U.S.S. Enterprise
Over Susquatane’s Dayside
This is a bullfight, Pike thought. And we’re the bull.
He’d only seen archival video of the ancient activity, long considered barbaric—but was aware of the tactics involved. A matador attempted to control the movements of an enraged bovine, assisted by lancers on foot and horseback. An escalating series of pokes and prods reduced the great animal, concluding with the tercio de muerte—the “part of death.”
The vessels assaulting Enterprise had neither hailed nor responded, but it was clear to Pike that they were working in tandem with one another, effectively controlling the direction and movements of his starship. First through their torpedoes—the source, he now knew, of the initial strikes against his shields—and later through disruptor fire as they closed in on Enterprise. Every time Pike tried to make for the nightside, some new attacker intervened.
“Shields at ninety-one percent,” Una announced. “And holding.”
“Kid stuff,” Pike said. Nuclear blasts? Where were the antimatter weapons? Did they even have them?
He found out. A shining spark sailed through the space before them, almost like a phosphorescent shell in an ancient war—until it exploded, hammering Enterprise’s forward shields and deflecting the starship’s progress.
“Evasive maneuvers,” he called out. “Oh-nine-oh mark one!”
“Antimatter reaction,” Nhan said. “That’s the real stuff.”
Damn it. Pike pounded his armrest with his fist. “They’re just toying with us. Nhan, are you having any luck?”
“I’m firing away, Captain. They’ve got shields too—and we can’t focus on one for more than a few seconds the way they’re buzzing around.”
One of the nearer attack vessels came more clearly into view. A long prism, close to Enterprise’s length stem to stern; it didn’t appear Klingon. The thing looked vaguely like a bomb-shaped frozen confection Pike had enjoyed on Mojave afternoons as a kid—and the bomb connection was apt. Perfectly pentagonal in lateral cross section, its five edges were festooned with weapons arrays running the length of the vehicle. Fixed disruptor cannons, ball turrets, and what appeared to be torpedo launch tubes. Between the rows of death, the faces of the vessel were barren, except for what appeared to be multiple docking clamps and airlocks.
“Are they battleships or carriers?” he asked aloud—only to have his words muted by another antimatter detonation off Enterprise’s bow.
“Directing power to shields,” Galadjian said. The researcher was shaken, but holding up. “These have not been direct hits.”
“Maybe that’s the idea,” Pike said. They’d known from the beginning of the mission that pirates might be in the nebula; had they accidentally found, at Susquatane, their hideaway? It was possible there might not be a tercio de muerte—but that wasn’t something he was going to take a chance on.
“Recording analysis complete,” Dietrich said from the science station. “The nukes we thought were volcanoes were delivered by probe-sized vessels. We saw the last one go in.”
“That’s about six crises ago,” Raden snapped.
“Stow that, mister.” Pike still thought the blasts occurred to attract attention—and not to target Enterprise or its people directly—but a weapon was a weapon. He looked back to Dietrich. “Feed the visual to Nhan. Get a tactical analysis. If we’ve got two kinds of hostiles running around out there, I want to know.”
More antimatter near misses and disruptor direct hits pounded the shields. “Say again, Lieutenant, I cannot hear,” Nicola shouted. His earpiece pressed to his ear, the communications officer looked fraught to Pike. “That was the tropical-site team, Captain. I was only getting a word here and there—now I can’t get them at all.”
“You can’t get them, I can’t get to them.” He had barely finished the sentence when it dawned on Pike: that might be the whole point. “Enough of this. Do we have any of the landing parties in line of sight?” Pike looked over to the port side, and Galadjian’s station. “Doctor, what’s the status on our people?”
“I am online with the transporter rooms,” the chief engineer replied. He looked flustered, overwhelmed by input. “I—I don’t believe they can get a fix.”
“I don’t want beliefs. I need certainty.”
Galadjian pressed a control and spoke. “Lieutenant Pitcairn, you have the coordinates. Can you get a fix on anyone?”
“Not through a planet, Doctor.”
Pike thought Pitcairn hit the last word a little hard, but he understood the frustration belowdecks. He felt it too. “Raden, try to put us in range of the closest camp.”
“That’d be Spock,” Raden said, feeling Enterprise quake from another barrage. “I’d be happy to, if these characters would let us!”
Polar Expedition Site
The communication from Kormagan’s transport was piped directly into her headgear. “Carriers report engagement,” one of her warriors declared. “Target Enterprise has put up shields and is returning fire.”
“Did they launch shuttles before they raised shields?”
“No, and they can’t do it now. The carriers have made sure of that.”
That was the plan: bottle up Enterprise, preventing it from recovering its people. The fact that she could hear the call from her junior at all meant something else. While several of her combat modules aloft had been jamming the Starfleet camps on the nightside, Enterprise hadn’t done anything to retard her forces’ ability to communicate with her ships on the dayside. The nebula blocked most subspace messages of longer distance; at least so far, her ability to communicate in the operational theater was unhindered.
The clingtrap cocoons had been successful in immobilizing the three Starfleet people; in hundreds of exfiltration operations, she had never known a bipedal life-form to escape one yet. Her specialist went from one captive to another, running quick scans on the captives. He read the results. “Subtype human, first encountered by Wave Five-One-Nine. Subtype Vulcan, Wave Four-Eight-Oh. Andorian, Wave Five-Three-Nine.” He laughed. “One of yours, Chief!”
“All exfils are alike to me,” Kormagan said. “Do they need to breathe?”
“I think so.”
“Stick ’em and punch ’em.”
Dutifully, the specialist and two of his comrades knelt over the prisoners, injecting sedatives through the clingtrap envelopes. Immediately afterward, they cut larger holes in the bags for breathing tubes. “These three won’t need special equipment on the ship.”
Kormagan wasn’t surprised, given that the three were clad only in their all-white thermal uniforms. Baladon had suggested Starfleet was some kind of multispecies militia, ranging in parts of the universe where existence was easier.
“Four troop modules is a lot to extract three people,” the specialist said.
“ ‘No second chances means nothing left to chance,’ ” Kormagan said, repeating something her mentor used to say. “Enough delay. Back to the troop module.”
Six of her warriors went into action as bearers, carting the captives through the snow. Any one of them would have been able to handle the weight alone, of course; the servomechanisms inside their armor multiplied the strength of wearers manyfold. But the cargo was too precious to damage—at least for now.
The exfils safely loaded, Kormagan took a call from another troop module. It was Sperrin, who had been coordinating the mission from aloft. “All opmasters have reported back. Quarry obtained. Repeat, quarry obtained.”
“Good. Tell everybody to raise ship and await my command.” Kormagan had no expectation of taking Enterprise—not this time—so a little trail covering was in order. She toggled a control to talk to someone else. “Aloga-Five, did you plant the cleaner at the camp?”
From the troop module parked farther south, a deep voice responded, “That’s affirm, Wavemaster.” It was Baladon. “Looks like I finally got my shot at Enterprise.”
The elation in his voice amused Kormagan. Perhaps there were second chances—at least for Lurians. “Lift off.”