by KATHY OLTION
The Enterprise swooped into warp drive. Sulu guided the ship around the planet in a precalculated arc, bringing them out just a thousand kilometers above the surface and directly in the path of the oncoming laser. There was nothing to be seen yet, of course, not in visual wavelengths, but Spock was ready with his modified sensors and he instantly took a reading. “Forty-five seconds to impact,” he said.
Forty-five light-seconds ahead of them, a patch of the laser beam quantum-shifted into neutrinos, then a tenth of a second later shifted back to photons. At least Kirk hoped it had. If it hadn’t, everyone was in deep trouble.
Thomsen quickly checked the Enterprise’s location with respect to optical beacons on the ground, and Sulu flew them the few hundred kilometers it took to put them directly over Buena Vista.
“Other ships are taking up position,” Uhura said. Kirk wished he could see what was going on on the other side of the planet, but without subspace sensors, he was blind. That worked both ways, though; so were the Kauld. From their point of view, the Enterprise and most of her support ships had just fled the battle; even if Vellyngaith had stationed observers on this side of Belle Terre—a suicidal proposition—they would never spot the Federation ships against the night side of the planet. And the remaining ships were still fighting, leading the Kauld into a tight knot between Belle Terre and the moon while their captains counted down the last few seconds.
“Ten.” Spock said. “Deflectors on line. Five. Four. Three. Two. Now.” He hit the manual override button in the same instant that the computer triggered the enhanced sensor beam.
Kirk held his breath. Enough energy to vaporize him was pouring right through his body, but neutrinos reacted so poorly with normal matter that all but the tiniest fraction of them passed right through—and right through the planet as well. There would have been no sign that anything at all was happening if the Enterprise hadn’t salted the beam front with its impulse drive exhaust four days earlier; but those ions were still being pushed along by the front of the beam, and they hadn’t turned into neutrinos. They had been accelerated almost to light speed, but not quite; they lagged behind by a couple of seconds, just long enough to let the crew begin exhaling before a sudden wall of gas slammed into the Enterprise, rocking it backward.
Involuntary screams echoed around the bridge.
“Keep station!” Kirk ordered, and Sulu brought them back into position again.
The night side of Belle Terre momentarily lit up as the gas layer struck the atmosphere, and the ground sparked in places as sections of the laser beam slipped past the suddenly jostled ships, but the light show only lasted a moment. A few thousand square kilometers had just gotten cooked, but it had been nothing like what the full force of the beam would have done.
Kirk imagined what was happening on the other side of the planet. The neutrinos, about a third of the way between planet and moon, would turn back into photons, which would slam at full intensity into the remains of the Kauld fleet, who would have stayed put, thinking they would be safe in the shadow of the planet.
That mental picture burst like a balloon when Uhura said, “Shipboard spotters report Kauld vessels appearing ten to fifteen thousand kilometers to the side of the beam.”
“They jumped away,” Kirk growled.
“Some of them did,” Uhura said. “We’re only spotting about half of the ones we left behind, and most of those are badly burned.”
“Good.” They were well outside the path of the laser beam, he noted, but they must be curious as hell about why it was cooking the moon on the other side of the planet and not even in evidence on this side. Let ’em wonder.
Kirk realized that Spock was tapping furiously at his controls and speaking softly on a private channel to engineering. He turned toward the science station. “Spock, is there a problem?”
“I am detecting a 12 percent variation in output power,” the Vulcan replied. “I believe the emitter might have been damaged in the battle.”
Before Kirk could say anything about that, Sulu yelled, “Incoming ships!”
“On screen!” Kirk ordered.
The main viewscreen lit up with the view from Sulu’s console. On it, three Kauld warships, including one of the new ones, were rushing toward the Federation fleet.
“All ships hold your positions!” Kirk warned. If anyone turned to fight, they would be instantly cooked by the laser beam. They could, on the other hand, narrow the beam they were emitting. . . .
Just as the lead Kauld ship approached within firing range of the Federation ship closest to it, that ship, the privateer Zavada, shifted its deflector a few degrees inward. In an instant, the Kauld ship flared brilliant white, then exploded in a shower of melting fragments. It had been just outside the diameter of the planet; the Zavada’s maneuver hadn’t even exposed the surface to the laser.
The other two Kauld ships veered away, but another one from farther out rushed toward the planet, ducking in low and flying beneath the Federation shield before anyone could maneuver to burn him.
“Aft phasers,” Kirk ordered. “All ships concentrate fire on that intruder!”
Two dozen phasers lanced out toward the ship, but without active sensor guidance to lock them on target, only a few hit. The enemy ship snapped off a shot at the Enterprise that rocked them sideways, but the shields held.
“Spock, can you angle our deflector to burn that guy?”
“Not at the moment,” Spock replied. “Mr. Scott and I are currently having difficulty maintaining emissions at all. If we try to alter the beam, we could destabilize the tuning to the point where the entire system goes down.”
Yeow. Kirk felt his heart skip a beat at that news. The deflector had to work for over twenty-one minutes. If it was starting to flake out on them now, they were in big trouble.
The Kauld ship fired again at the Enterprise, but three more phaser beams caught it in a crossfire and it veered away before it could do more damage. The phasers didn’t destroy it, though, and its success encouraged others to follow it. Soon there were five Kauld ships darting around beneath them, including the new olivium-powered one that had attempted to cross into the beam’s path moments before.
Things were getting dicey fast. The Federation ships were sitting ducks; they couldn’t budge without letting major sections of the planet burn, and without mobility their fighting capability was severely limited.
“Where are those damned reserve ships?” Kirk demanded. Had they been caught in the beam?
“Unknown,” Uhura replied, “but our spotters report twenty more Kauld vessels coming out of warp.”
“What? Where did they come from?” The entire Kauld fleet had been committed to the battle. Unless Vellyngaith had held some ships in reserve even from the war games, the ones they had been fighting were the only ones the Kauld had.
Disruptor beams lanced into the fray, but they were aimed at the Kauld ships, not the Federation defenders.
“Disruptor patterns indicate Blood vessels, not Kauld,” Spock said. A moment later the viewscreen image swirled around to show twenty ships accelerating hard toward them, and twenty immense cargo containers tumbling free in space behind them.
“Shucorion,” Kirk whispered. “That son of a bitch used warships to haul the cargo hulls.” He had never been so glad to see an order disobeyed in his life.
Two of the Kauld ships flared and died under the assault. The others blinked out under warp drive, then Uhura said, “We’re being hailed.”
“Put him on.”
Shucorion’s smiling face filled a quarter of the viewscreen, while the tactical display remained in place around him. “Greetings, captain,” the Blood leader said. “My apologies for shooting first and asking questions later, but it looked as if you were in trouble there. May I ask why your ships are all facing away from the obvious danger?”
“Because we’re stopping an even worse one from overhead,” Kirk replied. “Whatever you do, don’t send any of your ships out beyond our cordon.
”
“Why not? I see no danger there.”
Just then, the Kauld supership warped back into position and fired a full disruptor barrage at the Zavada. The ship’s shields went down almost instantly, and a moment later the ship itself exploded. There was barely time to blink at the flash before the scene grew brighter still: the section of laser it had been converting blasted through its space unchanged, vaporizing the fragments of starship and slamming into the planet below.
The Zavada had been over ocean. Instantly, huge gouts of steam rose up off the water as the surface boiled. The white vapor scattered the beam in all directions, but the lion’s share of its energy punched right through. In a few seconds, it would spawn major hurricanes; a few more seconds would change the global climate for years to come.
“All ships, increase power and close up that gap!” Kirk ordered. They had planned for this contingency. There was a little bit of overlap in deflector coverage; now the defenders shifted sideways until that overlap was all but gone, but the combined extension of range was enough to cover the area that had been the Zavada’s. The laser light blinked out again, and the ocean below ceased boiling.
“You’ve convinced me,” Shucorion said. “We’ll stay well clear of that!”
“Take a look on the other side of the planet,” Kirk said. “Something has happened to our support ships over there.”
“We’ll check into it,” Shucorion said: His fleet peeled away, and another video image sprang into place on the main screen as he relayed what his scouts saw: the olivium moon glowing like a magnesium torch under the brunt of the laser, and dozens of tiny specks of light milling around in its starkly defined shadow. Aggressors and defenders had both taken refuge there when the laser hit, and like bugs in a jar, they were fighting one another to the death.
The Blood ships moved closer, cautiously testing the space ahead of them with probes until they found the edge of the laser beam, then they parked just beyond it and opened fire on the Kauld.
Hit from two sides, the Kauld ships were immediately overpowered. Four of them flared and died, and the rest turned and ran. About half of them—including Vellyngaith’s flagship—warped away, but the rest used impulse power to flee down the long column of shadow. Their warp nacelles had evidently been damaged in battle or by the beam.
“Let them go,” Kirk said. If they couldn’t warp out, they would be easy to catch later. It might even be possible to capture them intact.
But Shucorion wasn’t interested in that. His ships kept pounding the Kauld, blasting one after another as they attempted to flee. One veered sideways out of the shadow and instantly flashed into vapor in the laser beam.
“That’s enough!” Kirk ordered. “Let them go!”
Shucorion shook his head. “This is my fight,” he said. “I will do it my way.”
“Damn it, that’s not—” Kirk began, but Spock’s voice stopped him cold.
“Captain, we have a problem.”
Chapter Thirty-three
SPOCK WAS keenly aware of the battle raging around him. and he knew he could probably be of considerable use in a tactical capacity, but he was already fighting a battle with equally serious consequences entirely on board the ship. Something was wrong with the modified sensor army. Power levels were fluctuating, and worse, the signal from the various antenna elements was drifting in and out of phase. Twice the condition had reached the critical point where the photon/neutrino transmutation effect became unstable, and twice he—and Mr. Scott down in engineering—had pulled it back into operational parameters with only moments to spare. Their fixes were only temporary; the oscillations were starting up again, and this time they were building faster than before.
“We are treating the symptoms,” he said on his private link to engineering, speaking softly so he wouldn’t interfere with the bridge activity around him. “We must find the source of the problem and fix it if we expect the deflector to last another fifteen minutes.”
“We’re tryin’ to!” Scott answered. “I’ve got people checkin’ every circuit between here and the deflector dish, but we’re not finding anything wrong. The problem’s outside.”
“Then you must go outside to fix it.”
“Do you have any idea how much energy is pouring through that dish?” Scott asked.
Spock consulted his data displays. “At the moment, 14.6 megawatts, but that is diminishing at an alarming rate. In another 2.5 minutes, the power level will drop below the critical threshold, and we will begin receiving a thousand times that much energy in the form of laser radiation.”
“Aye, I can see that,” Mr. Scott said. “We’ll have to go outside, all right, but we can’t do that with the antenna active. We’ll have to close up the gap and drop out of formation while we shut ’er down and replace the Klystrons.”
Spock tried to think of another way, but after a full ten seconds he came up blank. “You are correct. Prepare for EVA.” He looked up at the captain, who was busy arguing with Shucorion. There was no time to spare; he interrupted Kirk in midsentence and said, “Captain, we have a problem.”
The captain gave him his full attention. “What is it, Spock?”
“We must stand down and make repairs to the deflector array.”
“Stand down? We can’t just duck out for repairs. We’re shielding Buena Vista!”
“The other ships will have to cover for us. I estimate our down time at no more than three minutes, but if we don’t make the repair, we will suffer systems failure before half the beam is past.”
Kirk didn’t waste time arguing. “All ships,” he ordered, “Increase power again and shift to cover the Enterprise’s position.”
In the exterior view, Spock could see the other ships moving into new positions. He calculated their deflector paths based on their design parameters, and the moment they overlapped, he shut down the Enterprise’s array and said to Mr. Scott, “We are covered. Commence your repairs.”
“Aye, here goes.”
Spock noted transporter activity on the ship’s status monitor. Good; Mr. Scott was wasting no time. It was risky during Gamma Night, but it would probably work over such a short distance. Radio wouldn’t, though. From outside the ship there would be no progress reports. Spock directed an outer hull camera down at the deflector and zoomed in until he could see four space-suited figures around the central emitter housing. They didn’t bother with the bolts. One of them merely phasered the housing loose and flung it out into space, then all four people leaped upon the Klystrons and began ripping them loose, replacing them with new units that continuously beamed into easy reach beside them.
Then the figures backed away, and a second later they vanished in a sparkle of the transporter beam.
Spock immediately powered the array back up, noting with satisfaction that the phase instability was much less prominent. “That seems to have done it,” he said.
“Good,” replied Mr. Scott. “Now let’s get back into place and finish the job.”
“Agreed.” Spock relayed the message to the captain, and within seconds they were back on the front line.
“Time?” Kirk asked.
Spock directed the computer to answer. “Ten minutes twenty-four seconds to laser terminus.”
They were just under halfway into the beam. Even to Spock, whose time sense was exquisitely accurate, this ordeal had already felt like forever.
He checked his monitors again. “I read a 15.21 percent increase in power. However the focus is not optimal.”
“I’m on it,” Scotty said.
Suddenly the Enterprise lurched, throwing everyone on the bridge from their chairs. Spock grabbed the edge of the console before him and managed to keep upright. He helped Uhura back to her chair, then returned to his station.
“Report!” Kirk ordered as he got up from the floor.
Uhura listened for a moment to her intraship monitor, then said, “We took a hit portside from a Kauld disruptor. It looks like Shucorion must have missed on
e.”
“Shields down twenty-five percent,” Sulu said.
“Compensating,” Spock said, trading precious energy from the deflector array. They could spare what Mr. Scott had just gained.
Uhura said, “Minor damage restricted to decks seven through nine. No injuries reported.”
“Find that Kauld ship,” Kirk ordered. “Knock him out before he hits us again.”
Shucorion’s face vanished off the screen as the tactical display expanded to fill the entire space. It was hard to spot the Kauld against the dark planet below, but the moment they fired again, a streak of red light pointed straight at them. Sulu was ready for them; he swiveled the Enterprise’s phasers to the source of the beam and fired at full power. Two other ships did the same, and the night lit up momentarily as the Kauld ship detonated in a bright flash.
“Eight minutes to laser terminus,” the computer said.
Spock checked his monitors again. “Deflector efficiency has dropped to ninety-two percent.”
“I’ll have to recalibrate it, but it’ll continue to drop until I’m finished,” Scotty warned.
“Understood. I’ll boost the power input for the duration.”
“Shields down thirty percent,” Sulu reported as he did so.
Kirk said, “Thomsen, start routing power from auxiliary sources. We’ve got to keep both our shields and our deflector going on max.”
“Yes, sir.”
Spook could feel the humans’ anxiety as everyone watched the tactical display for enemy ships. Without their usual sensors, they were clearly distressed, worried about sneak attacks. He wondered if that was an instinctive response to the unknown, learned when their kind huddled in caves at night to avoid nocturnal predators, or if, like him, theirs was an intellectual fear based on a logical assessment of their danger.
