to populated space.” She aimed a sharp look at her chief engineer. “Doctor, you seem eager to speak. What’s our repair status and forecast?”
The white-haired engineer looked as if he had aged a decade in the past day. “I would be lying if I said our prospects were favorable. My department’s done all it can to put the ship back together, but we’ve run out of spare parts and working replicators. Half my personnel are currently in sickbay, and the other half haven’t slept in nearly thirty hours. That said”—he read from his padd—“our warp-hop into the gas giant damaged the starboard nacelle, so we had to take a bank of subspace driver coils offline. To balance our warp field geometry, I had to disable the corresponding units in the port nacelle. So our current top speed is limited to warp seven.”
Sarai leaned forward to ask, “How long until we regain full warp capacity?”
Ra-Havreii raised his prodigious white eyebrows. “Hard to say, Commander. It all hinges on our industrial replicator. If we can get that fixed in the next hour, we can restore full warp in about four hours. But that’ll mean postponing repairs to the phaser banks, the EPS network in the primary hull, and the main sensor array.”
The longer Ra-Havreii talked, the fouler Riker’s mood seemed to become. “Doctor, can you name any system on this ship that isn’t currently compromised?”
“Waste reclamation, thank the Great Bird.”
