Gardner shook his head wearily, rose from behind his desk, and took a tall, curve-necked bottle out of the bureau, along with a trio of small glasses. He immediately began filling all three with the fluorescent green Ganymedan whiskey he’d picked up during his last visit to Jupiter Station.
“They’re frightened,” Black said, waving off the drink. “They want something done about all these Romulan advances.”
“And they’re starting to get damned shrill about it,” Casey said as he picked up both glasses, downing the first in a single gulp.
Black nodded. “Calder. Tarod. Deneva. Berengaria. Threllvia. Only a damned fool wouldn’t be scared.”
“And there’s more to be scared of here than just the Romulans,” Gardner said after downing half the contents of his own glass.
“What do you mean?” Casey said, raising a steel-hued eyebrow.
Gardner nodded toward the window, and the crowd that lurked behind the blinds. “A public relations firestorm. A steady diet of this could convince Earth’s civilian leadership to push Starfleet and the MACOs into taking action prematurely.”
“Prime Minister Samuels is a pretty level-headed guy,” Casey said.
Gardner emptied his glass and set it down on his desk with a sharp clack. ”Samuels is a politician. An extremely capable one, but even he isn’t immune to a steady drumbeat like the one out on the street.”
Black nodded. “Or the one from the news media. The top war correspondents have sent half the planet into hiding and convinced the other half that all we need to defeat the Romulans is grit and clean living.”
“Gannet Brooks,” Gardner said. He refilled his glass, then gestured with the bottle toward the window. “I’d bet my admiral’s pips that most of the people out there watch her reports from the Romulan front every day.”
“At least Brooks is on the correct side of the issue,” Casey said. “She knows that appeasement only gets you dead. Or worse. I think she’s telling Earth the story it needs to hear right now. Not like that other one, the yellow rose of journalism.”
Keisha Naquase, Gardner thought. It seemed to him that Naquase’s message of fatalistic passivity wasn’t doing Earth any favors either.
Apparently the topic of pain-in-the-ass journalists had begun giving Black an old-fashioned bellyache; before Casey could raise Black’s discarded Ganymedan whiskey to his lips, the admiral took it, muttering something about needing a drink after all.
“Brooks’s heart might be in the right place,” Black said after he’d downed the drink. “But her expectations about Starfleet’s capabilities and timetables strikes me as unrealistic. And if enough people buy into those expectations—particularly among the civilian leadership— they can become a damned menace.”
Casey clearly wasn’t impressed. Standing ramrod straight, he said, “We’re MACOs. We can do anything.”
Gardner chuckled as he refilled all three glasses. “Semper Invictus,” he said. Always Invincible, the Latin motto of the Military Assault Command Organization.
“Boo-ya,” Casey said, then downed his second whiskey.
“You sharks might be invincible superheroes, George,” Gardner said, raising a glass. “But we squids have to take on the politics of war, on top of the war itself.”
“And Starfleet just might find itself in the position of having to try to... influence some of our opinion makers,” Black said. As an apparent afterthought, he added, “Within the framework of the UE Constitution and the Coalition Compact, of course.”
Casey scowled silently.
Sam Gardner found himself agreeing with his fellow admiral, though he hoped it was merely a reaction to the potent Ganymedan whiskey.
TWENTY-NINE
Wednesday, November 26, 2155
Columbia, Altair system
ERIKA HERNANDEZ LEANED TOWARD her command chair’s intercom pickup and opened a channel to engineering. “How much longer do your people need to get this job finished, Karl?”
The German-accented reply of Chief Engineer Karl Graylock came without hesitation. “It’s been going sehr schnell, Captain. Much more quickly than I thought it would.”
Standing to the immediate right of Hernandez’s chair, Commander Veronica Fletcher said, “We probably have that cadre of government engineers we picked up on Altair VI to thank for that.” Leaning toward the chair mic, she added, “No offense to you and yours, Karl.”
“None taken, Herr Executive Officer,” Graylock said. Hernandez didn’t even have to glance at her XO to know her back teeth were grinding; she hated being addressed as “Herr” even more than she disliked Starfleet’s traditional one-sex-fits-all use of the naval honorific “Mister.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised that Altair VI would make this mission a huge priority,” Hernandez said. “They have an even bigger stake in reinforcing their system’s warp-field detection grid than we do.”
“There’s about sixteen thousand very nervous civilians on Altair VI right now, more than half of them clustered in one place,” Fletcher said. “And there’ll be about as many crossed fingers down there until the new, improved defense grid proves itself.”
But Hernandez knew that Starfleet was not detached from Altair’s problems; it shared them to an increasingly uncomfortable extent. Starfleet had an urgent need to stem the recent rash of Romulan penetrations of the early-warning systems the Vulcans had provided to Coalition worlds and their colonies—penetrations that had already wrought horrendous results with the losses of the Daedalus-class Yeager and the NX-class Discovery.
Heck of a job, Vulcan, Hernandez thought, wondering for perhaps the thousandth time how the Romulans had been so consistently successful over the past several weeks in piercing the grid—and whether the measures taken today by Columbia’s crew and Altair VI’s finest engineering minds would succeed in patching whatever vulnerabilities the Romulans might have been able to exploit.
“I expect the final installation and testing operations very soon to be ganz vollständig,” Graylock said. “Totally complete before lunchtime tomorrow.”
That was indeed better than she’d hoped, by more than a full day. Still, a lot could happen in only a day.
“Will the system still be up and running in the meantime?” Fletcher asked, as though she’d read Hernandez’s mind.
“Ja, Commander. Like a Risan jackrabbit.”
Hernandez was impressed by Karl’s acumen, as usual, though her curiosity wasn’t yet entirely satisfied. “But don’t you have to have the system at least partially shut down to change out and test components?”
“We’ve identified the minimum number of subspace-linked nodes necessary to maintain complete network coverage of the system periphery,” Graylock said in tones fairly bursting with pride. “We determined that number by figuring out exactly which nodes were completely key to the system, and therefore had to be the first ones hardened against jamming and other types of outside attack.”
“So the network never falls below the minimum number of nodes,” Hernandez observed.
“Absolut richtig, Captain. Correct. And the Altairians have even tied their preexisting civilian communications satellite network into the system to provide additional backup coverage and processing power. But...” The confidence that had lofted the engineer’s words mere moments earlier seemed to fail him.
“What’s wrong, Karl?”
After a brief pause, he said, “Well, Captain, the Romulans have gotten past some early-warning systems that are even finer-grained than this one over the past few weeks. Heaven help me if I can figure out how they’ve been doing it.”
And heaven help us all if it turns out you can’t.
“You’ve done great work so far, Karl. Just keep on doing what you’ve been doing. Hernandez out.”
An alarm suddenly began to blare. Hernandez got to her feet.
“Report!”
“It’s the warp-field detection grid,” Lieutenant Kiona Thayer said as she worked the tactical console.
Thayer scowled at the data displays before her. “No, Captain,” she said, her speech tinged with a melodious Quebecois accent. “It’s the network itself. The key nodes along the periphery appear to be failing, one by one, in a kind of cascade effect.”
Hernandez returned to her chair and called back to the engine room.
“Karl, are you getting this?”
“We’re already on it down here, Captain. Twelve key subspace-transmitting nodes have gone gebrochen so far.”
“The warp-field sensors still show negative for Romulan incursions,” said Lieutenant Commander Kalil bin Farraj bin Saleh el-Rashad from the main science station. “At least that much is encouraging.”
But Hernandez found the Syrian science officer’s report anything but encouraging. After all, the last few Coalition-allied worlds the Romulans had annexed had enjoyed perfectly functional warp detection systems—at least apparently. The Romulans had surprised them anyway, as though their victims had left a key for them under the front doormat.
“Our instruments are telling us stuff that I don’t feel comfortable accepting on faith,” Hernandez said. Turning toward the helm, she said, “Lieutenant Akagi, plot a course parallel with the pattern of node failures. Take us out to edge of the system, maximum warp. Lieutenant Thayer, place the ship on Tactical Alert status and polarize the hull plating. Sidra, send a coded secure-channel advisory to the Heinlein and the Kon-Tiki. The local coast guard needs to know that Columbia is following a hot lead on the Romulans.”
As the Tactical Alert klaxon sounded, Fletcher stepped between the captain and the helm, which Akagi manipulated with the skill of a concert pianist. “Captain, if the Romulans have somehow managed to game Altair’s defenses, they might be deliberately trying to draw Columbia as far away from Altair VI as possible in order to launch a ground strike in our absence.”
“I know, Veronica,” Hernandez said. “But if they’ve been feeding fake ‘all clear’ data into the network to cover a stealth approach from outside the system, I want to catch ’em before they get any closer to Altair VI than they already are.”
Evidently satisfied, Fletcher backed away from the helm. “Course laid in and ready, Captain,” said the young helmswoman.
“Engage, Reiko,” Hernandez said.
The stars on the main viewer turned to streaks of light near the edges, and brightened into sapphire hues near the center as Columbia leaped into warp, compressing the light waves between the starship and infinity’s verge.
“We’re making sensor contact with... something,” said el-Rashad. He turned from the main science console toward the bridge’s center, surprise and concern etched across his olive features. “Spacecraft of some sort, near one of the detection grid’s failed primary nodes.”
“Sixteen vessels by my count,” Thayer said. “And we’re closing on them fast. Their speed is difficult to estimate while we’re at warp.”
“Configuration?” Hernandez said, peering forward into a warp-distorted starfield that so far revealed precious little about the peril toward which Columbia now raced.
“Definitely Romulan,” said el-Rashad.
Sometimes I really hate being right, Hernandez thought. Aloud, she said, “Reiko, bring us out of warp close enough to give ’em a good scare. I want to see right up their noses.”
“Captain, there are at least sixteen Romulan ships out there,” Fletcher said, her voice brittle with alarm.
“To which we can do one hell of a lot of damage if we hit them hard and fast,” Hernandez said, buttressing her words with a hint of admonition. “Stand ready, Reiko.”
With a tense nod, Akagi pulled back on the throttle-lever and the velocity-streaked stars on the main bridge viewer immediately settled down to their usual shapes.
Framed squarely in the viewer’s center, a flock of predatory birds approached rapidly from the heart of that darkness, opening and closing their formation as needed to avoid the large bodies of ancient ice and rock that tumbled about here on the ragged edges of Altair’s gravitational influence. Now clearly visible in the harsh glare of the system’s distant but nevertheless quite bright A-type star—Altair’s luminosity exceeded that of Earth’s star, Sol, by about an order of magnitude— the raptors moved as one, winglike engine nacelles extended like auguries of menace as they rolled effortlessly in a coordinated display of maneuverability.
All the while each vessel called attention to the aggressive, blood-red plumage that adorned its nearly flat underbelly.
“Have they noticed us yet?” Hernandez asked.
“I don’t think so, Captain,” Thayer said. “We may be close enough to one of the system’s larger Kuiper bodies right now to confuse their sensors.”
Which are probably in passive mode right now anyway, to preserve the element of surprise, Hernandez thought.
“Try and keep it that way, Reiko,” she said. “And, Kiona, please cut off that damned alarm.”
“Aye, Captain,” the young pilot said as she refined Columbia’s trajectory. Simultaneously, Lieutenant Thayer entered the command that rendered the battle klaxon mercifully silent.
Watching the lethal parade on the viewscreen with as much fascination as fear, Hernandez said, “The hostiles’ profiles look almost identical to the Romulan bird-of-prey images in our intel briefings.” Although she and her crew had tangled with the Romulans before, the enemy had yet to engage Columbia directly, without recourse to proxies like the Vulcan vessels they had hijacked near Alpha Centauri back in July.
Well, that’s all about to change, you motherless escoria.
“The ship profiles might look familiar,” el-Rashad said. “But my scans show these vessels to be far smaller than any Romulan ships anybody has ever encountered previously. I’d guess these to be one- or two-man ship-to-ship fighter craft.”
“I wonder if this is how they’ve been beating the warp-field detection grid,” Fletcher said. “By sending in swarms of vessels too small to set off the alarms.”
“Maybe, Commander,” el-Rashad said with a shrug. “But I find it hard to believe that a Vulcan-designed warp-field sensor would be that easy to fool.”
“We can sort all that out later,” Hernandez said impatiently. “They haven’t seen us yet, so let’s take advantage of that. Thayer, ready the forward phase cannons, and lock and load all torpedo tubes.”
“Aye, Captain,” Thayer said as she threw herself into the task.
Hernandez bared her teeth in a long pent-up display of aggression that left her feeling surprised at herself. “Let’s give these sneaky bastards a taste of their own medicine.”
The battle was fierce and at moments nearly blinding, but it was also agreeably brief. As Hernandez had hoped, Columbia’s sudden out-of-nowhere appearance had rattled the Romulan squadron just enough to allow Columbia’s relentless phase-cannon fire and torpedo launches to destroy about half of the Romulan force while it was still reeling and trying to regroup following the NX-class vessel’s surprise entrance into their midst. Two of the vessels had collided, all but vaporizing each other in their scramble to get clear of the far larger and less agile Columbia.
Five more of the small Romulan fighter craft went down over the next several minutes in exchanges of fire that cost Columbia two of her forward torpedo launchers and a phase-cannon array. The two remaining Romulan fighters had chosen the better part of valor by fleeing Columbia’s immediate vicinity.
But instead of taking the outbound trajectory one might expect of a fleeing vessel, the two small birds-of-prey had placed themselves on steep subluminal descent courses into Altair’s powerful gravity well, with each craft taking its own individual but decidedly “downhill” trajectory.
“They’re on separate headings for Altair VI, Captain,” el-Rashad reported. “Full impulse.”
“Pursue, Reiko,” Hernandez said. “Go in and out of warp as needed to pass ’em and come about. I think our stomachs can take it.”
“I�
��ll try to be gentle, Captain,” the helmswoman said with a sideways grin. A few heartbeats later, Hernandez felt her innards shuddering in protest as Columbia shot forward, straddling the superluminal line as she gained relentlessly on her quarry.
“The Romulans must be counting on eluding the warp-field detectors all the way down,” Fletcher said.
Hernandez nodded toward her exec, whom she thought looked a little green because of Columbia’s small but noticeable velocity oscillations. “And they’re gambling that we can’t fly precisely enough at warp inside the system to avoid overshooting them before they reach the planet.”
“Bad call on their part,” Fletcher said, her jawline taut with resolve and more than a little apparent anger at the Romulans’ brazenness.
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise) Page 26
