“But that’s okay. I don’t feel we always have to stay moving at the same pace . . . as long as we keep heading in the same direction.”
There was nothing Kirk needed to say in response. He simply held her gaze, and it was all they both needed. But Grev tilted his head and folded his hands before his chest. “Oh, well said, Val! I’m going to write that one down.”
6
February 18, 2166
U.S.S. Essex NCC-173, Psi Serpentis system
“SO MALTUVIS WASN’T EXAGGERATING about the size of his fleet after all,” Bryce Shumar remarked as he examined the scans of Psi Serpentis IV’s orbital space on the bridge situation table. The tactical display showed dozens of small but powerful ships in orbit of the watery planet, enough to cover every possible approach route. Telescopic scans showed them to be spindle-shaped craft with large airfoils, resembling something out of the twentieth-century space adventure fiction that Caroline Paris had enjoyed; yet they also bore more modern features, including multiple weapon emplacements and wing-mounted nacelles that looked like warp engines. And what they lacked in advancement, they made up for in sheer numbers. “Even if it’s meant more for controlling his own conquests than defending against aliens, it’s still a formidable blockade.”
A whistle came from the science station on the port side of the bridge. The captain was still getting used to seeing Alvaro Coelho there instead of Steven Mullen. “I’d call it sheer overkill either way,” the tan-skinned Brazilian lieutenant said. “How much did he have to impoverish his people to build so many ships in such short order?”
“That’s one of the things Commander Mullen’s team will determine,” Shumar told him, “assuming we can get them past those ships.” Coming around the table and moving forward into the main section of the bridge, he faced the tactical station on his right. “Their armaments, Ensign?”
“Consistent with the resistance footage, sir,” Jamala Mahendra responded. She was another less familiar face, as the regular armory officer, Morgan Kelly, was standing by with Mullen’s team down in the shuttlebay. “Primarily plasma cannons, supplemented by X-ray lasers. A number of ships are specialized as bombers—mostly ultritium signatures, but I detect plutonium fission bombs on some of them. No shields, but they have polarized hull plating.”
“Hmm.” Shumar turned to the black-haired young woman at the helm. “Ensign Moy, move us into their detection range. And remember to make it look like we’re trying to avoid detection.”
“I understand, Captain,” Melissa Moy answered, but there was uncertainty in her Hong Kong–accented voice. “But it’ll be hard to find a weak spot in their orbital coverage.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Shumar said. “Our goal is to create a weak spot. If they think we’ve already found one, they’ll redirect other ships to shore it up.”
“I get it now, sir. I just need to make us look overconfident.”
“Hmp. Yes, exactly.”
Whatever Moy did to create that impression, it appeared to work, since it wasn’t long before several of the Saurian craft accelerated outward onto intercept trajectories. “They’re hailing,” Miguel Avila advised from the communications station.
“On-screen, Lieutenant.”
A bulbous-eyed, smooth-skinned reptilian face appeared on the viewer, its violet complexion marking it as a member of Maltuvis’s ethnic group, the M’Tezir. “Federation ship! Your kind is no longer wanted in our space. Turn back now or be driven back!”
“This is Captain Bryce Shumar of the Federation vessel Essex. Perhaps you recall us from the first Federation diplomatic mission to your world. We are here seeking to renew a dialogue with Emperor Maltuvis.” It took all his discipline to utter the title and name without disgust.
The Saurian commander smiled. “Driven back, then. I hoped you would be stupid enough to choose that.” He cut the transmission with no further ceremony.
Moments later, Mahendra called, “Three ships closing to attack range. Their weapons are charged and free to fire.”
“Polarize the hull plating, but hold off on shields. Ensign Moy, evasive course toward the planet. Get us as close as you can.” Both officers acknowledged the orders in turn.
Of course, moving toward the armada ensured that the ship would come under attack. But getting close enough to send aid to the surface was necessary in both their feigned plan and their real one. Luckily, the salvos the ships unleashed against Essex were not particularly severe, causing only minor and localized damage to the hull plating.
“Bring us closer, Moy!” Shumar ordered. “Draw as many ships out of formation as you can.”
Moy gritted her teeth and continued to spiral the ship in toward the planet, while dodging and weaving enough both to elude fire and to tempt more of the silver-hulled defense ships to break orbit and come after them. At tactical, Mahendra was clenching her fists, unhappy to be holding return fire while the hull plating continued its gradual erosion. “The aft plating is down to thirty-two percent,” she announced after a while.
“That’s where we want it weakest,” Shumar reminded her.
“Nearing optimal range,” Moy announced.
Shumar tapped his command-chair controls to open a channel to the main shuttlebay. “Bridge to Shuttlepod One. Stand by for launch.”
“We’re braced and ready, sir,” Steven Mullen’s voice replied.
Shumar leaned over Moy’s seat. “Time to make your mistake, Ensign.”
The young flight controller sighed, reluctant to show imperfection even under orders. Shumar admired her discipline and pride in her work, but he found himself thinking that Caroline Paris would have had a lot more fun with putting on this show. He felt a twinge of regret that she was no longer around to lighten the mood.
Still, Moy carried out her error with clockwork precision. Essex swerved right into the path of a plasma barrage that struck the very rear of its cylindrical secondary hull. “Now, Steven!” Shumar ordered.
As soon as the barrage ended, Essex rocked from an internal explosion. The viewscreen showed the feed from a rear sensor as the hangar doors blew open—or rather, as a thin dummy plate impersonating the hangar doors was detonated from the inside. Assorted chunks of metallic debris were blasted out into space by the explosive decompression of the atmosphere within. The Saurians’ sensors were no doubt limited, so that the radiation, vapors, and shrapnel released by the explosion would interfere with their resolution, but they should be able to determine that the debris consisted of various refined metals and polymers of the type used in spaceship bulkheads, as well as gases and liquids that would be found in a life-support system. They would probably even be able to detect several human-sized objects registering as animal tissue, though hopefully their sensors would not be advanced enough to differentiate real human flesh from synthetic meat created by a protein resequencer. They would register that the debris was on a trajectory that would carry most of it into Sauria’s atmosphere, but as it would no doubt burn up before reaching the ground, they would have no cause for concern.
Thus, with any luck, they would fail to notice that one of the largest chunks of debris was the size and shape of a Starfleet shuttlepod.
“I think that’s enough of that,” Shumar said. “Time to limp away with our tails between our legs.”
“Aye, sir,” Moy said, her expression grim as she put the ship onto a wobbly retreat trajectory.
Shumar patted her shoulder. “Buck up, Ensign. You performed superbly. It isn’t easy for a skilled practitioner to fail so convincingly.”
She looked up at him, offering a grateful but somewhat abashed smile. “Thank you, sir.”
The captain turned to Mahendra. “Status of pursuers?”
“Following but falling behind, Captain,” the armory officer replied.
“As we thought, they seem to be short-range ships only,” Alvaro Coelho added. “Warp capable, but it’s first generation, barely more than the Phoenix had. Based on their emission profiles and io
n-trail composition, I’d say they aren’t even using dilithium-regulated annihilation—more likely an antimatter-spiked microfusion drive, which makes sense given the Saurians’ inability to manufacture antimatter in large quantities. No use for anything more than interplanetary hops within the system, a fraction above warp one for a matter of hours before they exhausted their antimatter reserves.” He raised his eyebrows. “Ironic—they have all that dilithium in M’Tezir, and they don’t even have the ability to use it yet.”
“Why even bother with warp drives, then?” Shumar mused. “It seems unnecessary for planetary defense. Let alone for controlling a surface population.”
“More power for his weapons?” Mahendra suggested.
“A dedicated reactor could achieve that more efficiently without the need to power warp coils,” Coelho told her. “Then again, given the speed with which he developed these ships, his Orion backers probably just sold him some existing first-generation warp-drive plans, reactor and all. Something his people grafted onto an existing surface-to-orbit aircraft design, from the look of the things.” The science officer tilted his head thoughtfully. “Not so different from the Phoenix, actually—Cochrane’s team converted that from an old nuclear missile.”
“There’s also the propaganda benefit,” Shumar said. “Maltuvis’s rule is predicated on Saurian superiority. He has to persuade his people that his regime can achieve everything outsiders can. As long as he can broadcast imagery of Saurian ships with warp nacelles, their actual performance barely matters.”
Mahendra checked her readouts. “The pursuit ships are breaking off. Decelerating onto orbital reinsertion trajectories—but slow ones, relying more on gravity than thrust. It’ll take them a while to get back into position.”
“Good,” Shumar said. “Commander Mullen’s team will have the entry window they need. Ensign Moy, once they return to formation, circle back round to take up our monitor station.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Mister Coelho, make sure you provide her with an up-to-date plot of the fifth planet’s ring system. We may be hiding there for quite a while, and I don’t want any accidents.”
“Understood, Captain.”
Shumar looked around the bridge. With both Mullen and Kelly on the infiltration team, Miguel Avila was now the only other person here who’d been on the alpha-shift bridge crew for more than a few months. Mahendra had been the gamma-shift armory officer for the better part of a year, but she and Shumar had rarely been on the bridge at the same time. Moy had transferred aboard after the Klingons had killed her predecessor last October. Coelho had been the supervising officer of the science labs belowdecks until Mullen’s promotion to first officer mere weeks ago. The captain hadn’t experienced this much crew turnaround in such quick succession since the Romulan War. And the new faces seemed to keep getting younger and younger.
After a moment, he shook off the surge of nostalgic regret. The new personnel deserved the chance to prove themselves, and so far, they were performing as well as Shumar could have asked. Rather than regretting the changes in Essex’s crew, he decided, he should be grateful for the opportunities they provided for new officers to gain experience and make names of their own.
Captain Shumar had no reason to doubt that the men and women around him now would make quite a name for themselves in the years ahead.
Sauria
Getting past the orbital blockade was only the first of the challenges Steven Mullen’s team faced in reaching Sauria. To avoid being tracked and shot down, they had to maintain the appearance of debris as they spiraled in through the gap in the blockade, their unpowered course carrying them a third of the way around the planet while the team sat tensely in their safety harnesses over several dozen minutes, hoping they had been correct about the range limitations on the Saurians’ sensors.
Well, most of the team sat tensely. Across from Mullen, Lieutenant Morgan Kelly looked almost bored. “Don’t drift off on us, Morgan,” Mullen teased her, mainly to distract himself and the rest of the team. “This is your plan, after all.” He tried to keep any accusation out of his voice.
From the look on the armory officer’s dark brown, square-jawed face, he hadn’t entirely succeeded. Though her tone was stoic as she said, “I went through drops like this a few times back in the war. Either we make it or we don’t. Best to save our energy for when we need it.”
He studied her. “So I guess it hasn’t changed your perspective much,” he ventured.
Her expression barely changed, but she knew what he meant. “Transitioning, you mean.” He nodded. “Not about things outside myself, no.”
“May I ask . . .” She waited patiently, so he continued. “If you weren’t comfortable being anatomically male, why wait so long to change? Most people I know who’ve transitioned did it fairly young.”
“You’re from Earth,” Kelly replied.
“Toronto born and bred.”
“The Altair colonies have more traditional ideas about gender roles. That happens on a lot of frontier worlds—you need a high birth rate to build a stable population, so it’s considered proper for women of childbearing age to focus on family. That’s why my big sister Janelle left to enlist in Starfleet—so she could be an engineer instead.” She shrugged. “But when I enlisted, it was to fight in the war, and I guess I brought that baggage with me. I thought I’d be a better soldier if I kept up the pretense of being cis-male. And the testosterone, the stronger body, didn’t hurt.”
“You still look plenty strong to me, Lieutenant.” He tried to keep it from sounding flirtatious. The fact that Kelly had been essentially male in physiology until five years ago did nothing to detract from her striking attractiveness as a woman; if anything, it was part of what made her so distinctively compelling. When Mullen was with her, it was difficult to remember that his new status as first officer made it inappropriate to pursue a romance with anyone under his command. His girlfriend Melina, formerly the ship’s chef, had been abruptly transferred to Starbase 12 as a consequence of his unexpected promotion, as Captain Shumar would not allow them to continue their relationship while serving on the same vessel. The resultant argument between Mullen and Melina had led to their breakup, rendering it a moot point anyway. The last thing he needed now was to let his rebound attraction to Kelly disrupt the mission.
Kelly’s expression made it clear that he’d again failed to hide his subtext from her, but she chose to ignore it. “I have to work at it a bit more,” she said. “But it’s worth it. This is the body I always belonged in. I realized that when I was nearly killed at Tenebia. The physical therapy afterward, relearning how to use my body . . . I fought the therapists at every step. One of them finally smacked some sense into me and helped me see that I was fighting my own body—that it was the wrong body for me, and I’d always known it. It was making me weaker, not stronger. I didn’t have time to get the surgeries until after the war, but just accepting that I was a woman, regardless of my anatomy, was what I needed to heal. In more ways than one.”
Mullen stared at her admiringly. “Well . . . I’m glad you found the right path. I think it suits you. A-as an officer, I mean. You’re . . . very good at your job.”
Unexpectedly, Kelly softened and gave him a small, wry smile. “I know what you mean. And thanks.”
Once the pod sank deep enough into Sauria’s outer atmosphere for a plasma trail to begin forming around and behind it, the pilot was able to extend the wings and stabilize the small vessel’s flight—yet he still had to maintain a steady course like an incoming bolide to avoid attracting attention. Only once they set off the charge to simulate the bolide exploding in the upper atmosphere, blinding any sensors, did Crewman Roget fire the engines in a quick burst to take the pod away from the explosion site and onto a stealthy low-altitude course for Lyaksti. Large meteoric explosions in the upper atmosphere were a daily event on most planets, statistically more likely to occur over ocean or empty land than a populated area. Roget had timed the bla
st to occur over one of Sauria’s many wide stretches of open ocean, where it was unlikely to alarm anyone.
Lyaksti, the largest of Sauria’s dozens of small land masses, was a rainforested continent, much like Brazil in size and ecology. That meant there was abundant cloud cover to shield the shuttlepod’s final approach. With the capital city in ruins, the leaders of the resistance had retreated upriver to the ancient city of Akleyro in the inland rainforest, one of the few enclaves that had managed to retain some degree of autonomy due to its remoteness and harsh surroundings, as well as its historical and religious significance. Mullen looked forward to seeing it. Although he was no longer a science officer, he was still an explorer at heart.
The landing coordinates the resistance had provided were for a small mesa on the edge of the canyon carved by the Vasakleyro River, under the near-perpetual shadow of the canyon’s northern wall (for Lyaksti was in the planet’s southern hemisphere). There, Mullen, Kelly, and the rest of their team were met by an armed squad consisting of two salmon-skinned Saurians, a massive Rigelian Chelon, and a stubbly-chinned young human with black hair and olive skin. After trading introductions, the human—Antonio Ruiz, evidently the man who’d documented the devastation of the capital city—looked over Mullen’s party unhappily. “Is this all Starfleet has for us? A half-dozen people?”
“It’s our first step,” Kelly said. “It’s not easy to get past Maltuvis’s blockade.”
“And we can’t just send in an invasion force without making Maltuvis’s propaganda about aliens seem justified,” Mullen added. “We’re going to help free Sauria, but it’s going to take time and patience.”
“Tell that to all the people who are going to die in the meantime,” Ruiz said. “Luckily you aren’t the only ones who’ve come to help.”
Mullen furrowed his brow. “What do you mean?”
Rise of the Federation Page 10
