by Andy Mangels
Nog smiled. “I always wondered why Tucker had such a great reputation. I mean, he wasa good engineer, and he wasan important part of the crew of the first Enterprisein Starfleet history. But there was always an aura about him, as though he’d done something legendary.But it never made sense to me before.”
“Maybe enough of the truth leaked out back then to influence his place in history,” Jake said. “After all, anyone with the power to rewrite history can use that clout for goodpurposes, too.”
“So, did he survive, or was this really his last hurrah?” Nog asked.
“You don’t know?” Jake said, teasing. He cuffed Nog on the arm, the way they used to do when they were kids.
“I told you I hadn’t watched it all the way through, hew-mon,” Nog brayed, giving Jake a good-natured shove. “You don’t believe me?”
Jake held up his hands in surrender. “That’s all the roughhousing these old bones can take.”
Nog snorted. “Oh, you’re suchan old man.”
Jake realized now how much he’d missed the banter and teasing he used to share routinely with his old friend. It really had been too long since they’d been in touch, and he resolved not to let so much time pass between their reunions in the future.
“All right, let’s see what happens next,” he said, his hand moving to reactivate the holo. “And let’s hope for the best.”
Forty-Six
Sunday, February 23, 2155
Near Romulan space
TRIP REJOICED WHEN THE INSTRUMENTS confirmed that their ship had actually made it past the known boundaries of the Romulan Star Empire. Of course, his joy was mitigated by the grim realization that Admiral Valdore’s ships weren’t about to be stopped by a border arbitrarily drawn onto some stellar cartographer’s maps.
Trip could be thankful at least that he and Ehrehin had managed to widen their small lead over their pursuers, albeit only modestly. Or until the next time this rust bucket’s warp drive conks out,he thought, hoping he wasn’t tempting fate by visualizing that scenario.
Perhaps a minute later, as he spared as much power as he dared to scan the subspace bands, Trip’s earlier elation vanished entirely.
God, no. No, no, no.Trip’s heart plunged abruptly into a headlong freefall as he continued putting together stray bits and pieces of the farrago of highly agitated chatter that was coming through the console and echoing inside his suit’s helmet. A relatively small number of words and phrases predominated, and thanks to the translation gear the Adigeons had installed inside his ears, Trip heard them distinctly in what had to be at least a dozen human and nonhuman languages:
“—Coridan Prime—”
“—struck—”
“—Coridan Prime—”
“—projectile—”
“—Coridan Prime—”
“—impact—”
“—catastrophe—”
“—Coridan disaster zone—”
“—continents ablaze—”
“—dilithium fires—”
“—Coridan Prime—”
“—devastation—”
“—conflagration—”
“—Coridan Prime—”
“—billions dead—”
“—burning dilithium—”
“—Coridan Prime—”
All Trip could do was sit and imagine the ignition of the mother of all nuclear core meltdowns, touched off by a collision containing orders of magnitude more energy than the asteroid impact that killed off Earth’s dinosaurs. Coridan Prime’s rich veins of dilithium would have ignited as a result of the Romulan ship’s impact, a disaster accompanied by an enormously destructive, uncontrolled release of antimatter from the vessel’s engines.
Would the Romulans have sent a pilot on such a mission? Perhaps they’d been planning to use the kidnapped Aenar to remotely launch more such attacks against other worlds, using ever faster and harder-to-intercept ships. His stomach lurched at the thought.
Trip noticed belatedly that Ehrehin was standing beside his seat and leaning toward him, apparently trying to listen in via his own suit’s com system. “Tell me, Trip. What’s just happened?”
I wasn’t fast enough.That’s what’s just happened.
“The Romulans already launched their attack against Coridan Prime,” Trip said aloud, his throat suddenly feeling as dry as Vulcan’s Forge. “And it sounds like it turned out pretty much the way you’d expect. The Coridanites probably never stood a chance.”
I couldn’t protect them from the Romulans. Just like I couldn’t protect my sister Lizzie from the Xindi.
Trip felt Ehrehin’s gloved hand gently pressing against the padded shoulder of his environmental suit, in what Trip took to be a fatherly gesture of solace. He reached up and placed his own hand on the scientist’s arm.
It was only then that he noticed the length of cable that coiled away from his shoulder, leading down to the floor near Ehrehin’s seat to the not-quite-closed floor-level compartment that housed the cockpit’s power relays.
“What the hell?” Trip tried to stand, but failed because of the unexpectedly hard downward shove the frail old man administered. Trip plopped awkwardly back down into his seat as Ehrehin scrambled away from him, retreating awkwardly toward the aft compartment. Trip struggled out of his chair again, laboriously regaining his feet as he tried to get hold of the cable that he only now realized was attached to the back of his own suit, rather than to Ehrehin’s.
But before his glove-clumsy hands could get a solid grip on the cable, a brief flash of light sent blinding golden spots swimming before his eyes, and his muscles suddenly went rigid. Trip’s paralyzed body swayed, tipped, and finally crashed all the way down to the deck. He fell with a bone-jarring impact onto his side, his body wedged ungracefully between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats.
The power relays,Trip thought woozily. He used the power relays to stun me.
Trip supposed it would have been worse for him had the old man opted to simply immolate him with some hidden disruptor pistol he easily could have picked up during the confusion of their hasty escape.
On the other hand, all he could do was look up helplessly through his faceplate as Ehrehin moved with evident caution back into view and began entering commands Trip couldn’t quite see into the pilot’s console. From the change in the vibrations in the deck beneath him, Trip could tell that the old man had dropped them out of warp.
Trip’s soul deflated as he struggled vainly to move a body that had essentially turned to stone. Soon Valdore’s ships would catch up to them, making his failure complete. Looks like somebody really oversold Spymaster Harris on how well I play with aliens.
Trip knew that his fate would soon be subject to the tender mercies of the Romulan military. And if Ehrehin could still be taken at face value on at least onesubject, Admiral Valdore wouldn’t be interested in taking him back to Romulus in irons. He fleetingly wished that Ehrehin hadjust burned him down with one of the Ejhoi Ormiin’s incendiary guns.
No. There’s no way I’m gonna let this happen.
Trip fought harder than ever to move his body. He was rewarded by a loud tapping sound that he quickly realized was one of his boots coming into sharp contact with the bottom of one of the cockpit chairs. He was elated to have achieved movement, albeit uncontrolled.
But Ehrehin must have noticed, because a second brief but crippling surge of current shot through the cable and into Trip’s body, penetrating his insulated suit as though it weren’t even there. As consciousness began to flee behind another salvo of bright, vision-obscuring spots, his final coherent thoughts were of T’Pol, with whom he still shared an intimate if tenuous mind-link. And whom he would never again see, nor bring any succor from the grief to which he had already subjected her.
He tumbled over the edge of oblivion wondering whether she would sense the distant echoes of his death.
Forty-Seven
Monday, March 3, 2155
The Presidio, San Francisco<
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“IREGRET TO INFORM YOU ALL that my government cannot participate in the Coalition under the present circumstances.”
I’ve finally said it,Ambassador Lekev of Coridan thought as the chamber was engulfed by the surprised, collective hush of the assembled delegates and representatives from the four other prospective Coalition worlds. For good or ill, the deed has at last been done.
Suddenly it was Lekev’s turn to exhibit mute surprise when Ambassador Avaranthi sh’Rothress of Andoria—rather than the more senior Andorian Ambassador Thoris, or the ever-argumentative Gral of Tellar—rose to disperse the shocked, murmur-laced silence. Lekev expected that silence to devolve very quickly into a cacophonous gabble of raised and argumentative voices.
“Why would your government choose to withdraw now,of all times?” sh’Rothress said, her voice high-pitched but resonant. “Your home planet has never been more sorely in need of the assistance and support of its allies than it is right now.”
A sudden outbreak of perspiration made Lekev’s simple, formfitting coverall bind and chafe against his skin, and he released a weary, resigned sigh behind his traditional Coridanite diplomatic mask. Lekev himself had made sh’Rothress’s present argument to Chancellor Kalev, as well as to the most influential members of her cabinet, but to no avail. Since he had failed to persuade his government’s intransigent senior leadership to alter their course, he’d been faced with a difficult choice: he had to resign, or else meekly fall into line. Even if doing the latter risked so escalating Coridan Prime’s ongoing civil strife that the seemingly inevitable collapse of Kalev’s government came sooner rather than later.
His furrowed brow concealed behind his mask, Lekev panned his gaze across the rest of the diplomatic assemblage, all of whose constituents seemed tensely anxious to hear his response. Minister T’Pau and Ambassadors Solkar, L’Nel, and Soval of Vulcan looked on in grim silence, while the Tellarite and Andorian contingents seemed almost to be vibrating with barely suppressed alarm. Even the human representatives—Prime Minister Nathan Samuels and Interior Minister Haroun al-Rashid, both of whom were usually far less excitable than either the Tellarites or the Andorians—looked toward Lekev with pleading apprehension in their oddly Coridanite-like eyes.
If only I had the courage to remove this mask, here and now,Lekev thought, wondering whether the humans would find his true face more familiar and less forbidding than the mask that duty and Coridanite tradition dictated that he never remove in the presence of non-Coridanites. But he knew that such a blasphemous act of defiance would not only earn him dismissal and imprisonment on his homeworld—if not outright execution—it would also certainly fail to persuade his government’s headstrong chancellor to alter her decision to abandon the new interstellar alliance. Still, doffing the ritual mask that doubtless made Lekev appear so very alien in the eyes of once-valued diplomatic partners might serve to remind at least somein Coridan Prime’s leadership hierarchy that these Terrans, Vulcans, Tellarites, and Andorians were far more like the Coridanite people than they were different.
Lekev’s eyes caught a hint of motion at the edge of the chamber, and he turned his gaze toward it. On the stairs that connected the edge of the council chamber to the gallery level above it, a group of blue-uniformed figures was making a silent entrance, coming to a quiet halt at the railing that overlooked the tense proceedings. No one else in the room appeared to have noticed their arrival.
The hard, chiseled features and determined look of the foremost of the blue-clad humans drew Lekev’s attention most keenly. Nowthere’s a man who probably has sufficient courage to remove whatever masks might stand in his way,he thought, recalling the words of inspiration that Captain Jonathan Archer had spoken here only a few Earth weeks ago—words that had kept this nascent, fragile Coalition of Planets from completely fracturing during the immediate aftermath of the Terra Prime crisis.
But circumstances had changed greatly since then, particularly for those who still clung to life on the infernal ruin that Coridan Prime had become. And Lekev knew he had no choice other than to face that grim reality squarely.
Turning his gaze back upon sh’Rothress, Lekev took a deep breath, gathered his scattered thoughts, and finally addressed the Andorian junior ambassador’s well-taken question. “Coridan cannot presently afford to concern itself with external matters, Ambassador. More than half a billion Coridanites died as a direct result of the attack, and more than that have perished as a consequence of the hugely destructive dilithium fires that resulted from the collision—which our best energy and environmental experts estimate to have consumed at least half of our planetary dilithium reserves. Our science minister believes that Coridan Prime’s ecosystems will take at least a century to begin to recover, should a recovery actually prove to be possible.”
“You have just enumerated several excellent reasons for allowing the Coalition to stand with you at this time,” said T’Pau of Vulcan. She exuded concern, but also a steadfast, rock-solid calm that Lekev could only envy.
Lekev shook his head. “Chancellor Kalev does not see matters that way, nor do the partisans in her government who comprise a majority within the Ruling Assembly.”
“But surely the people of your world will see the wisdom of accepting outside help during this crisis,” said Prime Minister Samuels of Earth. “Your chancellor can only put her leadership in jeopardy by failing to recognize that.”
For the sake of everyone who yet remained alive on his homeworld, Lekev could only hope that the Terran was right. But he knew all too well that the truth was far more complex than Samuels knew, perhaps even defying Lekev’s own understanding.
“That is certainly a possibility, Mister Prime Minister,” Lekev said, making no attempt to conceal the sadness underlying his words. “Though it is probably a good deal less likely than you believe. We are a proud people, Minister. Most of us would probably not be sanguine about accepting interstellar charity. In the eyes of many, such assistance would be indistinguishable from a military occupation—and if Coridanites feel that their world has been taken by outworlders, they will behave accordingly, driving out the perceived invaders by whatever means they deem necessary. I am certain that none of the remaining Coalition worlds would relish that prospect in the least.”
Lekev could only hope that such a scenario might motivate Coridan Prime’s many squabbling political factions to set aside their differences, at least temporarily. But he also felt certain that any pause in the steadily escalating civil war back home would endure only so long as the perception of an outside threat persisted, and not a day longer.
Lapsing into silence, Lekev once again raked his gaze across the faces of each of his diplomatic colleagues, eager to see and hear their reactions, while at the same time dreading them. After a seeming eternity of deceptive stillness, most of the diplomats present—with the exception of the characteristically stoic Vulcans—began airing those reactions, loudly and simultaneously. Nathan Samuels, the nominal chairman of today’s proceedings, banged his gavel impotently and all but inaudibly as the room descended further into high-decibel rhetorical chaos.
His grim duty finally discharged, Lekev bowed respectfully toward the chairman’s podium, then turned and exited the chamber. Outraged shouts and cries for order echoed and competed behind him.
Archer paused beside the spiral railing, and his senior officers stood quietly behind him on the stairs overlooking the small amphitheater where the delegates to the prospective Coalition of Planets were debating nothing less than the future political alignments of five solar systems.
The discussion—if the tumultuous gabble of indistinguishable shouts and cries that filled the chamber really qualified as such—was going every bit as badly as Archer had feared. We can’t afford to lose Coridan,he thought glumly. Especially not while the Romulans are so hell-bent on smashing the Coalition.A sense of utter helplessness descended upon him as he watched Ambassador Lekev turn and exit the room through one of the lower-level doors.<
br />
“It appears you’ve arrived in the proverbial nick of time once again, Captain,” said Doctor Phlox, who was standing slightly behind Archer. He was leaning toward the captain’s ear, almost shouting to be heard over the raised voices of the diplomats.
Archer bristled reflexively at the Denobulan’s remark. “Phlox, are you expecting me to just leap in there and make everything right?”
Phlox appeared unfazed by Archer’s surly tone. “You havedone it before, Captain.”
“I’m an explorer, Phlox, and sometimes a soldier. But I’m no diplomat.” He couldn’t help but wonder, however, whether he could do a worse job than the alleged diplomats who were trying to shout each other down while the meeting’s chairman looked on impotently.
“Frankly, I think Admiral Gardner expects you to contribute something substantive to this meeting,” Phlox said, apparently undeterred.
Archer scowled. “How do you mean? He ordered me to be present for the Coalition Compact signing. That’s not until Wednesday.”
“Well, of course he didn’t order you to be here today,Captain,” Phlox said, his avuncular smile widening until it took on vaguely disconcerting proportions. “He knew it wasn’t necessary. He’d have had to lock you up to keep you away.”
Archer couldn’t help but wonder if Phlox was on to something there; after all, the moment Enterprisearrived in Earth orbit, he’d expected Gardner to call him on the carpet because of his unauthorized attempt to reach Coridan Prime ahead of the disaster that had since struck there.
Or maybe Gardner hasn’t gone after me because he regrets orderingEnterprise to head for Earth instead of Coridan.Archer knew that he would always wonder if he might somehow have intercepted the vessel responsible for the assault against Coridan, if only he’d had a little more time. It was easy to imagine that the admiral, whose sphere of responsibility was much larger than Archer’s, was now second-guessing himself in the very same manner.
