by Diane Duane
Nevertheless she stood taller, put her shoulders back, gripped the back of the chair, and grinned. There were still options. She thought gratefully now of how Khiy and Mr. Sulu had spent all that first night of meeting, before Bloodwing and Enterprise departed for these spaces, standing in one corner and making strange motions at one another in the air with their hands, so that they had to repeatedly put down their drinks to continue the conversation. Their crewmates from both sides had teased them about this at the time—all but Aidoann, who had been nearby, listening and watching them closely, and sent her a report on the exchange. It had all seemed quite farfetched at the time, and she had hoped it would not be necessary. Now, though, she would find out how farfetched it was. And as for the rest—
“IDs, khre’Riov,” Aidoann said. “ChR 18, ChR 330, ChR 49, ChR 98, ChR 66, ChR 24, ChR 103—”
Amie, Neirrh, Hmenna, Llemni, Orudain: all cruisers of Bloodwing’s own class. And the big ones, the old supercruisers, Uhtta and Madail. None of them commanded by friends of hers, only the supercruisers better armed than Bloodwing, and the difference not so great considering the Klingon-sourced phaser conduits that had been clandestinely installed in her. But there were seven of them. “Not taking any chances, are they?” said Jim’s voice, remarkably calmly, from Enterprise, still outside the globe. “One of them leaving globe now, coming for us. Are any of these ships anybody you know, Commander?”
“Not personally,” Ael said. “And at the moment, I fear we shall only meet in some other life.”
“Still feeling insulted?”
“I will consult with you afterward as to that.”
Jim laughed. “Understood. Implementing.”
She swallowed. “Khiy,” Ael said, “show us your mettle now—”
“Ie, khre’Riov,” Khiy said.
The whole ship lurched sideways as he pulled Bloodwing around in a turn that made her structural field groan, and flung her straight at Hmenna, accelerating again toward warp, and firing like a mad thing, as if none of the rest of those ships closing in around them existed. They were basic enough tactics: to prevent englobement, pick a hole in the globe and escape. Sometimes it worked with one ship, sometimes it did not. Hmenna fired back, swelling in the screens—
—and then suddenly let loose a couple of hurried photon torpedoes and swung hastily away to port and “downward,” as Enterprise came hurtling straight in at Hmenna from behind, as if planning to engage in a game of stones-crack-egg with Bloodwing, using Hmenna as the egg. The two of them passed at nearly the same moment through the gap left by Hmenna’s frantic movement with barely a third of a kilometer between them. Bloodwing went out of the globe through the gap: Enterprise went in and plunged straight across the inside of it, straight for Madail, pushing up through .9c and making for warp, though not firing, since using phasers at such transitional speeds can have unfortunate results.
Mad, he is mad! Ael thought. Maybe Madail thought so too, for after a couple of ineffective phaser blasts at her shields she quickly moved sideways to let Enterprise out, rather than be rammed. Out Enterprise went, curving up high “over” the globe and down again, righting herself, making for the star.
Hmenna was after them now, and the globe was breaking up to follow. “Pay them no mind, Khiy,” Ael said. “Do your business as it was agreed. Tr’Keirianh! Shields?”
“Holding, khre’Riov, but—”
“No buts,” Ael said softly. “Do what you must, but hold them for your life, or that will prove short.”
They headed straight for 15 Trianguli.
Jim sat watching Bloodwing as both ships broke into warp, and swallowed hard. “Mr. Sulu—”
“Well outside the critical warp radius, Captain,” Sulu said. “Warp ingress went safely. No complications.”
“Yet.”
“I’m on it, Captain,” Sulu said. “Warp two now. Khiy, you know the drill—”
“Will this work, Hikaru?” said Khiy’s voice from Bloodwing.
“K8,” Chekov said under his breath. “The star is marginal for the routine. Checking the spectroscopy—”
“No time for that now,” Sulu said, and dove for it.
“There may not be enough mass,” Chekov said. “It’s borderline dwarf—”
“Captain?” Sulu said.
Jim breathed in, breathed out, clenched his hands on the arms of the center seat. “Seven of them. Two of us. Better find out,” he said.
Enterprise and Bloodwing dove together for the star. Chekov was backing the bridge viewscreen’s image intensity down as they went, but the glare was filling the bridge more unbearably every moment. Dwarf the star might be, “just a little K8,” but this close to it, it started to look like Hell itself, and Jim found himself sweating and hoping he was not about to be in a position to make a much more detailed comparison. “Spock, what about the shields?”
“Holding,” Spock said, peering down his viewer. “No degradation. Tuning.” There was a pause, and then Spock said, “Shield tuning is showing some slide.”
Jim hit his comm switch. “Scotty,” Jim said, “the shields are losing their tuning.”
There was a jangling from somewhere else in engineering as the ship began to shake, a bone-rattling vibration that combined very uncomfortably with the howl of the warp engines through Enterprise’s frame as she accelerated into the higher levels of warp. “Compensating,” Scotty said, sounding tense. “The star’s marginal, Captain! The corona’s not as hot as it ought to be, it’s changing the way the field-tuning equations affect the shields—!”
“The paired iron lines are there,” Chekov said suddenly. “Fe IX imaging is good. Working out the torpedo drop pattern now, Bloodwing—”
“Mr. Chekov, kindly hurry,” Ael’s voice said. “We seem to be having some difficulty with the tuning of our shields. If the ion wavefront hits us and we are not adequately protected—”
“Recompensating,” Spock said. “Commander, here are better frequency-prediction algorithms for you. Transmitting. Use them to retune.”
“Got it,” Chekov said softly. “Aidoann, here they come.”
A pause. “Evaluating,” Aidoann’s voice said, over an increasing engine roar from the other side. “Retuning shields now. Mr. Chekov, this means eight photon torpedoes for us at one per one-point-four Federation seconds. Coordinates plotting now.”
“Sounds right,” Chekov said, eyeing the targeting viewer as it came up on his side of the helm. “Here comes the reception committee.”
“Fire aft, Mr. Chekov,” Jim said. “Don’t let them singe our tails!”
The pursuing ships were firing already, but with less and less effect as Enterprise and Bloodwing both dived closer to the sun; light-based weapons, even pumped to compensate for use in warp, are just as subject as any other kind of light to being bent out of true by the gravity well of a star. “Clean misses,” Sulu said, sparing a moment from his piloting. “Ours too. Dropping out of warp to sublight. Coming down to ten thousand kilometers for the firing run—”
The ships chasing them were dropping out of warp and dropping back too, both unwilling to overshoot their prey and also unwilling to singe their own tails—possibly reasoning that Bloodwing and Enterprise could not keep this madness up forever. And they’re right, Jim thought; for though the ships’ shields were being tailored to cope with high-speed ionic discharge, there was little they could do about simple radiant heat…and it was getting hot already. “Scotty, how much time can we spend here?” Jim said.
“Twenty-four seconds total,” Scotty said. “Plus or minus two. After that the hull will start to buckle—”
Jim held on to the arms of his seat, while the front viewscreen, turned down as low as it could go without actually being turned off, was still blazing with the furious dark orange fire of 15 Tri. Ahead of them, a scarcely seen black blot against the roiling “rice-grain” plasma structure of the star’s low atmosphere, Bloodwing was skimming even lower than they were over the photosphere, firing
photon torpedoes off to both sides, into the “base” of the star’s corona. “Phaser program starts now,” Chekov said, and hit his controls.
The Enterprise’s phasers stitched through the star’s corona, flickering, the fire looking almost continuous, but not quite, like the flicker in old-fashioned neon tubes that Jim had seen. Chains of sunspots abruptly began to bubble blackly up all over the star’s surface, responding to the changes being induced in the uppermost part of the star’s magnetic field. “Dark sprite effect,” Chekov said. “Base percentage reached—”
“Uhura,” Jim said, hanging on as the ship began to shudder more violently, and sparing a hand from holding on to wipe the sweat off his forehead, “elapsed time?”
“Eighteen seconds, Captain.”
It felt like eighteen years. “Preparing for warp eleven,” Sulu said. “Accelerating out of the gravity well now.”
“Back in a moment, Bloodwing,” Jim said. The ship was cooling again, but that would not last. Out they went into the dark, and three of the seven ships came after them.
“Warp two. Warp three. Pursuit is in warp and accelerating.”
“Ready on the aft phaser banks, Mr. Chekov. Prepare a spread of torpedoes.”
“Ready, Captain.”
“Warp five,” Sulu said. “Warp six. Turning.” Everything slewed sideways. The ship was groaning softly now, the skinfield complaining about the stresses being applied to it…and worse was to come.
“Aft view,” Jim said. The screen flickered. Jim saw two of the pursuing Romulan vessels trying to turn to match, but not doing as well, turning wide, losing ground. The third one, the biggest of them, was turning and gaining on them, and firing.
“Clean misses. Warp eight,” Sulu said. Suddenly 15 Trianguli was swelling to fill the screen, flashing toward them. “Warp nine.”
“Mind that helm, mister,” Jim said softly.
“Warp ten. She’s steady, Captain,” Sulu said, while the ship began to shake and her structural members to howl in a way that suggested Sulu’s definition of steady was a novel one.
“Captain—” Scotty’s voice called out from the comm.
“Duly noted, Mr. Scott,” Jim answered calmly, never taking his eyes off Sulu at the helm.
“High photosphere. Warp eleven!”
Enterprise’s engines roared; the ship lurched as it hit the star’s “near” bowshock, lurched again, and then began to accelerate powerfully around the tight end of a “cometary” hyperbolic curve with the star at its focus. The sun’s corona, already irritated by the photon torpedoes and tuned phaser fire, was now pierced straight through by the carefully deformed warp field of a starship doing warp eleven…
…and nothing happened. 15 Trianguli’s corona lashed furiously at them as they whipped around and flashed away, but there was no burst of sudden ionization. The ship following them most closely, Madail, began to fire again. Enterprise shuddered.
“A hit on the port nacelle,” Spock said. “Shields down fifteen percent.”
“They won’t take that kind of thing for long!” Scotty’s voice came from the engine room. “All those laddies have to do is keep firing at us, eventually they’ll get lucky.”
“The stellar atmosphere is insufficiently stimulated,” Spock said. “Another pass—”
“Mr. Spock, we can’t—”
“The warp-field incursion effect has not yet attenuated,” Spock said. “It will last another eight point six seconds. Bloodwing—”
“Mr. Spock!” Ael said. “We seem somewhat short of results here!”
“If you will make one more sweep at ten thousand kilometers, with phasers tuned a third higher than ours—”
“Do it, Khiy!” Jim heard Ael say.
“Implementing.”
They plunged outward and away from the star. “View aft!” Jim said. The Romulan ship that had been chasing them was still doing so, firing still. They were keeping ahead of it, but it was starting to catch up as they watched Bloodwing dive low toward the chromosphere one more time. Overstimulated ions trailed behind her in a million-degree contrail from which Bloodwing was preserved only by its tenuousness. “For God’s sake be careful,” Jim said softly. The last thing any of them needed right this moment was for Bloodwing to be thrown back in time. Her phasers lanced out into the corona, flickering nearly as steadily as Enterprise’s had—
The star’s corona wavered around her, went sickly and pallid, and collapsed.
Jim swallowed. “Bloodwing, get out of there!”
She angled around and upward, arrowed away from the star. They all saw it start to come, then: a secondary curve of faint light over the surface of 15 Trianguli, not orange but bizarrely blue, rearing up right across the body of the star, like a bubble blowing—but a bubble nearly as big as the star was, easily two-thirds of its diameter. “Here it comes!” Sulu cried, and hit the ship’s impact alarms.
The screech of them went through everything. “All hands, brace for impact!!” Jim shouted, and braced himself as best he could, knowing that his odds of staying where he was were no better than fifty-fifty. “Maximum warp, Mr. Sulu, now or never!”
The bubble continued to bend itself up and up from the star’s chromosphere, arching, inflating, its “surface” swirling like that of a soap bubble with that virulent blue glow—getting taller all the time, impossibly tall, compared to the star. Any spicule, any prominence, would long since have either fallen back into the chromosphere, or blown away entirely…but not this thing. It grew. From engineering, over the roar of the engines, he heard a voice like a very nervous xylophone saying, “Dear Architectrix, Sc’tty, look at it, it’s not supposed to do that—!”
Oh, wonderful, Jim thought. “Bloodwing—!”
“Right behind you, Captain,” Ael’s voice said. But they were not right behind Enterprise, they were well behind. If their shields aren’t tuned properly—
The other Rihannsu ships had seen that upward-straining shape too. They turned, in a welter of different speeds and in seven different directions, and fled.
Blue, bulging, awful, the bubble strained outward…and then the bubble burst.
The Sunseed effect, as K’s’t’lk had said, released so much energy into such a small volume of space at such a speed and intensity that much of it had no choice but to propagate into subspace as a sleet of stripped ions, cyclotron radiation, and other subatomic particles. Once there, the newly created ion storm did not go faster than light itself, but it affected anything in subspace that did, such as ships with warp fields. The effect, so close to its source, was as if a great hand had grabbed Enterprise and was trying to use it for a saltshaker. Jim hung on tight, grimly determined that even if he died right now, he was going to do it in his command chair and not rolling around on the floor.
But dying was apparently not in the cards. The shaking began to ease off. Jim stared into the screen and saw eight sparks of light scattered over a great area of space behind him, all of them brilliantly backlit by an orange star, suddenly abnormally bright, with an equally sudden, swiftly expanding spherical halo of dimming but deadly blue-white fire. That halo expanded to meet them, surrounded them, rushed past them—
Seven of them flowered into fire themselves, one after another, as their shields failed, and in both realspace and subspace a billion tons of plasma struck them at a temperature of nearly two million degrees. The little spheres of pure white fire produced by the instantaneous annihilation of all the matter and antimatter in what remained of their warp engines was briefly hotter: but not by much, and not for long.
And one spark burned bright for a moment, its tuned shields shrieking light…then dull again, and duller still as the star behind it began to recover from its very brief solar flare.
“Bloodwing,” Jim said.
Silence.
“Enterprise,” Ael said, after a moment.
Jim breathed out. “Is everyone all right over there?”
“My nerves are a casualty, I would say,” Ael sai
d. “But the shields held, for which I praise Fire’s name…having seen It so close to hand, and lived. We have some minor structural problems, I believe.”
“We too will need to examine the hull, Captain,” Spock said. “But initial indicators seem to suggest only minor damage.”
“Good. Let’s get it taken care of,” Jim said, and stood up, now that it was safe to do so. “Scotty, K’s’t’lk, nice work.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Scotty said.
“I must apologize, Captain,” K’s’t’lk said. “I had hoped for better.”
Jim paused. “Sorry?”
“There was supposed to be a lovely evenly generated ionization effect that propagated right around the corona,” K’s’t’lk said, sounding mournful. “Not just a coronal mass ejection like that, all lumpy and asymmetrical.”
“I thought it worked rather well,” Ael said, sounding dubious.
“But not the way it was supposed to,” K’s’t’lk said. “Captain, Commander, I am mortified. We were very nearly all roast.”
“You mean toast,” Sulu said.
“Toast, thank you.”
“Nonetheless,” Ael said, “we are all alive…a situation on which I would have been unwilling to suggest odds when I first saw what was waiting for us. If a few adjustments in your version of the process need to be made, well, that is the history of science. But meantime, the effectiveness of the tuned-shield approach against the Sunseed routines is very neatly proven.”
“Assuming one knows the frequencies to which the shields must be tuned ahead of time,” Spock said. “Assessing and tuning them when the star cannot be analyzed ahead of time, but must be assessed at the same time, will be a considerable challenge.”
“I leave that to the three of you,” Jim said. “Meanwhile, we have another problem. There were seven Romulan ships in Federation space when they had no business to be there. I don’t suppose that was the diplomatic mission….”
“If it was, we have committed nearly as serious a breach of protocol as they did,” Ael said dryly. “But I very much doubt they had anything to do with the ships we are still expecting.”
