“Settle down, Shran,” Archer said. “Hear her out first before you run away.”
“Don’t push your luck, pinkskin,” Shran muttered.
T’Pol shook her head and adopted a long-suffering expression that was clearly intended for both men. “Actually, I am proposing no such thing.” She turned back toward her console and silently entered another command.
An image appeared on the monitor screen at the center of her console, a depiction of a small, delicate mass of improvised-looking wiring and circuitry. Archer recognized it immediately, and understood. The device made him think somberly of Trip.
Archer glanced at Shran, whose approving nod showed that he understood T’Pol’s plan as well.
The Vulcan rose from her chair and stood for a moment at crisp attention beside her station. “If you’ll excuse me, Captain,” she said, “I have some work to do elsewhere.”
Archer grinned. “Agreed.” She nodded once, turned on her heel, and disappeared into the turbolift.
“Perhaps you won’t need to offer the administrator that bribe after all,” Shran said, his azure face split by a fierce gird-for-battle smile.
Archer chuckled, then headed back for his command chair.
Before he could settle into it, he noticed the look of horror that had colonized the death-white features of Theras, whose antennae both sagged toward his shoulders, displaying his obvious emotional distress.
“Theras, what’s wrong?” Archer said.
“I fear I have erred grievously in not informing you earlier about Shran’s link to Jhamel,” Theras said. He appeared to be on the ragged edge of tears. “In the name of Infinite Uzaveh, what have I done?”
“What have you done?” Archer said as he laid a hand gently on the albino’s slight shoulder. “Theras, you may have just saved the day for us all.”
Twenty-Two
Thursday, February 20, 2155
Somewhere In Romulan Space
AN ALARM ON THE HELM CONTROL of the Branson suddenly began blaring, causing Trip’s sleepily drifting attention to focus like a mining laser.
“We’ve got trouble!” he yelled to the aft part of the vessel, where Phuong had lain down to rest several hours earlier.
Even as the other agent ran forward, the communications light flashed. Trip tapped a control in the center of the instrument panel.
“Ullho hiera, mos ih ihir nviomn riud ih seiyya!” The voice was stern and angry. The translator implanted within Trip’s ear immediately translated the warning.“Unidentified vessel, prepare to be boarded or destroyed!”
Phuong put a finger to his lips and tapped the communicator off as he sat down hurriedly in the main pilot’s seat. “We don’t respond to them,” he said. His newly elevated eyebrows enhanced his look of surprise.
Trip’s eyes widened, both surprised and alarmed himself. “What do we do, then?”
Phuong began manipulating verniers and toggles and tapped the buttons at the helm. “We polarize the hull plating and run like hell. And find a way to shake them.”
Trip felt the ship accelerate, and strapped himself into the copilot’s chair with the seat’s safety harness. He tapped the console, activating a small screen, which displayed an image of a semi-familiar ship. It was gracefully curved, with two struts on either side holding up the engine nacelles. The hull of the ship was greenish and had an intricate design painted on its ventral surface: the stylized image of a swooping predatory bird.
“It’s a Romulan warship,” Trip said, remembering the encounter that Enterprise had had with two similar ships two years earlier. “I don’t know where the hell they came from.”
“They’re opening fire,” Phuong said, sliding his hand over the controls. A moment later, the Branson shuddered from what must have been at least a glancing impact, and the two men braced themselves against the helm as the hull plating and the inertial dampers struggled to keep the ship intact and level.
Trip’s eyes were drawn to a red warp-engine warning light that began flashing urgently as the demands of the hull-polarization relays began redlining the warp core. Realizing he had only seconds to act, he swiftly entered a command into his console.
“What the hell are you doing?” Phuong said, looking at him as though he’d just lost his mind.
“Taking us out of warp. Slowing to impulse until the warp core cools down.”
“Now?” Phuong was beside himself.
“It’s better than redlining the antimatter containment system and blowing ourselves to quarks,” Trip said in the calmest tones he could muster.
“It’s not all that much better, Commander. Look at the rate they’re gaining.”
“We can’t outrun them,” Trip said. “And we can only dodge them for another few seconds. So unless you’ve got some kind of new souped-up hull plating folded up in your back pocket, what the hell are we going to do?”
Phuong paused momentarily to study some readings, then tapped another control. An old-style aviation joystick rose up from a recessed panel at the helm in front of Trip.
“I hope you can steer manually,” Phuong said, a grim smile on his lips.
Probably not as well as Travis can, Trip thought. He grabbed the stick. “Where are we going?”
Phuong tapped on the controls, and a viewscreen located just below the forward windows magnified the section of space directly in front of the ship. “There,” Phuong said, pointing to a field of space debris that lay ahead, faintly illuminated by the glow of the nearby orange star around which the debris field orbited. “That’s where we’ll lose them.”
It never failed. It often seemed to Trip that hot pursuits through space involved a nearby debris field or nebula or other such sensor-obscuring cosmic feature far more frequently than dumb luck alone could account for. He wondered if the Romulan military staked such places out, watching and waiting the way the highway cops of previous centuries used to trap speeders, and the Branson had merely had the bad fortune- or her pilot and copilot had exhibited the poor judgment- to fly too close to such a place.
Keeping his eye on the image of the pursuing ship, Trip jammed the control stick hard to the right, then forward. The two blasts of energy the Romulans had fired at them shot off into space, missing them entirely.
“That’s something like four million kilometers away,” Trip said. “While we’re stuck at impulse, we aren’t going to get there in time to do us any good.”
Phuong got up from his seat and moved to some wall-mounted controls. “We will if we go back to warp.”
Trip’s eyes widened. “Not a good idea while the core’s still this hot. It could be an hour or more before I can verify that the containment field won’t collapse under the stress of a fully operational warp field.”
“So let’s go to warp without a fully operational warp field.”
Trip was beginning to see where Phuong was going, and he was a bit embarrassed that he hadn’t seen the solution first. “We’ll set up a warp burst, just enough to kick us forward a few million klicks, then drop back into normal space.”
“We can lose them in there,” Phuong said. “These engines are tough. They can take it.”
“As long as we don’t overshoot the mark,” Trip cautioned. “Or smash into any debris too big for the hull plating to handle.”
Phuong shrugged. “We don’t have time to be choosy, Commander. They’re powering up their weapons again. Hit it!”
Trip jammed the controls to the side again, spinning the ship away from another pair of energy blasts.
“You ready?” Phuong asked, returning to his chair.
“Do I have a choice?” Trip answered.
“They’re my engines, Commander, so maybe I ought to be the one to handle the warp burst. Get ready to do some fancy flying.”
“I’d rather you fly while I handle the engines, Tinh. But she’s your ship.”
Phuong didn’t respond to Trip’s comment, either because he was ignoring it or because he was intent on the data spooling on
to the console at his left. “I’ll take us to warp for approximately zero point seven one seconds,” Phuong said. “And then you’ll get us lost among the rocks and asteroids.”
Phuong’s finger hovered over the controls for a moment, as if he were having second thoughts. Then he pushed the button.
Trip felt the familiar slight tug of warp acceleration, visually exacerbated by the brief streaking elongation of the stars and debris visible through the forward window. He felt a cold trickle of sweat running down his neck and wondered for an instant if his sweat had changed color the way his blood had.
In a fraction of a second, the Branson had traversed some four million kilometers. Both men were thrown forward as the ship abruptly returned to low impulse, their restraining straps taut until the inertial dampers caught up with the abrupt velocity change.
“Shit!” Trip exclaimed, wiping sweat from his brow. “We’re still in one piece.” They also appeared to have dropped out of warp only a few hundred kilometers from the densest region of the debris field.
Suddenly, the ship rocked violently, and an alarm klaxon filled the cockpit with a shrill wail.
“There’s another one of the Romulan ships!” Phuong shouted excitedly as he frantically tapped his controls. The viewscreen beneath the forward window responded by revealing the presence of a second birdlike vessel, this one apparently larger and better armed than the first.
“Get into the debris field, now!” Phuong said.
Trip ignored his instincts and pushed the lever to the left, sending the Branson directly into the most debriscluttered portion of the space ahead that he could find. Almost immediately, a proximity alarm began sounding, adding to the general din in the cockpit. With the help of the sensors and the viewer, he attempted to dodge a large chunk of rock, but evidently not quite quickly enough. He saw a boulder-sized meteoroid flash across the top of the viewscreen before it vanished, and the Branson’s hull transmitted the reverberating sound of the glancing impact into the cockpit, which seemed almost to ring like a bell for several seconds afterward.
“Between that hit and the Romulan blast, the hull plating is down to forty percent,” Phuong said, concern evident in his voice.
“I don’t suppose it would do any good to try talking with them, would it?” Trip asked, twisting the controls to avoid the debris field’s profusion of tumbling chunks of rock, metal, and ice. “We do look like them now, and these translator gadgets in our ears will let us speak their language.”
“We’re too suspicious all alone out here. If they didn’t kill us outright, they’d question us for weeks, and then kill us,” Phuong said. “No, we have to get integrated into their social structure before we start trying to bargain with Romulan military officers, and we need to reach our friendly contacts inside the Empire to do that. Which means our top priority right now is to avoid these two ships.”
One of the viewscreens showed a brilliant explosion behind them, as a large portion of a small asteroid suddenly became superheated vapor, evidently because of Romulan weapons fire.
“They’re shooting into the field!” Trip said. He wondered again, for perhaps the six-hundredth time in the past minute or so, exactly what had made him decide to take on this assignment.
“Then we’ve got to go in deeper,” Phuong said. The Branson rattled and shook. “And try not to get ourselves killed in the process.”
Commander Nveih i’Ihhliae t’Jaihen roared in anger and stabbed his kaleh into the neck of the controller. Centurion S’Eliahn clutched his neck, crying out in terror and pain as his emerald blood pulsed out in jets. He crumpled leadenly to the deck.
“Get over here and find them,” Nveih yelled to Tanekh, the female decurion who presently cowered at the communications station.
He stepped over the dying S’Eliahn and moved back to his command chair. He’d always found the young officer incompetent, but his attractiveness had made up for it. But last khaidoa, when the centurion had refused Nveih’s overtures to engage in carnal pursuits with him and Nveih’s wife, S’Eliahn’s fate had been sealed. All the Romulan commander had needed was any small excuse to rid himself of the party who had so insulted him.
The pursuit of the unidentified vessel into the asteroid field near the Galorndon sector had provided just that excuse, though S’Eliahn might well have been spared had he not bungled so badly in carrying out his orders to either cripple or destroy the fleeing vessel.
How did they get this far into Romulan territory without being caught? They were clearly vaehkh, aliens from beyond the Empire’s farthest-flung Avrrhinul, or Out-marches; Nveih could tell that from the configuration of their ship alone. He wondered if the small vessel had received help penetrating this far into imperial territory, possibly from dissidents. Or perhaps they’re just smugglers who’ve ventured too far from the customary lanes of galactic commerce for their own good. He didn’t really care. Either way, it was his duty to see to it that they neither escaped nor got any closer to Romulus than they already had.
“Commander, I’m showing that their ship is losing power,” Subcommander Vosleht reported from his post on the bridge’s port side. “Unfortunately, they’ve entered the densest part of—”
The bridge viewscreen of the Lha Aehallh suddenly flared brightly, and Vosleht paused in making his report to look. The explosion could really only mean one thing.
“They collided with an asteroid,” Decurion Tanekh said from her new station. “Initial scans show that they’ve been destroyed.” She had apparently gotten her nerves under control, and now sat above the pooled blood of her predecessor, whose body she appeared to have rolled just out of her way.
“Make sure of it,” Nveih snarled. “Find their wreckage and learn who or what they were.” He stalked toward the exit, then turned back to his crew and pointed toward the barely twitching S’Eliahn. “And have that piece of hnaev cleaned up.”
He wasn’t looking forward to telling Commander T’Ihlaah about losing the vessel. The only positive thing about it was that T’Ihlaah’s ship, the Qiuu Nnuihs, had bungled the capture first.
Perhaps he would be able to persuade T’Ihlaah that it was in their better interests to keep the incident out of both of their reports.
Twenty-Three
Thursday, February 20, 2155
Enterprise Nx-01
“I BELIEVE THE ADJUSTMENTS are now complete,” T’Pol said, setting the dynospanner down on the console beside her. She turned the chair- and the jury-rigged titanium helmet that sat atop the chair’s backrest- toward the three men who stood near her in the small alcove in sickbay.
“It doesn’t look much different than it did the last time we used it,” Shran said as he stepped in front of Doctor Phlox and Theras, then gingerly touched the device’s headpiece, obviously taking care to avoid touching the heavy cables that led from the helmet’s crown to the new power coupling the engineers had hurriedly installed in the bulkhead. “This appears to be the very same telepresence unit Commander Tucker built.”
T’Pol wasn’t eager to waste time giving Shran a detailed technical report- reassembling the device with Lieutenant Burch was difficult. A competent engineer, who kept repeating, “Call me Mike.” His very presence was a painful reminder of Trip’s death.
“It is the same device,” she said. “At least in essence. With some assistance from Lieutenant Burch, however, I have given it a considerable boost in both power and sensitivity, particularly at the most relevant brainwave frequencies.”
Theras stepped forward, his gray, blind eyes focused at some invisible point straight ahead of him. Although T’Pol knew that Theras couldn’t see in a conventional manner- his Aenar telepathy made a highly effective substitute for the normal visual sense- she thought he was being quite careful not to come into direct contact with any part of the nearby telepresence equipment, as though he feared it might shock him.
“Are you saying you can locate Jhamel with your device?” Theras asked, sounding even more anxious than u
sual.
“Yes, in a manner of speaking,” T’Pol said. “I believe that this equipment might succeed in enhancing the mind-link that Shran evidently still shares with Jhamel, thus enabling us to follow it to her, as well as to the rest of the Aenar captives.”
“Assuming,” Phlox said from a corner of the alcove, “that the device proves safe to operate.”
T’Pol couldn’t help but notice the look of abject hurt that had crossed Theras’s face at her mention of the mind-link between Shran and Jhamel; she could almost have sworn that the albino Aenar had just gone another half-shade paler. It was obvious to her now that Theras had been less than truthful when he had claimed not to be bothered by the fact that Shran, an outsider to the Aenar people, shared a deep and intimate psionic connection with a member of Theras’s marriage-bond group- a connection that Theras obviously had yet to forge with Jhamel, otherwise he would be the one about to be strapped into the chair rather than Shran.
T’Pol could also see that Shran failed to notice- or perhaps didn’t care- about Theras’s discomfiture. His antennae pushing forward aggressively, the Andorian moved toward the chair and raised the helmet from its backrest, picking it up with both hands.
“Let’s stop wasting time and get started,” he said in a deep, almost feral growl.
Very carefully, T’Pol took the helmet from Shran in order to allow him to get into the seat without becoming entangled in the cables. Once he was seated, she set the headpiece onto his cranium, taking care not to restrict his antennae, which appeared to be recoiling instinctively from the edges of the helmet. She set about methodically attaching and tightening the straps that held the headgear in place, then turned to enter a series of commands into the adjacent console.
A faint hum instantly filled the air, which almost immediately carried the faint scent of ozone. T’Pol hoped she hadn’t already routed too much power through the telepresence unit’s relays.
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