“And the galaxy has turned out to be a much more dangerous place than any of us realized,” Archer said, staring down into his nearly empty glass. On the other side of the room he could see Trip’s tequila bottle.
He immediately regretted having let his last few words slip out.
“You still miss him, don’t you?” Erika said quietly, backing away slightly, giving him some room.
He nodded silently.
“I know how close the two of you were,” she said. “Commander Tucker didn’t serve aboard Columbia all that long, but I worked with him long enough to know what a good sounding board he could be. And that’s something a captain needs almost as much as air and gravity. That big chair on the bridge can be a very lonely place.”
Archer chuckled, but without any humor. “Especially lately. But I don’t suppose either of us needs any lessons about how isolating command can be.”
“No, we don’t. But it does sounds as though I need to remind you to reach out to some of your other senior officers for guidance. You’re pretty tight with your tactical officer, Lieutenant Reed, right? And I’d be willing to bet that even your Vulcan XO would be a good listener in a pinch.”
He shook his head. “They’ve both been a bit…preoccupied lately.”
Erika frowned then, and for a moment Archer feared she might ask why she hadn’t seen either of them during the past days of repair and recovery layover that had followed the fight over Draylax. Instead, her frown softened. With a small shrug, she said, “Well, there’s always Doctor Phlox.”
Archer raised his glass, and some of the tequila nearly splashed out. “To Phlox. Maybe Starfleet won’t post bartenders aboard our ships, but a chief medical officer is usually the next best thing.”
And there’s always Chef and Porthos to fall back on if Phlox ever decides to steal the other shuttlepod and pull a disappearing act of his own, he added silently as he downed a considerable fraction of what remained of his drink.
He noticed a beat later that her frown had returned with a vengeance. “I’m a little worried about you, Jon. I haven’t seen you like this since we went rock-climbing right after the Xindi crisis.”
No more eager to discuss that topic than he was to open up to her about what was really going on with Trip, T’Pol, and Malcolm, he said, “You don’t have to worry about me, Erika.”
She folded her arms across her chest, her eyes narrowing in that familiar look of you-can’t-kid-a-kidder skepticism. “Oh, good. I’m glad that’s settled. I’m completely reassured now.”
Archer spread both arms and one hand in a gesture of peace, nearly spilling the remnants of his drink in the process. “Sorry. Look, I just don’t do the whole self-revelation thing particularly well. Maybe T’Pol has been rubbing off on me.”
He paused for a moment, grateful for her patience while he tried to gather his thoughts. “It’s just that I came out here to explore the galaxy,” he said at length. “I didn’t sign up to become a soldier. That’s why I joined Starfleet and not the MACOs, for Christ’s sake.” He raised his drink again.
She gently took the glass from his hand before he could finish emptying it. “You’re right, Jon. We should be explorers and ambassadors, seeking out the things no one has ever seen before. In peace, and with open hands. And I have faith that we will do that, one day.” She offered him a wan smile. “If not our generation, then the next one, or the one after that.”
Archer looked into her dark eyes, which were as soulful and sympathetic as he remembered. At that moment he wanted nothing more than to kiss her, to hold her, to be held by her. But that ship had left spacedock long ago. Besides, he was a canny enough drinker to realize that the impulse might have originated in the depths of Trip’s bottle of Skagaran tequila.
“I’m glad one of us is still optimistic enough to hang on to a little hope,” he said after the silence had stretched for a while.
Hernandez moved her hand to his shoulder, squeezing it gently. “As long as we breathe, Jonathan Archer, there will always be hope.”
TWENTY-ONE
Romulan Scoutship Drolae
ALTHOUGH THE SCOUTSHIP’S DAMPING SYSTEM effectively canceled out any noticeable inertial-acceleration effects, Tucker found he couldn’t keep his heart from lodging itself firmly in his throat. As he contemplated the velocity gauge on his copilot’s console, it occurred to him that he had never before traveled so fast in his life, not even aboard Enterprise. In fact, he might just have become the fastest human who ever lived.
Trip had picked up enough of the Romulan Empire’s dominant written language to understand the meaning of the text displayed on the speed readout before him. In his mind he pronounced the sounds that the blocky, angular Rihannsu script would make had he chosen to speak them aloud: avaihh fve ehr rhi.
Warp six point five, he thought, translating those alien sounds into English. Plasma flow is up to eight thousand kolem, with twenty-two thousand melakols of pressure in the intermix chamber. Damn.
Even during the Drolae’s swift voyage from Romulus to Cheron, Terix had not pushed the little scoutship’s warp drive nearly so hard as he was doing now. Once the Cheron mission had revealed Taugus III to be the most recent known location of the Ejhoi Ormiin cell responsible for Doctor Ehrehin’s murder and the theft of his warp-seven data, the centurion had seemed absolutely hell-bent on either reaching the dissidents’ enclave as quickly as possible or perishing in the attempt.
The little ship shuddered briefly, revealing what was probably an eddy of turbulence in the tiny, barely stable warp field that surrounded the vessel. He could only hope the unaccustomed vibrations didn’t portend some impending catastrophic failure; at such high speeds, a sudden warp-field collapse could reduce a vessel to a light-year-long string of vaporized debris in a matter of moments. And with the propulsion systems under so much obvious strain, the margin for error within that superluminal bubble of survival was probably too small even to measure.
“Do we really have to ride this poor beast so hard, Terix?” Trip asked, taking care to keep both Alabama and Florida out of his diction.
“We have no way of knowing for certain how long the Ejhoi Ormiin we seek will remain at the coordinates T’Luadh provided,” the centurion said. His gaze was focused straight ahead at the warp-distorted vista that rushed ceaselessly, and at unimaginable speeds, toward the scoutship’s forward windows. “We must reach the Taugus system before they find another hiding place.”
“All this speed won’t do us much good if we blow ourselves clear to Erebus getting there,” said Trip. “Besides, if we can generate this much speed with such a small warp core, I have to wonder why it’s worth taking such risks to recover the data these dissidents stole from Doctor Ehrehin in the first place.”
Terix turned to face Trip and looked at him as though he was being deliberately obtuse. “Look at the readouts on this ship’s support systems, Cunaehr.”
With a shrug, Trip did as the centurion asked. A moment later he realized that both the life-support and structural integrity systems were redlining—or rather greenlining, since the emerald-blooded Romulans had their own unique take on which color best signified imminent danger.
He realized all at once that he’d been playing the spy game so long that he’d momentarily forgotten to think like a warp engineer. The Drolae’s extreme current speed—which nearly rivaled that of Ehrehin’s yet-unrealized dream of a warp-seven stardrive—came at a trade-off cost that a larger, better-armed vessel could never sustain. Terix’s current speed-at-the-expense-of-everything-else use of the Drolae reminded Trip that Ehrehin’s research hadn’t been about merely reaching the upper reaches of the warp scale; it had been about doing so in a sustained fashion without sacrificing every scrap of a starship’s non-propulsion-related functionality.
“I understand,” Trip said, nodding. He didn’t relish the prospect of having a long conversation about the calculus of power utilization curves with the centurion.
Unfortunately,
Terix seemed to be one of those martinet types who enjoyed lecturing those he regarded as his inferiors. “We can’t very well assemble a viable war fleet out of ships configured like this one,” he said. “An armada that has to expend all of its energy resources just to reach the battlefield is useless from a tactical perspective. Unless your ship needs only to deliver one or two men very quickly to a target by stealth.”
“All right. So maybe taking a few risks to neutralize the Ejhoi Ormiin is a worthwhile thing after all. But I still say that blowing ourselves to quarks on the way there is a spectacularly bad idea.”
“We have little time to waste, Cunaehr. And for reasons other than our urgent errand in the Taugus system.”
Trip frowned, wondering whether his own time might not have just become even shorter than he’d feared. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Taugus will not be our only stop on this voyage,” Terix said.
That’s assuming we don’t smithereenize ourselves en route, Trip thought. Or get killed by Ch’uihv’s people once we reach Taugus.
Aloud, he said only, “Oh?”
The centurion offered a grim nod. “Once we put an end to the dissidents in the Taugus system, we shall head directly to the Sei Paehhos’aehallh sector.”
It took Trip a beat or two to translate the Romulan place name into the words that appeared on the star maps with which he was most familiar. Sei Paehhos’aehallh. That’s what the Romulans call the Gamma Hydra sector.
“Why aren’t we heading back to Romulus?” Trip wanted to know, almost as much as he wanted to know why Terix hadn’t seen fit to mention this little detour before now.
“Our intelligence operatives have uncovered evidence that the Coalition has recently set up a small surveillance station near the Tezel-Oroko star system. We must find that listening post and take it out.”
“Oh,” Trip said, still suspicious. “Well, I suppose we’d better get on with Taugus, then.” Pedal to the metal, he thought as he faced forward again and stared out into the relentlessly approaching cosmos.
Since the bureau wasn’t in the habit of deliberately giving itself vulnerabilities by briefing its operatives beyond what they needed to know for a given assignment, Trip knew he could neither confirm Terix’s intel about a Coalition spy base in the Gamma Hydra sector nor dismiss it out of hand. He desperately wished for enough time alone with the Drolae’s subspace transmitter to allow himself to touch base even briefly with his superiors, or at least to send a burst transmission to warn them to take precautions at Tezel-Oroko. That might not only protect anyone who was stationed there monitoring the Romulans, but could also keep him from being killed by friendly fire coming from the alleged listening post’s defenders.
It occurred to him then that he was already more than six hours late for his regularly scheduled check-in with what he liked to think of as “the home office.” Unfortunately, that couldn’t be helped. At least not so long as circumstances forced him into close quarters with a Romulan soldier who probably already harbored enough suspicion about him right now to justify blowing him right out the nearest airlock—and at warp six-point-five, no less.
Okay, so I don’t get to check in with Stillwell or Harris while this guy’s looking over my shoulder, Trip thought, hoping, as always, to make the best of a bad situation. But at least he can’t file any reports about me to his home office without my knowing about it.
Nevertheless, the continued inescapable presence of Centurion Terix gave Trip an intermittent but highly uncomfortable sensation.
He kept imagining he could feel Admiral Valdore’s hard, vigilant stare drilling into the back of his neck like a pair of white-hot mining lasers….
TWENTY-TWO
Sunday, July 20, 2155
Enterprise NX-01
ARCHER COULDN’T QUITE BELIEVE what Admiral Gardner was asking him to do. “You do realize that the only reason I was able to help with the crisis on Qu’Vat was because I was used as a guinea pig for the cure, and my ship’s doctor blackmailed the fleet admiral?”
The image of Gardner on the ready-room viewer nodded. “Nevertheless, the best xenoanthropological minds of the Coalition scientific community feel that you may be the one human to whom the Klingons are most likely to listen. On Qu’Vat, after all, you did become partly Klingon.”
Archer shook his head, still incredulous even though the admiral’s reasoning made a crazy sort of sense. “Sure, the therapeutic retrovirus Phlox injected me with left some Klingon genes in my DNA. But I also spread the infection to the fleet admiral himself, not to mention several dozen of his crew. Admiral Krell has, by the way, practically sworn a blood oath on Doctor Phlox over the whole damned thing, and I suspect he’d cook and eat me in a heartbeat if he could. Or maybe he’d even skip the cooking, take me straight to his dining room, and do the deed raw.”
“I never tire of your flair for the dramatic, Archer,” Gardner said, traces of both bemusement and condescension mixing in his voice. “The Klingon High Council has agreed to grant you an audience, authorized by Chancellor M’Rek himself.”
“This is the same chancellor who sent Duras to kill me for busting out of Rura Penthe. Just so we’re clear that you’re aware you’re sending me to face an extremely unfriendly crowd.”
Gardner sighed. “Among many warrior societies, opposing leaders would often meet on neutral ground, setting aside their hostilities in order to discuss terms. Our xenoanthro experts believe that the Klingons will be much too honorable to do anything to you while under a flag of truce.”
“Permission to speak freely, sir?” Archer said, struggling to keep calm.
“Of course,” Gardner said, nodding.
“Admiral, you’re already talking as if we are at war.”
“We will be at war if the Klingons ignore this message, Captain,” Gardner said, his voice grave. “Our formal ‘cessation of hostilities’ ultimatum will be better received—and discussed—if one of our own is there to hand it to them personally.”
“Have you ever heard the phrase ‘shoot the messenger,’ Admiral?”
Gardner offered a slight smile. “Archer, from what I’ve been told, the Klingon High Council holds you in much higher regard than you think. Although the resolution that you and your CMO brought to Qu’Vat’s metagenic virus crisis didn’t make those affected by the cure terribly happy, the virus you helped cure would have decimated the Empire, and perhaps even destroyed it if you’d left it unchecked. According to some intelligence we’ve gathered, a few influential Klingons have stopped just short of calling you a hero.”
“Joy,” Archer said under his breath. It wasn’t that he minded having these people regard him as a hero—it would be far preferable to being one of their targets—but Klingon warriors were tremendously mercurial and unpredictable. And, as he had learned from Enterprise’s very first mission, it was a mistake to assume that members of an alien society would think, act, or react the way that humans did.
“Have you reviewed the security recording I transmitted of the Klingon woman we recovered from the wreckage here at Draylax?” Archer asked.
Gardner nodded. “We did. All of us at Starfleet Command did. And we cannot support your theory that the Romulans were really behind the attack on Draylax. Just because one dying Klingon suspects it does not make it so. Your scans of the ships before they were destroyed showed Klingon crews—live Klingon crews—and despite the actions of the second cadre of battle cruisers, it is more likely that there have been intramilitary squabbles about hostilities related to the Coalition than it is that they were covering up Romulan involvement. Why would they not want to expose the Romulans? Or are you suggesting that the Klingons are also somehow in league with the Romulans?”
Archer clenched and unclenched his fists under his desk, wanting so badly to strike at something. “The Klingon woman specifically said that the crew on the ships that struck at Draylax were kept barely alive, but unable to act. That would explain our sensor readings. And the
second wave of Klingon ships may indeed have been trying to eradicate any trace of Romulan involvement. Whether that’s because they suspect it, or because they don’t want to be framed for the actions of those ships—”
“Exactly,” Gardner said, interrupting him. “The second wave of vessels—ships whose actions Krell apparently authorized—was acting in our favor. For whatever reason, they were trying to stop further attacks against Draylax, Enterprise, and Columbia.”
“Or they were trying to cover up the initial attacks.”
Gardner shook his head. “If they wanted to cover this thing up—if they didn’t care about how their actions would be interpreted—then they probably would have destroyed you as well.” He held up a hand, palm facing the screen. “Enough, Captain. The formal message you are to deliver to Qo’noS has been transmitted to Enterprise via subspace radio already. It is now your duty to bring it before the High Council and present it.”
“What about Columbia?” Archer said, squaring his jaw while trying not to look defensive.
“Two Daedalus-class ships—the Essex and the Archon—will arrive at Draylax within the next few hours. They will continue to assist Columbia with her repairs, and render assistance on Draylax as well.”
Gardner’s look softened a bit as he leaned forward. “Archer, whether you want to believe it or not, I do listen to what you have to say, and weigh your concerns, and present your arguments to my superiors. But you are just a part of this organization. So am I. Starfleet is bigger than either of us. And the Coalition of Planets is immensely bigger, even though it’s only been around for a few months now. You have been on the edge of discovery, have encountered new civilizations and seen things that most humans would never dream of outside of fiction. I have no doubt that history will record great things about you. Probably a hell of a lot greater than whatever it might say about me eventually.
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