U.S.S. Enterprise
Stardrive Section
Cloud Complex Zedra
“Shields up!”
Mann looked over at the first officer. “Say again?”
“Reflex,” Una said, eyes focused on the small screens before her and the wave of Rengru fighters approaching. “Prepare to engage.”
In the weeks since Enterprise’s separation, the engineers of the stardrive section had made progress on nearly every system but one—the shields, where all the problems had begun. That fact had required Una to look for “cool zones,” where the nebular radiation was less intense. She’d found several patches in a massive cloud complex the Boundless probes called Zedra. The Rengru had caught on to her moves. The appearance of a single scout in their scopes invariably led to the arrival, hours later, of a wave of fighters, occasionally supported by one of the larger Rengru mother ships.
That didn’t constitute a crisis, so long as the stardrive section could get underway quickly—but enough systems were still under repair that Una occasionally had to fight it out. While she would have preferred not to engage at all, the shield problem meant that her crew had an easier time on offense than defense. The phaser banks mounted above the hangar deck and flanking the underside ran on power from rechargeable batteries, and had suffered the least damage. Photon torpedoes were a limited resource, but had been useful at keeping the mother ships far away.
And Una had other tricks up her sleeve—but she guarded them jealously. The Rengru seemed to learn from every encounter.
“It’s like encounter six,” Mann said. Nhan’s second, her skills as a tactician had been constantly needed. “We have twelve—no, eighteen fighters inbound. No mother ship.”
“Mixed blessings. Save the torpedoes. Fire phasers at will.” She toggled her comm system. “Colt team, go.”
“On our way, Commander.”
Flashes from the stardrive section’s weapons lanced ahead on Una’s screen, annihilating one Rengru fighter after another. But the remainder continued, undaunted.
“They’re inside effective phaser range,” Mann said, sitting back and shrugging. This was routine now; there was nothing more she could do. “Seems like this is a gap in the defenses, once shields are out—or if you don’t have any to begin with.”
“More for the after-action report to Starfleet. They’re always designing something.” Seeing the Rengru closing with the ship, she touched the comm key again. “We’re going to have guests for lunch, Jallow. How’s it going?”
The Tellarite robotics expert rushed in behind her. “I’m here, I’m here!” he said, breathless. “DOT-Sixes are ready to deploy.”
“Excellent.” She rose from her chair. “Put them out as needed. We don’t have a lot to spare.”
Looking up, she waited to hear the first thumps of Rengru landing on the hull. All things considered, Una felt it was better that she was the one that was here. Pike had always hated the little control room with its confinement and limited view outside the ship, likening it to what he called “submarine warfare.” It didn’t bother Una as much. It forced her to imagine the locations of her opponents, a chess match for her orderly mind to play out.
“There they go,” Mann said, hearing the thunk-thunk of arriving Rengru. The next steps were always the same. Like cats clawing cardboard, their pincers would tear at the hull, trying to cause damage once they had purchase. They weren’t eating the ship, though that had been the easy reference to draw upon. “The giant space termites are back at it,” Mann added.
“Three are after nonessential areas,” Jallow said. “One on the nacelles. Six near the dorsal phaser banks.” His screen switched to a sensor view looking aft from the underside of the deflector dish mount. A small cluster of Rengru fighters clung to the hull with some limbs, tearing at it with others.
“I could fire and try to hit some—or shake them off,” Mann said.
“No, they’ve positioned just nearby,” Una said. “They’re wising up, looking for ways to disable the banks.” This might be preparatory to another attack, she thought. “DOT-Sixes to the phaser banks. Just a few.”
“Aye.”
The DOT-6 drones had been placed aboard Enterprise for “light housecleaning”: damage from impacts made by nebular material that made it past the shields needed to be repaired without exposing anyone to radiation. The drones had survived the Tsakat Incident, but their external release ports had been another casualty of the catastrophic systems failure.
Since repaired, the ports secreted several small drones onto the hull. The little crawlers approached the areas just damaged by the larger Rengru and went to work, repairing the ship’s flesh. The Rengru stopped what they were doing. Two fired their onboard disruptors at the newcomers; the others charged, tearing Enterprise’s robotic elves to metallic shreds.
“Our bugs against their bugs never works,” Mann said. “When they design the DOT-Sevens, maybe they should give them a phaser or two.”
Jallow’s enormous nose crinkled. “You really want more things crawling around and shooting?”
“We’re just delaying them,” Una said. With Jallow at her control station, she resorted to her communicator. “How are we doing, Copernicus?”
“Take a look,” Colt responded. Una watched the feed from the ship’s external sensors. A shadow crossed low over the hull—and then a shuttlecraft swept across, its angled nose chopping the Rengru from the surface like so many weeds.
Una nodded with satisfaction. “Galadjian has his machete, we have ours.” The Rengru, amputated from the hull, tumbled wildly in space, trying to regain their bearings. “When she’s clear, Lieutenant, fire away.”
Mann did so—one short burst that annihilated everything. “Looks like we got them in time.”
“Patching it up,” Jallow said, dispatching more DOT-6s to the location.
“Enterprise looks headless,” Colt reported, bringing Copernicus around. “It’s kind of scary.”
“Hopefully it’ll frighten off the Rengru,” Una replied.
“I don’t know,” Mann said. “Those uglies out there might prefer it this way. They certainly can’t leave it alone.”
More precision flying from Colt and Copernicus shaved off three more Rengru. These her team took care of, using the phaser in the weapons pod that Una’s engineers had improvised to give the shuttle a limited offensive capability.
Una nodded with satisfaction. She’d seen enough of the hull-top warfare with the Boundless that she didn’t want to put any personnel outside toting phasers. The fact that the shuttles, too, had suffered maladies from the collapse of the tsakat had underscored that the pulse had impacted everything. But she had a ship full of engineers to bring to bear, and all but one of the shuttles now functioned. Twice before, Una had used them to repel the Rengru—and so far, none of the creatures had survived to report back that the ship’s shuttles existed.
If they reported back at all, Una thought. How did the things communicate? Did they?
She needed to take a chance, try something different. She’d known that for a long time, but the need was becoming more urgent. Every attack had driven them farther and farther away from the region where Enterprise had split up. The Rengru never responded to hails; she’d stopped trying. She understood nothing of her enemy.
An idea struck her. She raised the communicator. “Yeoman, have you sighted the lone Rengru on the starboard nacelle?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of pawing, trying to get purchase. We’re discussing what to do. We don’t want to do the ice-scraper trick there.”
“I have Copernicus’s sensor view,” Mann said.
Una leaned over and studied it. “Can you target just the toughest part of the Rengru, the hump on its back? Extremely low power, so as not to impact the nacelle.”
“Give us a second.”
It took ten. A blast from Copernicus struck the final Rengru squarely as Una had directed. The creature let go of Enterprise—and seemed to come apart. The structure housing the creature’s rocket and disruptor emplacement snapped off, tumbling away. The writhing Rengru that remained seemed naked, a turtle out of its shell.
“Nice and surgical. Doctor Boyce would be proud.”
“Coming around to finish the job.”
“Negative,” Una said. She pointed to Jallow. “A life-sign status check, please.”
The engineer complied. “Same as usual—maybe dropping a little. We already knew they could survive the void.”
Mann looked fraught. “Are we really going to leave it out there?”
“No,” Una replied. “I’m going to take a page out of the Boundless’s book.”
“What page would that be? It looked to me like they lost that dustup back at the Hellmouth.”
“Not that page. A different one.” She spoke into her communicator. “Una to Lieutenant Pitcairn.”
“Pitcairn.” He’d been keeping station in the cargo transporter room, Una knew.
“I want to initiate a site-to-site transport.”
She thought she heard him chortle. “Excuse me, Commander. Did you say a site-to-site transport?”
“I did.” The technique, relatively new to the Starfleet menu, was extremely resource intensive, requiring a transporter to bring in a pattern and hold it in stasis while it prepared to send it somewhere else. “Is there a problem?”
“Not in theory, but we haven’t used the transporter at all yet. Has something happened to Copernicus?”
“No. I want this transport to go to the brig.” She thought for a moment. “And let’s have security officers waiting when it gets there.”