Gardner nodded. “Starfleet Command agrees with your assessment that the Vulcan ships that attacked the Calder II outpost were under the control of the Romulan Star Empire. The Romulans are obviously in the process of perfecting a new weapon capable of remotely hijacking the starships of their adversaries.”
Archer thought that “perfecting” was an excellent choice of verbs; the Romulans almost certainly would have destroyed or captured Enterprise had this new weapon already successfully made it through its shakedown phase prior to the attack on the Kobayashi Maru.
“Maybe the Romulan attack against Alpha Centauri was only a feint, Admiral,” Archer said. “I think what they really wanted in the short term was Calder II, which is much more strategic for them in terms of relaying their supply lines from their own core planets to the heart of Coalition space.”
The admiral idly stroked his neatly trimmed gray beard. “Agreed.”
“The Romulans are probably building a rapid-strike base on Calder II even now,” Archer said. “From there they’ll be getting ready to take on Andoria, or Vulcan, or even Earth. And if they go after Earth, they’ll be gambling that we won’t have enough of the new NX-class ships ready in time to stop them.”
Gardner frowned. “Even using Calder as a matériel base, it’ll take the Romulans some time to get their supply lines up and running and secure. Their new weapon notwithstanding, they’ve dealt with Enterprise enough to understand how formidable our NX-class starships can be. They’re taking a gamble that we won’t be able to meet them force for force before they get can use their new beachhead to maximum advantage.”
“Maybe it is a gamble on their part, Admiral. But unless you know something I don’t, it’s a damned good gamble. You know as well as I do that Enterprise and Columbia are still the only NX-class starships Earth has in service right now. And nobody’s heard from Columbia in nearly four days.” For perhaps the thousandth time, Archer prayed silently that Captain Erika Hernandez and her crew hadn’t fallen into the very same Romulan trap that Enterprise had so narrowly avoided.
The admiral’s fair skin grew even paler, until it was nearly a match for his crewcut and close-cropped facial hair. Archer could see immediately that he didn’t need to remind Gardner that Enterprise’s next two warp-five sister ships—Challenger NX-03 and Discovery NX-04— were both still a good month away from being ready to leave San Francisco’s orbital shipyards. Nor did he need to mention that the launch dates of Atlantis and Endeavour were several months further down the calendar still, and that was assuming that the construction teams experienced no setbacks.
“I wish I could say you were wrong, Jonathan,” the admiral said at length. “But it looks like we might have to start relying on the older ship designs, like the Intrepid and Daedalus types, to a much greater extent than most of the admiralty ever anticipated. Provided, of course, that the fleet yards can figure out how to incorporate your father’s basic warp-five engine design into the mix without slowing down the production process.”
Though he recognized, as the admiral clearly did, that this was a tall order, Archer nodded silently. He wondered whether the vicissitudes of war were about to transform the sleek, forward-looking NX-class into a technological dead end that people would someday view only as a charming museum curiosity, like the Trylon and the Perisphere from the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
“Well, I can think of one fleet that’s already built and ready to go,” Archer said. “Not to mention better equipped to handle the Romulans than we would be even if we spent Earth’s entire gross domestic product on starship construction for the next five years.”
“The Vulcan Defense Force,” Gardner said, nodding.
“Why haven’t the Vulcans stepped up to the plate yet, Admiral?” Archer said.
“They did stop the attack on Alpha Centauri cold, Jonathan.”
“But they didn’t lift a finger to keep Calder and Tarod out of Romulan hands. I know they can’t be everywhere, but their fleet is spread a hell of a lot less thinly than ours. Especially now that Vulcan and Andoria aren’t at each other’s throats any longer.” Since Trip had taken Enterprise straight into the middle of the Vulcan-Andorian crossfire last year and thereby defused that conflict, Archer had expected the effort to pay off in a “peace dividend” of a somewhat more tangible nature than the mere signing of the Coalition Compact.
Now would be a good time for the Vulcans to make at least a down payment on that dividend, Archer thought, biting down a resurgence of the bitterness that years of Vulcan obstruction to humanity’s space exploration efforts had engendered in him. We’ll need all the force we can muster if we’re going to have any chance of heading off the threat of a Romulan beachhead.
“Administrator T’Pau is visiting Earth now, to address the Coalition Council and answer questions about Vulcan’s defense posture vis-à-vis the Romulans,” Gardner said, sitting straighter at his desk, evidently winding up the conversation. “So get some rest before you get to the Tarod outpost, Captain. That’s an order. In the meantime, I will do everything possible to persuade T’Pau to send every available Vulcan military ship to Calder II as quickly as possible. Gardner out.”
Let’s hope T’Pau is in a listening mood, Archer thought as he settled back in his chair and watched the screen on his desk shift back to the default image of the Starfleet logo. Vulcans might be renowned for their logic, but they don’t get nearly enough credit for their stubbornness.
The whistle of the desktop intercom interrupted Archer’s gloomy musings. He jabbed the button with his index finger. “Archer here. Go ahead.”
The voice on the other end of the comm unit commingled excitement with apprehension. “Lieutenant Reed here, sir. I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
Archer chuckled. “Not at all, Malcolm. It’s a relief to learn I’m not the only insomniac aboard. What can I do for you?”
“I have some good news, Captain,” Reed said, the excitement in his voice quickly overhauling the apprehension. “At least potentially. I’ve been analyzing the various systems aboard Enterprise that the new Romulan weapon seems to have affected during the Kobayashi Maru incident. And I’ve noticed a peculiar pattern that might give us a way to plan an effective countermeasure.”
In spite of his dour mood, the news gave Archer some hope. “Sounds promising, Malcolm. Let’s go over it tomorrow.”
“Very good, sir. Reed out.”
Archer stood, stretched, and moved back toward the door. Maybe there’s still time for a quick jog, he thought. Then maybe a catnap before—
The intercom sounded again. “Bridge to Captain Archer,” said T’Pol, speaking in her customary even tones.
Archer sighed, then moved back to the desk and toggled the channel open one more time. “Go ahead, Commander.”
“Captain, we are approaching Tarod IX. Starfleet and MACO triage teams are assembling presently.”
Archer raised an eyebrow and did a quick calculation in his head. “We beat the schedule by at least six hours. Looks like Mike Burch in engineering deserves a commendation. What’s the condition of the outpost?”
“There has been no response to our hails. According to the medium-range sensors, the Romulan attack here was quite severe.”
Jogging, napping, and even shaving would have to wait. “Thank you, Commander. I’m on my way. Go to Tactical Alert, just in case there are still Romulans lurking in the system.”
“Aye, sir. Assuming that we can find them before they find us.”
Not about to debate that assumption, Archer closed the channel without replying and left his quarters almost at a run.
The good news, Phlox discovered to his enormous relief, was that there were indeed survivors to be found at the Tarod IX outpost following the Romulan sneak attack that had reduced it to smoldering ruins.
The bad news was that he had never seen so many injured people crammed into his sickbay, not even when he’d been swamped with some fifty wounded patients at the Matalas refugee
camp. Within an hour of Enterprise’s arrival in orbit of Tarod IX, the main treatment area had already begun to burst at the seams. The influx of dozens of wounded civilians forced him to expand even his basic triage operations out into E deck’s corridors, and he quickly filled up two cargo holds with lower-priority patients. And he’d had no choice but to dragoon all available Starfleet and Military Assault Command Organization personnel who’d had even rudimentary first aid training into service as ad hoc corpsmen, nurses, and medical technicians.
As the doctor finished taking a diagnostic reading on one of the growing multitude, he looked up from his handheld scanner in time to see Master Sergeant Fiona McKenzie helping a pair of her MACO troopers struggle a fully laden stretcher through the transparent aluminum doors and into the sickbay’s crowded periphery.
“What’s her condition?” Phlox said as he moved past several burn victims whose condition seemed to have stabilized, at least for the moment. His newest patient was an unconscious young woman, human like all the rest. Her hair was singed, her skin all but broiled in places.
Phlox closed his eyes tightly for a moment, but opened them immediately to ward off an unbidden memory of the seventeen corpses he’d found very early in his medical career. The encounter had occurred on the bridge of a cargo vessel whose crew had died messily in a shipboard explosion while orbiting his native Denobula Triaxa, and Phlox had the misfortune of being part of the first response team.
He was determined never to allow another such death tableau to plague the memories and dreams of anyone else, if there was anything he could do to prevent it.
“Radiation burns,” said Corporal Matthew Kelly, one of the two MACOs who had done most of the heavy lifting on the stretcher. “Hypothermia, too, probably because she ended up exposed to the elements after the Romulans blew apart the structure she was found in. She’s also got some lacerations or punctures on the torso.”
“Administer ten cc’s hyronalin,” Phlox said. “And I need to take a good look at her other injuries.”
Corporal Ryan, a trained MACO corpsman, dutifully injected the woman through a relatively unscathed patch of skin on her neck. McKenzie and Kelly quietly left to see to other wounded people while Ryan stayed behind to assist Phlox in slicing off the remnants of the burned woman’s distressed, blood-soaked garments.
He didn’t need his scanner to see from the woman’s blue lips and gray skin tone that her body temperature had fallen dangerously because of direct exposure to the harsh conditions of Tarod IX, whose average temperature reflected its extreme distance from its primary star. Nor were the severity of her lacerations, apparently created by flying debris or shrapnel, a great mystery. Luckily for the patient, some of the larger fragments that had penetrated the woman’s abdomen seemed to have put pressure on the very blood vessels they had severed, thus preventing her from bleeding to death immediately. And the extreme cold she’d experienced since the Romulan attack may also have operated in her favor by causing a vasoconstrictive reaction that slowed down her circulatory system.
Phlox stepped to one of his worktables and reached into a small glass box he kept between the self-contained habitats in which his prized Pyrithian bat and his Regulan bloodworms lived. A moment later he stood beside the new patient, the wriggling, warm pulsations of a clutch of small alien life-forms dangling from his hand. As he brought the medicinal creatures toward the woman’s abdomen, her eyes opened and she drew a single deep breath that she promptly converted to a single sharp scream and a quick stream of terror-stricken words.
“What the hell are those things?” the woman said as she tried to sit up before the large but gentle hands of Corporal Ryan and her own pain dissuaded her. “They look like leaches!”
“Not leaches, ma’am,” Phlox said, using his most soothing tones. “Osmotic eels.” Very gently, he laid the eels directly on the worst of her abdominal wounds and began another scan, preparatory to attempting to remove the largest pieces of shrapnel embedded in his patient. “They should stop the worst of your bleeding very quickly, and may speed up the restoration of your core temperature. Once we’ve taken care of that, we can begin the process of removing...”
His voice trailed off as he noticed that the touch of the osmotic eels seemed to have caused the woman to faint dead away. A quick scan revealed that her vital signs were steady, though still faint.
Phlox soon moved on to another wounded patient, whose blood-spattered bandages were being changed by Ensign Malvoy. The ensign’s dark blue Starfleet duty uniform was almost equally bloodied, though from without rather than from within. I came here as a researcher and an observer, Phlox thought, sighing. Not to become a battlefield surgeon.
The notion made him feel like just another piece of ordnance in somebody else’s war. He suddenly felt no more enlightened than those of his countrymen who allowed themselves to be drawn into ugly conflicts against the Antarans, Denobula’s traditional enemy.
That is most definitely not what I signed on to Enterprise to do.
The sickbay doors opened again.
“Doctor! More incoming!” shouted McKenzie. Phlox caught a glimpse of something black, red, and glistening following immediately on her heels.
He closed his eyes once more, then opened them again, relying on the brute force of his intellect to restore and maintain his focus. He told himself that now was not the time for recriminations or regrets.
It was time to save as many lives as possible, for as long as the captain he had sworn to serve needed him to continue doing it.
As the time of his appointment in the captain’s mess drew near, Archer stepped into the bridge turbolift, T’Pol following only a few paces behind.
“I have confirmed that our guests are ready to meet with us, Captain,” T’Pol said.
Archer nodded, though he continued to stare quietly at the moving lights that marked the turbolift’s rapid descent from A deck to E deck.
During almost the entirety of the rescue and recovery operation, Archer had remained on the bridge, coordinating shuttlepod and transporter operations from the captain’s chair through the gamma-shift bridge watch. But although the constant stream of firsthand reports he’d received from T’Pol, Reed, Mayweather, O’Neill, and MACO Master Sergeant McKenzie had prepared him intellectually, nothing could have braced him for the emotional impact of what awaited him beyond the turbolift doors.
A heterogeneous group of at least a hundred ragged men, women, and children stood in lines or leaned against walls or sat on the deck all along the curve of E deck’s main corridor. They were, or had been, scientists and engineers, both Starfleet and civilian. They were also doctors, soldiers, energy-extraction specialists, administrators, and frontier laborers, though sorting such details out under the current circumstances was next to impossible, not to mention irrelevant. All Archer knew for certain was that if he lived another century he would never forget the gaunt faces and haunted eyes of these people the Romulans had displaced from the Tarod IX outpost—those that hadn’t been vaporized outright during the Romulans’ initial strike, and hadn’t needed immediate life-sustaining surgery. These survivors were mostly silent, stifling their desultory conversations as Archer and T’Pol advanced slowly through their nearly stationary ranks, moving from Enterprise’s core toward the saucer’s forwardmost starboard-side section. They looked, variously, stunned and shell-shocked and angry and grief-stricken, and smelled of sweat and blood and fear.
The captain couldn’t help but wonder how many of them fully understood yet that the Romulans had just transformed their homes and workplaces into rubble, vapor, and frozen ash—pulverized remnants that even now were being driven far and wide across Tarod IX’s frigid scarps and canyons by the planet’s merciless, eternal winds. As he passed them, Archer could feel the quickly accumulating weight of their gazes falling upon his back, hard stones of summary judgment cast by an army of the unquiet dead—a quiet chorus of lost souls who had received damnation unjustly.
Enterpr
ise got here as quickly as possible, he reminded himself, just as he had already done more times than he could count already. No other ship could have saved this many survivors. And no matter how badly I might want to stop these Romulan bastards before they attack, there’s only so far I can bend the laws of physics to do it.
He only wished he could force his gut to accept that as easily as his brain could.
T’Pol followed Archer through the hatch that led into the captain’s mess. The door closed behind them again as they stepped toward the large table that dominated the room. Two humans, a man and a woman, sat on the table’s far side, while Chef busied himself setting up the formal dining linens and cutlery. Framed by the stars and the dim glow of Tarod IX visible through the wide transparent aluminum window behind them, the destroyed outpost’s senior surviving military and civilian leaders watched blankly as Chef worked.
The male human guest appeared to be about the same age as the captain, while the woman might have been ten or perhaps even twenty years older; since both humans were obviously under stress and lacked rest, their true age was difficult to assess. The man wore a rumpled civilian suit with slightly singed sleeves and a soiled collar, while the woman wore an olive drab MACO duty uniform that had clearly seen some hard service. Both of their faces bore extensive bruises and cuts, though none of these appeared to be immediately life threatening.
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise) Page 5
