CHAPTER
18
AARON STILES CONSIDERED THE TINY BROWN-AND-BLUE sphere of Oreias Nine on his viewscreen.
“We are in communications range,” Darigghi announced from his place at the captain’s side.
Stiles nodded. “I know that.”
“Shall I hail the colony administrator?”
“That won’t be necessary,” the captain told him.
The first officer looked down at him. “Do you not intend to communicate with the colonists?”
“That’s correct,” Stiles responded evenly. “I don’t intend to communicate with them.”
Darigghi licked his fleshy lips—a gesture that the captain had come to know all too well. “The people on this world have been living in fear,” the Osadjani observed. “Knowledge of our presence in this system will give them a sense of security.”
“I’m not here to hold anyone’s hand,” said Stiles. “I’m here to take care of whatever attacked Oreias Five. When that’s done, the colonists will feel plenty secure.”
Darigghi didn’t seem satisfied with the captain’s response. “Then what will you do? Proceed directly to Oreias Five?”
“I’ll proceed in that direction,” he told the Osadjani.
Darigghi tilted his head, confusion evident in his deep-set black eyes. “But you will not stop there?”
“I don’t see any need.”
“No need?” the first officer asked, a strain of incredulity in his voice. “When the colony may hold clues to its attacker’s identity?”
Stiles chuckled dryly. “There are captains in this fleet who would give their eyeteeth to examine that colony—and I’m only too glad to give them the chance. Me, I’m going to sniff around this system and see if I can’t pick up the enemy’s propulsion trails.”
Darigghi stared at him for a moment, as if weighing the utility of arguing the point. In the end, he must have decided that opposition was futile, because he made his way to the lift and disappeared inside.
The captain wasn’t going to miss him. Turning to his navigator, he said, “Ms. Rosten, set a course for Oreias Eight. And scan for propulsion trails, maximum range.”
Rosten got to work. “Aye, sir.”
Sitting back in his chair, Stiles eyed his viewscreen again. Every vehicle known to man left some kind of residue in its wake. He was betting that his adversary’s vessels were no exception.
With luck, he thought, he would get a notion of where the enemy had come from before the rest of the fleet arrived.
“Here he comes,” said Cobaryn, as a gleam appeared in the sky over the pristine curve of a bone-white dome.
The husky, fair-haired individual standing beside him shaded his eyes against the brittle sunlight. His name was Sam Lindblad, and he was the administrator of the Oreias Five agricultural colony.
“I still don’t get it,” the fair-haired man told him.
“I beg your pardon?” said the captain.
“Why Earth Command didn’t respond. This is an Earth colony, after all. And Earth Command knows how to fight.”
“Starfleet can fight, too,” Cobaryn pointed out.
Lindblad grunted disdainfully. “Not from what I’ve heard.” He glanced at the Rigelian. “They say you’re just a bunch of scientists.”
“And that bothers you?” asked Cobaryn.
“Right now it does,” said Lindblad.
“Even though you are a scientist yourself?”
“Especially because I’m a scientist myself. I know what I can do and what I can’t do—and going toe to toe with some alien invader is one of the things I can’t do.”
By that time, the gleam in the sky had grown into a shuttlepod. As it descended toward the plaza in which they were standing, it raised a cloud of amber dust with its thrusters. Then it settled on the ground, joining the pod in which Cobaryn had come down from the Cheyenne.
“Perhaps we can change your mind,” said the Rigelian.
The colonist frowned. “I sure as hell hope so.”
A moment later, the pod door slid open and Cobaryn’s colleague stepped out. Squinting as his eyes adjusted from the relative darkness of his vehicle, he said something to his crewmen, who were still inside. Then he made his way across the plaza.
“Administrator Lindblad,” said the Rigelian, “this is Bryce Shumar, captain of the Peregrine.”
Shumar shook hands with the colonist. “Sorry about all this,” he said with what was obviously heartfelt sympathy. He turned to Cobaryn. “Have you had a chance to survey the damage yet?”
The Rigelian shook his head. “We just arrived ourselves.”
Shumar looked to Lindblad. “Shall we?”
“This way,” said the fair-haired man, gesturing for the Starfleet officers to follow him. Then he led them on the straightest possible course through the colony, a complex comprised mainly of large geodesic domes and the occasional pyramidal supply hut.
Cobaryn had sent his team ahead with its portable scanners to conduct their analyses while he waited for his friend to land. As a result, the Rigelian’s only exposure to the stricken parts of the colony had been through the observation port of his pod.
Now, as he and Shumar followed Lindblad, Cobaryn began to see firsthand what had drawn the Federation’s fledgling Starfleet to this planet. There were burn marks on the walls of some of the domes along with rents in the fabric from which they were constructed.
And the farther they went, the worse it got.
The punctures and scorch marks gave way to splintered supports and major structural damage. In fact, some of the domes seemed unsalvageable, though the teams of men and women attempting to make repairs might have taken issue with that verdict.
As Cobaryn and his companions went by, the colonists stopped and scrutinized them. The captain wondered if they were more fascinated with his alien appearance or the blue uniform he wore ...and decided that neither answer would have surprised him.
“Here’s the worst of it,” said Lindblad, as they came around the shoulder of a half-shredded dome that still smelled of burning, and looked out toward the edge of the human settlement.
It was the worst, all right. There was no question about that in the Rigelian’s mind. Perhaps a dozen of the colonists’ residences, all of them situated between a pair of rounded hills, had been seared and pounded into the ground. What was left looked like a collection of blackened carcasses baking in the afternoon sun.
Cobaryn’s landing party—his science officer and two crewmen—had all hunkered down among the wreckage with their scanners. After all, whatever residue had been left by the directed-energy weapons of the colony’s assailants would be in greatest evidence here.
Shumar frowned as he gazed at the carnage. “And no one was hurt?”
“Miraculously, no one at all,” said Lindblad. “But we were plenty scared, I can tell you that.”
Shumar nodded soberly. “I’ve been fired on myself. I know what that can feel like.”
The Rigelian negotiated a path through the ravaged domes and joined his science officer, a stern-looking woman named Kauff. Her scanner was cradled in her arms and she was playing it over a blackened strut.
“Anything yet?” Cobaryn asked.
Kauff put her scanner down and stretched out her back. The device was too heavy for a human to carry for very long, especially when one was working in such an obstacle course.
“One thing’s for sure,” said the science officer. “It wasn’t the Romulans who did this.”
“Why do you say that?” the captain inquired.
Kauff pointed to her scanner’s digital readout. “The Romulans use electromagnetic beams, just like we do—and there’s no electromagnetic beam in the universe that can cause this kind of molecular disruption.”
The captain bent over and studied the readout. The woman was right. The colony’s assailants boasted weapons much more advanced than those employed by the Romulans.
“So we know who it is not,” he
concluded. “Now all we need to determine is who it is.”
“We’ll get there,” Kauff assured him. “Eventually.” Then she bent, hefted her scanner again, and moved to another section of wreckage.
Next, Cobaryn went to check on Crewman Milosovich. The fellow was analyzing the soil to see if the aliens might have been after some kind of mineral wealth. They wouldn’t have been the first group to try to scare a rival off a potentially valuable piece of land.
Stopping behind Milosovich, the Rigelian ventured a guess. “Precious metals?”
The crewman looked back over his shoulder at his commanding officer. “No, sir. At least, nothing to write home about. But there are heavy concentrations of organic materials.”
“Oh?” said Cobaryn.
“Yes, sir. A certain polysaccharide in particular. It suggests that this area was once teeming with life.”
The captain took a look around at the surrounding landscape, much of which had been turned into dark, carefully ordered farmland by Lindblad’s people. Only in the distance was the terrain still dry and barren, a broad expanse of yellow plains dappled with dusky orange hillocks. Outside of a few small, spiky scrub plants, Cobaryn couldn’t find any obvious signs of indigenous biological activity.
“Teeming with life,” he repeated ironically. “That must have been a long time ago.”
“That would be my guess as well, sir,” said Milosovich. “Though I would have to conduct some lab tests to determine how long ago.”
Catching a glimpse of blue out of the corner of his eye, Cobaryn turned and saw Shumar’s team approaching. Their captain pointed to an as-yet-unexplored area with a gesture, then led the way.
After all, Shumar was a planetary surveyor by trade. When it came to performing scanner analyses, he was as qualified as anyone.
For that reason, Cobaryn disliked the idea of interrupting the man. Nonetheless, he walked over and knelt beside Shumar as the latter adjusted the data input on one of his scanners.
“So tell me,” said Cobaryn, “how is Lieutenant Kelly?”
His friend looked at him, his expression one of surprise tinged with amusement. “You never give up, do you?”
Cobaryn smiled. “In my place, would you?”
Shumar thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. “Maybe not. But then, I haven’t thrown in the towel yet insofar as the Daedalus is concerned, so I’m probably the last person you want to ask.”
“Anything new on the Dumont front?” the Rigelian inquired.
“Nothing,” his colleague told him. “And what happened here isn’t going to help our cause one bit. If the Federation believes they’ve got a new enemy to contend with, they’re not going to be devoting a lot of resources to science and exploration.”
Cobaryn weighed the comment. “I suppose that’s true,” he was forced to concede.
“Look at the bright side,” said Shumar, managing a humorless smile. “When the fleet becomes Ed Walker’s toy, you and I can quit and do what we wanted to do all along.”
“Explore the galaxy,” the Rigelian responded.
“And forget about people like Walker and Clarisse Dumont.” With a grunt, the human went back to work.
Quit Starfleet? Cobaryn thought. Somehow, “the bright side” didn’t seem all that bright to him.
For the better part of an hour, he watched his men and Shumar’s as they went through one pile of charred debris after another, gathering all kinds of data. During that time, Lindblad came and went a few times. So did some of the other colonists, including a few children, seeking to satisfy their curiosity or gain some sense of reassurance... or perhaps both.
Then, as the sun approached the horizon and they began to lose its light, both teams agreed that they had accumulated all the information they could. Lugging their scanners back through the heart of the wounded colony, they returned to their pods and prepared to analyze the data in greater depth.
But as Cobaryn took his leave of Lindblad, he knew that they hadn’t uncovered anything that would lead them to the colony’s attackers. For all intents and purposes, they had come up empty.
Hiro Matsura considered his viewscreen, where a bony-faced man with small eyes and thick brown hair looked back at him.
“So you’ve heard about what happened on Oreias Five,” the captain recapped, “but you haven’t seen any sign of alien vessels yourselves?”
“No sign at all,” confirmed Tom Orlowski, the administrator of the Oreias Seven colony. “But that doesn’t mean a thing. If they attacked Oreias Five, they may decide to attack us, too.”
Matsura could hear the strain in the man’s voice. Clearly, the last few days had been difficult ones for him.
“That’s why we’re here,” the captain said. “To figure out who staged the Oreias Five attack and why...and to make certain that sort of thing doesn’t happen again.”
Orlowski frowned. “You sound so confident.”
Matsura smiled. “And you don’t.”
That caught the administrator by surprise. “With all due respect,” he said, “we asked for—”
“Experienced help,” the captain noted. “And that’s what you’re getting. Don’t let the uniform and the age fool you, Mr. Orlowski. I was at the Battle of Cheron. So were two of the other captains assigned to this mission. Whatever it takes, we’ll get the job done.”
The statement seemed to calm the administrator a bit. “That’s good to know,” he told Matsura.
“Now,” said the captain, “I’m going to send a team down to scan your colony and the area around it. When we’re done, we’ll compare notes with our teams at Oreias Five and the other colonies.”
“And if you don’t come up with anything?” Orlowski asked.
“Then we’ll pursue other strategies,” Matsura assured him. “In fact, at least one of our vessels is doing that already.”
The captain looked forward to joining that pursuit—just as soon as his scanner team took a look around.
Hours after his visit to Oreias Nine, Dan Hagedorn could still see the faces of that planet’s colonists, their eyes full of fear and uncertainty and the desperate hope that he could help them.
He had grown accustomed to that look during the war, seeing it at civilian settlements from one end of Earth space to the other, but there was something unsettling about seeing it now that the war was over. As hard as Earth had battled the invader, as high a price as she had paid, she should have earned a respite from armed conflicts.
Unfortunately, Hagedorn mused, it was a cruel universe—one that seemed to have a limitless supply of unpleasant surprises.
Just as he thought that, his navigator turned from her control console to look at him. “Sir,” said Glendennen, a slender, dark-skinned woman, “we’ve picked up an unusual ion concentration. And unless our instruments are off, it seems to describe a pretty coherent line.”
The captain felt a twinge of anticipation, but he was careful not to show it. “Sounds like a propulsion trail,” he observed.
“It certainly could be,” his navigator responded.
Hagedorn tapped his fingers on his armrest, considering the discovery from all angles. After he had rejected the idea of a trap, he said, “Get me Captain Stiles. He’ll be interested to hear what we’ve found.”
“Aye, sir,” said Glendennen.
Hagedorn leaned back in his center seat. If this had been an Earth Command mission, its next stage would have been a simple one: seek out the enemy and destroy him.
But this was different, wasn’t it? It wasn’t just a matter of tearing their adversaries’ ships apart. Somewhere along the line, they would have to find out why hostilities had begun in the first place.
It raised the level of difficulty considerably. But then, the captain reflected, that was the nature of the job.
Once, when he was a teenager, Aaron Stiles had seen a hawk pounce on a field mouse. Right now, he felt a lot like that hawk.
His viewscreen showed him four alien shi
ps—the ones whose propulsion trails he and Hagedorn had been tracking. The vessels were small, dark, and triangular, with no visible nacelles. For all Stiles knew, they weren’t even capable of faster-than-light travel.
He opened a communications link to his colleague’s bridge. “I’ve got visual,” he told Hagedorn.
“Same here,” said his fellow captain. “And they don’t seem to know we’re on their tails.”
“That’s my impression, too,” Stiles responded. “Remember that maneuver we pulled near Pluto?”
Hagedorn grunted audibly—as close as the man ever came to a laugh. “How could I forget? I’ll work on their starboard flank.”
“Acknowledged,” said Stiles. He glanced at his helm officer, a woman named Urbina who wore her flaxen hair in a tightly woven braid. “Heading two-six-two-mark one, Lieutenant.”
“Aye, sir,” Urbina responded.
Over his comm link, the captain could hear Hagedorn giving the same sort of orders on the Horatio. Though Hagedorn was no longer Stiles’s commanding officer, Stiles liked the idea that the man was working alongside him.
He regarded Weeks, who was sitting in front of him at the weapons console. “Deploy power to all batteries, Lieutenant.”
“Power to lasers and launchers,” Weeks confirmed.
“Range?” asked the captain.
Weeks consulted his instruments for a moment. “One minute and fifty-five seconds, sir.”
“Thank you,” said Stiles. Finally, he turned to his navigator. “Raise shields, Ms. Rosten.”
“Raising shields,” came Rosten’s reply.
The captain studied the viewscreen. The enemy ships were maintaining their course and speed. Apparently, they hadn’t spotted the Christophers yet. Or if they had, they weren’t giving any indication of it.
It felt good to be in battle again, he thought. It felt good to have an enemy in his sights. Stiles wasn’t a scientist or a diplomat, and he didn’t think he could ever become one.
He was a soldier, plain and simple.
And right now, he was in a situation that called for a soldier’s skills.
Starfleet Year One Page 17
