STAR TREK®: NEW EARTH - THE FLAMING ARROW

by KATHY OLTION

  No, whatever the disruptor was supposed to shoot at after it leveled the comet’s face, it would be on this side. Except that there was only one thing within range: the long stream of carbon dioxide ice they had been sending in-system.

  The disruptor beam would vaporize that in an instant. He could see no good reason to do that. It wasn’t like it would explode or anything; it would just become an expanding column of carbon dioxide vapor.

  Aimed right at the Federation colony planet.

  With an optically flat surface at one end.

  An ugly suspicion began to grow in his mind. He’d seen the barrels of silver paint waiting beside the tool locker. He was willing to bet that their next job would be to spray the face of the comet with it.

  “Hey,” Terwolan said. “I’m standing here.”

  “Hmm?” He looked down, disoriented.

  “You want to call out the shot?”

  The shot. Holy father of terror, the shot.

  Chapter Eight

  “GET READY, DOCTOR,” Scotty said as he reached for the tug’s warp controls. “This may be a wee bit rougher than you’re used to.”

  “How rough?” McCoy asked, his eyes narrowing and wrinkles appearing in his forehead. He was seated in the copilot’s chair before the wraparound control board, but he was studiously avoiding contact with anything vital. Scotty was happy to see that; after all the modifications he’d done to this pile of scrap, piloting it was going to be tricky enough without conflicting commands from an inexperienced copilot.

  “I’d lean back in my chair if I were you,” he said. “At least until the inertial dampers adapt to the engines’ new performance figures.”

  McCoy didn’t look happy about that. He apparently knew enough about engineering to know what could happen if the inertial dampers were off by more than a few hundredths of a percent when a ship went into warp. Even his superb medical skills couldn’t help a person who was smeared into strawberry jam against the rear bulkhead.

  “Wait a minute,” the doctor said. “I think I forgot my razor back on the Enterprise. Why don’t I go get it while you make a test flight or two?”

  Scotty looked at him askance. “You can borrow mine. Hang on, here we go.” He shoved the lever forward, feeling the electrical contacts connect with the smooth swish of copper sliding on copper.

  Hard wiring, he thought. What have I gotten myself into? All the same, he felt a thrill as the tug responded and leaped into warp. True to his warning, the little ship shimmied and bucked like a targ on a tether. He glanced up at the viewscreen and saw not the normal smooth, straight streaks of hyperspace shooting past them, but an insane jumble of bright zigzags. The small control cabin creaked and groaned as engines designed to haul huge cargo containers from star to star poured all their power into just the tug.

  That alone would have made for a bumpy ride, since Scotty had stripped the tug down to the bare minimum, leaving practically no inertial mass to smooth things out when spatial anomalies influenced the warp field; but he had made one other modification to the craft that affected it even more. The engines normally ran on antimatter, but antimatter was in short supply this far from civilization. There was, however, a lot of quantum olivium just waiting for a good home, and that was even more powerful than antimatter. Where antimatter merely released its energy by annihilation with normal matter, quantum olivium catalyzed the annihilation of space itself. It was like having a miniature Big Bang continually erupting inside your containment field.

  He hoped it would stay inside the containment field. That was the tricky part.

  Squinting to read the blurry displays, he adjusted the Schofield converters to route more power into the field generating coils.

  After the longest eight seconds in history, the inertial dampers’ active logic matrix finally adapted to the new thrust parameters, and with a last swift kick in the rear as the new program took effect, the buffeting settled down. Scotty called up the status monitors and double checked the ship’s major systems. Navigation, communications, shields, and what weapons arrays they had were all optimal. The external sensors needed calibration, and the autogalley had gone off-line during the ride, but other than that they were in the green.

  “Hah! Not bad for a derelict old can of bolts, don’t ye think, Doctor? Doctor?”

  He turned to see Dr. McCoy taking deep breaths and slowly releasing his grip, finger by finger, from the worn armrests of the copilot’s chair. His eyes were wide, and his eyebrows were knotted together over the bridge of his nose. “Not bad? I just saw my whole life flash before my eyes.”

  “Really?” Scotty made a show of checking the readouts. “Must ha’ been a leak in the chroniton flux generators.”

  McCoy eyed him stonily. “There’s no such thing.”

  “Ah. Well, then, that explains it.” Scotty looked at the navigation display for real. “We’re doing warp eleven point eight,” he reported happily. “At this pace, we’ll reach our first target star in less than a day.”

  “What’s the name of it?”

  “BTS 453.”

  “That’s not a name.”

  “It’s all we’ve got. It stands for ‘Belle Terre Survey’ object number 453. Spock’s been doing deep space scans when Gamma Night lets up, and this star apparently has evidence of a technological civilization on one of its planets.”

  McCoy flexed his hands. “Spock. I should have known. ‘BTS 453’ is exactly the sort of fond, endearing name he’d give a star with people living around it.”

  “We could give it our own name, I suppose,” Scotty said.

  McCoy thought it over, then shook his head. “No point in it. We’ll learn what the natives call it soon enough.”

  That was certainly true, Scotty thought with pride, but from his tone of voice, McCoy didn’t seem to appreciate just how fast they were going. At her normal cruising speed, it would have taken the Enterprise five days to cover the distance they would be covering in one. The Enterprise couldn’t even reach warp 11.8 without risking severe damage; to maintain that speed for more than a few minutes would be suicidal. This converted tug however, with its souped-up engines and tight, form-fitting little warp field, could keep it up indefinitely.

  A sudden thought made him cock his head and say, “I’ll tell you what else could use a name, though.”

  “What?”

  “This ship.”

  “Didn’t it come with one?”

  “It was called the Selenite when it was in service, but the nameplate was on a hull section we left behind, to cut down on mass. At the moment we’re just BTR 23.”

  “Let me guess. Belle Terre Reserve?”

  “Registry.”

  “Ah.” McCoy rubbed his chin and stared out at the white streaks that space debris made as it swept past them in hyperspace. “Well, it’s fast, so why don’t we just make a play off the initials and call it Beater?”

  Scotty snorted.

  “What?” asked McCoy, frowning.

  “You, ah, weren’t into garage mechanics when you were young, were you?”

  “No.”

  “A ‘beater’ is what you call something that’s worn out, held together with wire and prayers, and is generally a hazard to navigation.”

  “Weeell, then,” McCoy drawled, “it’s perfect. You just called this a ‘derelict old can of bolts,’ and I don’t know about you but I was certainly praying just a minute ago.”

  Scotty patted the bulkhead at his side. “Aye, but I was just bein’ affectionate. We don’t want to—”

  An alarm drowned him out in midsentence. He looked to the control board, saw that the plasma-flow couplings were starting to overheat, and adjusted the thermal dampers to compensate; but that overloaded the power transducer, which in turn sent a ripple of overloads through the accumulator buffers, the Heisenberg baffles, and the phase-control monitors. Half of the controls were manual; Scotty busied himself with adjusting things back into operating range, but the computer kept overcompensating
with the systems it still controlled, and the values began to oscillate back and forth as he struggled to outguess it.

  The ride grew bumpy again. “Now what?” McCoy demanded, but Scotty ignored him. He needed all his concentration on the controls. But even that wasn’t enough. The oscillations grew wilder and wilder until finally, just before the olivium reaction went critical, he slapped the emergency abort switch and yanked back on the T-handle.

  There was a stomach-wrenching twist as they tumbled back into normal space, then the buzzing alarms quieted one by one until the cockpit was silent.

  “On second thought,” Scotty said, “I think Beater suits it just fine.” He stood up and squeezed past McCoy’s chair to the access door into the tiny crew quarters and the engine room beyond. “Come on, Doctor. Let’s go see what we need to wire back into place.”

  Chapter Nine

  VELLYNGAITH, the commander of the All Kauld fleet, paused in the speech he was giving to the room full of his warship captains. They had come here at his orders, though some were less than enthusiastic about the meeting. He knew many of them were disillusioned with the way the war with the humans had gone. Several had sustained major damage to their ships and lost many fine members of their crews. But he could see that despite themselves, they were very interested in what he’d been saying. By Kurzot, they should be.

  These Federation vermin were proving tougher to dispatch than Vellyngaith had estimated. By all rights, it should have been as easy as a steeth taking out a sick zagette that had strayed too far from the herd. Obviously, this particular zagette wasn’t as lame as he had thought, but there had to be a limit. He suspected it was well below the power he was bringing to bear this time.

  The last major offensive had nearly worked, but Kirk had managed to turn the tide of battle at the last moment. The Kauld fleet had sustained tremendous damage and had ultimately been forced to withdraw, but not before seeing the colony and their Starfleet protectors suffer as well. Even so, Kirk still controlled the olivium mines on the colony planet’s moon. Every time he thought of that travesty, Vellyngaith’s blood churned and he ground his jaws in anger.

  He looked about the room and realized that every other Kauld here felt the same way. Many of those in this audience had crossed paths with that annoying human, and none of them had come away any more victorious than Vellyngaith. Kirk seemed blessed by fate, favored by the gods, and luckier than chance itself. That alone would make him an obvious target for anyone with a sense of proportion, but he also had an ego the size of the galaxy. He was just begging to be knocked down. Even if he didn’t control the most valuable prize in this sector of space—the Kauld’s sector at that—he would attract the attention of every warship commander in this room.

  He would continue to win, too, unless a radical new battle tactic were employed. One like Vellyngaith was about to unveil.

  “The humans,” he spat the word as though it tasted foul, “have had luck on their side. But it is they who are in the wrong here. It is they who have taken what is not theirs to take. It is our moral obligation to make a stand and take back what is rightfully ours.”

  The assembled captains cheered his words. He basked in their response to his pep talk. What he’d said so far was nothing that any of them hadn’t thought of on their own. Perhaps that was why they cheered, because someone of his level had underscored their own feelings. Well, the best part was still to come.

  He clasped his hands together behind his back and leaned forward. “I need not tell you how the humans have humiliated us, time and again. But I tell you now, their time has run out.”

  “What makes you so sure?” The voice was deep, resonant, and full of scorn.

  Vellyngaith spotted the heckler in the crowd. Gongalen, captain of the Sharf, sat, arms crossed and waiting for an answer. Vellyngaith recognized him as a tough Kauld with a sharp mind and a sharper tongue that often brought him more than his share of trouble, but his battle record spoke for itself. And his timing is perfect, Vellyngaith thought.

  “My sources inform me that the humans have sustained heavy losses due to severe weather on the planet. They underestimated how badly the climate was affected when the explosion on the olivium moon flash-burned the planet’s one main supercontinent. Ever since they landed, they have struggled for mere survival, but they are slowly losing the battle. For instance, they apparently parked most of their ground-to-orbit craft on low ground. Several settlements, including one of the four largest, were also in the same valley. All were completely wiped out by a flood.”

  He advanced the wall screen’s display to show reconnaissance photos of the devastation. The explosion on the moon had blown huge chunks of regolith free, some of which had impacted the planet below, creating craters that had filled with water during the torrential rains that followed. Those crater walls were highly unstable, and one had finally given way, flooding the entire valley below it within minutes.

  “This is only the latest of many natural disasters to befall them. And with every such setback, the colonists have concentrated on rebuilding their settlements rather than their defenses. We, on the other hand, have kept a low profile after our last near-win, thus adding to their false sense of security.” He paused again, letting the crowd’s anticipation grow just to the edge of annoyance before flipping the wall screen to the next sequence.

  “During this time, not only have we repaired our ships and trained new recruits, we have built another fleet.” He timed his announcement to coincide with a display of several shiny new Kauld warships.

  The commanders erupted in bedlam at the sight of such an array of ships, but a loud, grating voice cut through the others like a knife through unarmored flesh. “This is a simulation. Such a fleet would take years to build. By the time they are finished, we will have already won.” It was Yanorada, whose own plan of attack had just been triggered a few days earlier.

  Vellyngaith acknowledged his statement with a slight bow. “So we thought, which was why we approved your plan. But then we realized the flaw in our thinking. We don’t need to build a fleet of ships from scratch. We need only to fortify that which is already available to us. In reality, only three ships will see their maiden voyage. The rest are either exploration vessels, cargo transports, or mining barges that have been refitted with armor and weapons, using the newest technology available. And I do mean the newest olivium technology.”

  The murmur rose from the assembly as they digested this new piece of information. It was the reaction Vellyngaith expected. If all went well with the rest of his presentation, there would be many similar reactions from the audience. By the end of the session, he planned to have each and every one of these captains believing that he was the greatest tactician his people had ever known.

  He wasn’t there yet. Gongalen spoke up again. “Technology is only part of a successful battle. The finest ships alone cannot win if the enemy is clever. It is the Kauld behind the controls that makes the difference. The captain of a cargo ship may do his job well, but that doesn’t mean he can win a battle.” Some captains nodded, while others whispered in their neighbor’s ear.

  “I can’t agree with you more,” Vellyngaith said, regaining the floor. “Which is another reason you are all here. It will be with your input that I will issue the new promotions and assignments.”

  More murmurs and whisperings rose from the audience. This could affect them directly. Someone had to fly those pretty new ships!

  “And then there is our secret weapon.” He pressed the control that would advance the display again, at the same time saying, “Yanorada’s plan will destroy the planet’s atmosphere, but it will take time. Time we don’t have. My plan will destroy the atmosphere, wipe out the human colony, and burn the surface down to bedrock—in seconds.”

  The screen showed the planet resting serenely in space, swirls of cloud scattered across its day side, the terminator drawing a dark curve around its bulging flank. Then, without warning, the scene turned brilliant blue,
and the clouds were ripped away like leaves in a hurricane. The entire atmosphere churned, slid sideways, and streamed out into space, while the continents beneath were charred black and the exposed oceans began to boil.

  He let it go for a few more seconds, then froze the image. “None of you need to know how this will be accomplished. All you need to know is that it will happen. My weapon will wipe out the colony once and for all.”

  This time the entire room erupted in shouted questions and accusations, but Vellyngaith merely let them go on for a few seconds, then said loudly, “I stake my future upon this. It will work. But I will not risk a leak from any source, not until the . . . device . . . has already been triggered.” The room settled down, if only so people could hear him.

  He didn’t answer their questions, merely went on with his presentation. “As I said, I will wipe out the colony, and I will do it without the loss of a single Kauld ship. Unfortunately, that cannot be said of the final phase of the attack.”

  He flicked the screen to the next simulation. The Enterprise leaped toward the assembled captains, drawing a strangled cry of dismay from a few and growls of anger from the rest. Behind the Enterprise, dozens more Federation ships swooped into view, their shields shimmering around them.

  “Given enough time, our secret weapon can also burn through a starship’s shields. We may be lucky enough to kill one or two before they scurry for cover, but as I noted earlier, luck seems to favor the Federation. Therefore we will not rely on luck. We will rely on our own skill and our newly augmented fleet to finish them in ship-to-ship combat.” The simulation showed the All Kauld warships swooping around the Federation ships, whittling away at their defenses until a final barrage of disruptor fire blew them apart one by one, like the grand finale in a fireworks display. He let it run until the last ship was an expanding cloud of debris, then shut off the screen.