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“Admiral to the CCIC!”
Whitmore’s voice was urgent, but not panicked, so Kendra didn’t quite run. Quite. It was definitely a fast trot, though, and she was shouting, “Make a hole!” to clear the corridors between her and her destination.
The Command, Control, and Intelligence Center was full of activity and Kendra immediately sought out Whitmore through the controlled frenzy.
“What’s happening?”
“We have a launch from Scipio City,” Whitmore said without preamble. “A Copernicus. The CAP already called it in and are tracking it, cautiously.”
The CAP was a mix of Wolves and Direwolves, but neither were a match individually for a Copernicus.
“What‘s our status?”
“Primary weaponry is online, but we don’t have a shot, Admiral. He’s stooging around the far side of Luna.”
“Zeus take it.”
“There’s something odd about this, too,” Whitmore continued.
“I don’t like odd. Odd gets our people killed. What, precisely, is odd about it?”
“Diana, give me a hologram,” Whitmore said by way of answer.
“Yes, Colonel.”
Luna and the space within a half light-second appeared.
“Normal procedure for the Copernicus cruisers is to boost into orbit, then vector onto their expected course. He’s not doing that; in fact, it’s like he’s waiting for something else to happen.”
“We can’t know, but we can speculate.” Kendra was struck by a thought. “Where’s Nicole?”
“She’s with her family,” Whitmore said. “I thought she could use some time.”
Kendra hesitated, torn between her impulse to agree and the need for better information. She compromised.
“What about Taylor?”
“He’s still being debriefed by Montana’s people.”
“Get them both. Keep an eye on that Copernicus; I think you’re right. Something’s up.”
Kendra left Davie to organize and turned back to the hologram. There was something off, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Not quite. It was just there, tantalizing her, refusing to drop into her head long enough to focus.
Orbits. What about the orbits?
“Davie!”
Whitmore was over in second.
“Where are their dreadnoughts?”
“What?”
“The al-Battani and El-Baz. Where are they? Aren’t they usually stooging about over Artemis City?”
“Oh, Oberon’s balls! Diana!”
“Retrieving data. No data. Searching.”
“You mean we have two warp ships unaccounted for?” Kendra snapped. “How the frak does that happen?”
“We’re working the problem, Admiral. Back off and let us do our jobs!”
Kendra took a deep breath, then another. Then she returned to the hologram.
“Diana, visual.”
The station AI’s avatar appeared next to her.
“Admiral?”
“Show me the last time we have the dreadnoughts on scanners.”
Two blue lights appeared in orbit around Luna.
“Time?”
“Twenty twenty-seven, thirty-one point six.”
“Eight thirty last night.”
“Only approximately, Admiral.”
“And it’s nearly noon. Okay. We didn’t pick up their warp signatures, did we?”
“No, Admiral.”
“Then assume they’re trying to sneak, running at low power with their transponders off. Get into position for, well, for something. With those parameters, where could they be, now?”
“Calculating.”
Two tracks extended outward from Luna, along the orbital track and then blossoming into a roughly conical shape before fading away.
“Those are my best estimates of their possible positions, Admiral.”
“They could be anywhere!”
“Possibly, Admiral, but if I may?”
Kendra nodded her permission.
“They have relatively efficient sublight engines, and their acceleration is only limited by their inertial compensators. My analysis of the Averroes systems indicates the possibility of up to 5 g acceleration without a noticeable footprint, within one light-hour. In kilometers, that is one billion, seventy-nine million...”
“Just call it a billion kilometers. Okay, so?”
“Increased acceleration would reveal their presence, as would jumping to warp. The maximum distance they could have achieved, so far, is less than eighty million kilometers.”
The hologram shifted to show the furthest possible reach of the dreadnoughts.
“I suspect they dove inside Earth’s orbit, to maintain the ‘shadow’ effect, then headed in-System, towards the Sun.”
“The Sun? Why?”
“If my calculations are correct, they are moving in excess of 2700 KPS; they could be planning to use the gravitational well to slingshot them around and pick up more speed, to make a sublight run at Njord. Nothing we have will be able to catch them except our own starships, and moving at any substantial percentage of c will impact their targeting ability.”
Two dotted lines extended from Luna’s orbit, past Earth, around the Sun and intercepted Njord further along its track.
“And the Copernicus?”
“A Judas goat, Admiral. A distraction.”
“Frak me with a hamster wheel. It worked to perfection.”
“This is all speculation, Admiral.”
Kendra waved it off. “And how often are you wrong? No, this sounds right. Davie!”
When Whitmore arrived Kendra had Diana repeat her speculation; halfway through, Whitmore was nodding to each point.
“Makes sense,” she finally said. “If they encounter a starship they can jump to warp and run.”
“I am concentrating my scanners on the most probable paths of the ships,” Diana continued. “I would recommend dispatching both Defiant and Defender to increase our scanner efficiency. Their sublight engines will leave a trail which can be followed, but they dissipate quickly. Time is of the essence.”
“With Enterprise and Endeavour back, that’s not an issue,” Kendra said. “Colonel, take care of it.”
“Right away, Admiral.”
Launching the two smaller starships was a rapid process, one which practice had worn smooth. Inside ten minutes both had departed the station and were in pursuit of their quarries. Between their sensors and Diana’s predictions both ships had locked onto the dreadnoughts. They had taken reciprocal courses, one North of the ecliptic, one South, and both projected to cross behind Njord’s orbital path. They were still more than fifty megaklicks distant; even at their current speed they wouldn’t be in effective energy weapons range until late afternoon.
“Warn them off,” ordered Kendra.
Diana began broadcasting on the known Union frequencies, hoping for an answer while the starships closed the gap from astern. While the Scimitar-class dreadnoughts were more heavily armed than any other ship in the Union, their firepower was concentrated forward and into broadsides. They mounted two chase lasers, but they were fixed mount and designed more for intimidation than effect.
“No reply, Admiral,” Diana reported. “Defiant is within 40 kiloklicks, Defender 30 kiloklicks.”
“Paint the bastards,” said Kendra.
The sensors on the Defiant-class starship were designed for maximum effectiveness with minimal transmissions, inspired by the submarine experience of the Federation’s senior Captains. However, like a submarine, the starships also mounted powerful active sensors. At close enough range they could melt hulls from the intense energy.
A Captain who failed to answer getting their hull painted was either asleep or dead. It was the stellar equivalent of a bucket of cold water tossed on a sleeping man.
“No response, Admiral. Wait. Defiant’s target has begun to power up their drive.”
“Do we let them run?” asked Whitmore.
Kendra was torn. She didn’t want to open fire, not yet, not when they were still so many millions of kilometers distant. However, they had nearly gotten away with their planned attack, or at least what she assumed was a planned attack.
When in doubt, ask the experts.
“What do you think? Nicole?”
The youngest member of what Davie referred to as the ‘Artemis Ex-Ministry of War’ frowned.
“No. They didn’t actually do anything.”
“Jake?”
“I disagree. If we let them go, they’ll try again.”
“Davie?”
“Close to a thousand kilometers, give them a warning shot, and demand their surrender. Then, when they don’t reply, blowing them out of the sky is totally justified.” Whitmore paused, then added, “Bring their warp drives to standby, in case they try to run for it.”
“Concur. Do it.”
Both ships were warming their warp drives now. Kendra knew from experience the Scimitars took ten minutes to power from a cold start. It was a side effect of the less-advanced design Carnahan provided. Not only was it slower to power up, but it was also less efficient all around, resulting in warp fields which were easily twice the size of the Federation-designed drives.
Additionally, they could guess fairly well at the intended speed based on the size of the warp field generated. The larger the field, the higher the speed. Until the field started to flex, though, there was no movement, simply potential. SOP for Federation vessels was to enter warp gradually, expanding the field outward smoothly, instead of jumping from sublight to a higher warp factor. They could, of course, but the chance to bring along an unexpected hitchhiker within the field was too great to ignore.
“Colonel,” Courtney Colona said from her position at defense. “Defender is in position.”
“Have them execute the plan.”
Colona passed along the orders. In a moment she looked up, shaking her head.
“No reply to the message, no response to the warning shot.”
Whitmore glanced quickly to Kendra, who responded with a millimetric nod.
“Whitmore to Defender.”
“Go, Colonel,” replied the voice of the Defender’s Captain, Petra Orloff.
“ROE Alpha approved. Take them down.”
“Colonel!” Horst Pipher called across the CCIC. “The dreadnought’s jumping to warp!”
“Pursue!” shouted Whitmore, and Orloff passed the order to her crew, even as Diana was adding her own voice to the sudden chaos.
“NO!”
It was too late.
Warp fields acted on reality by removing whatever they enclosed from the normal physical laws of the universe; they did this through the application of tremendous quantities of power. That kind of power deserved a healthy dose of respect, and so it had become a fundamental tenet of Starfleet that no warp drives were ever activated within ten kiloklicks of Njord, or another starship, to prevent the possibility of two drives interacting. Dr. Roberts had speculated as to what would happen, and most of her models suggested that it would be like connecting two batteries together at the same poles: a massive short-circuit. The result, she believed, would be two megacredit warp drives fused into lumps of metal.
There were other equations, though, which pointed to a more energetic response, as the fields collapsed like soap bubbles and the energy they had contained seeking an outlet. These equations indicated that the power, instead of being directed to liquefying metal and vaporizing volatiles, would feedback to the annie reactor and blow up the ship.
The Defender’s warp drive spooled up to jump, expanding a warp field in a blink of an eye out to a hundred kilometers from the ship. At that point it ran into the warp field from the dreadnought, which had ballooned outward in an instant. Both fields collapsed.
As it turned out, Roberts was half-right.
In a heartbeat the Defender’s drive melted. That was the extent of the direct impact of the collapse, as Roberts had been correct about her drive and warp field design. The power was entirely contained within the drive itself.
That didn’t make the secondary effects less devastating.
The decks and bulkheads, all made of durasteel, vaporized, and a fireball of superheated metallic gas expanded outward from the heart of Engineering. The only factor which saved the ship was the placement of the drive, relative to the hull. Only two bulkheads separated the drive from vacuum, and once those were breached the remaining force followed the path of least resistance.
The dreadnought, the El-Baz, wasn’t so fortunate. The Union engineering wasn’t up to Starfleet standards, and the drive design was Carnahan’s, not Roberts. Power fed back through the drive and into the body of the ship, bursting through conduits, liquefying power runs, and knocking every safety interlock offline on their twin annie reactors. Both magnetic bottles failed in under a half-second, and a half-second after that the entire ship and her crew of five hundred and twelve were a glowing, expanding ball of plasma.
Kendra was the first to recover.
“Defiant, break off! Do not pursue!”
“Admiral?”
“Let them go,” she ordered Resler. “Assist the Defender.”
“Aye, Admiral.”
Whitmore was in motion now, watching the hologram as the other dreadnought successfully scrambled into warp.
“Endeavour,” she commed.
“Go,” answered Commander Sanzari, the XO.
“I need you out of dock two minutes ago.”
“I, yes, Colonel. We’ll be underway momentarily.” The voice grew muffled as she relayed orders. “Colonel, Captain Stewart isn’t aboard.”
“No time to wait,” Whitmore said. “We’re tracking a dreadnought in warp. I need you to follow it and keep it the hell away from Njord.”
“We’ll take care of it, Colonel.”
“Admiral? Further orders?”
Kendra looked around, then locked on Whitmore.
“What about?”
“The other dreadnought. What should Endeavour do?”
Kendra had a moment to think as Sanzari commed in.
”Njord, permission to depart.”
“Granted, Endeavour,” Diana said. “Good hunting.”
“Roger that.”
“Admiral?” prompted Whitmore.
“We can’t touch them in warp,” she mused. “But if they come out of warp within an orbit of Njord, shoot them down.”
Whitmore relayed the order to Sanzari.
Spurgeon was directing the Wolves to assist with the SAR while dispatching both Direwolf squadrons to take over all CAP duties. Pipher was analyzing his data, and Colona helping him.
The Copernicus, the instigator of all these events, quietly slipped from orbit and headed towards Earth.