The Enterprise War

by John Jackson Miller

  “It already is for nothing! Don’t you see it?”

  The wavemaster was momentarily confused, thinking Quadeo was speaking generally. But Dreston piped in to explain.

  “Something’s happened to Enterprise,” he shouted. “It’s split in two!”

  The image appeared before her. The saucer front of Enterprise had separated from the rear section, even as both portions were still under attack by Rengru. Several of her troops were still aboard the dish.

  “Should we order our people back?” Dreston asked.

  She hesitated. It really did look like the end of her prize. The starship had come apart at the seams—but there still was a chance that somebody could get aboard for a minute and find something of use. She’d come too far to walk away with nothing.

  And with the damage done to three waves, that might be all that remained of her career tomorrow.

  “Hemmick, Quadeo—back your carriers out to the cloud line and recall your modules. The Thirty-Niners are going to see this through!”

  Outside U.S.S. Enterprise

  The chaos surrounding Spock had not abated since the Rengru arrived. What he needed to do involved concentration, a feat nearly impossible given the running battles on the surface of the ship and between ships. Seconds after watching a Boundless member astern from his position rocket away, he had felt one jolt after another shaking the starship under his boots. Powerful explosive bolts fired, propelling Enterprise’s saucer away from the stardrive section.

  Things are worse than I surmised, Spock thought. He could wait no longer for the perfect chance. He had to act.

  The only shadow he still had to contend with, the Gold Squad subaltern, was engaged in a firefight while covering him at the airlock. That was satisfactory. Spock disliked taking advantage of someone defending him, but he had no choice. Facing the airlock, he activated his laser torch—

  —and turned it on himself. Or, rather, the governor module jutting from his back. He had studied it since learning of it in Jayko’s lab; it was supposedly impervious to sabotage, by the battlesuit wearer or a companion. Except in one case: a precision burn by a laser torch, an item not usually in the Boundless warriors’ complement of tools.

  It was a dangerous act: like doing laser surgery on himself. The burn had to be in precisely the right place and of the right intensity and duration. He could cut himself, breach the huge reservoir of jetpack fuel he was carrying, or touch off one of his munitions with the tiniest miscalculation. In a bit of irony, his battlesuit’s AI helped him keep his hand steady.

  An alarm sounded briefly in Spock’s ears, but nothing in his interfaces changed. He wondered if he’d done something wrong.

  “Hey!” Goldsub spun around. “What are you doing there?”

  “Apologizing,” Spock said. He fired his disruptor at the hull near his squad leader’s one planted boot. Only partially affixed to Enterprise, it gave way—allowing Spock to fire again. The impact on Goldsub’s personal energy shielding propelled him away from the saucer.

  As Goldsub swore, Spock stepped forward, thinking he might need to fire again. But the saucer section was in motion now, heading forward and away from the engineering hull. That made sense; if such a measure were necessary, the crew would be using the saucer to escape a catastrophic blast.

  He stowed his weapon, reset his comm channel to one previously prohibited by the governor, and spoke quickly. “Captain Pike, this is Lieutenant Spock. I am on the hull of Enterprise, requesting transport!”

  There was no response. He could well imagine no one listening at such a juncture; the transporters might be inoperative as well. He turned back to the airlock—and saw a warrior standing before the closed accessway.

  “Well, if it isn’t Spock.” Baladon’s name appeared in Spock’s interface. “Don’t tell me you’re homesick too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Connolly just tried to run. Being at the doorstep seems to have an effect on you people.” He gestured to Spock’s governor unit, still sparking. “Obviously Connolly didn’t have your smarts. It’s a neat trick. I can’t override your battlesuit.”

  Spock regarded Baladon. The warrior seemed heedless of the fighting and destruction around him. “What do you intend?”

  Baladon pointed to the stardrive section, still being battered by Rengru. “Enterprise is no prize now—for the Boundless, or for me. But I’m sure they’d like a word with you after all this. I’ll settle for bringing you to them instead!”

  37

  * * *

  U.S.S. Enterprise

  Saucer Section

  Little Hope

  “I have the tally,” Nicola announced. Since nobody outside Enterprise had seemed interested in talking, the comm officer had switched to the more urgent task of contacting other decks on the saucer section. It was another place where the ship’s computer wasn’t being its usually helpful self. “We have ninety-nine aboard.”

  “Which means we have seventy-four aboard the stardrive section,” Pike said. Since Susquatane, it had become the unbearable arithmetic of his life. “Status?”

  “Still not moving,” Nhan said. “Some of the Boundless ships are leaving—and a lot of Rengru are following. Maybe they all think we’re worth less, broken in two.”

  Or maybe they’re afraid the engineering hull will explode, Pike thought. He dismissed the idea as quickly as he could. He already knew there was nothing to be done for Una and the others. “Look for escape pods.”

  Nhan called out. “Captain, we still have boarders on the hull, both sides.”

  “Both the Rengru and the Boundless, or both sides of the saucer?”

  “Sorry. Both both. The Rengru are just tearing into the hull. Some of the Boundless are at the airlocks.”

  “Show me.” With security already stationed inside some of the airlocks, he had delayed checking the feeds from the hull to deal with more pressing matters.

  The main viewscreen lit up with the display from the airlock just behind and beneath the bridge. Pike had expected to see armored warriors there, laying siege to his ship. Instead, he was surprised to see the two Boundless warriors outside were battering not the airlock, but one another.

  “They’re fighting!” Amin said. “What the hell?”

  Nhan squinted at the scene. “Is everyone doing that?”

  “I don’t care,” Pike said. “They’re not in yet. Raden, the thrusters are still nominal?”

  “Aye.”

  “Angle the dorsal exhaust ports perpendicular to the center, as far as the gimbals will allow. Ventrals the opposite direction.”

  Raden smiled with recognition. “I think I get you.”

  “They want to ride along so bad? Take them for a spin!”

  * * *

  “Baladon, this is unnecessary,” Spock said.

  “Really? I am quite enjoying it!”

  With hell breaking loose in the space all around, the two armored warriors, made titans by their battlesuits, pounded at one another as they rode the hurtling saucer. With their feet magnetically planted on the hull, there was little either could do to dislodge the other.

  Unfortunately for Spock, that fact—plus the bulk of his gear—made it difficult to bring his Suus Mahna training into play. Every step off the surface was a danger, a chance for one of the combatants to knock the other off the starship.

  Now there was a new element: the saucer section had started to spin.

  As the rotation accelerated, Spock saw Rengru and Boundless warriors alike losing hold and tumbling off the saucer into space. Baladon saw it, too, and laughed. “Wonderful! Hilarious!”

  “Some of those are your own people,” Spock said.

  “You fret about everything, Vulcan. I’m having the time of my life!” Baladon brought both fists down on Spock’s headgear again and again, jolts that his battlesuit barely cushioned. “You need to smile more!”

  Spock hunkered down beneath the rain of blows. He could not defeat a brawler without foo
twork—and as Enterprise spun ever faster, centripetal force came into play. All the boarders closer to the edge of the saucer were already gone, flung into the dust; only he and Baladon, near the center, remained.

  Soon Baladon was all he could see—as the surrounding war and debris vanished into a whirl. Baladon flailed against him, broad blows beginning to miss more than connect—but each strike from the more massive warrior nearly sent Spock to the hull.

  The hull! As Baladon wound up for another haymaker, Spock realized what he had to do.

  Spock ducked the blow, as he had before—only this time, he did not rise back up to a fighting posture. Instead, he went down to a crouch and slapped his hands on the hull. “Magnetize!”

  Baladon laughed—and grabbed Spock in a wrestling hold. “It’s time to go, Vulcan,” he said, and his jetpack activated. It was all physics—Spock’s four points of adherence fighting against Baladon’s upward thrust, even as both struggled against the force generated by the saucer’s now-frenzied rotation. Alarms went off in Spock’s interface. Too much stress on his armor, stress on his body.

  Baladon spoke again. “Hey! Don’t—”

  An orange flash filled the visual receptors of Spock’s battlesuit. Baladon released him. Spock lost hold of the hull and tumbled outward and forward, barely catching on with his hands. He looked up to see Baladon hurtling end over end into the morass, his jetpack blazing away.

  His feet no longer affixed, Spock tried to mash every molecule of his gloves to the hull. Under the ripping force of the saucer’s rotation, his torso and legs floated from the surface, pulling against his grip on the ship.

  A phaser blast struck nearby, causing his right hand to reflexively move—an act translated by his battlesuit as an order to let loose. Clinging and dizzy, he looked up—and saw in the open airlock what had happened to Baladon. A spacesuited Christopher Pike stood braced inside the aperture, pointing a phaser at the people he thought were trying to board his ship.

  “Captain, it is Spock!” he called out.

  Whatever channel he was on, it wasn’t the right one. He did finally think of a way to send a signal—but a second after he did, his left hand came loose too.

  Enterprise vanished—along with everything else.

  * * *

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Nhan said as Pike clambered back up the ladder and out of the turbolift shaft.

  “Mark the inertial dampers as ‘also barely working,’ ” Amin said.

  “I figure that got rid of the boarders,” Pike said, removing his helmet and staggering toward his chair. “Please tell me that’s everybody.”

  “We were down to two,” Nhan said. “I saw you shoot the one.”

  “The other fell off,” Pike said, collapsing in his chair. His helmet tumbled to the floor and rolled, curving away. “But it was strange. Before he let go, I could have sworn he made a Vulcan salute.”

  The mystery moment had little time to sink in, for before Pike could order a stop to the spinning, a final colossal blast ended the conversation altogether.

  38

  * * *

  Little Hope

  Spock meditated.

  Or he thought that was what he was doing. He was back in his quarters on Enterprise, his focus on a candle. A candle for a lost ship. Enterprise was a lost ship. His impulse to reason naturally tried to connect the two—but logic said he could not be on a vessel and mourning it at the same time.

  Still, the candle burned.

  He thought to close his eyes, to see if the light would disappear or linger. He realized then that they were already closed. He still saw the light. It was red. A kind of red that only existed in the deepest recesses of his memory, where he had forcibly hidden it away.

  He had been a child on Vulcan when it had appeared to him. Crimson, glowing rays emanating—no, extending—from a figure that was there, and yet not there. It had hovered over his bed, instilling in him wonder—and also bone-chilling fear. There was no logic to the thing’s presence then—nor in his mind now.

  I will not have this dream again. I will not!

  Spock opened his eyes to darkness—and breathed the cool reprocessed air of his battlesuit. It had indeed been a dream, he thought, caused by exhaustion or injury. Or a hallucination caused by a flaw in his oxygen mixture—or perhaps nitrogen narcosis from the pressures exerted on his body. He had been spinning, hadn’t he?

  It was then that he realized where he was: in space. The darkness, he now realized, wasn’t complete. A brown dwarf sun sat dully off to his right, a fuzzy blob hardly visible through the dust of the region. Much nearer, to his left, was a gas giant; his body had joined its family of satellites.

  Spock had been aboard Enterprise. No, not aboard, but atop it—and had been dislodged. That, he remembered—along with the last sight he’d seen before losing consciousness: a blast, well aft, which sent the saucer section careening out of sight. He hadn’t been able to tell whether the blast had come from a Rengru weapon—or, worse, from the stardrive section, which Pike must have cast off for a reason. What mattered was that the ship was gone—

  —and so was everything else from the colossal melee. It was as if the conflict had never taken place. No Rengru, no Boundless debris was visible anywhere, to the extent that anything could be made out.

  He looked around, unsure of what to do. His gaze fell upon a white circle. An icy moon of the gas giant; perhaps it had been a full-fledged dwarf planet when the body was still a star. Now there was nothing special about it—except for the red point of light that had lingered before his eyes earlier. It appeared only when he looked at the orb; when he looked away, it vanished.

  The jetpack on the Boundless suit could take him to it, he realized—eventually. It would take him a week to reach there, saving enough propellant to touch down safely. The armor could keep him alive during that time, and much longer.

  It made as much sense as anything else. He was likelier to be found on the surface of a world, any world, than if he were floating like jetsam. Why not that world?

  He called up the dialog allowing him to control the suit’s engine. Only then did he realize that, imperceptible to him, his jetpack had been operating all along, driving him toward that particular ice planet.

  He had set the course in his sleep.

  CAPITULATION

  * * *

  May 2257

  INCOMING TRANSMISSION (ENCRYPTED)

  TO: CAPTAIN C. PIKE • U.S.S. ENTERPRISE • NCC-1701

  FROM: REAR ADMIRAL TERRAL, STARFLEET COMMAND

  STATE OF WAR CONTINUES. SARATOGA, STARBASE 22 LOST. DISCOVERY IS STILL MIA.

  WE DID NOT HEAR FROM YOU WHEN YOUR TWELVE-MONTH MISSION ENDED. REPORT WHEN CONDITIONS PERMIT, BUT DO NOT RETURN.

  WE ARE EXTENDING YOUR MISSION, END DATE TO BE DETERMINED.

  END TRANSMISSION

  39

  * * *

  U.S.S. Enterprise

  Saucer Section

  Little Hope

  I’m dead.

  No, I’m not. I just don’t want to move.

  Christopher Pike awoke to those thoughts—and to pain. He coughed. The air was stale, reminding him of another experience in utter darkness that he’d tried long and hard to forget. His thoughts grasped for something, anything else to light upon.

  Freena. No, that was back then too.

  Vina? Seeing her face in his mind’s eye was nice, but also wrong.

  He needed memories, not dreams—and his last recollection was of flying. No, not flying, but hurtling upward, toward the transparent aluminum port that sat in the bridge’s overhead dome. Sailing up and out, like an angel—or someone with a jetpack.

  Only he was not an angel, and had no jetpack. It made no sense. But he knew it made no sense, and that helped to clear his mind. As reason returned, he realized he had not broken through the dome at all. Rather, he was sprawled across it, suspended over inky blackness beyond.

  Enterprise was upside down.

 
But it can’t be upside down, he thought. Can it?

  He lifted his head from the port and drew his fingers through his hair. It was matted with dried blood from where he’d struck it. And the not-very-heavy mass atop his legs wasn’t crushed rock—but the stirring form of another person, similarly incapacitated. Sitting up, Pike squinted until he recognized who it was.

  “Amin, are you all right? Wake up!”

  His navigator rolled off Pike’s ankles and moaned. “What hit me?”

  “I think you hit me—and we hit the overhead. Only it’s no longer overhead.” Pike ran his hand across the port. It hadn’t given way beneath their weight, but it didn’t seem like a place to stay either. Indeed, the ship seemed to be undulating—gently, almost imperceptibly. “Any light around here?”

  “Here, Captain.” To his left he saw Nhan, her face illuminated by a handheld device. She crawled toward them.

  “Over there,” he said as she reached the edge of the dome.

  She complied—and the rays illuminated a third body. “It’s Raden!” The helmsman had struck the outer frame of the dome and was still out. Pike saw blood from Raden’s left forehead lobe. “He must have hit hard.”

  “Careful getting to him,” Pike said as Amin moved toward the Ktarian. “Either the artificial gravity’s really confused, or we’ve landed—and I’m not at all sure we’re on something solid.”

  Working together, they moved Raden off the edge of the dome. “He’s light,” Pike said. “So are we.” They were clearly in a weak gravity well of some kind. Nhan lifted Raden onto the metallic composite surface and checked his condition.

  “He’s breathing,” she said. “I think he’s coming around.”

  Raden’s eyes opened a fraction. Woozy, he spied Pike and mumbled, “Did . . . I leave . . . a mark?”

  “Your head will be fine,” Pike said. “We’ll get you help.”