As he contemplated his slate of options—a list that grew steadily shorter with each passing day that Praetor D’deridex continued to draw breath—Admiral Valdore came to realize that it wasn’t the act of murder that made him feel so unsettled.
He closed his eyes, and immediately noticed that the dimly glowing red surface of the burning sea of Coridan was rhythmically rising and falling before his mind’s eye. I have already become an instrument of murder, he thought, unable to banish the image for which he was responsible. Must I become an instrument of treason as well?
FORTY
Monday, March 8, 2156
Enterprise, near the Sol system
TWENTY-SEVEN DAYS TO GET HERE from Vulcan, Archer thought, grateful to note that his unofficial stopover at his exec’s homeworld hadn’t put a crimp in the ship’s itinerary. Pedal to the metal across sixteen light-years and change, and without letting the engines blow us into a half-parseclong streamer of superheated plasma.
He made a mental note to put Chief Engineer Burch in for a commendation once Enterprise reached Earth.
Ensign Leydon turned toward him from the helm. “We’ll reach the periphery of the Sol system’s sensor grid in two minutes at this speed, Captain.”
Archer nodded. “Acknowledged. Drop out of warp in ninety seconds. We don’t want to set off any alarms. I want everything to go by the numbers.”
Like the rest of Earth’s small NX-class fleet— Columbia and the recently completed, just-launched Atlantis—Enterprise was tasked with trying to determine just how the Romulans managed to fool the Vulcan warp-field detection grids. The most expeditious way to do that was to attempt to pierce the grids using Starfleet ships, flying them into each system at random, unannounced approach angles, while employing every imaginable stealth protocol, in the hopes of exposing whatever vulnerabilities the Romulans had learned to exploit.
Both Columbia and Atlantis had already tried this method, under the utmost secrecy, in several Coalition systems and their outsystem colonies over the past several weeks. So far, the defense grids at Tau Ceti, Procyon, 61 Cygni, Alpha Centauri, and even Sol herself had passed with flying colors.
Archer didn’t find that very encouraging.
In fact, he agreed completely with Starfleet Command’s official opinion that these test results constituted very bad news indeed. He sincerely hoped, as Enterprise prepared to undertake her first concerted attempt to “break” the defense grid, that today’s test would yield the opposite result. You have to find the leak before you can patch the space suit, he thought.
He turned his command chair toward the comm station where Ensign Sato sat, apparently listening to the local subspace bands with rapt attention. “Any sign that Starfleet has detected our presence yet, Hoshi?”
“None, Captain,” said the comm officer with a shake of her head. “I’m picking up nothing but normal traffic throughout the Kuiper belt outposts, and all is calm everywhere else, from Jupiter Station all the way down to the solar monitoring outposts on Mercury.”
“Good. Keep listening, but maintain communications silence.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Dropping out of warp now, Captain,” Leydon reported as she entered a course correction into the helm console.
“Very good, Ensign. Keep station here. Silent running.” He punched a button on the arm of his chair. “Archer to Shuttlepod One.”
A familiar British-accented voice responded crisply from deep in the belly of E deck. “Shuttlepod One here, Captain. I’ve completed the prelaunch checklist. The boat is ready for launch whenever you give the word.”
With a grin, Archer rose from his chair. “I’ll give you the word in about two minutes, Malcolm—in person.”
“I’ll keep the left chair warm for you, sir.”
Archer turned to face the bridge’s aft section, where Donna O’Neill was maintaining a vigilant watch over Reed’s tactical console.
“You have the bridge, D.O.,” he said as he strode toward the turbolift.
Shuttlepod One
”This is the last time we’ll be able to speak before we know how this test will turn out, sirs,” O’Neill said. Seated beside Reed in the small, instrument-crammed cockpit, Archer smiled at O’Neill’s thoroughness; she seemed to be giving both men a gentle reminder of the importance of maintaining strict radio and subspace silence once the shuttlepod was under way.
“Understood,” Reed said from the copilot’s chair, where he was busy double-checking a status reading.
“If you manage to pull this off, Lieutenant Reed,” O’Neill said, “Starfleet is liable to name a new standard tactical plan after you in some Academy textbook.”
Reed wasted no time responding in kind to O’Neill’s wry tone. “Thank you, Lieutenant. And if things don’t work as expected, I’ll try to make sure you receive full credit as well.”
“Shuttlepod One out,” Archer said. Success has a thousand parents, he thought as he closed the channel to the bridge and disconnected the shuttlepod’s hardwired comlink. But failure is an orphan.
“We’re in low-power mode, rigged for silent running, and ready to launch.” Reed said from the chair beside him. “Is the word given, Captain?”
“Let’s get you into the history books, Malcolm,” Archer said.
The captain released the holding clamps, whose opposing motion pushed the shuttlepod clear of Enterprise. Next he fired the dorsal thrusters for a few seconds to put a little distance between the shuttlepod and the starship. Then Archer briefly activated one of the portside thrusters, sending the little vessel into a slow, leisurely roll. The maneuver provided a slowly revolving glimpse of Enterprise as she dwindled away rapidly into invisibility, owing to the combination of distance, relative motion, and the dimness of the light here on the fringes of the Kuiper belt.
So far, so good, Archer thought.
After nulling out the shuttlepod’s roll with an equivalent and opposite firing of a starboard thruster, Archer took manual control of the small craft’s course and heading. He placed Sol almost directly in the center of the forward windows and opened up the throttle to one-quarter of the shuttlepod’s maximum sublight velocity; Archer felt the force of acceleration push him into his chair for an instant, until the inertial damping system kicked in and restored the local gravimetric conditions to a static one g.
Since a shuttlepod had no warp capabilities, its maximum sublight velocity was, in fact, the upper limit of its speed capability. And that fact lay at the heart of today’s test of the warp-field detection grid, as conceived by Malcolm Reed and Donna O’Neill. Without a warp drive, a ship could take hours or even days to cross the gulf that separated the farthest extremities of the detection grid from the planets it protected, down deep in the solar gravity well, relatively speaking. In theory, that interval should have allowed any starfaring race enough time to mount a substantial defense.
But only if interloper vessels generated the warp fields necessary to set off a systemwide alarm.
Reed’s discovery several weeks ago of a passive means of finding— and thus of mapping—a detection grid’s individual sensor nodes had been the first step; one couldn’t very well avoid setting off the warp-field alarm without knowing where its “eyes” and “ears” were located. The tactical officer’s supposition that the Romulans may have developed a similar technique—a hypothesis supported by the data Columbia had gathered during last November’s narrowly averted Altair attack—was the second step.
Today’s test was to be the third and most significant step in the process, because it held the potential of shoring up the defense-grid “holes” that had allowed the Romulans to pierce the warp-field detection grids in numerous systems, with lethal results.
“I hear Starfleet has really been beefing up the sensitivity of the grid over the past month or so,” Reed said, breaking the silence that had descended over the dimly illuminated cockpit. “I hope whatever changes they’ve made won’t spoil the test. If it does, we’ll
be back exactly where we started.”
“Then we’ll just have to regroup and try again,” Archer said. “At least until we finally figure out how the hell the Romulans have been beating the warp detectors.” The captain knew that his tactical officer was preoccupied not with personal glory, but rather with preventing the Romulans from doing to Earth what they’d already done at Deneva, Berengaria, and Altair. “Don’t worry, Malcolm. We’re going to beat them at their own game.”
As he spoke, Archer never took his eyes off Sol, the distant bottom of the system’s deep gravity well. At this distance it looked more like an unusually bright background star than what it really was: a vast fusion furnace that ultimately powered every energetic process on Earth and all her planetary siblings—the central star around which the rest of the solar system quite literally revolved.
“So do you think this test will turn out like all the others?” Reed asked at length. “Do you think they’ll detect us before we get all the way to Earth?”
“Doesn’t seem likely,” Archer said. “The shuttlepod isn’t generating a warp field.”
“But Starfleet’s engineering people have done a lot of fine-tuning to the grid’s overall EM sensitivity over the past few weeks.”
Apparently that hasn’t made much difference in any of the static tests Starfleet has run this past month, Archer thought. Aloud, he said, “When we’re in silent running mode, the shuttlepod blends in pretty thoroughly with the interstellar background noise. That should make us nearly as invisible in the EM bands as our lack of a warp field makes us in subspace.”
Archer thought the odds of anyone making visual contact with the tiny shuttlepod before it got within striking distance of Earth were pretty remote. Even at subwarp speed the little craft was moving at a not-inconsiderable fraction of c, which would make a chance sighting highly unlikely. Besides, the shuttlepod’s precise location and angle of approach to its inner solar system targets had been deliberately withheld from Starfleet for the purposes of today’s war game. And added to that was the sheer scale of the space that the shuttlepod was now crossing. Although Archer had visited many unimaginably distant alien worlds, he was still staggered when he considered the vastness of even the much smaller volume of space contained with his own home system.
“Space is big, Malcolm. Even local interplanetary space. That fact alone will go a long way toward hiding us.” Just as it hid whole Romulan fleets at Deneva and Berengaria, Archer thought. And at Altair, until it was almost too late.
Apparently satisfied by Archer’s reassurances, Reed lapsed once more into a nervous but companionable silence. The resumption of the quiet allowed Archer to focus his thoughts inward as the distance gauges on his pilot’s console began monitoring and reporting each milestone the shuttlepod reached: the equivalents of the relative distances from Sol of the orbits of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, the asteroid belt, and Mars, with the shuttlepod maintaining an off-the-ecliptic trajectory that kept the vessel well away from any planet, minor planet, or asteroid.
The whole passage took nearly twenty-two hours, so Archer and Reed took turns. The captain was relieved at how uneventfully the time passed, though the back of his brain—not to mention the little hairs on the back of his neck—were increasingly charged with tension as Earth grew steadily nearer until the blue world of his birth looked close enough to touch right through the forward windows.
“We did it!” Reed said, grinning from ear to ear.
“Congratulations, Malcolm,” Archer said, not wanting to risk jinxing this success by saying anything cocky while they were still in the home stretch.
A red alarm indicator suddenly began flashing on his console, telling him that it might already be too late to avoid the wages of cockiness. The gods must have been listening.
“Incoming,” Archer said, still studying at his console. “Four vessels. Tactical alert.”
Malcolm nodded. “Powering up weapons system. Armed and ready.”
A moment later, two of the bogeys appeared in the shuttlepod’s forward window, approaching swiftly from behind the western limb of the planet. Though still distant, Archer could see that both possessed the spherical forward sections that clearly identified them as Daedalus-class vessels. The third and fourth bogeys rose together perhaps three seconds later, rising out of the darkness that lay beyond the eastern limb. One of them quickly resolved itself into the sleek, flat profile of an Intrepid-class starship.
The fourth ship bore the unmistakable profile of the NX-class.
Columbia.
With a grin, Archer touched the fire control panel to his right, enabling the launch switch.
“Essex, Archon, Intrepid, and Columbia are all ordering us to stand down,” Reed said, his attention held by the copilot station’s comm indicators. “They’re all powering up their phase cannons. Getting ready for a crossfire.”
So Uttan, Bryce, Carlos, and Erika had made it to the party after all, after having been caught with their pants down; had they detected the shuttlepod even a few minutes earlier, they would have had time to surround him significantly farther away from Earth. Shuttlepod One had obviously surprised them, sent them scrambling.
“Too late,” Archer murmured. Quietly savoring a moment of triumph over his peers, he gave the “launch” button a firm tap. The shuttlepod rumbled as the inert payload in its belly exited at multimach speed, on a straight-line, perpendicular course for Earth.
The captain watched the descending payload sprout a rooster tail of yellow-orange plasma as it began to burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere. Columbia and Intrepid chased after it, phase cannons blazing.
Then the pulse cannons of Archon and Essex struck the shuttlepod in tandem, ringing her hull like a bell.
San Francisco, Earth
The debriefing that followed at Starfleet Headquarters went pretty much as Archer had expected. After unanimously (if reluctantly) awarding the war game’s kill to Enterprise, Admirals Black and Gardner expressed both gratitude and chagrin at having had such a gaping vulnerability in Earth’s defenses pointed out to them. Though he never mentioned it, Archer sympathized with the admirals. They must have felt at least as foolish as he did never to have imagined before that the raptorlike Romulan ships had no warp capability; the success of Reed’s penetration of the security grid confirmed this hypothesis as the only plausible explanation for the Romulan sneak attacks.
But now that Starfleet Command clearly understood both the extent and the likely cause of its vulnerability—one that had apparently afflicted all Coalition worlds and their colonies from the outset—one critical question remained unanswered: Could Starfleet find a way to neutralize this vulnerability before the Romulans made effective use of it here in the Coalition’s very heart?
Captain Archer could not avoid worrying that a Romulan mother ship might be lurking deep in the weeds of this system’s Kuiper belt even now, just beyond the ability of the grid to detect. At any moment Earth could be facing a large, virtually undetectable armada of small but lethal sublight fighter craft. Archer could only hope that the number of vessels would make them vulnerable to early detection. But space was big; it could hide a multitude of ships, perhaps until it was too late.
On his way to an informal dinner with his peers at the Lotus Blossom restaurant, Archer’s mind continually revisited his concerns. With his tactical officer at his side, the captain passed through the restaurant’s familiar glass doors about thirty minutes late. The establishment’s diminutive and impeccably dressed Asian maître d’, Tommy, delivered his customary enthusiastic greeting and conducted the two newcomers to the large private dining space at the rear. Four of Archer’s fellow Starfleet captains were already seated around a large table, where they were sharing a platter of steaming Chinese dumplings, two pitchers of beer, and a large decanter of wine.
“Congratulations, Jonathan,” Erika Hernandez said, rising from her chair and shaking Archer’s hand firmly before helping her colleagues to make room at the
table for both Enterprise officers.
“Thanks, but the credit really ought to go to my tactical officer,” Archer said, gesturing toward Malcolm Reed, who now stood a couple of paces behind him, as though intimidated by the rare concentration of captain’s pips clustered around the table.
Erika grinned as she greeted Malcolm, and then introduced the other three captains to him. Captain Uttan Narsu of the Archon offered his own smiling congratulations on a job well done, as did Captain Bryce Shumar of the Essex. Captain Carlos Ramirez of the Intrepid wore a wry half-smile, as though laughing at some private joke.
“Jonathan, do you have any idea how close I came to scattering that faux-tonic torpedo of yours before it made it into the lower atmosphere?” Ramirez said.
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise) Page 34
