Setting aside his ire at Casey’s hostile tone, Gardner raised his eyes to the ceiling, a look of mock supplication on his face as he muttered, “Illegitimi non carborundum.”
Samuels suppressed a snicker as he watched Casey fume in silence at the admiral. Evidently the general possessed enough command of nonmilitary neolatinisms to recognize the decidedly post-Roman adage, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
Minister Littlejohn stood and raised her hands, as though trying to ensure that the Starfleet and MACO brass remained in their respective corners and refrained from trying to land any physical blows.
“Okay,” she said. “We know that the NX-class starship is the most advanced design Starfleet currently has.”
“And we have the goddamned Vulcans to thank for that fact, too,” said Admiral Black.
Ignoring the interruption, Littlejohn continued. “But we also know that building the NX is a long and expensive process.” She paused significantly. “Maybe too long and expensive.”
“What are you driving at, Madam Minister?” Black asked.
“Mainly this: I’ve been told that at least three Daedalus-class vessels can be built in the time it takes to put a single NX-class starship into service,” Littlejohn said. “And that’s also a better schedule than we can expect for the newer Intrepid-type design.”
“That’s true,” Black said with a nod. “But we need to build fast ships, even if it takes us a bit longer. Without warp-five capable ships, the troops might as well have to walk to the battlefields.”
“We need quantity, though,” Minister el-Rashid said. “Maybe at least as much as we need quality. Otherwise we’re still placing way too much faith in luck—betting on the chance that our least-numerous but best-equipped ships will just happen to be close to wherever they need to be as this war continues to deepen and broaden.”
Captain Stillwell looked decidedly unhappy, which Samuels found unsurprising. Not only had the captain long been a vocal advocate for the production of high-warp propulsions systems like the Henry Archer warp-five engines that now powered the NX fleet, he was also currently in charge of Starfleet’s cutting-edge warp-seven drive research project, being conducted in conjunction with the Cochrane Institute on Alpha Centauri III.
“As long as we’re still talking about luck,” Stillwell said, “then perhaps we ought to discuss going full-bore into the business of manufacturing our own luck—the way Columbia did.”
“Exactly what are you getting at, Captain?” Samuels asked, hoping that Stillwell wasn’t about to exacerbate his incipient headache.
“Let’s concentrate on quality and quantity both,” the captain said. “We could convert all of our current Daedalus-class production capacity—and that’s a considerable amount of capacity—into NX-class production.”
No such luck on the headache, Samuels thought.
“That’s insane!” Black said. “We’d be betting all of our limited war resources on a still-unproved set of technologies.”
“Unproved?” Stillwell said, his voice rising in both pitch and volume. “Archer’s Enterprise and Hernandez’s Columbia have more than proved the capabilities of the NX design.”
“Which remains Starfleet’s only starship configuration that has shown a consistent vulnerability to Romulan remote-hijack attacks, Captain,” Black said, accentuating his own higher rank.
But Stillwell wasn’t letting go. “Consistent? Admiral, a dataset of two incidents does not make for good empirical research. We’d be upgrading our technology. If we formally consolidate our Daedalus efforts with the NX program, along with all the progress my team has been making lately on the warp-seven project—”
“Your still highly speculative warp-seven project,” Black said, interrupting.
“Admiral, I—”
“All right, let’s save some of this aggression for the Romulans,” Samuels said, shutting down the rapidly overheating discussion. But unlike the present debate, the pressure inside his skull was continuing to build steadily, like the insistent whistle of a teakettle at full boil.
He knew that whistle wouldn’t quiet down before he’d reached a decision—a decision that only he was empowered to make.
Settling back in his chair, Samuels addressed the entire room. “A great man once said, ‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it.’ And after much consultation with all of you, I propose that we do exactly that.”
He paused, looking from face to face to face during the ensuing silence. Blank stares. Completely, utterly lost, all of them, except perhaps for Vanderbilt.
Good. There were times when an uncommon familiarity with the obsolete sport of baseball could be a useful thing rather than a mere oddity.
“We will indeed pool our shipbuilding resources,” he said at length. “Though possibly not in the way any of you might have expected. We’ll address our need for large numbers of ships by amping up the production of Daedalus spaceframes.”
“Respectfully, Mister Prime Minister, that will not address our need for large-scale high-warp capability,” Black said.
“It will if we use all the resources of Starfleet and UESPA to integrate our NX-class propulsion expertise with our much more efficient Daedalus production capabilities,” Samuels said. “And if we also give the NX and Daedalus teams full and complete access to the interim results of the warp-seven research program, who knows what we might accomplish?”
One by one, Samuels made wordless eye contact with Black, Gardner, Stillwell, and Casey. Each of them seemed to mull over his idea with commingled skepticism and pleased surprise, as though only their internecine rivalries had prevented each man from forging precisely the same chain of reasoning on his own. Stillwell, who had always taken a highly proprietary interest in the warp-seven research program, appeared more skeptical of Samuels’ plan than anyone else in the room, though he held his tongue.
Gardner was the one who finally broke the silence. “Mister Prime Minister, I have to admit that your plan makes a lot of sense, at least conceptually. But I’ve spent almost half my career helping to shepherd the NX design through every stage of its development. It’s the most advanced production spacecraft Earth has ever developed.”
“I know it is,” Samuels said, hoping the sympathy he felt was coming through in his manner. “And I’ve always tried to give your efforts as much support as possible. But the world is changing, Sam. And we have to change along with it.”
Gardner offered a deferential nod. “And I appreciate that, sir. But I’d hate to think we’re taking a step backward just for expediency’s sake.”
“I prefer to think of it as a step toward the smallest number of moving parts,” Samuels said, standing to signal that the meeting had come to an end. “After all, ‘less advanced’ can also translate to ‘not as much can go wrong.’”
After his colleagues and advisers had filed out of his office, the prime minister decided that such questions were best left to be settled by the historians.
And with any luck at all, he thought, humans will be the ones who’ll write those histories, and not the Romulans.
THIRTY-ONE
Enterprise, en route to Earth
HOSHI SATO WONDERED just how long Ensign Elrene Leydon’s hand had been waving just centimeters from her face.
“Oh, good. You’re still in there somewhere,” said the helmsman as she withdrew to her own side of the small table in the mess. “I was afraid for a second I might have to get Doctor Phlox over here to revive you.”
Sato tore her gaze from the patch sewn onto Leydon’s left sleeve; the patch, which matched the one on her own sleeve, was emblazoned with the motto that Captain Archer had selected from a list of contenders submitted a few weeks earlier by personnel from every department, thanks to an ancient tradition that had been revived aboard Columbia.
Ire audaciter quo nemo ante iit.
Although she agreed wholeheartedly with the motto’s sentiment, it wouldn’t have been her own first choice; she
still preferred her own submission, the pithier Scientia, scriptatum in astra: “Knowledge, written in the stars.”
Making a slow half turn in her seat, Sato glanced to her right, where Phlox was seated at one of the other tables, which he shared with Commander T’Pol; the Vulcan’s meal was both abstemious and vegetarian, while the Denobulan physician’s was conspicuously neither. But despite their vast differences in both taste and temperament, the sight of the pair dining together wasn’t an uncommon one; they were, after all, the only two nonhumans who served aboard Enterprise.
Sato once again belatedly became aware that her friend had started speaking again. “Okay, I’m reasonably sure you’re not having a stroke or a seizure, Hoshi,” Leydon was saying in an apparent effort to brighten Sato’s all-too-obviously gloomy frame of mind. “But I’m still trying to make sense out of something you said a minute ago.”
“What?” Hoshi said, kicking herself for her bad habit of thinking out loud. It seemed to come with the territory, however, when most of one’s energies were devoted to chopping, grinding, and analyzing words and their underlying ideas.
“That comment you made about the Edsel,” Leydon said around a swallow of iced tea. “I’m still not sure what you were talking about.”
Sato tried to put a brave face on what she had been fretting about for the past couple of hours. “You never heard of the Edsel? I’m surprised at you, with all those stories you have about that ancestor of yours who ran the flight deck of the old wet-navy Enterprise.”
Leydon coughed as the iced tea nearly came back through her nose. “He was only deck crew.”
“Sorry,” Sato said, smiling. “Telling tall tales about your family is your job.”
“Thank you,” Leydon said, coughing into her hand. Setting aside the iced tea, she continued. “My great-grandfather might have only been a skittle on old CVN-65, but he did own a Ford Edsel. Left it to my grandfather, who was still driving the thing until an ECON bomb attack wrecked it during Dubya-Dubya-Three.”
Sato nodded. “So maybe you’re not aware that the Edsel was considered one of the great automotive marketing blunders of its era.”
“I get that. I mean, the Edsel was ugly. Even people back in the mid-twentieth century must have thought so, since nobody wanted to buy ’em. That’s one of the things that made Edsels valuable to collectors decades later. What I don’t get was why you muttered, ‘We’re flying back to Earth in an Edsel’ under your breath a minute ago.”
Sato made an understated please-use-your-inside-voice gesture, spreading both hands just above the tabletop. This close to Enterprise’s keen-eared exec wasn’t the ideal venue for the passing along of scuttlebutt. With her back to T’Pol and Phlox, Sato leaned closer to Leydon and whispered, “I just heard that the NX design is going to be phased out, and soon.”
Leydon looked as though she’d been slapped. “Where’d you hear that?”
“As communications officer on Starfleet’s highest profile NX-class ship, I have a few... inside sources. You’re not going to get more than that out of me without using torture.” Sato wasn’t about to betray the confidence of Sidra Valerian, her counterpart aboard Columbia, or those of several others she knew inside Starfleet Headquarters.
The helmswoman crossed her arms, her gaze squinting through a haze of doubt; Sato didn’t find that surprising, considering how hard her friend had worked to get posted to Enterprise.
“And just what do your ‘inside sources’ say Starfleet intends to replace the NX design with while the Romulans are circling us like sharks?” Leydon said. “A hot-rodded Daedalus?”
Sato was glad her friend wasn’t sipping her drink again just now. “That’s right. One that’s supposed to be capable of making warp five, or can at least sustain a warp four-and-a-half cruising speed. It’s supposed to cut the shipyard manufacturing time by a factor of at least three. But you didn’t hear any of this stuff from me, okay?”
Leydon settled back into her chair and slammed down the rest of her iced tea. A moment later she looked forlornly into the empty glass as though wishing it had held something a good deal stronger.
“I didn’t hear anything,” she finally said at length, speaking quietly. “And I won’t believe it until Newstime picks up the story. And maybe not even then.”
Hoshi could imagine the debate that would consume the attention of the interstellar news media once this rumor was confirmed. Keisha Naquase would worry that Earth’s once exploration-oriented Starfleet was about to get itself onto a permanent war footing. Gannet Brooks would see the move as a temporary step backward, made necessary by the unfortunate but often inevitable circumstances of war.
Of course, the stately NX-class design wouldn’t disappear overnight. If the rumors were true, they merely meant that Starfleet and UESPA were shifting their expectations going forward; Earth would no longer be relying upon Enterprise and her sister ships as humanity’s primary wartime workhorses.
Starfleet probably expects the NX-class to disappear on its own, Sato thought glumly as she imagined the many battles that were certain to come. Losses would mount on both sides. The Romulans might well take out the few remaining NX specimens still flying, including Enterprise and the small handful of her sisters still being assembled in spacedock even now.
Sato looked down at the motto on her own sleeve patch. The lofty sounding phrase, cribbed from a seminal speech by Zefram Cochrane decades ago and translated into Latin to give it additional heft, seemed to mock her.
Ire audaciter quo nemo ante iit.
To boldly go where no man has gone before.
We humans are warriors now, not explorers, she thought with a sense of all but infinite loss. Starfleet just hasn’t got around to making all the formal announcements yet.
That wasn’t what she’d expected when Jonathan Archer had talked her into signing on to his initial mission to Qo’noS four years ago. And it still wasn’t what she’d expected this year, after the captain had barely managed to talk her out of leaving alongside Travis Mayweather.
All Hoshi could do for the moment was to cling to the desperate hope that the human species—starting with the crew of Enterprise— would one day find the road back once all the shooting finally stopped.
THIRTY-TWO
Thursday, November 27, 2155
U.S.S. Yorktown NCC-108
Proxima Shipyard, Proxima Centauri
HIS LIMBS TAUT with an almost electrical feeling of anticipation, Travis Mayweather sat behind the newly refurbished helm console, awaiting the order he knew Captain Shosetsu had to deliver any moment now.
A seeming eternity later, that moment arrived. “Clear all moorings, Mister Mayweather. Take her out.”
“Aye, Captain,” said the helmsman. A grin spread across his face, reflecting his commingled delight and relief as his hands moved swiftly over the still-slightly-unfamiliar console before him. But the fact that the arrangement of a Daedalus-class vessel’s standard helm controls differed somewhat from those found on the bridge of an NX-class ship was of no concern to him; he was still far too excited about his new posting for that.
Yorktown was getting under way at long last, now that her repairs were finally complete, and was leaving spacedock for the first time since Mayweather had joined Ketai Shosetsu’s newly reconstituted crew—a crew whose numbers had been cruelly reduced, his new shipmates had informed him immediately after his arrival, during Yorktown’s recent Romulan encounter near the planet Valakis.
“We’re clear, Captain,” Mayweather said a few moments later.
He heard the captain’s enthusiastic tenor voice coming from over his shoulder. “Very good, Ensign. Nice and smooth.”
“Thank you, sir,” said the helmsman with no small amount of pride. Having literally grown up in deep space, Mayweather had become used to achieving almost a Zen-like serenity that made a starship almost an extension of his arms and legs and eyes. “Standard patrol course entered, as ordered.”
“Execute course at
warp two once we’ve cleared safe navigational boundaries,” said Commander Tyler Mendez, Yorktown’s executive officer. “One-quarter impulse until then.”
Mayweather acknowledged the XO’s orders as the bridge’s wide forward viewer displayed an aft view of the intricate latticework of metal trusses and beams that made up the largest shipbuilding and repair yard in the Centauri system. The sprawling orbiting shipyard was framed against the cool blue haze of Proxima Centauri’s glacial second planet and the dim ruddy glow of Proxima itself, the red dwarf that circled the gravitational fringes of the far friendlier inner stars Alpha Centauri A and B. Although the vast open-architecture facility steadily dwindled in size on the screen, signs of furious activity—tiny environmental-suited figures nudged massive yet weightless components into position amid the brilliant orange flashes from the beamjacks’ arc-welders while small workpods flittered about from worksite to worksite—remained manifestly in evidence. Ships of human manufacture, fully half of which were Daedalus-class vessels like Yorktown, filled each of the complex’s sixteen unpressurized but solar-flare-shielded repair bays—except for the two micrograv hangars that were conspicuously dark. One of these was the one in which Yorktown had just completed her repairs. The other had for nearly a year served as the cradle and incubator for one of Starfleet’s newest warp-five-capable ships of the line.
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise) Page 28
