U.S.S. Enterprise
Pergamum Nebula
“Ram us through!”
Captain Christopher Pike called out a second warning to the Starship Enterprise bridge crew, but even he couldn’t hear it. The black cloud that had loomed on the main viewer for the last few minutes devoured the screen—and the vessel shook wildly. The ship’s gentle sonorous hum gave way to the din of quaking bulkheads.
“Kappa band entered!” shouted Lieutenant Jamila Amin. One of several recent additions to the crew, the navigator was barely audible despite sitting meters away from the captain’s chair. “External boundary breach in twenty seconds!”
I don’t care for the word “breach” in the current circumstance, Pike thought to respond—but against the roar he worried someone would think he was trying to say something more important. He looked up and around. Pike had grown accustomed to nearly everything the universe had to throw at a starship, but flying through dense material was his least favorite by far.
Enterprise was up to it, of course; space wasn’t fully a vacuum, and a starship needed to be able to traverse areas of plasma unscathed. But a starship still responded to the outside environs, buffeting as material impacted its shields. Accelerating quickly through a thick medium somehow managed to transfer enough stress through the shields and hull to make the bulkheads complain.
Some Starfleeters had likened the eerie sound to the creaking of a wooden ship of old. To Pike, it was like being back inside a mountain that didn’t want him there.
Slowly, the shaking and racket subsided, and the viewscreen image shifted from oily black to just oily. “Kappa nebular band cleared,” Lieutenant Raden said from the helm. “But we may want to go back and pick up the rest of the hull!”
“Relax, Raden,” Amin said. “Your beauty’s intact.”
“I’ll believe that when I can inspect it myself,” the Ktarian replied. “Not before!”
Pike’s forward station was completely new, with Yoshi Ohara and the veteran José Tyler off to well-deserved commands of their own. While Amin had settled in, Raden still treated Enterprise like his parents’ hovercraft—one he was terrified to leave a scratch on. That had given the otherwise fully competent helmsman a jittery demeanor to match his animated golden eyes.
“Lambda band detected,” called out the wavy-haired young man from the science station. “Measuring particulate velocity, direction, and composition.”
“Thank you, Mister Connolly,” Pike said. “Sad news for you, Mister Raden. This wall of guck has as many layers as the Greeks had letters.”
Two fewer, actually, but Spock wasn’t there to correct him. That was just as well: the Vulcan was where he needed to be. Pike had ordered Enterprise’s premature return the second after he’d read the message from Starfleet about the declaration of war. At the time, Spock had been forward in the stardrive section, working on a new program for the navigational deflector. Pike expected he was still there, shoveling facts into the system to adjust for every new region they encountered.
“Lambda region readings confirmed. Conveying to engineering and nav,” Connolly said. “Carbon monoxide and nitrogen, dust particles in suspension. Less ammonia in this one. Outer boundary is majority formaldehyde.”
“That’s fine. I’m feeling ready to be embalmed.” Pike grinned at the lieutenant. He never liked to show concern before the young ones—especially in a place as hellish as the Pergamum Nebula.
The adjective was apt. The colossal astronomical body known on deck just as the Pergamum was named for the city that held Satan’s throne in the Book of Revelation. It lived up to the title. Superheated reds and oranges alternated with deep blacks of absorption formations, giving it such a levels-of-hell feel that even Starfleet’s staid astronomical naming body felt the need to get poetic. While distant from the core of Federation space, it stood near the intersection of routes popular with civilian prospectors—and a number of vessels had never returned from the region. Pike’s orders had been to find out why, while conducting a comprehensive survey designed to take an entire year.
Pike had only needed a few days inside the Pergamum to know that the hazard wasn’t its proximity to the nearby Ionite Nebula, rife with Lurian pirates. The Pergamum was simply too harsh a place for ships that weren’t built for it. Enterprise was up to the challenge. Pike had been able to scout a handful of target worlds for closer study before the war news came.
It was just a brief repeating text message sent in the open on an extremely low-frequency subspace channel, the only one where signals could even occasionally penetrate the clouds. From the time code, Pike could tell Starfleet had first started broadcasting it earlier—months earlier, mere days after he had entered the nebula. That made it easier for him to decide that the part about staying in the Pergamum might no longer be operative.
Maybe it was a fig leaf, but he didn’t care. Shenzhou was gone. If the best of us are falling already, he’d told Number One in the turbolift, we’re needed.
And he wouldn’t spare the horses. An orderly departure would have meant taking days to go around the Acheron Formation—the river-to-hell–named gauntlet of space chemistry bounding the Sol-facing end of the Pergamum. The Federation might not have days to spare.
“Lambda in ten seconds,” Raden said. He looked back. “Still time to change course, Captain, and find a cleaner lane.”
“Always appreciate hearing the options, Mister Raden,” Pike said. “Brace yourselves.”
Another cloud, another shipquake, worse than before. Ahead, Pike watched his tireless first officer, Commander Una, keeping an eye on the vessel’s condition from the bridge control station. “Shields holding,” Number One called out. “Hull integrity nominal.”
“Burro” Schmidt would laugh, Pike thought. My “shortcut” might take longer than his did. But his crew wouldn’t let that happen. Between the bridge officers, main engineering, and Spock, Enterprise was constantly reshaping her shields to find the best angle of attack—even as the cloud formation threw surprises at them.
“This is a bad patch,” Raden said, wiping sweat from his large forehead lobes.
He wasn’t alone in his concern this time. Una glanced back at the captain. It was as close to “Are you sure you want to keep doing this?” as his closest advisor was likely to get before the crew.
“Steady as she goes.”
Five minutes later, an interstitial void allowed a brief respite—and time to explain briefly to the bridge crew the reason for their sudden return. It mattered that they felt the same urgency he did. A couple had friends and classmates impacted by the Klingon attacks, and everyone knew Shenzhou from their shared Sirsa III adventure the year before. Scientist Connolly, he thought, was about ready to transfer to security then and there.
Pike hadn’t made an announcement shipwide, though, and he wasn’t going to now. Michael Burnham was aboard Shenzhou. He knew Spock had a familial connection to her; it wasn’t the sort of news to learn over the public address system.
“New region approaching,” Amin said.
Raden looked at her. “I thought we were just up to Mu.”
“No, I meant new as new. Not the letter, as in—”
“Never mind,” Pike said. With another opaque wave growing in the viewscreen, levity had found its limit.
“Dense but narrow.” Connolly studied his readings. “Shouldn’t be so bad on the other side.”
Pike blanched at the sight. “Are you willing to swear there’s another side to it?”
“Spock is reshaping shields for maximum efficiency,” Number One reported.
Well, I wanted to do this, Pike thought. “Here we go again.”
Enterprise pierced the blackness. There were some light shakes, but the starship found a corridor with easier going. Pike breathed a sigh of relief on behalf of everyone. “Well, that one wasn’t so—”
A shock wave struck the ship, pitching Enterprise forward, stern over bow, and throwing several crewmembers from their seats. Artificial gravity and inertial dampers could accommodate for a lot of jolts, but not that one. Alarms screamed on the bridge as the tumbling continued.
Pike, thrown forward, had wound up between Raden and Amin, knocking both of them from their chairs. The helmsman hung onto the console and worked control after control, trying to restore the ship to an even pitch. Several moments later, Enterprise was stable again.
“Full stop.” Pike looked around. “Everybody okay?”
Connolly stood up from where he had been thrown backward against the command well railing. “Lucky this fence was here.”
His helmsman and navigator reclaiming their seats, Pike climbed back into his chair. “What the hell was that?”
Number One had been working the problem already. “There was a concussive force in our wake.”
Raden frowned. “What would do that?”
Connolly studied his readouts. He spoke tentatively. “The shape of the blast—” he began, before pausing.
Pike faced him. “Come on, what do you think?”
“Maybe I’m still dizzy. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it looked like . . . a photon torpedo blast, detonated somewhere in the soup behind us.” He looked at Pike. “But I know better.”
A torpedo? All eyes darted to Commander Nhan at tactical, their new head of security. Until now, the long-haired Barzan woman had little to do at her station but to hang on. “Most of our sensors were directed forward,” Nhan said, “just like our shields.” Nobody argued the wisdom in that. “But I didn’t see anything aft. We haven’t seen anyone for weeks. Just probes.”
“And half of them ours,” Pike said. Old and spent, from previous surveys. “How could a torpedo hit us that hard?”
“It’s the medium,” Connolly said. “All that debris hit us like a tsunami. And we couldn’t have gotten a visual if we’d wanted one. Not in that morass.”
“Check the logs anyway,” Pike ordered. “We must have gotten a reading from something.”
Nhan set to it.
“Damage reports coming in,” Una said. “Whatever it was, we weren’t shielded aft.”
Pike frowned. He had someplace to be. He looked to the engineering station, and the Tellarite lieutenant who served as departmental second officer. “Jallow, will we still have warp drive when we exit?”
Jallow worked his interface furiously. “I don’t know, sir. I’m checking for reports now.”
Una’s eyes narrowed as she turned to face Pike. “Should we stop, Captain?”
Always trying to save me from myself. “No,” he said, standing. “You have the conn. Resume course as soon as impulse power and engines allow.” He made for the turbolift. “I just remembered we have a superstar belowdecks.”
She looked quizzical. “Captain?”
“Our new chief engineer. Maybe he can rub his two Cochrane Medals of Excellence together and get us home before the war ends.”