“That’s a long way off for basic MACO training,” she said. “Earth’s a lot closer.”
“United Earth asks too many questions, don’t they, Colin?” Charis said, addressing the boy in tones steeped in a cocktail of bitterness and regret. “Starting with ‘How old are you, son?’”
Brooks felt she was beginning to understand. “Ah. The recruiters must be a lot less fussy about following the rules so close to the, ah, hostilities.”
“Delta Pavonis is a key forward base of the Military Assault Command Organization,” the boy said. “Which is good for quick deployments. Much closer to the action.”
That last word had made Charis flinch visibly, though the boy, Colin, appeared not to have noticed.
“Earth could start getting a lot less fussy soon enough, Colin,” Charis said, clearly unconvinced that Earth deserved to be considered some sort of safe haven for humanity.
“Only if we fail, Mom,” Colin said. His somber tone told Brooks that he hadn’t dismissed failure as a more than likely outcome. Perhaps he even expected to die. “Only if we fail.”
Brooks thought she was beginning to see the key difference between humans from Earth and their Centauri cousins. It was the difference between being attacked at home, in humanity’s cradle, and being challenged on a remote frontier world, a found place that could, at least in theory, be replaced easily enough by some other found place.
But Earth could never be replaced. No new Earth was likely to be found. It was an irreplaceable treasure. It had to be defended, guarded with as much blood and as many resources the task might require, whatever terrors might challenge it.
The challenge that the Xindi had presented to Earth was both faceless and terrifying, as was the challenge that the Romulans now posed out here and beyond. On Earth, against all odds, the Xindi crisis had been averted before it had encompassed the entire planet and threatened the existence of all human life on Earth. But out here, across a four-light-year-plus-deep gulf that separated the local human race from its birthplace, nobody could guarantee those same long odds would play out in Homo sapiens’s favor ever again. Just as nobody could guarantee even the possibility of making peace with the Romulans, a foe that had already made inroads into Coalition space—and would very likely have by now begun invading and occupying both Alpha Centauri III and Proxima Centauri II if not for the timely intervention of the Vulcans, who had since retreated to the sidelines.
Brooks was beginning to see that the Centauri people, rather than being significantly more fearful than their Terran cousins, were merely more mindful of the unreliability of long shots and miracles. Perhaps the inherent uncertainty of life on the frontier had made them more pragmatic than panicked, more realistic than romantic—particularly in a universe that demonstrated each day that the house nearly always wins in the end, no matter how conservatively one might bet.
After wishing the Idahos well, Brooks moved on, drifting through the crowd, a ghost among the ghosts, absorbing the comments of those who would speak to her, whether on or off the record. She could all but smell the fear and regret of the fleeing, as well as the fatalistic determination of those who claimed to be staying, having come merely to bid loved ones farewell, perhaps for the last time.
After a large, squat transport vessel had settled on the tarmac, its thrusters cooling, a small ground crew gave the vehicle’s exterior a desultory examination before entering the craft to make the final prelaunch preparations. No passengers disembarked, since Alpha Centauri had by and large become an origin point rather than a destination.
Perhaps fifteen minutes later, after the last of the farewells had been said, the tarmac stood empty. Brooks sat watching the empty stretch of asphalt from a lounge that was now considerably less crowded. Across the wide waiting area, Colin Idaho sat a patient vigil, apparently unaware that she was watching him. He gazed inscrutably in the direction of the two dim stars that remained visible in a sky that had purpled like some vast, world-encompassing bruise. She wondered if he was facing Delta Pavonis, or if he even knew how to pick it out of the sky, with or without a set of charts.
She knew only that he now had no place else to go.
Be safe out there, kid, she thought, despite a rising certainty that life was about to get far more dangerous for everyone, and particularly so for those headed ever deeper into the interstellar dark, as she was.
Clutching her small duffel to her side, she joined the boy’s vigil without moving a muscle, waiting in sympathetic silence for the next outbound transport.
TWENTY-ONE
Thursday, October 16, 2155
U.S.S. Yeager NCC-76
Kappa Fornacis III Deneva
ONLY A SPLIT-SECOND after their seeming emergence from nowhere, the three gaudily painted Romulan birds-of-prey had struck hard and without any warning whatsoever. Commander Julia Stiles hadn’t been surprised by the Romulan’s ferocity. She was flabbergasted, however, by the fact that they had somehow managed to catch the Deneva colony unaware.
How the hell did they get past that Vulcan warning grid? she thought as she checked the six other uniformed bodies that lay sprawled on the deck or across burning consoles for signs of life.
All dead. Every last one of them, including Captain Gerhard, whose corpse lay pinned beneath a fallen support beam. Coughing in the ozone-tinged air, Stiles acknowledged with a calmness born of equal parts training and shock that she was now in command of a Daedalus-class starship for the first and probably last time simultaneously.
Belay that kind of thinking, Commander, she told herself. She imagined the thought to have come from outside herself, in Gerhard’s voice, even though the rational part of her mind knew to a certainty that the captain would never issue another order. Instead of dwelling on such grim realities, she decided to take maximum advantage of whatever lucidity she might have retained since the sneak attack.
From the controls on the command chair, she ran a quick check on the ship’s internal communications grid, which appeared to be as dead as the bridge’s main viewscreen. At least the bridge’s death throes appeared to have stopped the ear-splitting blare of the emergency klaxons, which had activated when the dim emergency lighting came on, moments after the initial hull breach that had been reported from the lower decks.
Those decks had held the bulk of the mixed group of Starfleet, MACO, and civilian personnel who had been assigned to patrol, test, and, if necessary, make repairs to the network of sensor nodes in the outer Kappa Fornacis system.
A network that had evidently failed utterly in its purpose. Somehow, the Romulan ships had managed to get all the way to the asteroid belt beyond the orbit of Deneva, apparently making use of the dense metallic bodies of which the belt was comprised to conceal their presence until—literally—the last second before their assault on the Yeager.
At least the Romulans have stopped pounding holes through our hull, Stiles thought.
The pain in her ankle made her wince as she moved on to the forward tactical console, which smoldered in the absence of a functioning fire-suppression system. Then she stumbled and nearly fell as the gravity plating lurched nauseatingly. At the same moment the hull directly overhead groaned like an anguished ghost, providing an uncomfortable reminder that a hard vacuum lurked just beyond the top of the Yeager’s spherical primary hull.
After she’d tried and failed to access every major system on the ship, Stiles concluded that the Yeager was little more than a still-twitching corpse. The Romulans left us for dead, she thought. And it’s not because they’re being cocky.
She knew, of course, what else that meant: The Romulans must have already moved on to Deneva proper. With the Yeager no longer standing in the breach, that beautiful blue world, from Lacon Township to all the other human settlements and outposts that stretched across the paradisiacal Summer Islands Archipelago, now lay defenseless at the Romulans’ feet.
If they have feet, that is, she thought as she worked console after console frantically, like a d
octor continuing to try to save a code-blue patient long after the vital signs had stopped.
The partially melted communications console rewarded her stubbornness by lighting up and displaying an image, apparently being generated by the secondary external sensor array.
A procession of half-shadowed, box-shaped metal objects was making its way through the blackness of space, with the glowing azure crescent of Deneva slowly growing in the background. The bright yellow rays of Kappa Fornacis, Deneva’s primary star, glinted off the slight curvatures of the small duranium-composite hulls.
“Yes!” Stiles shouted in triumph, stabbing a clenched fist into the air. Somebody—several dozen somebodies, from the look of it—had made it to the escape pods and had managed to launch the emergency vehicles manually.
Then a shadow hove into view from across the blue planet’s terminator, drawing the attention of the Yeager’s automated backup sensors. Stiles watched with a slow sinking feeling in her gut as a shape that appeared much larger than any of the escape pods grew steadily as it approached those who had fled the dying Yeager. With the Denevan sun at its back, the new arrival was all but invisible except for its silhouette.
Until it turned and displayed the fierce red plumage that had been painted on its belly, abruptly killing and burying the euphoria Stiles had felt when she had first glimpsed the escape pods.
A talon of amber fire reached out from the ventral hull of the returning bird-of-prey.
An escape pod abruptly exploded into so much drifting shrapnel, transforming abruptly from a solid object to a cloud of debris, like dust motes suspended in sunbeams.
Despite her best efforts to remain calm, Stiles let out a scream as the renewed but strangely unhurried Romulan onslaught claimed a second pod. She regained but little of her equanimity as a third shattered and mostly vaporized, followed by another, and another, and another. The attacker’s pace seemed methodical and deliberate, like a child choosing targets at a carnival shooting gallery. The Romulans evidently considered the other two birds-of-prey to be more than adequate to the task of seizing this still only lightly settled human colony, so much so that the remaining vessel could afford to play with its victims, like a cat taking its sweet time to kill a captured mouse.
The hull overhead groaned again, in even more anguished fashion than before. This time, however, an explosion followed, a din louder than any emergency klaxon she had ever heard. The gale-force wind that came with it immediately peppered her with a hail of loose debris as it bore her ceilingward and beyond.
And spared her from having to witness any further carnage.
Tellarite cargo vessel Skev
Near Kappa Fornacis
Christ, but this has to be the toughest room I’ve ever played, Gannet Brooks thought moments after she began the interview in Captain Shav’s cabin.
The grizzled, hirsute freighter captain had been obliging enough when she’d offered him a rather generous fee in exchange for passage to one of the hinterlands of Coalition space. Once she took a seat on one of the two low, futonlike cushions on the deck, however, his demeanor had changed radically. She wasn’t keen on sitting on the floor, but at least she felt cooler there than she had while standing anywhere else aboard the ship. The average temperature of Shav’s homeworld, Tellar, must have been somewhat higher than that of Earth.
“I seem to encounter your kind out here with increasing frequency every time I make a freight run through this sector,” Shav said, his beady eyes staring out querulously from beneath his shaggy, overhanging brows. “You hairless anthropoids must breed like Altairian blowflies.”
Brooks was grateful for the several encounters she had already had with Shav’s species, for which rudeness, insults, and even invective were all simply the coin of the realm. She understood that by Tellarite standards, Shav was being downright gracious.
“Your snout is obviously well acquainted with the dungheaps from which those blowflies take their nourishment,” Brooks said with a polite nod, delivering what she’d hoped was the equivalent of a polite verbal curtsy. “But I am gratified to see that your interest in insect mating habits has not kept you too busy to continue making your rounds across the far reaches of Coalition space.”
“I have a business to run,” Shav harrumphed. “The freight must get through.”
“Even though Romulan ships have recently started stepping up their attacks on freighters and convoys all over the sector?”
“Profits often increase as a function of danger. This is one such time.”
“So you’re saying that the only effect the war has had on you is to increase your business?”
Shav bared his white, tusk-like teeth. “What war? It might look like a war from beneath the mud puddles where most of your race hides, but out here the Romulans don’t seem to be any more troublesome than the occasional band of pirates have proved to be.”
Brooks had conducted enough interviews to recognize high-octane bullshit when she smelled it; bluster, after all, was nearly as important to the Tellarite cultural identity as were insults.
“Really? Even after Calder II and Tarod IX became Romulan military bases in Coalition space?”
Shav waved a three-fingered hand in a gesture of dismissal. “Faugh. Your Vulcan friends have outfitted all the Coalition systems with their warp-field detection devices. And once they finished with that, they set up detectors in so many of the outlying systems that the Romulans can’t so much as sneeze without somebody hearing them.”
“So you’re not worried.”
Shav leaned forward and grinned lasciviously. “Worrying might etch unattractive lines onto my face.”
Brooks answered with a polite sneer. Then a high-pitched squeal stepped on her verbal rejoinder, startling her off her futon in the process. The sound reminded her of the unearthly ululations made by the hog callers at a rural county fair she had attended as a child.
It wasn’t until Shav had got his stubby legs beneath him and had walked over to a communications panel mounted on the wall that she realized the sound had signaled an incoming message.
“What?” Shav barked once he’d shut off the com squeal.
“Come to the bridge, Captain,” one of Shav’s subordinates growled in annoyed tones.
“Why?!” said the captain, sounding unhappy.
“We’ve received a distress call from a ship adrift near the Terran colony world of Deneva. Several sentients are aboard, most of them injured. All are human.”
Shav tossed both of his blunt, stumpy hands into the air in frustration. “Faugh. Let the military handle it. What the hell am I paying taxes for anyway if I have to do their job as well as my own?”
“The ship is rapidly losing atmosphere, Captain. The nearest military ship is still hours away. But we could be there in minutes.”
Shav scowled, and Brooks thought she could see some of the worry lines that the captain had sought to prevent creasing the visible portions of his already wrinkled face.
“Why in the Great Sty are they losing atmosphere?” the Tellarite captain said.
“According to the distress call, they barely escaped a mass attack on Deneva.”
“An attack by whom?”
“Romulans, Captain.”
Shav’s scowl only deepened, along with those beauty-spoiling worry lines. He paused to scratch his flat, porcine nose as he stared at the wall speaker, obviously turning the matter over in his mind.
Brooks could certainly understand Shav’s reluctance to dive headfirst into a hot spot in the Romulan-human conflict. To a large extent she shared it. But for the sake of her fellow humans, she hoped that Shav wouldn’t succumb to the impulse to “chicken out” right in front of her.
Hoping that he would take from her next words the encouragement she intended, she said, “It’s a lucky thing for us humans that you don’t find the Romulans to be all that troublesome.”
Of the eight uniformed MACO soldiers Shav had taken aboard, six of them had already expired by the
time the freighter’s crew had stretchered them into the Skev’s modest infirmary.
Taking care to stay in a corner and out of the way of the furious-looking Tellarite medical team, Brooks noted that the dead seemed to have succumbed either to the weapons burns and blood loss they had sustained during their encounter with the Romulans, or to the effects of cold and decompression that had followed the failure of their charred and battered escape craft’s environmental system. But as far as Brooks could tell, none of these men and women would have survived for as long as they had but for the efforts of the civilian pilot, now among the dead, who had brought them aboard her vessel moments before making a hasty departure from the besieged surface of Deneva.
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise) Page 21
