“This is what we’re going to do,” Kirk said.
“He’s at warp one point eight, and still slowing,” Worf reported.
The Klingon had taken Leybenzon’s position at the tactical console. The security officer was now at an auxiliary station that had been configured to control the ship’s transporters. As soon as the Belle Reve’s shields went down, Kirk and everyone on board his vessel-however many there really were-would be beamed off and held in the buffer while their identities were confirmed. La Forge had set up a separate circuit for the holographic emitter that gave the Emergency Medical Hologram his physical form.
“You’re not certain you’ve covered all contingencies,” Troi said quietly.
Picard sighed. She was right, as usual.
“Kirk can dock with us, in which case we can beam him aboard, confirm his identity, and move forward,” Picard said. “Or, he can try to speed by us at warp. If he does, I doubt even the Belle Reve’s shields can withstand the onslaught of phaser fire and quantum torpedoes we’ll be able to direct at her. Or, he can turn around, in which case we’ll have another opportunity to disable his engines and take him in tow. It’s difficult to think that he has any other options.”
“Yet you’re not convinced,” Troi said.
“I keep asking myself: What would I do in Kirk’s position?”
Lieutenant Leybenzon looked up from his auxiliary console. “Sort of like playing chess against yourself. Impossible to make secret plans.”
Picard agreed. “I know Kirk’s sitting on his bridge right now, asking himself what he would do in my situation.”
Worf gave another report from his console. “The Belle Reve has slowed to one point five and holding.”
Picard looked to Worf. “He’s not dropping to impulse?”
“No, sir.”
“What is it?” Troi asked, and her concern mirrored the alarm Picard suddenly felt.
“Kirk knows exactly what strategies I’ll take against him….” Picard’s apprehension escalated as he took the next step and tried to work out Kirk’s next move. “So he’ll…” And then he had it.
He jabbed at his communications controls. “This is the captain… all hands brace for collision!”
“You can’t be serious,” McCoy said.
“Take a seat and brace yourself,” Kirk said. “Mister Scott, keep us on course, fifty-meter deviation only.”
“They won’t know what hit them,” Scott said.
But Kirk knew better. “Yes, they will. By now, Jean-Luc knows exactly what I’m going to do.”
“Fifteen seconds to impact,” Scott said. He sounded as calm and confident as Kirk felt.
“But his ship will be destroyed!” Troi said.
Picard felt anger surge within him. “He won’t hit us dead-on. The fact that he’s only at one point five means he doesn’t want to destroy us any more than we want to destroy him.”
Worf growled from his station. “May I suggest evasive maneuvers, sir?”
“That’s what he wants us to do,” Picard said. “It’ll give him just enough of a delay to slip past us.”
“I don’t understand,” Troi said. “Why is he doing this?”
Picard tried to hide his admiration for Kirk’s tactic, but failed. “With him coming directly at us, we can’t hit his engines without shooting through his bridge. And he knows I won’t do that.”
“We’re just going to sit here?” Troi asked.
“It’s an old Earth game called ‘chicken,’” Picard said. “But I know how to change the rules, too.”
“Captain Kirk! The Enterprise has dropped her shields!”
Kirk reacted to the holographic doctor’s shock with admiration for his foe, and his friend. That particular tactic he hadn’t anticipated.
“Well done, Jean-Luc,” Kirk murmured. “Are all her shields down?”
“Navigational shields only,” the Doctor replied. “But they’ll only protect her from dust and debris, not us.”
“It’s all right,” Kirk said. “Jean-Luc knows we won’t hit him.”
“Orders, Captain?” Scott asked.
“Maintain course,” Kirk said as he once again put himself in Jean-Luc’s position and guessed what his fellow captain’s next move would be.
“He’s going to try and slow us down with tractor beams.”
“Och, but that’ll tear us apart!”
“They’ll have transporters on standby, ready to save us.”
“Should I change course?”
“No,” Kirk said. “Power up our tractor beam and don’t hide the signature. We don’t have enough transporter capacity to save Jean-Luc’s crew, so if he wants to cause damage, he’ll have to be sure he can clean up after himself.”
“Their tractor beams are powering up,” Worf said.
Picard grinned-the only one on his bridge who wasn’t behaving as if total destruction was only a few seconds away. “Got him.”
“What?” Troi asked.
“Anything I can think of,” Picard said, “Kirk can think of, too. So the trick is to stay just one step ahead of him, even for a few seconds… Mister Worf, stand by on shields…”
“Standing by,” Worf growled. “Impact in– “
“– five seconds,” Scott said. “Four…”
Kirk gripped the arms of his chair, and only at three seconds to impact did he finally realize that Picard had out-maneuvered him.
“Scotty!” Kirk shouted. “Hit him dead-on! He’s going to– “
21
THE OORT CLOUD, SECTOR 001
STARDATE 58567.4
Like their captains, if the Belle Reve was the irresistible force, the Enterprise was the immovable object.
At one second before impact, the Enterprise’s shields flared into life at full power, just as Kirk had anticipated.
The Belle Reve’s shields impinged on the Enterprise’s in a silent, rippling flare of blue Casimir energy.
But not enough energy to completely dissipate the forces of that collision.
Some bled into warp space as spreading pockets of subspace distortion. Some spread into normal space-time as cascading gamma radiation that over the course of hours would register on astronomical detectors throughout the inner solar system.
And the barest fraction of one percent was converted into kinetic energy.
Motion.
The Enterprise spun around her center of gravity, an enormous, off-center windmill.
Inside her hull, alarms screamed and the structural-integrity field that held her together drew all power from her generators, lowering gravity, blacking out the lights.
The crew not strapped into place at their duty stations were thrown into bulkheads, slid up to the overheads, propelled by centrifugal force.
Sparks erupted from overloaded systems.
Smoke and cries of protest filled air that was no longer being recycled as life-support went offline.
Outside of the mighty ship, streaming trails of vapor marked the futile firings of her chemical reaction-control thrusters, trying to bring her into trim. But too much energy had been imparted to her by the collision, and only her impulse engines could stabilize her again-engines that had no power because of the requirements of the structural-integrity field.
The Enterprise spiraled out of control.
The Belle Reve, barely a third the length of the Enterprise, was in little better condition. Though it was the energy of the smaller ship’s momentum that had been transferred into the Enterprise, the Belle Reve was left spinning just as violently. But because she was of lesser mass, her thrusters were able to counteract the unwanted motion more rapidly.
Had this collision happened in interstellar space, Kirk’s ship would have recovered well before the Enterprise and continued on her way.
But this was the Oort Cloud.
The Belle Reve slammed into a nameless chunk of primordial ice roughly the size of a runabout, ten seconds after the ship had caromed off the shields of the Enter
prise.
The wildly spinning Enterprise collided with another, larger cometary fragment seventeen seconds later.
The chain reaction of ship and smaller debris collisions continued for six minutes.
And in the end, the immovable object and the irresistible force, like their captains, hung dead in space, engulfed by clouds of shattered rocks and ice, both their missions over.
There was so much redundancy built into the Belle Reve, serious damage was the least of Kirk’s concerns.
He was with Scott at the environmental station, working to be certain life-support still functioned. With only three people on board requiring those systems, the demands were not great.
The next question was warp capability. Despite the Belle Reve’s advanced shields and weapons, her biggest advantage over the Enterprise was speed.
“Warp status?” Kirk asked.
The engineer scanned the diagnostic screens at the navigation console. “Offline but resetting…. All the backups are enabled.”
“How long?”
“Ten minutes,” Scott said.
“Make it five,” Kirk told him.
He saw Scotty’s sly grin. “I had a feeling you were goin’ to say that. Five it is.”
Kirk heard an echoing boom thunder through the bridge. The sound originated somewhere below the bridge. He joined the two doctors at the tactical console. “What was that?”
“Debris strike,” the hologram said. “Our shields are down and those particular backups are not resetting.”
Another bang made the bridge shudder. Then Kirk heard what sounded to be a shower of sand rushing overhead.
“We’re moving at almost the same speed as the debris, so the impact energy is negligible,” the hologram explained.
Kirk didn’t need him to finish the thought. “But we can’t go to warp without shields.”
McCoy frowned at him. “We can’t even go to impulse, Jim-not out here.”
Kirk called to his engineer. “Scotty-you’ll have to get shields up first.”
“Then I’ll need to get down t’ engineering.”
“Go,” Kirk said. “And let’s hope the Enterprise is in worse shape.”
Scott threw Kirk a skeptical look as he rushed for the turbolift. “Somehow, I doubt it….”
The new restraints on the bridge chairs had kept Picard’s key staff in position during the impact and its aftermath, but more than half now succumbed to nausea from the violent spinning.
Picard was one of the few who successfully fought against it, and when the inertial dampers had at last caught up with the spin rate and gravity was restored, he punched out of his restraints and carefully made his way to the tactical console.
Worf had been standing at the time of collision. He was now unconscious on the deck by the ready-room doors, being treated by an ensign who had been stationed at an engineering console.
On the main viewscreen, the stars still spiraled.
“Compensate for the ship’s motion on the viewscreen,” Picard ordered. “Then find Kirk’s ship!”
The ensign at ops modified the viewscreen’s output so that the distant stars remained still. Picard was surprised to see that some points of light continued to swirl past, but quickly realized they were part of the ice blizzard the two ships had created.
“Thermal reading on the Belle Reve,” the ensign said. “Distance: eighty-three kilometers. Sending to tactical.”
On the tactical console, Picard studied the new image of the smaller ship. It had stopped spinning, but seemed locked in a dense cloud of debris. He saw no sign of atmospheric or antimatter venting, so he felt confident the ship was intact.
And if it was intact, it was still a threat.
“Bridge to engineering,” Picard said.
La Forge answered at once, coughing, sounding winded.
“How soon will we have propulsion?” Picard asked.
“Captain, we’re good to go on one impulse thruster right now. But we won’t be able to get a crew in place to reset the others while it’s operating.”
Picard frowned. With only one thruster, a lunar shuttle could outrun his ship.
“Do we have tractor beams?” Picard asked.
“That I can give you,” La Forge answered.
“Power them up,” Picard said. “Conn, set a course to the Belle Reve.”
And with the tractor beams as the feint, Picard called up the controls he would need to launch his real attack on Kirk.
“Jim, the Enterprise is coming about….”
Kirk looked up from the engineering station, saw Picard’s ship on the center screen, literally plowing out of a cloud of cometary ice, heading directly for the smaller ship.
“Scotty…” Kirk said into the console communicator.
“Shields or engines, Cap’n-I can’t give you both by the time that behemoth reaches us.”
Kirk called over to the doctors. “Is he powering up his weapons?”
“All weapons systems appear to be offline,” the holographic doctor said.
But beside the EMH, the flesh-and-blood doctor added, “We’re picking up fluctuations from their tractor-beam emitters.”
Kirk stared at the screen, thinking like Picard. “He can’t outrace us, he can’t outfight us, so he’s going to grab on to us….” He tapped the console communicator again. “Scotty, what’s the status of our tractor beams?”
“What tractor beams?” the engineer replied. “All the emitters are fused.”
Kirk knew what Picard was going to attempt. With a tractor beam, he had a chance to counter the move. Without one… Kirk ran through the capabilities of his ship, seeing each system as a potential weapon. But time was almost up.
“Get me shields as soon as you can,” Kirk said. “Jean-Luc’s trying to misdirect us with those tractor beams, but he’s going to come at us with the transporter.”
Just as Picard got his transporter locks on Kirk, McCoy, Scott, and the holographic doctor’s emitter, the Belle Reve’s navigation shields flashed on and ended his attempt to retrieve the crew.
Without wasting a moment, Picard activated the tractor beams at full power, latching on to Kirk’s ship.
He braced himself at the tactical controls, waiting for Kirk to attempt to pull away. But instead, the Belle Reve accelerated toward the Enterprise even faster than the tractor beams propelled it.
Picard checked the sensor scans: none of the Belle Reve’s propulsion systems were active.
“What’s driving that ship?” Picard asked aloud, again trying to put himself in Kirk’s position.
The answer came from La Forge in engineering. “Captain-they’ve boosted their artificial-gravity generators! The main field’s outside their hull and they’re falling toward us!”
The Belle Reve twisted suddenly in place, and with the combined torque imparted by the Enterprise’s tractor beams and the smaller ship’s reconfigured gravity field, the Enterprise was forced to swing slowly around, directly into a cloud of debris.
But the Enterprise had what the other ship did not-a working thruster.
She reversed, skimming the debris cloud, but pulling the Belle Reve into it instead.
The Belle Reve swung out of the cloud, trailing flashes of superheated ice and organic gases that had been old when Earth’s sun was new. Her weakened shields were overloading and the Enterprise’s transporter beams punched against them, again and again, speeding their failure.
In response, the small ship fired a quantum torpedo past the Enterprise, to detonate behind her and send a rush of radiation against her one operational thruster, trying to overheat it.
The Enterprise countered by throwing all power to its aft shields and abruptly cutting its tractor beams. As if an elastic cord had been cut, the Belle Reve fell up under the attractive power of its own artificial gravity, scraping against the Enterprise’s lower hull until it was once again held in place by tractor beams, just in front of the sensor dish. Then the larger ship reestablished its shields
with the Belle Reve inside their perimeter.
They were locked together now, both ships evenly matched in a complex equation of capability and battle damage. Both captains masters of their art, equally determined, each with a single, different advantage.
Picard’s advantage was that he did not fight alone. Three Starfleet vessels were already under way to lend assistance. The first, the U.S.S. Tucker, would arrive within twelve minutes and the Belle Reve’s capture would be complete.
Kirk’s advantage was an operational warp drive.
And at this distance, it was a weapon.
“If we go t’ warp inside her shields, ye’ll tear the Enterprise apart,” Scott exclaimed.
Kirk bounced his fist on the arm of his command chair, calculating the odds. “No. Jean-Luc won’t risk his ship. When we power up our warp engines, he’ll lower his shields.”
Scott didn’t look convinced.
McCoy was more vocal. “He won’t, Jim. Picard’s under orders to protect his home system. There’re three ships coming to help him right now. And he knows you’re not willing to kill half his crew.”
“What if those ships that’re on their way are full of shapechangers, Bones? What if Picard’s unwitting bait, just like Marinta?”
The holographic doctor scowled in disapproval. “I have never seen a more dispiriting display of obsessive distrust. Captain Kirk-you and Captain Picard are fellow starship captains… friends. Is there no common ground you can find between the two of you?”
“He’s fighting for his home,” Kirk said. “I’m fighting for my son.”
There could be no common ground.
22
THE OORT CLOUD, SECTOR 001
STARDATE 58567.4
Worf, forehead glistening with newly regenerated skin, reported from his console. “Captain-the enemy vessel is powering up its warp engines.”
Worf had identified Kirk as “the enemy.” How has it come to this? Picard thought.
“Mister Scott’s on that ship,” he said. “He knows what going to warp inside our shields would do to us.”
Troi leaned forward from the chair to his left, spoke urgently. “Captain, I’m certain you were speaking with the real James Kirk. I sensed no duplicity, no indication that he might’ve been an impostor. But I can’t be certain about Scott.”
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