“How was I injured?” Nimthu asked shakily, tilting her orange-complexioned head as she tried to lever herself up with her hind arms. “I do not understand.”
Mayweather tried to break the news as gently as he could, but she struggled to comprehend what had been done to her. Once it sank in that her family had already attended her funeral, she panicked for a time, and Mayweather regretted that he couldn’t go in to hold her hand. Doctor Liao had to pipe in a sedative gas, relying on Velelev’s limited medical database for composition and dosage. “I think her mental condition can be improved with therapy, but it would have to be by people who knew what they were doing,” Liao told him as they watched Nimthu sleep restlessly, her four legs twisting into an intricate knot. “Her best bet is for us to reach her homeworld as quickly as possible.”
They traded a knowing look. The two Boomers had experience with shipboard medical crises where the only available action was to hope a patient would survive until they reached a port with suitable treatment facilities. Mayweather was grateful that, at Pioneer’s speed, the wait would be days instead of months.
“Any luck identifying our other patient?” he asked.
Liao shook her head grimly. “The Menaik have never encountered his species. And whatever that station used his cerebral cortex for, it’s badly eroded his memory engrams. If he ever does regain lucidity, I’m not sure even he’ll be able to tell us where he’s from.” The diminutive doctor shook her grizzled head. “Our best bet is to keep exploring and hope we run into his people, or someone who knows them. Good thing making new contacts is what we’re here to do anyway.”
February 25 to 27, 2165
In time, Nimthu regained enough calm and clarity to process what had happened to her, and what had been done to save her. “I cannot express my gratitude, Mister Mayweather.”
“Travis.”
“Travis. That your people would risk so much for me, a stranger. Not even your own biology.” She lowered her head. “I am most grateful to the one who died to rescue me. When I return, I will perform a ritual to consecrate his soul to the Core of Creation, for there is no body.”
“I’m sure Clifton would’ve appreciated that. Thank you.”
“But why would you risk so much for us?”
“Because I’ve been through the same thing you have.” Mayweather told her the story—embellishing it far less than he usually did, for of course her ordeal had cost her far worse than his. “I guess I had it lucky,” Mayweather said. “I was only plugged into that thing for a few hours. All I lost was my immediate memory of being abducted. Well, I couldn’t remember much about that week’s movie either, but that was probably for the best.”
Nimthu asked what a movie was, and Mayweather regaled her with descriptions of all his favorite classics, from Casablanca to Godzilla to The Day the Earth Stood Still to The Planet of the Undead. In turn, she described some of her favorite myth-plays—often struggling to remember the details and frustrated when she realized her accounts made less sense than she’d intended. But Travis told her, quite sincerely, that he found her idiosyncratic retellings more entertaining than the originals probably would have been. Menaik expressions were hard for him to read, but her laughter let him know their conversation was helping her mood. And Liao told him that prompting her to remember, even imperfectly, would help her mental recovery as well. He was very glad of that. Her fate—or that of the other, still anonymous patient in Liao’s sickbay—could have easily been his.
And thus Mayweather spent as much time visiting her in decon as his duties would allow, trading stories and helping her to remember. And comforting her, as best he could through the thick door, when the nightmares came and she awoke lost and screaming. “It’s all right,” he assured Nimthu. “You’re safe. They can’t hurt you anymore. You have my word.”
Eighty minutes later, the Ware battleship attacked.
February 27, 2165
Tobin Dax fidgeted in his seat opposite Captain Reed’s ready room desk. The human captain was determined, intense, the trim facial hair that bracketed his mouth giving him an air that the Trill engineer had always found faintly menacing. “We need to be ready,” Reed said to him and to Rey Sangupta beside him. “We don’t know how many more Ware facilities we may encounter in this space. And their technology gives them a decided advantage over us. I need you two to analyze that technology and find its weaknesses.”
“We did pretty well despite that advantage, didn’t we?” Sangupta said. “I mean, we rescued the captive, and got one more as a bonus.”
“And lost one of our own!” Reed’s gaze skewered the young science officer, whose face sagged at the reminder. “I don’t consider that an acceptable trade. The more we can anticipate the threat the Ware poses, the safer we’ll be.”
“Excuse me,” Dax ventured, as much to distract himself from the urge to bite his nails as anything else. “Wouldn’t the safest thing just be to, well, avoid them? If we just warn people to stay away, wouldn’t that be good enough? Eventually the brains they have would just . . . lose viability . . . and the stations would break down.”
“I don’t like the idea of writing off the captives that are still recoverable, Doctor. And I don’t think the races in this region would either. Once they learn the truth about the Ware, either from Captain Rethne or from us, many of them will probably want to mount rescue expeditions. And that means any losses they sustain will be partly due to our actions. Maybe it’s not our responsibility to personally rescue them all, but I’ll be damned if I don’t do all I can to give any other rescuers the best chance possible to succeed and survive.”
Dax shrunk in his seat. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, Doctor. Work the problem.”
Fingers absently rose toward his teeth. He grabbed them with his other hand, kneaded them both before him. “Well, it’s . . . hard to figure out. The way the stations work is pretty strange. They’re clearly a trap, but the defenses are, well, oddly lacking. I know, sir, I know—they were very effective up to a point, and I’m very sorry we lost Mister Detzel. But inside the data core itself, the station seemed almost defenseless. All it could do was threaten the ships on the outside. That’s a strange gap in the design, if holding the captives is so essential.”
“Tobin,” Sangupta said, “we need to deal with the security they do have. The security they don’t have isn’t really our problem.”
“But I can’t sort out the problem until I understand why the stations are designed the way they are. Why some security methods and not others? I mean, the security seems so, so makeshift. The only actual weapons we’ve seen the stations use are ones they replicated for the occasion. It doesn’t . . . sorry, but it doesn’t feel to me like the stations were designed to be aggressive. It’s like they’ve been repurposed for—”
The intercom signaled from the bridge. “Reed here.”
“Sir,” came Valeria Williams’s voice, “you’re needed on the bridge right away. Two ships have just emerged from warp, closing fast, and they don’t look friendly.”
The three men hastened out the door onto Pioneer’s bridge. On the viewer, Tobin saw two gray-white craft, each with a polygonal core body mounted atop two boxy, pontoon-like warp nacelles. Despite their lack of central spheres, their common design lineage with the space stations struck him immediately. “They’re Ware,” he said.
A moment later, a glowing light passed through the bridge as the atmosphere luminesced from a powerful sensor beam. Tobin’s body tingled as it passed over him. His hands reflexively went over his abdominal pouch, not that they would do any good shielding the Dax symbiont within it from harmful radiation. But he felt fine afterward.
“I’d say that confirms your appraisal, Doctor Dax,” Reed said.
“Signal coming in, sir,” Ensign Grev said from communications.
“Let’s hear it,” said Reed, taking the cente
r seat.
Mayweather entered the bridge just as the Tellarite opened the channel. “Your vessel is in possession of proprietary components,” came the dulcet feminine voice of the Ware. “Return the components or your vessel will be forfeit.”
The first officer exchanged a look with the captain. “ ‘Components,’ ” he growled. “They mean people!”
“Biosigns?” Reed called.
Sangupta answered from the science station while Dax moved to take over the engineering post. “None registering, sir.”
“Your vessel is in possession of proprietary components. Return the components or your vessel will be forfeit.”
“Shut that off, Grev,” said Reed.
“Aye, sir.”
“Automated ships defending an automated station,” Mayweather said.
“I know,” the captain replied. “I’d hoped that if we could talk to an actual person, we might be able to reason with them.”
“Sir, they’re charging weapons,” Williams said.
“Raise shields. Polarize the hull.”
“Aye, sir. Shields raised, hull polarized.”
“What kind of weapons?” Mayweather asked.
“Phased nadion pulse beams, sir.” Williams threw him a grim look. “Like the kind that took out Detzel. Much stronger than our phase cannons.”
Reed threw Dax a look. “So much for not being designed for aggression.”
“I know, I don’t understand—”
A blow rattled the ship. “Evasive,” Reed ordered Ensign Tallarico at the helm. “Val, return fire. Target critical areas.” He smiled grimly. “If there’s nobody aboard, there’s no need to hold back.”
Williams’s grin was more wolfish. “Aye, sir!”
Pioneer’s phase cannons barely put a dent in the Ware shields—yet each blow from the Ware cannons drained Pioneer’s shield generators by a fair percentage. Regina Tallarico dodged as best she could, but the small, blocky ships were faster than they looked. With no live occupants to damage, they could accelerate harder and maneuver more sharply than the Starfleet vessel. The ship was taking a pounding.
“Sir,” Mayweather said after recovering from a sharp hit that had made him stumble, “our first priority is to protect Nimthu and the other survivor. I promised her that.”
“Better part of valor,” Reed murmured. “Regina, try to break away and go to warp. Let’s see if we can outrun them that way.”
But the constant barrage of energies striking the shields created too much interference to permit a stable warp field. “Trying to compensate, but one of the injectors has taken damage,” Dax said. “Sir, I can do more from engineering.”
Reed nodded. “Go.”
Tobin ran for the lift, directing it to D deck once he was inside. Moments later, a powerful impact pealed through the ship and the lift lurched. Tobin feared for a moment that he’d be stranded in the lift, the shaft bent or crumpled by the blast damage. (Why did Starfleet think elevators were safe in an emergency?) But then the lift resumed its journey and let him out on the right level. He ran aft until he reached the heavy hatch to the main engine room, opened it, and ducked inside. “Show me the injector damage,” he ordered his second-in-command, Lieutenant Prentis Morrow, as he headed down the metal steps to the lower level (not willing to trust another lift, even the small, open one here in the engine room).
But just then, another impact rocked the ship. Tobin heard the crack and sizzle of circuits blowing out in the walls even as he stumbled off the steps and slammed facedown into the deck.
“Bridge to engineering!” came Mayweather’s voice. “Our shields are fluctuating!”
Tobin moaned in pain as Morrow helped him to his feet. He reached the intercom and punched it. “But the injector—”
“If we lose shields, we lose the survivors! Keep them up, no matter what!”
“I’m on it,” Tobin said, though much of his concentration was still on maintaining his balance. “Prentis, you do what you can with the injector while I take the shields.”
“Aye, sir,” the lieutenant replied crisply—a habit Tobin had been singularly unsuccessful in talking him out of. The sandy-haired man jogged over to the wall panel that housed the injectors—
Just before an explosion tore through engineering and dropped half the ceiling on his head. It was the last thing Tobin saw before the other half landed on him.
* * *
Travis Mayweather awoke to find himself in a recovery bed in sickbay. The last thing he remembered was the bridge tumbling around him. Val Williams had just managed to find a vulnerable spot on one of the robot ships and blow it apart, but the other had struck before she could retarget, and then . . . he was here. “Take it easy, Commander,” Doctor Liao said. “Your injuries aren’t major, but even a mild concussion’s no laughing matter. You just lie back.”
Captain Reed came into view, his left arm in an osteogenic brace and sling beneath his loosely draped uniform tunic. “Captain,” Mayweather said. “The ships . . . Nimthu . . .”
Reed’s lowered gaze told him the worst. “Once our shields fell, they beamed them out almost immediately. The only mercy is that once they had what they came for, they broke off the attack and left.”
Mayweather clutched his captain’s uninjured arm. “I assume we’re in pursuit?”
“That’s not an option,” Reed told him solemnly. “We took serious damage in engineering. I’ll spare you the technical details, because they’re past fixing.”
“Doctor Dax . . . he’ll find a way. He knows those engines better than anyone.”
Liao and Reed exchanged a look. It was Liao who broke the news. “Doctor Dax . . . has been badly injured.” She turned her head toward another recovery bed, surrounded by privacy curtains. “I managed to save him . . . all of him,” she added, oddly. “But his physiology is still . . . very alien. I don’t know how long it might take him to regain consciousness.”
“We’re going nowhere,” Reed grated through clenched teeth, “until Starfleet can send a rescue ship to tow us home. The subspace radio’s about the only thing still working other than life support.” He held his first officer’s gaze. “I’m sorry, Travis. We’ve lost them.”
Mayweather sank back onto the bed, squeezing his eyes shut painfully hard. “I gave her my word,” he said. “I promised we’d keep her safe.”
Reed clasped his shoulder. “We did everything humanly possible, Travis. And we paid dearly for it.”
Mayweather looked up sharply, seeing confirmation in Reed’s eyes. “Who did we lose?”
Liao replied; as a doctor, delivering such news was part of her job, and she did it calmly. “Morrow and Kano died in engineering. And we lost Bergmann to an atmosphere breach in his quarters.”
Travis stared up at the ceiling for a time while he absorbed it. He embraced the pain, letting it harden his resolve. “Three more people those damn machines took from us. Captain . . .”
“I know how you feel, Travis,” Reed told him with determination. “I promise you—this is not over.”
3
March 18, 2165
Starfleet Headquarters, Fort Baker, California
ADMIRAL ARCHER WAS pleasantly surprised at the blue-skinned face that greeted him as he and Captain T’Pol disembarked from Endeavour’s shuttlepod. “Shran!” Archer greeted his old friend heartily. “Good to see you.”
Thy’lek Shran, chief of staff of Starfleet’s Andorian Guard branch, smiled at them, his antennae high and wide like open arms. “Welcome back, Jonathan. And you, T’Pol.”
The Vulcan captain nodded courteously toward the older Andorian. “Admiral. It is agreeable to see you, though I find it puzzling that the duties of a Starfleet chief of staff afford you time for such a routine greeting.”
“One of these days, T’Pol, we’ll convince you to lighten up. What good is hav
ing rank if you can’t use it to do what you like, eh, Jonathan?”
Archer chuckled in mild amazement. If there were a secret to getting flag rank to work for you that way, he had yet to discover it. Instead, he constantly found himself at the mercy of others’ demands, their insistence that only he could achieve what needed to be done. But as Shran would remind him if he raised that complaint again, that was the price of being effective.
The senior admiral led them through the spacious, echoing hangar, past bustling crowds of passengers and technicians heading to and from the numerous shuttles—not just the familiar pods, but the larger-capacity passenger shuttles that were being built now that transporters were no longer in regular use. “So I gather you didn’t meet with much success at Maluria,” Shran said.
But as the trio emerged onto the grassy, tree-lined grounds of Starfleet Headquarters, Archer took a moment to soak in the weather of this rare fog-free day—the clear blue sky, the lapping waves of San Francisco Bay, even a clear view of the city’s shimmering towers beyond the low domes of the Headquarters complex. “It could’ve gone better,” he conceded after savoring a deep breath. “I don’t think we can expect much help from the Malurian government in containing the Raldul alignment.”
Shran harumphed. “You’d think they’d welcome our help in rounding up their own criminal class.”
“The Malurian establishment,” T’Pol told him, “is extremely . . . inner-directed. In their view, whatever occurs beyond their own planetary system is irrelevant to their lives. Even the mining and agricultural colonies on the other settled worlds of Epsilon Fornacis are neglected by the government on Malur itself. Despite the value of the resources they provide to the homeworld, they are considered largely a dumping ground for criminals, social outcasts, and the disaffected, providing excellent recruiting grounds for Raldul.”
Star Trek: Enterprise - 017 - Rise of the Federation: Uncertain Logic Page 4
