Only this time, the admiral had not summoned him.
McEvoy tried to draw strength from the agitated murmuring that lingered in his ears, thanks to the angry crowd—a commonplace these days—that had gathered beyond the security perimeter of Starfleet Headquarters. Although the thickness of the walls precluded his actually hearing anything from outside, he imagined he could still hear the chants, the imprecations, the pleas.
People were becoming desperate for Starfleet to get off its collective brass and finally do something about the Romulans, and McEvoy could hardly blame them.
As his uniformed chaperones conducted him into the plushly carpeted office of Admiral Gregory Logan Black, the editor thought, If this jackbooted fascist expects me to tug my forelock and beg his forbearance, then he’s got another goddamned thing coming.
But Black, his back to the door as McEvoy entered, looked anything but imposing as he turned around and dismissed the security people.
“Drink?” he said, offering McEvoy one of the two glasses he carried.
“I’m not thirsty.”
Black shrugged, and then set both glasses down on his desktop. “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward the hard-backed chair before the desk as he took the taller, more lavishly upholstered seat behind it.
McEvoy folded his arms across his chest. “I prefer to stand.”
Another shrug. “Suit yourself, Mac. Now what can I do for you?”
“You know damned well why I’m here, Admiral.”
“Of course I do, Mister McEvoy.” Black’s earlier pretense of being a gregarious host, much less an old college friend, abruptly vanished. “And I’d think you might approach me with a bit more politeness, given that I didn’t owe you a return call, much less an unscheduled face-to-face meeting.”
“This isn’t about my manners, Admiral,” McEvoy said. “You know damned well you owe me an explanation.” You owe everybody on the whole damned planet an explanation, he thought, now beginning to regret having agreed to treat this meeting as off the record as a precondition for even having it.
Black nodded and leaned back in his chair, his earlier fit of pique appearing to extinguish itself in the drink into which he had begun staring. McEvoy began to wonder if the explanation he had demanded was actually forthcoming.
But after a pregnant pause, Black said, “There’s a crucial distinction between freedom and license, Mister McEvoy.”
“And you obviously believe that Newstime can’t tell the difference,” McEvoy said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have suddenly pulled all of my people’s credentials.”
“I didn’t ‘pull’ them,” Black said. “The reporters holding those credentials are being given detailed security and background checks. It’s an unfortunate wartime necessity. If everything goes smoothly, it should all be cleared up in a few weeks.”
“This is outrageous! Freedom of the press is fundamental to both the United Earth Constitution and the Coalition Compact!”
“But not the freedom to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. Besides, I didn’t suspend all of your reporters’ credentials. Caen passed muster right away.”
“Caen only writes about food, wine, and celebrity gossip, Admiral. But I suppose those things are a lot less troublesome for you than topics like the Romulan raid on Beta Hydri IV.”
“Every battle in this war is a potential hornet’s nest on the home front. Gannet Brooks has been stirring up too many of those, going back to the Romulan-Andorian skirmish at Threllvia and even earlier than that. In my judgment, she’s posing a threat to domestic security.”
McEvoy found what he was hearing infuriating, though not at all surprising. “Whatever danger you might see coming from Gannet’s editorializing, I can assure you that public ignorance will do a hell of a lot more harm in the long run.”
A smile spread across the admiral’s face. “And I assure you, that’s the last thing Starfleet wants to bring about. As I said, if everything goes smoothly, all this business with the reporter credentials and the security reviews should be cleared up in a few weeks.”
“And exactly how does Starfleet define ‘smoothly’?” McEvoy asked, not impressed in the least by the smile, which vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
“Put a leash on your dog, Brooks,” Black said. “That would go a long way to smoothing out just about everything for Newstime.”
The implied threat, of course, was that a decision to do anything else would ensure that life would be anything but smooth for Newstime.
“Do you really expect Gannet Brooks to come running obediently home if I were to recall her?” McEvoy said. “I don’t think she’d cooperate if I tried to put her on the sports beat, or gave her the gardening section.”
Black shrugged again. “Starfleet has both the ability and the authority to greatly curtail the dissemination of her subspace broadcasts. I don’t think she’d enjoy essentially talking to herself out there on the ragged edge of the war. Wouldn’t she find it in her... professional self-interest to try to take a more cooperative tack?”
“Cooperative. Are you asking Newstime to become a propaganda service for Starfleet?”
“Of course not,” Black said, actually looking offended. “But seeing as the survival of her own species is at stake, does she really need to portray our war effort as so... ineffectual?”
McEvoy considered commenting that the objective truth of Starfleet’s efficacy was largely up to Starfleet, but decided against it. Though he felt no less violated now than he had before, he had to admit that he could see the admiral’s last point—just as he could see he wasn’t going to budge Starfleet on this, the purity of his journalistic ethics notwithstanding.
“All right. I’ll ask her to be a little more... moderate in her criticism,” McEvoy said at length. “Would that make things go more smoothly on the background checks?”
Black grinned, then rose from behind his desk. “It certainly couldn’t hurt.”
McEvoy nodded, though he couldn’t bring himself to offer a “thank you.” When the admiral extended his hand, he turned without waiting to be dismissed and found his own way to the door.
I can try to put Gannet Brooks on a leash for you, Admiral, he thought. But I can’t guarantee she won’t leave an unwelcome surprise or two on your lawn.
FORTY-NINE
Yorktown, Zeta 2 Reticuli
I GUESS I REALLY have become a “bad-luck charm” since my Enterprise days, Travis Mayweather thought as he surveyed the correspondences on his padd.
The bulbous primary hull of the Yorktown gleamed like a crescent moon outside the wide observation windows that ringed the repair and shore-leave facility’s public gallery. The place was all but deserted at this hour of the local night, which made it an excellent place of refuge whenever Mayweather wasn’t busy doing his part in the Yorktown’s post-battle repair efforts.
His solitude here was far more complete than what his shipboard quarters would have afforded him; he never seemed to have that limited space all to himself, even for a few precious hours. As Mayweather sat alone in his booth looking over his transfer applications in the Yorktown’s shadow, he wondered if his latest batch of shipmates hadn’t simply given him a wide berth here after making a collective decision—consciously or not—that he was a latter-day Jonah, a magnet for trouble. As absurd as it sounded, he’d heard enough scuttlebutt over the past few days to convince him that a substantial percentage of the Yorktown’s crew was spooked enough by the war to take this whole “bad-luck charm” business seriously.
And why? Just because I drove Jonathan Archer’s getaway car the night he abandoned the Kobayashi Maru to the slaughter. And because my hand was on the rudder when Discovery went down at Berengaria.
Rereading the stack of “thanks, but no, thanks,” replies from the XOs of the last several ships to which he had submitted transfer-application queries, he couldn’t help but wonder how far and wide this “bad-luck charm” juju had already spread. The entire Dædalus fleet see
med to have drawn the same conclusion about him, figuratively rolling up their gangways at his approach.
Just when he was beginning to believe that a veritable legion of XOs was arrayed against him, he scrolled down to a just-arrived reply to his query about a helm position aboard the recently-launched Atlantis NX-05. Admittedly, it had been one of his long shots, since NX postings were becoming rarer by the day, almost literally.
Mayweather had been accepted, apparently in the hopes that his prior experience aboard Enterprise would help expedite her newest sister ship’s current round of repairs in spacedock. He blinked in disbelief, but the text before him remained confidently in place. He grinned, delighted as much by the chance to rehabilitate his unfairly smeared reputation as he was by another opportunity to fly one of the fleet’s best and fastest vessels. His only regret was having to break the news of his decision to Captain Shosetsu, who had always treated him with decency and fairness. Shosetsu might actually have a serious problem with Mayweather’s decision to leave. But if he did, Mayweather was confident that Commander Mendez would get his CO on board with it in fairly short order.
The Yorktown’s exec had never seemed reticent about disposing of “bad-luck charms,” particularly when they were asking to be sent elsewhere.
FIFTY
Sunday, March 14, 2156
Heliopolis, Achernar II
THANKS TO EARTH’S NEWS MEDIA, Tucker had already seen images of the slow, chaotic exodus from the planet’s main human-inhabited city. But it wasn’t until he actually saw it from space that he realized that it was visible from space.
“The people down there must be terrified,” he said in a not-quite-Vulcan turn of phrase as he swiveled in his copilot’s chair toward Ych’a, who was running the conn panel while simultaneously checking and rechecking the functions on at least two other consoles. Posing as Sodok the trader, Trip had assisted her in checking out the small Tellarite shuttle’s vital systems during the hour or so prior to their purchasing it yesterday at the central Heliopolis spaceport.
“Those people chose to build a city deep inside territory controlled by a deadly and deeply paranoid society,” Tevik said from the portside communications console he was quietly monitoring. “It seems... illogical that the humans here have grown concerned about the possible consequences of their folly only now.”
Tevik’s tone sounded cold-blooded, even for a Vulcan, and his reference to logic seemed particularly alien, at least coming from him. Trip knew his uncomfortable awareness was because Tevik of Vulcan was actually Terix of the Romulan Star Empire. Trip still half-expected the man to call the planet below Atlai’fehill Kre, rather than Achernar II. And as that azure world continued its steady retreat from the shuttle’s belly, he found himself idly wishing to head in the same direction as Achernar II’s departing human citizenry.
But the constellations visible through the forward windows consisted largely of stars that lay ever deeper inside territory controlled— and presumably jealously patrolled—by the Romulans. Inside of an hour, one of those stars became much brighter, growing swiftly from a distant pinpoint lost among a myriad of others to a small disk, a foreground object that continued to increase sharply in size as the little shuttle approached. Trip and Terix darkened the shuttle, damping down its power in order to make it as undetectable as possible to whoever might be watching them approach.
A sensor alarm on Trip’s console began to issue a chorus of frantic bleeps and rhythmic flashes of light.
“What was that?” Ych’a asked.
Trip shrugged. “Not sure yet. Sensors picked up a flash of hull metal for a moment, then it vanished.”
“Curious,” Tevik said.
Ych’a did not seem impressed. “Not really. It could be an artifact of solar radiation interacting with local dust particles.”
“A sensor ghost,” Tevik said.
“Precisely,” Ych’a said, nodding.
“Maybe,” Trip said. “Or there might be another ship out here trying to keep a low profile, just the way we are.”
Much to Trip’s relief, no more sensor ghosts—or half-hidden ships— appeared for the duration of their approach.
“You weren’t kidding when you said the Romulans put the shipyard close to Achernar,” Trip said as he helped Ych’a bring the shuttle into as close a parking orbit as they dared and began making passive scans. The vast open spaces Trip detected inside the spherical, three-kilometer-wide duranium structure did indeed appear to be ideal for hangaring spacecraft, especially those that needed to be concealed. “But it seems strange to leave it out here without a lot of obvious protection.”
“Such protection might tend to call undue attention to the facility,” Tevik said. “The Romulans do not like to call attention to that which they prefer to keep hidden.”
Nodding, Ych’a added, “The brightness and hard radiation from this system’s primary star does a great deal to obscure its presence— unless, of course, one has spent months obtaining intelligence indicating the precise place to look.”
“Of course,” Trip said. “So... are we just gonna beam right inside, or what?”
No more than five minutes later, and much to Trip’s amazement, he, Terix, and Ych’a had not only done just that, but were standing in a small, pressurized observation chamber that provided a spectacular bird’s-eye view of the two mighty starships that floated near the center of the main hangar, surrounded by several small, inactive work-drone shuttlecraft. Although the two main craft floated in weightless freefall with the rest of the facility, they were also connected to it—and to its presently invisible central power generation system—by a complex bird’s nest of delicate scaffolding, conduits, and umbilical lines.
“Welcome to the Atlai’fehill Stelai complex,” Tevik said, his unaccented pronunciation of the Romulan place name sending a cold shiver through Trip’s nervous system. “That’s the Romulan name for this place.”
Trip returned his attention to the two vessels before and below them, both of which were illuminated only dimly in what Ych’a soon confirmed was night on the Romulans’ watch. They could have run duty shifts around the clock in perpetually simulated daylight, but the Romulans must have deemed it healthier for long-term deep-space crews to maintain a normal diurnal rhythm. Still, it seemed odd that there wasn’t at least a skeleton crew working.
The farthest away but most prominent of the two ships was a Vulcan military vessel whose dominant feature was its hoop-shaped outboard warp drive, through which the long, narrow, tapering crew compartment passed like a spear. Sh’Raan-class, Trip thought, impressed despite all the times he had compared the signature Vulcan design to a flying lampshade. The thing dwarfed even Enterprise. And she’s capable of warp six-point-five, at least. The Romulans must have grabbed her last year at Alpha Centauri, before the Vulcans pulled out of the fight.
It occurred to Trip that the loss of that one ship might well have represented much of the reason for Vulcan’s withdrawal; risk-averse by nature, the Vulcans would not have wanted to allow the Romulans any further opportunities to co-opt their technology.
Looks like that genie might already be out of the bottle, though, Trip thought as his gaze drifted down the Vulcan ship’s nacelle-hoop and down to the second, though nearer, vessel. A kind of bastard offspring of the larger Sh’Raan-type ship it floated beside, it bore the sleek lines and backswept, delta-wing nacelle configuration that he’d seen several times already in the V’Shar intel files—not to mention in the electronic notes and hand-rendered drawings made by the slain Romulan scientific eminence, Doctor Ehrehin i’Ramnau tr’Avrak.
There could be no mistaking it for anything other than what it obviously was—the Romulan Star Empire’s prototype warp-seven starship.
Which left Trip with one very immediate worry—a reprise of his concern about the lack of a night crew. “Why doesn’t anyone seem to be keeping watch over this place?”
“Never assume the Romulans are being lax in their security proce
dures, Sodok,” Tevik said as he hefted the massive toolbox that Trip knew held a good deal more than spanners and scanners.
“Romulan security is exactly what concerns me right now, Tevik,” Trip said, trying with only indifferent success to keep his voice level.
“My sources tell me that the Romulans have recently developed priorities other than security redundancies,” Ych’a said. “Nevertheless, I would recommend caution.”
Sound advice, Trip thought as he pulled out his scanner and began searching out a means of accessing some of the larger umbilicals that connected both ships to the rest of the facility.
FIFTY-ONE
Bird-of-Prey Terrh’Dhael
Haakona
THE FLEET HAS far more urgent duties to attend to than adventures such as this, Commander T’Met er-Iuruth t’Hveinn thought, her eyes fixed upon the gold-and-amber disk that was slowly expanding on the command deck’s central viewer. This is a waste of time and resources that would best be deployed elsewhere.
Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise) Page 42
