Columbia NX-02, near Alpha Centauri
“THEIR TRACTOR BEAM has locked onto us, Captain,“ Lieutenant Karl Graylock said. The chief engineer’s German-accented words were muffled more than usual by the still balky shipboard comm system. “Hull stresses are staying within the error bars... so far. I’ve got my repair teams deployed preemptively, though. And Major Foyle and his MACOs are standing by to assist. Just in case the tractor tears our bumpers off.”
“Good work, Karl,” Captain Erika Hernandez said, brushing a few stray strands of her straight black bangs away from her eyes. Apart from her slightly unruly hair, she tried to set a textbook example of command comportment for her bridge crew, sitting ramrod straight in the chair at the center of Columbia’s busy A-deck nerve center. Four days after a Romulan sneak attack had left the starship crippled and adrift, the discipline of preserving appearances had become more important to morale maintenance than ever before.
“Keep the hatches battened down and tell our friends we’re ready to go home,” she said.
Hernandez’s exec, Commander Veronica Fletcher, stepped toward the captain and came to a stop alongside the command chair. “Back to Earth, to lick our wounds,” the fair-haired young woman said quietly in her New Zealand twang. “And we have to accept a tow from the Vulcans, no less. We’re never gonna live this down.” She shook her head ruefully.
Hernandez allowed a grim smile to cross her lips. “Maybe. But I’ll wager that the Vulcans have a hell of a lot more to be embarrassed about right now than we do.”
Fletcher’s brow crinkled like a dented hovercar fender. “How do you figure? We just discovered how easy it is for the Romulans to sneak right up onto the human race’s back porch. That’s a pretty damned mortifying thing, if you ask me.”
“Granted,” Hernandez said, nodding in concession to her exec’s point. “But we weren’t the ones whose ships got hijacked and turned into Romulan weapons.” Not eager to encourage her second-in-command’s tendency to accentuate the negative, she refrained from adding the word “yet.”
“I suppose that particular badge of shame would have to go to the Vulcans,” Fletcher said. “Still, I don’t see anybody sneaking up on them.”
That’s the nature of sneaking, Hernandez thought. Nobody sees ’em—until after they come up out of the weeds. Aloud, she said, “I think we can count on Starfleet and the MACOs to do everything possible from here on in to make sure humanity doesn’t get caught with its collective pants down again.”
“Saying that’s a lot easier than doing it,” Fletcher said, folding her arms before her. “And a lot of the doing could depend on our using something faster than the Pony Express to get our after-action reports in front of Starfleet Command.”
Hernandez leaned against the command chair’s right arm as she considered Fletcher’s words—and her unspoken implication that embarrassed Vulcans might not be entirely forthcoming to Starfleet about a Romulan seizure of Vulcan vessels. As things stood now, until Columbia’s subspace radio was back in operation, those all-important classified after-action reports would reach Earth no faster than Hernandez herself could get there.
“Captain!” The sharp exclamation came from the forward portside communications station, where Ensign Sidra Valerian was feverishly working at her console. Hernandez rose from her seat and approached Valerian, and Fletcher followed at her side.
“What is it, Ensign?” Hernandez said. “Please tell me you have some good news for me for a change.”
A broad grin of triumph split the redheaded comm officer’s face as she answered in tones that evoked the scent of the Scottish highlands. “The subspace transceiver array’s finally back online, Captain.”
The comm officer’s grin went metastatic, cloning itself on the exec’s face. “I guess even we can’t roll snake eyes every time.”
Just four days earlier, Karl Graylock had described the charred remnants of the comm system as so much irreparable junk, commenting that a four-and-a-third-light-year-long spool of twine stretched tightly between two aluminum cans would have given Columbia a far better chance of raising Starfleet Command.
Hernandez took a couple of deep breaths, centering herself. Transports of joy weren’t any more appropriate on the bridge than was a display of despair. After all, the fickleness of luck was an integral part of life in the space service.
“Ensign, get me Admiral Gardner, and pipe the call into my ready room,” she said, then strode quickly toward the bridge’s starboard side. Before the damned thing frazzes out on us again, she appended silently as she opened the access hatch that led to her private office.