Combat Module Carrier 539-Aloga
Little Hope
“We got ’em!” Dreston called out. “Target’s position is on your display.”
Kormagan saw it. Enterprise had dropped out of warp and stalled, drifting, amid the mingled debris of a pair of failed stars. One was a brown dwarf; the other, a massive gas giant where fusion had fizzled out. And all around, dust and rubble. Just like the rest of Little Hope, the system was a wreck.
The wavemaster had a hunch that Enterprise might be one too. This was no calculated move, no planned place of cover to which the starship had retreated. She didn’t know what magic Captain Pike had been using to swiftly traverse Little Hope, heedless of the nebular material in his path, but he didn’t seem to be able to use it now. The trick was one more discovery she would pry from the ship. Perhaps Spock could explain it.
“The torpedo was ours,” Quadeo transmitted. “My carrier fired it!”
Kormagan was glad anyone had hit anything, though she knew this success would only make her rival more unbearable. It didn’t seem like a good time to remind Quadeo whom it was that had given everyone the orders to fire in the first place. There was more important business.
“All operational carriers, close in,” Kormagan said into her armor’s mic. “Assume positions to block avenues of escape. Disable shields if they come back online—otherwise, harassing fire to cover troop module approach and prevent the launching of shuttles. Troop modules, zero in on Enterprise and commence operations.”
Pike had fought with cunning, but his gambit had failed. It was just a matter of time.
U.S.S. Enterprise
“Captain, main engineering is on fire.”
It was not a thing captains—or anyone else aboard a starship—liked to hear. “What happened, Number One?”
“That feedback appears to have damaged the warp control systems. Some equipment exploded when we tried to jump.”
Pike heard shouts in the background. “The warp core. Is it intact?”
“Still trying to get close enough to evaluate. The fire retardant systems are offline.” More sounds of chaos. “Stand by.”
Pike hurried to the bridge support console. “Report.”
“Many systems appear to have gone into diagnostic safe mode,” Dietrich said.
“Even the safety systems?” Pike couldn’t make sense of the data he was seeing. Enterprise seemed to be speaking another language. “What do we have that’s up?”
“I’ve got tactical sensors,” Nhan said. “We’ve got inbounds. Looks like those modules that were attached to those carriers. Ten—maybe twenty of them.”
“What weapons do we have?”
“Phasers. Which would be helpful, if the plasma regulators were online.” The phasers were another new addition to Enterprise since Talos IV; some bugs were still being worked out. Without the regulators, Nhan had no way of controlling the intensity of the bursts they fired. She hammered at her interface in frustration. “Give me something that works!”
“I’ve got thrusters,” Raden called out.
Pike looked back. “Impulse?”
“Honestly, I’m afraid of it. I don’t like these readings. I don’t want another blowup.”
He trusted his helmsman. Impulse movement was out, at least until he got an update from below—and warp certainly was off the table. “What kind of feedback would cause all this?” Pike asked. “I wouldn’t think ODN cabling could even transmit something like that.”
Hunched over his station, Galadjian stared at his screen. “Given the electromagnetic properties of the shielding systems and the energies generated by—” He stopped in midsentence and rubbed his temples. “I don’t know.”
Pike looked back at his chief engineer for a moment—until an intraship hail turned his thoughts to a doctor of a different kind. “Boyce to bridge!”
“Pike here. Where are you, Doctor?”
“I’m . . . in main engineering,” Boyce said between wheezes. “There are injuries from the sudden stop . . . and from damaged consoles.”
“Phil, are you all right? Is it the fire?”
“Nearly . . . under control.”
“But the way you—”
“Bulkheads didn’t drop . . . smoke retardation systems inoperative. Turbolifts out—tough getting to people.”
“Keep me posted.” Pike looked at the turbolift doors. “I guess we’re really not going anywhere.” He stepped back to the center of the room and turned to face the viewscreen. That was still working, at least—although he quickly saw that the Hellmouth didn’t look any more hospitable up close. They had dumped out of warp in a gravity well. A gas giant loomed; in the sickly light of a nearby brown dwarf, the sphere appeared as a colorless blot. All around, moonlets and asteroids tumbled aimlessly in the dust.
No—there were shapes with direction out there too. Heading Pike’s way. He looked back to his engineer. “No shields?”
“Or transporters.” Galadjian shrugged, palms open. “I have a dead board here. Useless.”
“You’re—” Nhan started, before closing her mouth. She shot a furious look at him and turned away. Wounded, Galadjian faced his station and looked down.
“Don’t do this,” Pike said with a pointed glance at Nhan. “Not now.” He couldn’t have the staff melting down, not under these conditions. “We pushed the limits. We shouldn’t be astonished that we found them. Sometimes even the best horse bucks.”
He gave a look back at the viewscreen—and turned, striding purposefully toward an equipment cabinet. “We’re going to use the thrusters to keep moving—make this difficult for them. We’ve got to buy Una time to get things sorted out.”
Looking back at him, Raden nodded. “Aye, sir. Anything else?”
“Yes. Stand by to repel boarders.”
Troop Module Aloga-One
“Now!” Goldsub shouted. One by one, the doors over the heads of the troopers in the depressurized chamber blew open. The panels they were standing on shot upward, catapulting Spock and his squadmates into space.
Spock hurtled wildly for several moments before the jets affixed to the mass on his back fired, stabilizing his orientation.
“Just look at the target. Once it’s in your reticule, toggle your booster,” Goldsub called out over Spock’s comm system. “You’ll home in automatically.”
All Spock saw was the gas giant and debris—and dozens of other warriors, soaring on back-mounted rockets of their own. But then something else entered his view. The deployment area of the Boundless troop modules had no ports to look from, in part to keep soldiers calm about what they were heading toward. Enterprise had existed for him only as a memory and a goal—but now it rose into his field of view.
It didn’t look normal. Several of its brilliant lights had been extinguished. Was it Pike’s plan to hide in the nebula? If so, it had not worked.
“What are you waiting for, Gold-Five? Set your course!”
Spock focused on a section directly astern from the bridge dome. There was an airlock there. He oriented toward it and triggered his jets. A surge went through his armor to his body as he shot forward, leaving his companions behind. Moments later, they were alongside.
“That’s it!” his subaltern said. “Lead the way, Gold-Five.”
“We’re with you too,” announced another voice. It was Opmaster Sperrin, still aboard the troop module, which was now following the warriors through space. “We’ll cover your approach.” Spock knew there was another reason Sperrin was monitoring: to keep an eye on him.
In fact, it was becoming hard to know where to look, especially as Enterprise opened up on the troop modules, battering their shielding with phaser fire. It was not particularly effective, Spock saw; each shot seemed to vary with intensity. Some Boundless modules fired back, attempting to target the weapon emplacements—with the floating warriors soaring in the territory between.
And now the carriers approached, strafing the space nearby in an attempt to make Enterprise’s attempts to evade costly. The unshielded starship’s response had been far more limited than Spock had expected; it was using its thrusters only to escape the tightening net.
He couldn’t think about that now—not with the dorsal hull of the saucer section filling his view. Enterprise dipped abruptly, heading away from him; he could see other Boundless warriors overcorrecting, sailing right on past. As the ship lurched again, others slammed off the hull, hurtling back into space.
Spock adjusted his jets to bring himself into contact with the hull—and then magnetized the palms of his gloves. He cut his engines the second his fingers made contact with the smooth surface. Then it was a matter of hanging on until he affixed his boots to the ship’s skin as well.
He looked back to see several other warriors on the hull. Some nearby, others farther away at the other objective points. Goldsub, standing, saw Spock and gestured to the bridge dome.
Trying to keep his balance, Spock looked at it. There was no channel he could access on which he could open communications with anyone aboard Enterprise: to it, he resembled just another boarder. “Call the shot,” Goldsub said.
“Their standard procedure will be to block all manual airlock overrides,” Spock said. “The mechanism cannot be defeated. It must be removed.”
“Affirm.” Goldsub nodded and patted his utility casing. That was where the laser torches Spock had requested resided. He turned to wave his arriving squadmates in.
Spock began the plodding magnetic walk up the sloping hull toward the bulge of the bridge assembly. The destination had been inevitable since Spock learned of Kormagan’s plan. She had figured that by having him with the troops assailing the bridge, he might forestall a costly fight. He had theorized there was no rescuing his comrades unless Enterprise learned the full story of where they were, and how they were being held. They just had very different ideas about what he would do when he got there.
It was time to act. Seeing Goldsub’s back turned, Spock began to reach for his own laser torch.
“All squads, stand by!”
Spock stopped in midmotion. The call had come not from his squad leader or Sperrin—but from Kormagan.
“Over there!” Goldsub cried out. “It’s the Rengru!”
Spock turned—looking to the sky above his squad to see what they were pointing at. Hundreds of Rengru fighters swarmed through space, a torrent of raindrop-shaped propulsion shells. Something was protruding from them; his telescopic sights showed them to be the Rengru’s limbs, evidently invulnerable to the hostile environment of space. The fighters served as a vanguard for larger pyramidal ships of a kind Spock had never seen before—all headed his way.
He and Kormagan had envisioned quite different fates for Enterprise. Spock realized now that the Rengru had ideas of their own.