Trike?
Trike. Kickstand. Three-legged Deano. You know, the Undine.
Every war generates a fair amount of shorthand nomenclature, mostly pejorative, intended for referencing enemies. The Undine War is no exception to the grand military tradition that allowed such monikers as “Jerry,” “Fritz,” and “Victor Charlie” to enter the general lexicon. I understand the impulse. Still, I have to wonder how the many tripeds who served as MACOs during the war—Triexians and Edosians, to name only two species—feel when they hear a slur like “Trike.” But I sense that bringing that up might not endear me to the sergeant.
Of course. You’ve been in closer quarters with the Undine than most Starfleet officers have managed to get.
I suppose I got closer to Deano than even most MACOs did.
Even that might be a bit of an understatement. After all, you’re one of the relatively few humans who’s actually been aboard an Undine starship and lived to talk about it.
I just did what anybody else with the same training would have done: I tried to keep my buddies alive.
I’d like to discuss the boarding operation, if you don’t mind. Can you give me some of the details?
I was serving with a MACO detachment that the U.S.S. Thunderchild was ferrying toward a hot spot just outside of the old Romulan Neutral Zone boundary. The place we were headed for was an asteroid, an airless hunk of rock and metal that the Romulans left honeycombed with mining tunnels. I never learned the Romulan name for the place, but I know it was renamed Chiron Beta Prime after the Earth-Romulan War left it under Earth’s jurisdiction.
So we were training hard throughout the voyage, running environment-suit combat drills in holographic mine simulations throughout every duty shift. Didn’t want to get caught with our cammies down around our ankles, you know?
It’s a good thing you were so vigilant. According to the mission logs, the Thunderchild was nearly a parsec away from its destination when it encountered the spatial anomaly.
That’s right. I heard later that Lieutenant Andex was at tactical when the bogey appeared, and that he reported the anomaly as a graviton ellipse. Most of the guys in the Thunderchild’s MACO unit assumed that Deano had to be hiding either inside the ellipse or right behind it. All the squids on the bridge thought so, too.
Squids?
It’s shorthand for “Starfleet.” From an old nautical term referring to sailors. Goes back to the days when wet navies landed jarheads on beaches for amphibious assaults. The guys who piloted the boats were the squids. The marines who leaped off the boats to storm the beach were sharks. You know, like in the language of the Maori, where the word for “shark” is mako?
Anyhow, “squid” was our sort of good-natured nickname for the Starfleeters, though it didn’t always fit them all that well. Take Andex, for example. He was from Sauria, and it would have been a lot easier to think of him as a “squid” if his mouth wasn’t a half meter across and bristling with about a hundred steak-knife-sized teeth.
I want to thank you for being so patient with my asking questions that nobody who’d served either in Starfleet or with the MACO would have to ask. And I hope you’ll indulge me with another stupid question: What exactly is a graviton ellipse?
I’m not surprised you don’t know about those. Nobody in the MACO does, and in Starfleet it’s next to nobody. A graviton ellipse is a small volume of normal space—it can range from microscopic size up to the size of a small asteroid, or maybe even bigger—that’s been kicked into high warp speed because it somehow got tucked inside an envelope of gravimetric distortion. GEs mostly travel through subspace, only popping out when their trajectories take them close to an EM hot spot—like a Federation starship on its way to a throwdown with the Kickstands.
Anyway, most everybody aboard expected the Trikes to leap out of the ellipse and down our throats any second. Me, I wasn’t so sure.
Why?
Because of something nobody else in my combat unit was thinking about, probably because none of them were part squid the way I was. As dangerous as GEs can be, I knew that they had one redeeming trait: the fact that they’re about as rare as monasteries on Risa. Only a handful of GEs have been documented since a big bastard of one plucked the old Aries IV command module right out of the Martian sky way back in 2032. If Deano really was surfing into our universe on top of that anomaly, then he was damned lucky to have found the perfect wave by sheer accident. Either that, or he was damned smart to have figured out how to re-create the very subspace storm that nearly shut down all human space exploration beyond the Earth-Luna system forever and ever, amen.
Well, we always knew that Deano was a clever bastard. Maybe even a very clever bastard, having built all those elaborate simulation-environments they’d used to train their fake-human infiltrators. He was certainly clever enough to surf in on a convenient spatial anomaly he happened to notice heading toward us through fluidic space and subspace. But was he a clever enough bastard to build both his own board and the wave beneath his three big nasty-scary feet? I was still holding out some hope that he hadn’t gotten quite that clever yet.
The after-action reports of Commander Marta Segusa, the Thunderchild’s senior science officer, say that the initial analysis of the spatial anomaly turned out to be wrong. The phenomenon turned out not to be a graviton ellipse at all.
That’s what Major Shea told us once the bridge crew discovered that what we were really dealing with was just a garden-variety subspace rift. I would have been relieved to hear that, but there wasn’t time for that because the rift opened up almost directly in the T-child’s flight path. And it spat out a honking huge Trike bioship so close to us that we almost traded paint jobs.
The Undine ship was hiding inside the anomaly, waiting to ambush the Thunderchild?
It sure as hell looked that way. I mean, what are the odds of our two ships crossing paths purely by accident? Look, the word “astronomical” was coined specifically for situations like that one. Space is really, really big, so a haircut’s-breadth near-collision like that couldn’t have been an accident. I figured they must have entered normal space at the exact location and time that they did because they knew we were coming. They were watching us. Somehow they had learned to monitor our universe from safely inside their own, or from inside subspace. And that allowed them to engineer the superluminal almost-crash that collapsed our warp field and knocked out our shields, among other things, in the same slick maneuver. Like I said, Deano is a very clever bastard—for a three-legged alien grasshopper from the darkest pit of hell, that is.
Before you boarded the Undine ship, did you get a good look at it from the outside?
Hell yeah. I saw way more of it than I wanted to, as it turned out, inside and outside. Neither one are sights you ever forget, no matter how much you might want to. I got a good, long look at the thing’s hide—you have to call it that when you see it up close, since it resembles crocodile skin a lot more than it does hull metal—because one of the systems that went down during the near-crash was the transporter. So beaming a combat team inside Deano’s ship simply wasn’t an option. Fortunately, Major Shea and Sergeant Ogilvy had worked out a plan for this very contingency with Captain Hoffman and Lieutenant Andex: we did an old-school boarding, using breach pods.
I’ve had some… unfortunate experiences with escape pods, so I’m familiar enough with those. Can you explain how a breach pod is different?
Sure. A breach pod is really just an escape pod that’s been repurposed to run toward trouble instead of away from it. Instead of abandoning the Thunderchild and the ship that was getting ready to rip her to pieces like a lion dismantling a zebra, we aimed our pods straight at the enemy. That was when I got my closest view of the outside of Deano’s ship—when our pods approached that weird, bumpy hull, latched on with the magneto-mechanical grapplers, and started cutting into the crocodile hide of Deano’s ship.
What was your first impression of the enemy vessel?
That
it was actually alive. I mean, it didn’t have a machined look to it. You could tell it wasn’t built in any shipyard. Its hull metal didn’t come from some foundry. It looked more like it was hatched from some enormous alien seedpod, or grown out of a blob of jelly from some colossal beehive. And it sort of… undulated through space like an enormous three-tailed squid with rough, mottled green skin and a mass of writhing, very grabby-looking tendrils streaming from the tip of the bow section. Or maybe that part was the thing’s mouth. I don’t know how else to describe it.
Anyway, when we were making our approach in the breach pods, it was as though we were moving in slow motion. It seemed to take a year to get through the few minutes it took to reach their hull, clamp on, and start cutting our way inside. That part I remember really well, since I was in charge of the cutting phaser. It felt like I was slicing into an impossibly huge pumpkin. It’s funny, because I can remember thinking at the time that there was stuff inside the hull that had to be a hell of a lot scarier than pumpkin seeds.
The worst part of cutting our way in was the way the hull felt when I touched it, even through the environment suit’s gloves. You’d swear the thing had a pulse, or that the ship’s hide was actually recoiling from the cutting beam, the way the tourists here do when the local pollinators start swarming. Of course, I suppose that sensation could have been just a rumbling power conduit or something. But it was damned spooky just the same.
How big would you estimate the Undine ship was?
It was goddamned big. Nearly two hundred meters along the long axis, and maybe forty meters at the beam—if the damned thing had a beam, which I suppose comes down to whether the thing really was a ship or a living creature. Either way, there was a real sense of menace about it. You could feel it in your marrow when you stared at it. It was… malevolent. Sinister, full of hate. That ship, or whatever it was, was an abomination. Wrong as a Vulcan drad band.
But you went inside the thing with the boarding team anyway.
Boo-yah. I was MACO to the bone. A marine. Still am, ’cause there’s no such thing as an “ex-marine.” Semper Fi, Semper Invictus.* We had a job to do, and we went in and did it. When we finished cutting through the hull and our escape pod started to flood with the squishy warm goo the Trikes used for an atmosphere, we weren’t gonna let it slow us down. We just adjusted the breach pods’ force fields to cram the stuff back into the breach in Deano’s hull—and to carry us inside with it.
What did the Undine ship look like on the inside?
Everything was sort of indistinct, since we were trying to move in full environmental suits while carrying our rifles and field packs through “air” that had a viscosity factor like orange marmalade. But I remember stepping into a narrow corridor with shiny, glistening walls and deck that made a wet squish that got you thinking about revisiting your breakfast whenever you moved. It was like we had just been injected out of a giant hypospray into the veins of some alien leviathan.
But mostly I remember the hard surge of adrenaline that struck me like a disruptor bolt when the firefight got started. And it was “game on” from the moment we finished pushing through into the corridor, where we were caught immediately in a crossfire, which must have been coming from at least two groups of Trikes that I couldn’t see yet. Of course, with all the confusion of the battle, and the trouble we had with visibility, we probably lost at least a few to friendly fire.
Why were you having visibility problems? Do the Undine use a different spectrum of visible light than we do?
Deano obviously likes his mood lighting, and the ship’s internal atmosphere really scattered our helmet lights. But if there’s enough light to carry off a romantic dinner, then there’s enough light for a MACO squad to put down a column of Kickstands. No, a lot of our visibility problems came from the e-suits themselves. They’re a necessary evil in a ship that’s designed to keep Deano comfy, but those helmets really cut down on your peripheral vision, which is tough to take in a close-quarters combat situation. That alone can raise the “scary factor” of anything by at least tenfold. Running into Flotter T. Watter III while I was wearing one of those helmets, and under those conditions, would have scared the living piss out of me. And if you have to face something that’s already scary in circumstances like that… well, then you’re just about certain to decorate the inside of your suit with the Brown Cluster Award for Combat Incontinence.
You were lucky you had enough time to get your breach pods into position on the hull before the Undine managed to charge up their ship’s external weaponry and open fire on you.
Damn right, you know? We were already slicing into Deano’s hide when the Trikes finally cleared their tubes. We were literally already on top of them, so they couldn’t hit us with their bio-pulse cannons or particle beams or projectiles without damaging themselves more than we’d already done. Thunderchild wasn’t quite so lucky, though. She took several direct hits before Chief Engineer Thomas could get her shield generators back on line. The T-child was crippled, and she would have been destroyed entirely unless Deano got real distracted, real fast.
Didn’t the Undine have shields of some sort to fend off boarders?
It’s true, Deano usually had some pretty powerful shields up his sleeves. But this one’s shields were down when it came swooping into normal space, as was his weapons array. The squid engineers chalked this up to the cost of this particular type of ambush maneuver, which temporarily disabled both ships, at least to some extent. The Kickstands were evidently gambling that their systems would recover faster than the T-child’s could. The Trikes were right about that, at least in terms of defense.
You mean they hadn’t taken a MACO offense into account.
Well, I wasn’t counting on that at the time, just hoping, and with a pretty fair degree of confidence, even though we all knew already what a tough sonofabitch Deano was. I mean, there was good reason to hope that they’d have real trouble coping with the MACO. After all, we’d heard a lot of thirdhand intel and scuttlebutt about the great lengths the Trikes had gone to in trying to infiltrate Starfleet. But nobody’s ever found any evidence that they’d so much as tried to do that with the MACO.
An absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. Starfleet Command once thought they’d made their ranks infiltration-proof, only to find out the hard way that they were wrong about that. There’s a first time for everything, to coin a cliché.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see, then. But if you ask me, I think Deano might have decided he just couldn’t quite pull off a convincing impersonation of a MACO. Not after receiving the stern talking-to that we delivered that day. Maybe from that time forward he decided to spend his time going after easier targets.
About the combat itself: what kind of tactics were effective against an enemy like the Undine?
The squids used to consider a lot of our tactical plans unorthodox—until they saw them working in the field when standard procedures failed. I’m talking about a number of engagements with the Borg, the first of which left us sadder but wiser. Like Major Shea used to say, good judgment comes from experience—and experience comes from bad judgment. So I guess we have the Borg to thank for the fact that every MACO trooper in our boarding party was carrying energy dampeners and modified TR-116s instead of standard phasers.
Would you mind describing the TR-116?
The TR-116. My sweetheart. It’s a piece of old-school warfare technology. The TR-116 is a rifle that Starfleet developed for use in high-radiation environments that would cripple a phaser. Or against enemies like the Jem’Hadar, or the Borg—a foe with the ability to shield itself from directed-energy weapons. But instead of firing a collimated energy beam, the TR-116 uses an internal chemical explosion to launch metal projectiles, either one at a time or in rapid-fire mode. We called it the T-Rex for short because it was a technological dinosaur. And because it was loud, not to mention scary as hell.
I remember someone going on a killing spree decades ago aboard Deep Spac
e 9 using one of those things.
So you know how effective a weapon like that can be, even in the age of the phaser. The TR-116 can shred nearly any solid enemy with a lethal hail of ballistic micromissiles. It can even fire through most material barriers without so much as scratching the paint on the walls, thanks to its computerized targeting system and the microtransporter built into the barrel.
When we boarded Deano’s ship, we had to soften him up before our T-Rexes could answer his greeting in the manner that etiquette demanded. Major Shea and Sergeant Ogilvy took care of that by launching the energy dampeners down that squishy-soft corridor in both directions. Usually we’d throw the damps like old-style grenades, but the viscous air forced us to launch ’em like mortars, or old-style rocket-propelled ordnance. There was a blinding flash a couple of seconds later, and the energy beams coming at us from both ends of the curving hallway immediately stopped.
That’s when Deano came in close, once he realized his bio-pulse disruptors were out of commission. So we locked, loaded, and split into two back-to-back firing formations as they approached.
We can take a break if you’d like.
No. I’m fine. I’ll just try to avoid going into too many of the gory details about what can happen when Deano has the home-field advantage. Like what happens to the human body after a Trike’s claws slash open his e-suit and lets it fill up with that warm goo they pump their ships full of.
I’ve seen the logs from Voyager’s early encounters with the Undine. Ensign Harry Kim nearly died after one of the creatures injected him with some sort of enzyme that started consuming him from the inside.
Nearly died. Huh. Deano must have learned something from his scrimmages with the Voyager squids. If the Trikes we fought got their claws on you, you were toast. No “nearly” about it.
ONLINE THE NEEDS OF THE MANY Page 2
