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To the art department of Star Trek: Enterprise, for creating a near-future environment that’s so much fun to inhabit.
This isn’t about finding someone else to watch our backs!
—Jonathan Archer, January 2155
2162
1
September 25, 2162
Kemsar Colony, 10 Tauri IV
HE COULD ONLY WATCH as the colony burned around him.
A minute ago, it was the children he’d been watching as they’d run through the bright blue grass of the colony’s central square, using child-sized throwing sticks to try to hurl a ball through a ring that hovered above their heads on repulsors. They could have been human children back on Earth, if not for the color of the grass and trees, and if not for the subtle V-shaped notches between their brows. Some of the parents had been urging their children to victory, while other, less competitive-minded ones were content to let their kids just run and play, some recording the event with cameras while others simply basked in the light of the bright yellow-white star overhead.
And then something had come out of that light, faint specks against the sun’s disk. Before they could even be resolved into ships, they had begun firing, bolts of fierce yellow-green plasma tearing into the ground, the buildings, the people. The parents in the square, quicker to understand what was happening, began to panic before the children did. A few managed to stay calm, tried to rally the others to gather up the children and flee to safety. But then a plasma bolt tore through the metal sculpture at the center of the square, sending out shrapnel that felled many of the parents and children nearby. The shock wave left him looking up at the sky from ground level as bodies fell around him. The ships flew overhead, and he recognized them: angular bronze polyhedrons, most only big enough for two people, but undeniably powerful. He watched helplessly as one of the larger, more elongated ships set down in the square and opened to disgorge the raiders, who began methodically shooting down the surviving parents, seizing the screaming, crying children and dragging them back to the ship.
He knew those faces too: bald, cantaloupe-green, textured like stucco. The faces of Suliban.
One of the raiders reached him, loomed above him, a rifle barrel pointed at his head. He studied that mottled face closely, unafraid of the weapon, knowing he could do nothing to affect what he saw. He could only watch as the raider crouched, a hand reaching forward to fill his field of view . . . leaving only blackness.
“There! Do you see?”
With a heavy sigh, Admiral Jonathan Archer reached up and took the virtual display visor off his head, the blackness lifting away to reveal the gray-walled conference room of the Grentra, a warship in the Tandaran fleet. His hands shook slightly as he lowered it, and he made an effort to still them, feeling a twinge of frustration. Doctor Phlox had assured him the latest round of treatments would hold off the tremors for months.
But after a moment, he realized that his shakiness was probably an emotional response to the sensory playback he’d just experienced, recovered from a proud parent’s holorecorder by the Tandaran soldiers who’d come to Kemsar Colony to aid the survivors and investigate the brutal raid. Anyone would have been shaken after watching the attack from the vantage point of one of its victims.
Archer gathered himself and turned his gaze to the portly, dark-featured Tandaran who had spoken. Valk wore the quilted gray tunic of the Tandaran military, his twin black sashes declaring him an officer and the golden rank pins on the sides of his brown leather collar marking him as a general. “No one’s disputing what happened here, General Valk. It’s a terrible crime, and the Federation extends its sympathies for your loss.”
“Sympathies don’t heal mortal wounds, Admiral,” Valk fired back. “Nor do lies. Let me remind you, the only reason we agreed to tolerate your upstart government’s grant of asylum to Suliban refugees was in exchange for your assurances that there would be no Suliban retaliation for our . . . disputes with them over the years.”
Archer resisted an undiplomatic reply to the general’s choice of words. They both knew the history perfectly well. In response to the Suliban Cabal’s decade-long war against the worlds of the Tandar Sector, the Tandaran government had imprisoned innocent Suliban civilians, lifelong citizens of Tandaran society, in brutal internment camps—allegedly to protect them from the persecution of the masses or forced impression into the genetically enhanced ranks of the Cabal. It had been over eight years since the factions in the Temporal Cold War had ended their intrusions into the twenty-second century, leaving the Cabal with no instructions from the future to guide them or genetic enhancements to motivate them. The directionless Cabal had fragmented, some former members using their augmentations for petty piracy and crime, others simply fleeing from the Tandarans, Klingons, and others whom they’d wronged in service to their twenty-eighth-century sponsor’s unknowable agendas. But it had been years more before the Tandaran government, having killed or imprisoned most of the Cabal’s surviving leaders and suffering no further attacks, had consented to close the camps once and for all, under pressure from Tandaran activists who had learned of the conditions there from former prisoners like the ones Archer had helped free a decade ago.
But the Suliban had still faced fear and bigotry from many in the Tandar Sector, and while some had chosen to reclaim their homes there and try to rebuild their lives and relationships, many had chosen to resume their nomadic ways or relocate to other worlds, including some within the territory of the United Federation of Planets—the fledgling union of United Earth, the Confederacy of Vulcan, the Andorian Empire, the United Planets of Tellar, and the Alpha Centauri Concordium. Jonathan Archer, who had played a significant role in bringing that union about, had used his clout to persuade the Federation Council to grant the refugees asylum as one of its first acts. More importantly, he’d persuaded the Tandaran government to accept that grant, although in return they’d insisted that the Federation erase all records indicating that the Tandarans were aware of the Temporal Cold War, as part of some sort of disinformation campaign directed at the future. It sounded fishy to Archer, but he’d gone along with it for the sake of the refugees. “The Federation has kept its side of the bargain,” he assured the general.
“Then why,” Valk asked, “have all three of these attacks been along the border closest to your territory?” He nodded to his aide, a lean, ash-blond woman named Major Glith, to slide a data tablet across the table toward Archer. “And why,” the general went on, “do the raiders’ weapons signatures read as consistent with Vulcan and Andorian firearms?”
“The Vulcans and Andorians were fighting for a long time before they finally made peace,” Archer said. “Some of their weapons must’ve fallen into other hands over the years.”
“But which hands? Most of the Cabal’s members and resources have been accounted for by our intelligence agencies. Yet the biosignatures of these raiders,” and he worked a control on his own tablet to send new data to the one before Archer, “are not baseline Suliban.”
“Nor do they correspond to any known enhancements,” Glith added in a much cooler tone.
“Then they can’t be Cabal, can they?”
Valk stoo
d and leaned forward, trying to intimidate Archer with his bulk. “Or maybe the Cabal has simply found a new set of sponsors willing to protect them from discovery and dole out a different form of genetic edge. Maybe defeating the Romulans has given you humans and your allies a taste for conquest, and you’ve decided to go after the Tandar Sector using Suliban as your shock troops!”
“The Federation is not about expansionism.”
“Isn’t it? For generations, the Vulcan High Command imposed its ‘benevolent’ interference on its neighbors, often at the point of a plasma cannon. Now they claim to have retreated into pacifism, but only after their human protégés rise to power with unprecedented speed, build a massive war fleet that drives the Romulans into retreat, and assimilate the once fiercely independent Andorian and Tellarite nations! Giving your so-called Federation of Planets the strongest battle fleet outside of the Klingon Empire as a result, even with the Vulcan fleet in mothballs. And no sooner have you dealt with the Romulans than you begin pressuring the Denobulans, Arkenites, and others to submit themselves to your rule as well.”
“We’re offering them equal partnership for mutual support and defense. And we don’t force it on anyone who doesn’t want it.”
Valk scoffed. “Says the man who spent years forcibly interfering in the affairs of the Tandarans, the Klingons, the Mazarites—”
“This is getting us nowhere, General!” Archer interrupted. The truth was, he couldn’t offer a solid defense on this point. The Federation was too new, its identity and objectives still in flux. He knew that the minds behind the Federation saw its purpose as benevolent, but there was still much disagreement over how to fulfill that purpose, or how aggressively to pursue it.
“We can argue about the Federation’s intentions all day long,” he continued, “but it won’t bring those raiders to justice or liberate the children they captured. I came here to offer you the means to do just that.”
“How? If you’re not in collusion with these Suliban, how can you track them down when we cannot?”
“Because we know you’re looking for the wrong thing.”
“How do you know this?” Glith asked. “What do you propose we look for instead?”
Archer hesitated. “I can’t tell you that. I could tell you what I know, but you’d never believe me without proof, and my sources are . . . highly classified.” The general scoffed. “But what I can do is help you find the raiders and show you who’s really behind them—and help you get your children back. But you’re gonna have to extend us a little trust.”
“So that you can win your way into our good graces?” Valk blustered. “Maybe persuade us to submit to absorption into your Federation?”
Archer faced him squarely. “So that those children won’t have to live in slavery. Isn’t that enough?”
Valk held his gaze firmly a while longer, reluctant to give any ground, but the reminder of what was truly at stake penetrated his armor, to his credit. “Explain to us how you propose to track down the Suliban so long after their warp trails have dissipated.”
“We’d be happy to. Travis?”
“Yes, sir.” Lieutenant Travis Mayweather stepped forward from where he had stood behind Archer, waiting patiently to play his part. The handsome, dark-skinned, bright-eyed officer gave Archer an easy smile and nod as he stepped up to the table, a reminder that the tensions that had arisen between the two men at the onset of the Romulan conflict were now decisively a thing of the past. Admiral Archer was still getting used to the sight of him in the new Federation Starfleet uniform. Although the various space agencies of the UFP’s five founding members still existed and oversaw their own ships and specialties within the combined fleet they jointly administered, they’d agreed they should adopt a common uniform with elements reflecting all its member states. Mayweather’s black undershirt sported a Vulcan-style Mandarin collar; over it was a V-necked tunic worn above a separate pair of black trousers and boots. Archer’s own command-division tunic was an avocado green not unlike the command color of the Andorian Guard, while Mayweather’s operations-division tunic was reddish-brown per Tellarite military convention. The lieutenant’s rank insignia—a single gold stripe, as opposed to five alternating wide and narrow stripes for Archer—adorned each of his cuffs and shoulder straps. The shoulders were set off by a shallow chevron of gold-fringed navy-blue piping extending from shoulder joints to mid-sternum, reflecting Vulcan designs from the twenty-first century. Below the piping, next to the vertical zipper of the left-hand tunic pocket, was the gold arrowhead insignia of the United Earth Space Probe Agency, the government department that administered Earth’s Starfleet. To balance it, the mission patch had moved to the right sleeve, with Mayweather and Archer both bearing the generic Starfleet Command patch, a circular blue field of stars behind a horizontal gold chevron, rather than a specific ship’s design. Mayweather’s wide-ranging experience during the Romulan War had broadened his interests beyond piloting starships, and he’d been a valuable advisor to Archer in this current assignment.
“I don’t mean to contradict you, General,” Mayweather began in his usual laid-back, conversational tone, “but those warp trails haven’t completely dissipated. There’s still some ion residue out there.”
“Disconnected traces,” Major Glith said, “already blended into the interstellar medium.”
“Almost, but not quite. See, the thing about reconstructing ion trails is that you need to know what you’re looking for. You searched for a lot of small trails, right? One for each cell ship?”
“That’s correct,” the stern-faced major replied.
“Well, we have reason to believe these cell ships aren’t capable of warp drive. They would’ve had to dock with the two motherships you detected in orbit. So you’d be looking for two larger trails instead of a few dozen smaller ones.”
Glith pondered Mayweather’s words for a moment, then turned to Valk. “It’s a plausible notion, General. If the sponsors who provided the Cabal’s advanced technology truly have been gone as long as we believe, then the Suliban would be unable to repair those micro-warp drives when they failed. They may have been forced to retrofit their larger vessels with standard drives and rely on the modular nature of the craft to cluster them together.” She looked back at the Starfleet officers. “But we did scan for the mother-ships’ traces as well and found nothing conclusive.”
Mayweather smiled. “That’s where we can help you, Major. There’s a little trick we picked up a few years back in the Delphic Expanse. Helped us track down some Osaarian pirates who’d destroyed an alien ship and then ransacked Enterprise. See, what you have to do is model the effect of the warp field’s own gravimetric distortions on the ISM’s density profile, then correlate that with the ion concentrations to compute the most probable trajectory. We’ve already found their most likely course out of this system, which should put us on the right track.”
Valk was taken aback. “If you already found that information, why haven’t you shared it with us?”
“Well, we would’ve told you sooner, sir, but, well, you were talking and it would’ve been rude to interrupt.” Archer suppressed a chuckle. From anyone else, the comment would’ve come across as snide. But Mayweather’s natural good humor and openness softened the barb, getting the criticism across without provoking the general’s ire. If Valk did take offense, it would be clear that his bluster, not Federation duplicity, would be the source of any further delays in tracking down the raiders.
Still, General Valk was slow to let go of his suspicions. “So you would have us follow you in pursuit of a trail you claim only you can find. How do we know you won’t lead us into ambush?”
“You’re welcome to join us aboard my flagship, General,” Archer proposed. “You can observe the entire operation yourself. And we’ll share our sensor telemetry with your ships.”
“Which have no means of verifying its accuracy without further analysis.”
“But you’ll have plenty of time to analyze
it later,” Mayweather told him. “If we did trick you to lead you into a trap, your people would have the proof, and that would look really bad for the Federation. So either we’re not your enemy—or we are, but we’re a really stupid enemy. Either way, what have you got to lose?”
Valk made a show of discussing it with his officers, but Archer could tell Mayweather had sealed the deal. He gave the lieutenant a tiny nod and smile, earning a bigger smile in response.
U.S.S. Endeavour NCC-06
Whatever flimsy filament of trust General Valk was willing to extend to Starfleet did not include trusting his bodily integrity to the transporter, a technology the Tandarans lacked. So Archer and Mayweather ferried him across by shuttlepod—which Archer was glad of, always appreciating a chance to see the new pride of Starfleet from the outside. Endeavour had been the sixth NX-class starship built by Earth, originally a twin to Archer’s beloved Enterprise. But that class had suffered badly in the Earth-Romulan War—production of the state-of-the-art ships had been suspended in favor of mass-producing older, simpler designs, leaving only a handful of NX-class ships in service, and most of those had been lost to Romulan weapons. Enterprise herself had survived, but with her spaceframe too compromised in the decisive Battle of Cheron ever to fly again; so she was now in honorable retirement at the Smithsonian’s orbital annex. Thus, Endeavour was now the last active survivor of the NX class.
Yet she was also the first of a new breed of Federation starships. After the war, she had undergone a massive refit, the results of which were visible to the shuttlepod’s occupants as it drew nearer. From above, Endeavour looked much the same as it always had: a silver-skinned saucer with two large pontoons stretching back to connect to a pair of red-domed warp nacelles on upswept, winglike pylons. Yet as the shuttlepod descended alongside the ship, her newest feature came into view: a cylindrical secondary hull with a deep rear undercut, positioned and sized to occupy the secondary node of the vessel’s warp field while in flight. The hull had been added to house the larger, more powerful warp reactor that allowed the ship to surpass warp factor six for finite periods of time, and also bore a large, circular navigational deflector dish on its prow to supplement the flattened oval of the saucer deflector. The new design—which would be the template for more ships to follow—had been redesignated the Columbia class at Archer’s insistence, in honor of the first NX ship to be lost, the vessel commanded by his dear friend Erika Hernandez until her disappearance in the first year of the Romulan War.
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