Star Trek: Pioneer Book I: "The Great Barrier" Chapter 2 – The Flare By Darrell Schielke Rating: R (For language, sexual references, and Sci-Fi violence) Disclaimer: I do not claim to own Star Trek or any property of Paramount's. I've not been paid for this work and have written it in my spare time. The settings, mannerisms, affectations, and the reference to any and all Star Trek canon is used for creative purposes and not for material gain. I own the plot, characters, and much of the settings in place within this story and have not been contracted to produce them. Genre: Action, Drama Description: There is much afoot Captain Peyter Koon is unaware of. Captain Angela Semmes of the USS Diocletian discovers Pioneer hasn’t been destroyed by the Flare and turns her ship about to find him. Meanwhile, Koon must stop the Flare before it rushes out beyond the 3KPC arm and destroys everything it its path. Author’s Note: Special thanks to Hadrian McKeggan for setting me straight on my Caesars. For those of you who’ve read the story before, you’ll note USS Damacletian has been replaced with USS Diocletian. My spelling isn’t all that great to begin with and my distant Roman history is failing me I’m afraid. Thanks again Kegg for pointing this out to me.         “Koon survived?” Captain Angela Semmes blurted.  Surprising Semmes was a rare thing.  Any other day the woman was stoic as a granite slab.  Anyone who knew her well would liken her to an implacable sage.  She never asked a question she could not answer, and she always asserted her authority with the smug satisfaction of overwhelming strength.  She was like Plato with an Uzi.  She was like Buddha with a howitzer.  She was like Jesus calling for blood to bathe in.  Nevertheless, she was not one to stare slack-jawed in amazement.  She did not gape, blurt, gasp, or suffer a moment thunderstruck, but she had just received the one thing she was unprepared for.         “We received their latest report.  They detailed the damage they sustained.  Captain Koon even apologized for being late reporting in, but they only repaired their sub-space array a week ago,” Commander Tim King explained.         Semmes ground her teeth hard enough for the noise to send a chill up King’s spine.  It was a habit that she could not break despite her iron determination to stop.  In spite of herself, she had ground no fewer than ninety-nine teeth to useless stumps.  Even her dentist was resigned to keeping a few stocked for her use.         Koon!         Damn it to Hell, Peyter! She raged inwardly.  Silently she bit her curse into her clenched jaw.  Koon was supposed to die.  Pioneer was supposed to be lost.  Her crew was supposed to be eliminated by now.  All the witnesses had to be swept away.  Of all the objectives her mission profile detailed, Koon and the Pioneer was becoming the most frustrating.         Send them around a pulsar: they come back.  Run them through a subspace minefield: they find a way through.  Add four years to their journey: Koon accepts it.  By all rights, the crew should be ready to mutiny by now, but they kept plodding on.  Time after time, Pioneer, or more specifically Captain Peyter Koon, frustrated Semmes efforts to wipe the record clean of its mission.         For six years now, Semmes had directed Koon about the 3KPC arm of the Milky Way in an effort to destroy him.  The transmissions he sent out to Starfleet, Semmes intercepted and jammed.  Her transmissions back to Admiral Forrestal included Koon’s reports, but reached Earth via technology Starfleet had not and would not develop for a decade to come.         Destroying Pioneer outright was tempting but ultimately unwise.  Somehow it would come back to haunt them if it were revealed a Starfleet Dreadnaught destroyed a Starfleet Cruiser.  Let the hazards of exploration, freak natural phenomena or the locals destroy Pioneer, but do not dirty the hands of Captain Angela Semmes or soil the reputation of Admiral Forrestal.  That was as it should be Section 31 thought.  Let the tail wag the dog, and keep to light and shadow.         But Peyter wasn’t helping.         If they sent a report last week…         Semmes smiled a beam fit for the gratified.  “Tell me, Commander, where does that leave us?” she said sweet as a Sunday choir.         King knew he was in trouble, but he resigned himself to the onslaught coming his way.  This must be what a man felt like when his crops washed away after a flood, he thought.  Farmers knew the risks involved, and even preyed for the rains.  But when the downpour came and scoured the fields down to worthless mud, the only thing to do was get ready for the next season.  Patiently, deliberately, and without enthusiasm, he answered what he knew was the tip of a spear aimed for his vitals, “Out of position, Captain.”         “It troubles me sometimes that ambiguous language may make my orders confusing,” Semmes confessed.  “I mean, I may have the finest crew in Starfleet, but sometimes I can tax the vocabulary of the best man aboard.  Do you follow me so far?”         “Yes, Captain.”         “You understand that we must remain ahead of the learning curve both intellectually and physically?” she asked.         King was about to answer but she interrupted him.  The more she spoke the faster and angrier her cadence became.         “You see, I clearly remember a report coming across my desk describing in some detail the destruction of one U.S.S. Pioneer with the loss of all 815 hands.  This does not strike me as a trivial detail, mister.  If what you say is true, we lost that ship for six weeks.  How do you lose a Nebula-class ship with 815 aboard?  I find that question compelling, Commander, I find it compelling to an alarming magnitude.  If a member of Pioneer’s crew answers that question, Admiral Forrestal will suffer a great deal of scrutiny.  If he suffers scrutiny, it may be revealed that we facilitated that loss.  That strikes me as criminal, mister, criminal behavior aboard this ship.  And I will not have my people suspected, interrogated, charged, or convicted of a crime.  I know my crew is the finest in Starfleet, and I have no criminals aboard.  Am I clear?”  Her voice had risen to a shriek.         “You’re upset, sir…” King said calmly but Semmes shouted him down.         “Shut up!” she snapped.  “Don’t patronize me when an answer is required!  Our orders are to see to it that ship is destroyed before we move on to our objectives in the Gamma Quadrant.  We are not to link ourselves to that destruction in any way as specified in section 1A of the list of mission parameters.  That means the top of the list, mister!  The language is clear.  It is not open for interpretation or modification.  So how do you lose a cruiser with a living crew?”         Calmly King reported, “Pioneer was obscured from our view by the sub-space distortion until they repaired their communications array.”         “Inadequate answer, Commander,” Semmes barked.  She leaned back in her chair and composed herself.  She left unspoken the simple matter of locating Pioneer.  A beacon had been planted aboard her before she left spacedock seven years earlier so finding her should be child’s play, but pointing this out now would only state her ignorance about its not working.  “Turn us around and get us back on station,” she ordered.         Relived that the fit was over, King acknowledged the command, “Aye, sir.”         Semmes tuned to the security officer, “Contact the nearest Hirogen scout.  Give them as little information as you can, but peak their interest.  Link into their net and scan the arm from here to the Delta Quadrant.  I’ll take the report in my ready room.”         She stood and strutted from the bridge.  Well aware that all eyes followed her, she took her time about it.  Captain Angela Semmes was a stunning beauty, and she knew it.  Tall, raven haired, and fine featured, she had the body of teenager, and the bearing of a Queen.  Ever since she was a child, people struggled to please her because she was so striking.  While civilization was supposed to look under all that, it almost never did.  In Semmes’ humble opinion, people had not changed since Adam and Eve.  Beauty commanded attention, and that attention meant power for those smart enough to fashion it.  While not personally vain, she was aware of the power vanity held over humankind.  She could add or detract from men and women by her comings and goings, and she used that against people.  Her ambition blinded her to the cruelty she inflicted by doing so, but she felt fulfilled nonetheless.  Ambition blinded her to her faults, and fueled her hungers.  However, that ambition was not blind, nor did she feel it was unreasonable.  Section 31’s pragmatic approach to Starfleet policy suited her perfectly for this reason.  Her superiors justified their means by the ends they hoped to achieve, and knowing those goals in detail, as she did, blasted away the pangs of conscience she felt on occasion.  Sacrifices had to be made.  It was better to pay them now and get it over with she felt.         In her ready room, Semmes opened a channel to Starfleet.  Unlike Captain Koon who had to wait for months to get a reply over a subspace channel, Semmes linked to Admiral Forrestal instantly.   The technology needed to accomplish this had been stolen from a Tholian diplomat twenty years ago and had taken Section 31’s scientists ten years to figure out.  Unknown to Section 31, the Tholians modified their system from Iconian technology they had uncovered shortly after that race vanished.  Using a gap in dimensional space, the communication slipped out of the plane where life was possible, traveled for the same distance but not in time, and slipped out again.  Bodily travel of this nature would crush flesh and matter under the weight of enthalpy just like the event horizon of a black hole, but the proper energy traveled across it with clarity and in narrow lines.  The problem with this technology was the habit of that other dimension to compress the beam of energy in time as well as space.  That meant that link ups were tricky and transmissions had to be in fits and spurts instead of a continuous feed.  Through the manipulation of the receiver’s recognition algorithms and the transmitter’s pattern of transmission, this method of communication proved to be quite practical.  Since the transmitters had to strobe out data fragments in a specific length, this mode of communication was called the pulse array.         The Admiral appeared on the screen in good humor.  “Hello, Angie,” he greeted her, “this is a bit early today, so I’m guessing you have a problem.”         Semmes ground her teeth again.  She hated the name “Angie” and preferred to be called “Captain” or “Semmes” but Forrestal insisted on using it.  “Pioneer survived, sir.  I have to return to station.  We may be late for the link up with the Caligula.”         Forrestal stared at her in shock.         “I’ll send a complete report along with this transmission,” Semmes continued.         “How late will you be to the Gamma Quadrant?” Forrestal asked.         “Six weeks, maybe more,” Semmes speculated.  “If you allow us to move in on Pioneer directly we can eliminate her in short order.  We’d be back on course in a month.”         This was no idle boast. U.S.S Diocletian was a dreadnought of the Caesar-class.  With her crew of 2,500 and outstripping the Galaxy-class in size by two thirds, the Diocletian was among the most powerful ships ever made by Starfleet.  Aboard she had the last generation photon torpedoes and the first generation of quantum torpedoes.  She had phaser cannons, phaser arrays, Klingon disruptors, Romulan Plasma torpedoes, Cardassian repulsors, and a fourth generation cloaking device developed by Federation scientists.  Semmes had the power, speed, and stealth to overwhelm Pioneer in short order, but all those weapons, warp trails, and cloaking signatures would lead back to the Diocletian and possibly back to Section 31.  For this reason Forrestal had forbade Semmes from acting directly against Pioneer, or so he clamed.  Another reason more rooted in fear than cold calculation, loomed large in the Admiral’s decision not to destroy Koon directly.         “What makes you think you can find her?” Forrestal asked.         Semmes felt her impatience boil to the surface, but she managed to control her voice.  “We observed the Lassen’s Cutoff pass directly through the saucer section of the Pioneer, Admiral.  We observed the Pioneer enveloped in a fusion cascade.  Either of these events should have proven fatal to her, but we lingered, at our own risk, and watched a massive explosion within that cascade.  We scanned the area for a day before we gave up the search.  I wanted to stay a bit longer, but you ordered us to proceed to the Gamma Quadrant.”         She had not answered the Admiral’s question, but he took the bait all the same.  “After your recommendation, Captain,” Forrestal said acidly.         “We scanned that flare for two sectors, Admiral.  We did our job.  Now I’m telling you that an error was made on your part, and you have the nerve to question my abilities?”         Forrestal shrunk under her assault.  He was not accustomed to willful subordinates, and his approaching retirement did not galvanize his resolve.  If anything, he was wilting under the strain.  The cleanup a career in Section 31 required tapped his reserves of courage and intellect to the breaking point.  He was becoming prickly and skittish.  He took offense easily (always had), and startled easier with each passing day.  Semmes imagined his retirement becoming one long panic attack at the rate he was going.  People really did not retire from Section 31 anyway; they went on reserve list of personnel instead.  She pictured the Admiral huddled in a darkened house with the windows shut and the doors locked dreading every incoming communication as a recall or court-marshal.  The man’s anxiety was turning him into a recluse. It amused Angela Semmes to no end.         The Admiral regained his composure, scanned the report she transmitted along with her message, and addressed the real issue why he was so upset.  “What about the item?” he asked.         Semmes cooled her tone to an icy clip.  “We believe they lost it in the collision,” she said.  “From the damage they reported, they can’t have overlooked it if it were there.”         “Then there is no reason to continue with the mission, Angie.  If they are found now, we can walk away clean.  Continue to the Caligula and let them wander off into the Delta Quadrant,” he ordered.         Semmes was tempted by the idea.  Leaving Koon out there to die slowly or unexpectedly appealed to her sense of mission.  Forrestal’s notion that their hands would be clean was not far from true.  But blocking his transmissions back to Earth was the only snag.  Diocletian could only intercept narrow-band transmissions on a direct line of sight and broadband transmissions within a certain range.  Eventually Koon’s story would be overheard.  If Forrestal were not able to deflect attention from his office, even after retirement, the inquiry would be embarrassing.  Sending a purpose-made drone to accomplish this would take months of development and placement, and that might not work.  Pioneer or any of a dozen species around the Great Barrier might detect the drone.  The drone might lose them or malfunction.  Furthermore, no alternative appealed to her.  The local Hirogen would not conspire to hide a starship; they were far too direct for that.  Unleashing them on Pioneer was an option, but informing them of Koon’s whereabouts might prove tricky without exposing the Diocletian.  She knew she had ordered King to proceed along those lines, but that would take potentially longer than reaching the Pioneer herself.  The Hirogen communication network had taken Diocletian’s scientists three months to figure out, and much of what they did with it was dicey at best.          In the Delta Quadrant, Seven of Nine had figured the network out in a little over a week by herself.  Unlike Semmes, Seven of Nine had no patience for clandestine use of the network, overpowered the net, and alerted the Hirogen, much to their annoyance.  Semmes would have been disgusted.  Diocletian used the network to shade and highlight.  They led the attention of the Hirogen rather than merely talk to them.  Semmes’ way was elegant while Seven of Nine’s way was efficient.         Shaking her head thoughtfully, Semmes said, “No, we have to proceed until Koon is run to ground.  You can’t afford the embarrassment Pioneer’s discovery would provoke.  It would lead to us.”         Forrestal was shocked.  “Are you countermanding my orders, Semmes?”         Semmes walked Forrestal through her reasoning.  After ten tedious minutes, he consented.  “I’ll send the Justinian to the Gamma Quadrant.  Be warned that depletes our reserves within the Federation to the breaking point.  There’s trouble brewing with the Cardassians.  We suspect the Dominion may be involved ahead of schedule.  Having only the Hadrian and the Caesar in the Alpha Quadrant means we’re left with only Pharaoh-class dreadnoughts for heavy firepower.”         “We have twelve Pharaoh-class ships, Admiral.  That’s more than enough firepower for any two wars,” Semmes lectured.  While she appreciated the input Forrestal was giving her, force dispositions were his problem, not hers.  She only cared about keeping one puny Nebula-class cruiser out of sight until either it was destroyed, or she lost patience with the exercise and atomized it herself.  What stung was the abandoning of her Gamma Quadrant objectives.  That was a bitter pill to take, and she fought back shame when she thought of that self-important fool Captain Emile Radcliff and the Justinian doing her job with the Dominion.  But her duty to Section 31 was clear: Pioneer must vanish.         “Porter is getting nosey,” Forrestal, said changing the subject slightly.         Semmes was not surprised.  She knew Commander William Porter from Academy days.  He was a taciturn, methodical man who despised secrets.  Semmes thought his assignment to Forrestal’s office a grave mistake from the first… or so she claimed.  “Reassign him, Admiral,” she suggested somewhat too sternly.  “He’s relentless.  Bill won’t stop until he’s found the truth of what he’s looking for.”         Forrestal’s arrogant demeanor crashed down like an avalanche.  His nose darted up a few degrees, his nostrils flared, and his mouth thinned to a disgusted line, “You seem rather free with your council, Captain,” Forrestal said.  “I won’t bore your simple mind with the necessity of keeping Porter here until my command is deactivated, but second-guessing my strategy is not acceptable.”         Not impressed Semmes countered, “Your tactics leave much to be desired, Admiral.  If you had just destroyed Pioneer near the Neutral Zone like I suggested, I wouldn’t be out of position now.”         Forrestal sniffed, “That would have provoked a war we were unable to control.  Are you so short-sighted as not to see that?”         Angered, Semmes ground her teeth again until her head rang.  “You should speak, Admiral,” she growled.  “You’re no more than…”         “Five minutes from home,” Forrestal interrupted.  “Yes, I know that, Captain.”         “It’s different out here near the core.  I don’t expect you to understand it like I do, sir.  Besides a war with the Romulans would have been something we could have won.”  That had been her argument for years.  In the most profound depths of Starfleet Office of Strategic Services (Section 31’s parent agency), war plans had been in place for years that could overwhelm the Romulan Empire.  What was lacking in them was a political will to use them.  Every practical war plan in place conceded the need for a short, brutal, and costly war with Romulus, but the rewards outweighed the investment in Semmes’, and many others, opinions.  That the war could be provoked was beyond question.  The Romulans with their institutionalized paranoia were eager to lash out at the Federation.  Two Federation Presidents had turned down promising invasion plans after clear provocation had been endured, and Section 31 knew that the Borg was crippling the Romulans.  The recent incursions into Federation space had been matched by two equally devastating strikes into Romulan territories.  Had a shrewd head of state been elected to office, neutralizing the Borg threat could have been the pretext for chartering the invasion and ending decades of cold war.  The Romulans were weak, but no Chief Executive found had the nerve to face the arithmetic.  Semmes argued that Section 31 could override the civilian policy makers, as was their primary function, but Forrestal and his superiors were confident another way could be found that could prove less costly.  The Borg had to be neutralized before invading Romulus, and the Diocletian was supposed to move on to the Gamma Quadrant to harness the power of the Dominion against the Borg before the move on the Romulans could be made.  For all their weaknesses, the Romulans could still cripple the Federation and open the way for the Borg to move in.  Semmes thought this line of thought was defeatist and pessimistic, but Admiral Grinnell, Admiral Richelieu, and the retiring Admiral Forrestal thought differently.         However, the snag to all this was the evidence aboard Pioneer.  Two Borg vencules were stored in her.  Section 31 had made ten vencules in an effort to use them against the Borg, but they had quickly attracted the Hive Mind.  Starfleet’s first interaction with the Borg had happed when a Borg cube had come to activate the vencules.  In the ensuing battle, five Section 31 cruisers and millions of citizens of a Neutral Zone planet had been assimilated and destroyed by Section 31’s vencules.  Catastrophe had been averted only at the last minute by a Tal’ Shiar’ fleet that had happened to notice transwarp activity off their border.         While the Romulans remained oblivious as to what they had chased away at the time, they had been badly frightened by what they had seen.  Convinced that the Federation was behind the Borg’s move into their space, Romulan planners ramped up their war plans in an effort to defend themselves.  Fortunately, for the Federation Romulan planners were so paranoid that they did not exclusively blame Starfleet.  In a stunningly ironic twist, the Tal’ Shiar convinced itself that a massive conspiracy between the Federation, Klingons, Cardassians, and a dozen or more other factions was acting against Romulus.  Strategically such a union was too powerful to overrun through invasion, so Romulan planners decided to circle the wagons and defend themselves against the onslaught of this threat that surrounded the Empire.         That by huddling behind their lines like frightened children would make the Alpha and Beta Quadrants a safer place to live was something Section 31 found hysterical.  Starfleet High Command thought the situation to be hopelessly provocative, and Section 31 thought that illusion to be their finest work yet.         But the cause of all this, the vencules, had been discreetly removed from the Neutral Zone.  Six had made their way back to Borg Prime where the Hive Mind discovered the full extent of the Alpha Quadrant’s resources that they had so far ignored.  The two hundred Starfleet volunteers that had been assimilated by their homemade vencules were taken back to Borg Prime and never seen again.  One vencule was destroyed by the Tal’ Shiar’ and the remaining three were removed by Section 31 to Wolf 359.  When Section 31 destroyed one of the remaining three, the Borg somehow discovered this and moved on the Federation.  Section 31 had enough warning to remove the remaining two vencules out of Federation space before the Borg made their first official incursion.  Pioneer’s mission was formulated to expedite this removal.  Knowing that destruction of the vencules attracted Borg somehow, Section 31 wanted to remove them as far away as possible; preferably without further loss of Section 31 personnel.  Pioneer’s crew was never meant to return.         What Section 31 had not counted on was Captain Koon’s ability slip out of trouble.  The destruction of the evidence against Section 31 superceded all other mission requirements, but Koon refused to lie down and die.  Oblivious to the cargo he carried, Peyter Koon had slipped out of more traps than a forewarned man might have hoped to manage.  His reports reflected his complete ignorance of the forces arrayed against him.  While he was convinced Admiral Forrestal was frustratingly inept, he failed to grasp the true nature of his plight.         In part, this was due to Forrestal’s and Semmes’ efforts to keep him ignorant of their role in his problems, but the larger reason was Koon’s distrust and distain for conspiracies.  Much like Commander Porter back in Forrestal’s office, Koon thought secrets were wasteful, counterproductive, and useless.  He built up his crew’s trust by holding no secrets and pointing no fingers.  His security officer Lieutenant Commander Speer was one of the worst counterintelligence operatives in Starfleet history, and Koon had deliberately sought the man out for the mission in an effort to keep crew tensions to a minimum.  How such a policy could work at all ran diametrically against everything Section 31 stood for, but they were more than willing to take advantage of Koon’s inborn trust.  Two operatives aboard Pioneer reported regularly back to the Diocletian until they died aboard the Lassen’s Cutoff.         Semmes argued further.  “Admiral, if you want me back on track, let me take Pioneer out now and let the Borg pick up the pieces.”         Forrestal rolled his eyes.  “That would expose us to an invasion rout we cannot defend, Captain.”         Semmes glared at the distant Admiral with contempt.  “Half that invasion rout is bordered by the Romulans.  Do you believe they would not respond to a threat like that?”         “We can’t count on them to act against them!”         “They’re so keyed up right now; they’d leap at the chance to unload on the Borg.”         “If they are expansionist, they could swing through the Klingon Empire and get us in a pincer while our forces were committed against the Borg.”         “They won’t risk allowing the Borg to gather that much momentum.”         “You underestimate their racial prejudice against Klingons, Captain.”         “You’re ignoring what they will perceive as the mortal threat to their way of life.”         Forrestal took a deep breath before he lost control of his anger.  Semmes had almost sent him over the edge of a full fit.  His frustration… no exasperation, with Semmes stemmed from her insistence on dictating strategy to him.  She was a Captain driven to achieve glory, and she did not care if the delicate balance he struggled to achieve against threats to the Federation dictated discretion.  “Your input is duly noted, Captain,” he said in a dry, dismissive tone.  “Return to station and see to it the Hirogen move against Pioneer.”  In enunciated, staccato syllables, he ordered: “Do not take direct action against Pioneer until authorized by me or Admiral Richelieu.”         The screen went blank.         “Idiot!” Semmes snapped.         It took a while for her to collect her thoughts, but when she did, she knew what she had to do.  She called King on the intercom.  “Commander, have the Hirogen net shut down in the Flare’s sector.  They’ll go running to find out what bypassed the system.”         King responded well.  In fact, he thought the tactic rather clever.  “Aye, Captain,” he said.         “Strange,” the day watcher said.  He tapped a few keys on his display to slew more sensors onto the anomaly.  He had a great many to choose from.  Hunting ships were extravagantly equipped in this regard.  Prey tended to find more inventive ways to fool detection than a mind could comfortably imagine, and the current sate of Hirogen technology reflected this in an ironic way.  Hunting ships contained some of the most sophisticated detection and listening equipment ever devised, bar none.  When tallied, fully two thirds more mass and power was dedicated to the sensors and sentry field than any other system.  No one aboard appreciated it though.  Descriptions of the ship detailed the weapons to an embarrassing degree of intimacy.  Performance and agility also figured heavily into the worth of a ship.  But the sensors were top shelf and rarely mentioned.  Not that it mattered to the day watcher; he was only interested in potential targets.         Hirogen are talented students of behavior, in particular abnormal behavior.  And right now, space was behaving oddly on a grand scale.  The Great Barrier was sending out a massive flare at a speed and mass unheard of to the day watcher.  Scrolling through the sensor readout, he juggled the figures until he found telemetry and a point of origin.  Starfleet scientists might have killed for the data he discarded.  Detailed as it was, they would have been frustrated by the Hirogen disregard for statistical data.  Rather the data the day watcher was interested in was more general than that.  It detailed trends and progress instead of the quantitative facts.  What the day watcher finally produced resembled a weather report rather than astrophysics.  Almost romantically, it told him where the flare started, its projected course and its effects on what lay in its path; however, the computers aboard immediately tasked themselves to past behavior and included it in the final readout.  What caused it or what it was made of was of no concern to the day watcher or anyone else aboard.  At least for the moment.         Satisfied, the day watcher altered the ship’s heading and strolled to the Chieftain’s cabin.  “Possible target,” he announced through the closed door.         From within, a voice replied, “Nearby?”         “Two weeks away at high cruise,” came the answer.         After a long pause the door dilated open and the Chieftain emerged, “That’s a ways off.  Let’s have a look at what you have.”         The day watcher returned to his station with the Chieftain following him.  Once there, he seated himself and scrolled through the data.  The Chieftain remained standing behind the day watcher.  His height was unusually short for a Hirogen and sitting in the seat next to the day watcher would have obstructed his view of the readout.  After examining the readout for several minutes in silence he asked, “Have you examined this holographically?”         “No,” the day watcher admitted, “I thought this would interest you when I noticed this.”  He tapped his finger on the line data detailing relative acceleration and speed.         The Chieftain peered at the data.  After a moment, he sniffed the air in a Hirogen gesture of thoughtful consideration.  A human at this point might say “Hmmm” or “interesting,” but Hirogen sniffed the air like the predators they were.  Not that they knew anything about humans, but all races have identical traits masked in different habits.  “Show it on main holo,” the Chieftain demanded.         In the middle of the bridge the flare appeared.  Looking like a wisp of cloud erupting from a blue-white plane it seemed to gather itself like a cyclone.         “Show it in time lapse,” the Chieftain ordered, “One part per two hours.”         The results were dramatic.  The resemblance to a cyclone solidified.  One could almost feel the unseen wind rushing towards the base of the flare and the cold air dropping away from the main cloud of the Great Barrier out into space.  But no currents of this kind existed in space.  Interstellar dust was far too insubstantial to support currents capable of affecting stellar bodies.  Only radiation storms could make themselves felt on this scale, but the Great Barrier always absorbed them or slowed them.  This thing was accelerating.  Maybe by miniscule amounts (about 120 kilometers per hour per day) but it was speeding up.         A new voice interrupted the Chieftain’s thoughts.  “Look at that,” the first lord said with uncharacteristic wonder, “It began in subspace.  One moment it wasn’t there and the next it was traveling at warp speeds.”         “That means it’s not natural,” the Chieftain declared.  “Every hunter within ten-thousand light years will be on the way.  We have to get there soon.”  He turned to the day watcher, “Well done, Levran.”         The day watcher felt a rush of excitement.  Now that the Chieftain had addressed him by his name, the whole crew would do the same.  Hirogen crewmembers achieved status, indeed identity, from exploits alone.  New crewmembers lived aboard in a social limbo where they were treated like parts of the ship.  They were not spoken to unless it pertained to their duties.  They were shoved aside in the corridors as if they were sentient bits of furniture that had the bad manners to get up and walk around.  Levran had endured this cold treatment for over a year.  He’d been cursed at, scolded, beaten, and mostly ignored.  Now he would be part of the crew.  All that would change.          A name had that kind of power to Hirogen.  Names were attached to deeds and history, more so than dates.  Names could be stitched into legend, and deeds were the currency of folklore. All Hirogen were obsessed with this fact of life.  They based their worth on their accomplishments, how many kills, which hunts, and the intimate details of those hunts were what they remembered.  Immortality waits only for glory.         Pioneer moved cautiously towards the base of the flare.  On the main viewer, the thing looked like the most violent of waterfalls.  Even half a light year away, the thing dominated the screen.         To Okuma it resembled an approaching Martian dust storm.  She remembered those well from her days growing up there.  Nothing was feared more on Mars than the dust storms.  The swirling, churning masses of dust seemed to roll across the land in great, clawing sheets of debris picked up from the arid surface.  From horizon to horizon, the storms would blot out the white sky in an amber haze until finally the darkness would engulf the settlement.  There was an instinctive rush to dive for cover when the winds slammed against the buildings.  Even though the Starfleet Core of Engineers claimed the structures to be completely safe, everyone felt the rooms shudder before the onslaught of wind and sand.  She felt the same trepidation now as she watched the viewer.  The march of the storm, the sudden lull leading the weather front, and the howling rush of the wind as it gathered itself, all of it could be translated to what she knew was before them.         “We’ll have to start here,” Totem said.  “We need to draw the flare this way.”         Samantha Okuma thought the notion insanity.  She knew the science behind what they had to do to get the flare to recede, but she only had to look at the thing to feel uneasy.  It was like standing before an onrushing tsunami, and declaring your handkerchief would soak up the water.  We want this thing coming towards us?         Forte and Kree started the sequence.  Pioneer rolled its dorsal side towards the Great Barrier.  Behind her the warp field stretched out in a long and extremely wide arc.  The shape of this field was crucial to success.  It would change as they progressed up the flare; becoming longer and narrower as they went so that they could capture as much mass as possible.  Theoretically, their top speed could only exceed warp three with the field stretched out so far, but Totem had his doubts about that.  The mathematics reached a chaotic cascade only a third of the way up the flare.         Dropping into subspace Pioneer scraped as close to the Great Barrier as they dared.  “Raising a rooster tail,” Forte reported when he checked the aft sensors.         “Rooster tail, Lieutenant?” Totem asked.         “A racing term on Earth,” Forte explained.  “We’re raising a column of dust behind us as we go.  During a race, that tends to mean a speedy pace.”         “You’d never guess we’re only going warp one,” Koon added then turned to the science officer.  “How’s it looking so far, Willie?”         Hurst did not turn from his station.  “Just like the simulation, Captain.  We should know a lot more when we make our turn.”         If the blasted thing doesn’t draw us in and crush us, Okuma thought.  Gordon was confident that would not happen, but he also mentioned that they would not survive another trip inside the flare.  Pioneer may be functional and underway, but she was bruised and bloodied.  The Chief Engineer had months of work ahead of him to bring the ship up to standard.  A trip to dry-dock would be ideal, but the nearest one of those was decades away.  As it was, the ship moved and acted well enough to attempt the Flare Jump, as they had come to call it, but time rather than Pioneer’s state of repair dictated their actions.  If they did not do something soon, the flare would be beyond their ability to control.  Seven weeks of uninterrupted growth had made a monster out of the thing.  If allowed to grow, the size and destructive power would increase geometrically.  Statistical models confirmed the beginning of the classic S-curve when the force of the shock wave was measured against time.  Spaulding and his team made that point almost hysterically clear when they began studying it.         “Warp two,” Forte reported.         “That’s a little too soon, Lieutenant,” Hurst said from his station.  “Try to slow us down so we reach the initial point within two nanoseconds of calculated.”         “Aye, sir,” Forte said.         “IP in four minutes,” Kree reported.  The current obsession with the initial point was not in the slightest bit trivial.  If they reached the IP going too fast, they stood risked overshooting their chance to turn away from the flare itself.  If they reached it too late, they were in danger of being drawn into the Great Barrier by virtue of the gravitonic forces they were stirring up behind them.  Implosion of the hull or collision with the flare was the cost of the slightest error while beginning their turn up towards the end of the thing.  Kree preferred overshooting the IP to otherwise; at least it would be over in an instant.  Hurst told her he preferred the latter since they might be able to hold the ship together just long enough to escape… maybe.         Commander Okuma was terrified of both, and right now, her fears ran riot in her mind.         For the last few weeks, she had kept herself occupied with the duties of the ship, and it had almost drained her.  With the repairs to the ship, the monitoring of the flare, and researching schemes to reverse the damage they had done, she’d had little time to be scared.  Pioneer was only just well enough to move and it had taken every waking and resting moment to get her here at all.  Between catnaps, she shuffled people about the ship shoring up hull breaches, stringing plasma conduits, and keeping the life support functional.  Wherever she could, she bent her own back to the repairs and she had the aches and pains to prove it.         The largest problem was the life support.  Even now, sections of the ship had to be evacuated due to the risk of any number of catastrophes.  The doctor had been kept busy with people falling victim to the utter breakdown of the system over the past few weeks.  Two men were burned when the room they were in suddenly flashed into a plasma oven.  More crewmen had almost frozen to death when power went out in the hanger bay.  Okuma herself had almost suffocated in her sleep when the air supply in her quarters had shut down while she was napping.  The plasma conduits to almost every system had overloaded not to mention to beating the hull had taken.  Like a poltergeist, the ship attacked them with systems they used to trust, and it did so at the worst times.  Only the fast action of a Bolian Engineer had saved the lives of three crewmen and himself when a hull breach had exploded out of transporter room two.  With a deft punch to the controls, he initiated an emergency transport directly to transporter room one of every object in the room as the air howled into space.  The transporter had been destroyed by the effort, but the Bolian and the other crewmen had survived with serious injuries.  After that, Okuma ordered the transporters in the shuttles manned and ready until the primary units aboard could be repaired.  Over the course of five more hull breaches, everyone endangered had managed to be saved by this measure.         Working in such an environment made everyone jumpy to say the least.  Nerves worn raw by the endless procession of hazards, all deadly, made morale low and tempers short.  Even a Vulcan crewman had resorted to giving his work partner a neck pinch when he could stand the crewman’s semi-panicked blubbering no longer.  Fights broke out, and some crewmen refused to work together after exhausted minds and spent bodies were forced to superhuman effort merely to survive only a few seconds more.  It was Okuma’s job to take care of these people.         Using an iron will and an impatient ear, Samantha kept the crew from falling apart.  Koon played his own role, but it was Sam’s place to handle the crew directly.  Koon held the will while she held the whip, in a manner of speaking.  Behind her back, she was called “the overseer” and “Dragon Sam.”  Hard to believe at one time she was a popular officer.  That was no longer true.  Koon managed to be respected if not loved.  She was hated.         That she was tired and stressed did not occur to Samantha as the reason behind her isolated feelings.  She knew what they were saying and she knew why.  She was tough on everyone but…         “Commander?” Koon asked interrupting her thoughts.         Okuma turned to see her Captain looking intently at her.         “I’m sorry, sir.  I was just thinking about the…” she said.         Koon cut her off.  “Relax, Sam,” his voice boomed softly in her ear.  He sounded gently concerned.  He spoke quietly enough so that anyone else wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop.  For the first time in years, his Russian accent colored his words.  “Your hands are bleeding.”         Sam looked at her lap and found she had bunched her fists so tightly, that blood oozed from where her fingernails had dug into her palm.  Shocked she almost lost her hold on her emotions.  “I’m sorry, Captain,” she blurted, “It’s just that…”         Koon did the strangest thing.  He leaned forward and kissed her quickly on both cheeks in the Russian fashion.  It happened so fast and so unexpectedly, she could only gape at him.  “Have I ever thanked you?” he asked.  “You’ve pushed these people harder than I thought they could run, and they never broke.  When we’re done with the Flare Jump, take a day or two off.”         “But there’s still so much to do,” she protested.         “And I’ll see to it while you get some rest,” he assured her.  “I can make it an order, Commander, but I shouldn’t have to.”         “Captain, I,” she began, but Koon kissed her again.  A simple peck on the lips that so astonished her that for a few seconds all she could think about was how strange it was to be kissing a superior officer.  When he withdrew, again there was a twinkle in his eye.  What was he thinking?         “Don’t suppose I should ask what you’re doing,” Lieutenant Commander Speer said.         “It’s a Russian custom to thank good people for good work,” Koon said with a smile.         Speer gave off a derisive snort, “I’ll settle for a handshake, Captain.”         “I’ll remember that,” Koon said.         “IP in thirty seconds,” Kree said.         “Slow it down, Darin,” Hurst ordered.         “Power output is feeding off the Barrier, Commander, getting the ship to slow down is a bit tricky,” Forte said.         “Can you slow down at all?” Hurst asked.         “Not without being overtaken by the rooster tail behind us, or collapsing the field,” Forte said nervously.         “Can you make the turn?” Koon asked.         “It’ll be a bit harder, but yes, sir,” Forte said.         “Lieutenant, we can’t risk ourselves that way,” Hurst barked.         “Let the boy work, Willie,” Koon said.  “He’ll do what he must.”         “But…”         “We don’t have time to debate it, Willie,” Koon said with uncharacteristic steel edging his voice.  “I’m not taking him out of that chair until he’s done or dead.”  Tuning to Forte he said, “Do what you have to, Darin.”         “IP in five… four… three… two… one…” Kree counted off.         Pioneer nosed down away from the Great Barrier.         Over the span of a few seconds, the ship doubled its speed without power from the warp core.  Darin Forte noticed this, but could only feed in corrections to their flight plan.         From his console, Willie frantically scanned the data.   “Forte..?” he said drawing the word out into an uneasy question.         Spaulding and Totem were looking at the data in alarm.  The numbers were already in cascade, fully fifteen seconds ahead of the model.  Normally at odds with one another, they exchanged an alarmed glance.  Seeing the mutual certainty that everything they were looking at was wrong, both scientists sprung into action.         “I’ll take the data,” Totem said.         “I’ll take warp control,” Spaulding said.         Instantly the two scientists were babbling mathematical jargon to each other several orders of magnitude above everyone’s comprehension.  Frantically Spaulding peppered the keys with entries while Totem did the same.         “Sir?” Lieutenant Shin the Com officer asked nervously.         Koon looked at the girl then tuned around to see what she was staring at.  Totem and Spaulding had the look of automatons.  Koon had once met the famous Lieutenant Commander Data and watched him pour over difficult readings from several sources with the kind of speed he both envied and feared.  The android’s hands seemed to flutter over the controls like humming bird wings in flight.  His body became fixed in place as he devoted most of his processor capacity to the data before him.  While Koon was suitably impressed by what he saw that day, what stuck with him was the fixated expression on Data’s face.  His eyes were wide, his lips were pressed into a thin line, and he never blinked.  The curving surface of his eyes remained so still they reflected the readouts in legible detail.  Totem and Spaulding now emulated the same expression of intensity.         Something was wrong.         To punctuate this realization, the intercom chirped and Eddie’s voice demanded his attention, “Captain!”         “Go on, Commander,” Koon said without taking his eyes off the two scientists.         Almost in a panic Eddie blurted out, “I’ve lost warp control down here, and the nacelles are critical!”         Calmly Koon told him, “Don’t worry about the warp control, Commander.  Doctor Spaulding and Doctor Totem have it.”         From the helm Forte added, “Just find a way to keep the nacelles glued to the ship at warp nine with a warp one output.”         “Did you catch that, Eddie?” Koon asked.         “Catch what?” Gordon asked.         Forte repeated himself into the intercom.         “That explains a lot,” Eddie said thoughtfully.         What Eddie, in fact no one, was seeing was the chaos the ship was undergoing.  Forte was skimming the Flare close enough to touch.  Debris surrounding the Flare was everywhere like a sandstorm.  The main deflector pushed much of it around the ship.  As the dust was pushed aside, it collided with other debris causing friction and heat.  Fluorescing under the onslaught of sudden energy the dust glowed white hot directly in front of the main deflector and cooled to a deep blue at the perimeter of its cone.  Since Spaulding and Totem were constantly reshaping and rephasing the warp field, the main deflector automatically reconfigured its output to match the shape of the field causing the dust to swirl as the output pulsed and shifted.  For the first time in any of their careers, the crew saw the outline of the deflector field as a spinning heart of a typhoon.  As the ship accelerated that typhoon distended ahead of the ship and squeezed the warp field ever closer to the hull.         Beside Pioneer, the warp nacelles whipped about so violently that they came mere feet from colliding with the hull.  Designed for a specific speed for a specific output of power, they were almost shut down in an effort to slow the ship, while Spaulding and Totem frantically adjusted and readjusted the shape of the warp field.  However the ship continued to accelerate, caught in the same subspace cascade the Lassen’s Cutoff had created.  Connected to the side and rear of the ship by thin outriggers intended to flex with acceleration, they were absorbing torsion from the mission module high over the saucer section.  Connected to the ship by a sturdy pylon, the mission module used part of the warp nacelles structural webbing to balance itself during high warp acceleration.  Unfortunately, the nacelles were accelerating slower than the main body of the ship.  The mission module pressed forward into the structural spars and weakened them.  As a result the nacelles began to toe in towards the nose while the warp filed tried to press them along the line of flight.  Eddie had never seen it happen.  Nacelle flutter was heard of, but not in a progressive loop.         Racing along at warp eight, instead of the predicted warp two, Pioneer moved right onto warp nine and faster without adding a watt of power.  She was riding a wave now, her belly to the stars beyond, and her back to the storming surface of the Flare.  She spiraled up its flanks like a tetherball, tighter and faster.         Inside g forces began to crush everyone down to their seats or to the floor with gentle yet increasing force.         Forte was sweating freely now.  Balancing the ship against the contrary forces at work, he focused all his attention on his flying.  If he tried to turn too tight, the ship would collide with the Flare.  If he turned too wide, centrifugal force would cause immediate loss of control.  If he went too fast, the ship would be crushed, and if he went too slowly, the rooster tail would catch up with them and kill them all.  To complicate matters, the deflector dish was picking up objects too large to push aside in their flight path.  Forte had to weave along their flight path in spasmodic little jinks that, in a ship this size, were near impossible.  Pioneer was dancing as never before.  She bobbed and weaved like a serpent past asteroids, comets, and planetoids missing some with bare kilometers to spare.  As the speed reached warp 9.6 the ship began to shake in a progressive palsy making maneuvers even more difficult.  It was like trying to ride a bike in an earthquake.         “Uh-oh,” Forte murmured.  Directly ahead lay not one but thousands of little fragments, the remains of a planet crushed by the Flare.  He could not sweep past it or around it.  The field was just too large.  “Locke!” he shouted in a near panic.         The weapons officer saw it coming and unloaded a full spread of torpedoes without being ordered.  In less than a heartbeat, the torpedoes sought out eight of the largest objects in their path and smashed them.  Pioneer raced through the explosions followed by the rooster tail, which promptly consumed the debris.         Once beyond the torpedo wake Forte saw one last chunk of debris in his path.  Irregular in shape and five hundred kilometers long, it had the mass of Olympus Mons and would not be moved.         “Oh, God,” Locke gasped.  In a split second of synchronicity, she and Forte knew what they had to do.  Forte swung the jittering ship to a jagged outcropping of rock while Locke targeted it.  They could not move beyond it, but the might make it through.         Her nacelles shaking violently and unable to slow down, Pioneer performed the maneuver badly.  She shuffled to the side in a stuttering wobble.  Her nose yawed uncontrollably to either side, but she jittered to about the point Forte wanted her to.         Locke fired the phasers and cut the outcropping off the larger asteroid.  It was an exquisite shot, only three other people in Starfleet could have done it, but it was not enough.  The separated chunk of debris moved far too slow to clear Pioneer’s hull between it and the asteroid.         The chunk tripped over the warp field, moved a fraction and struck the mission module at relative speed.  Pioneer shuddered and the loudest bang anyone had ever heard made everyone duck their heads instinctively.  Another chunk about the size of a man loomed over the ship in a lazy, almost playful arc.  After a second being pushed ahead of the ship by the subspace bubble, the chunk seemed to gather itself and struck the saucer section just aft of the bridge.  While it did no real harm the main viewer showed the rock racing right at them up to the point it skimmed an inch above the bridge, and deflect off the curved surface of the saucer.         Pioneer bucked, but did not slow.  The nacelles whipped outward from the saucer until they were perpendicular to their intended fixture in less than a second.  Impossibly the outriggers stretched out to almost twice their original length, but did not break.  Down in engineering all the crewmen heard two dull grinding sounds, massive and shrill.  Those close to the outer hull saw the metal bulge inward as the nacelles pressed against the outer body.  Then the force of the warp field acted against this motion and brought them back into line where they evened up and were stable at last.  Without the mission module between them to transfer harmonic torsion, they became stabilized by the warp field rather than by the structure of the ship.         Under Forte’s hands, the ship responded like a champion now.  Having shaken off a nasty little tic under her saddle, Pioneer wanted to run.         “Mission module hit!” Okuma reported.  “It’s sealed off.”         “What about repair crews?” Koon asked.         In front of him Forte cheerfully muttered, “Huh, that’s better.”         “It’s gone, Captain,” Okuma said.         “Eddie,” Koon said into the intercom, “Can you keep the ship together like this?”         After a pause the Chief engineer said, “Yeah, the control ends weren’t severed, but the warranty is officially blown.”         “Whatever you need, Chief,” Koon said.  Turning to Speer he asked, “How about shields?”         “Unwise,” Hurst answered from his station.  “We might disrupt the cascade.”  In fact, he was amazed by what he was seeing.  Totem and Spaulding had reshaped, rephased, and adjusted the power output to the warp field like conductors in font of a symphony.  The original model would have been inadequate seconds after the IP.  Now they were close to succeeding.  The Flare was beginning to bend back towards the Great Barrier.  The cascade behind them was still chaotic, but the two scientists shaped and reshaped it to their needs.  Chaos was translating into infinite power resources that Pioneer controlled instead of a random destructive tide.  “Kree, second IP in twenty seconds after recalculation.”         “Aye, sir,” she replied.  Kree was sweating badly for an Andorian.  Her hair was pasted to her scalp in dirty yellow clumps while salty fluid dripped into her eyes.  The path ahead of them kept changing.  It bucked and rolled like bad lover on a bed of gelatin.  Plotting their course much more than a few seconds ahead of Darin’s sensor coverage was worthless.  She knew where they had to end up, but the path there was circuitous, erratic, and cast in shadow beyond the horizon.  It was like flying at top speed through a maze, but she knew in an instinctive sense how to get there.  She just would not have the luxury of examining the safety of the ground where she placed her running feet.         “Impressive,” the Chieftain said.  “Do you suppose they know we’re here?”         Levran thought not.  From the looks of things, whoever was flying that ship was very busy indeed.         On the holographic image, the flare began to convulse.  First Lord Heartstock waved at the flare as it hooked back upon itself.  “There,” he declared, “When that Flare collapses, we should be here,” he said pointing to a spot on the holo that lay beyond the point where the tip of the flare would sink back into the barrier.  “Take them from head on when they are exhausted.”         “You assume they will be exhausted when they reach that point,” the Chieftain chided.  “We don’t know how difficult this is for them.  For all we know they do this sort of thing all the time.”         Heartstock shook his head.  “That has to be intense,” he argued.  “The power output alone would cripple us.  It would be best to lance out at them when their guard is down.”         “Nervous, my Lord?” the Chieftain asked.         Master Hunter Grivnash shook his head thoughtfully.  “I think he’s right,” he said.  He was the night watcher Levran’s immediate partner and superior.  A veteran of many hunts, his powerful frame held a methodical mind.  His was the art of tracking, and it made him one of the most conservative men on the crew.  Careful, deliberate attention to details caught prey not weapons, he often argued.  In his view, the kill was far less exciting than finding and tracking a target in difficult conditions.  It required skill, patience, cunning, and judgment to track.  Killing took aggression and skill but little else.  Peering at the holo a moment longer he suggested, “We could find cover here, and surprise them when they get underway again.”  He indicated an unremarkable flare erupting from the Great Barrier near the point this new ship would be when the big flare collapsed.  “Use this as a blind, and let them move right past us.”         “The talk of old men!” Heartstock sneered.  “We can overwhelm them in seconds without hiding like nervous children.”         “When the prey is wary, my Lord, we would be wise to keep our presence hidden,” Grivnash warned quoting the Hunters Scripture.         The Chieftain nodded then tuned to Levran.  “You found it, Levran, do you have something to add?”         “They’re wounded,” Levran said.  “I watched them while we made our way here.  For weeks they scarcely moved.”         Heartstock was unimpressed, “You call that wounded?  They’ve almost outrun our top burnout speed.”  He spoke of the speed their ship could not exceed without immediate, catastrophic failure: about warp 9.992 depending on the conditions of subspace.  This close to the Great Barrier: that speed began to drop in an exponential relationship with the distance from the Barrier.  But mathematics was not something Hirogen were terribly adept at, barring vectors, so no one thought to figure up just how fast they could go that close to the Barrier.  Besides, they had no intention of using warp speed for a sustained time.  All they needed to do was get within transporter range.         The Chieftain nodded, “Good point, my Lord.  We may have only a glancing chance to get aboard.  We’ll ambush them while they’re preoccupied.  Unload a full barrage on the ship, cripple it, and board her before they know they’re being attacked or if they ran into trouble with this phenomenon,” he said indicating the declining flare.         Do you know something we don’t, Chieftain?” Grivnash asked.  “You seem all too eager to strike.”  Adopting the tone of a seasoned professor lecturing to a misguided student, he expanded upon his view.  “We have never seen a ship like that before,” he said itemizing his train of thought by tapping the arm of his seat.  “We don’t know what they are doing.  Furthermore, we don’t know how they are doing it.  We don’t know the size of the crew, or the floor plan of the ship.  We don’t know their weapons capability, or their sensor capability.”         “All good points,” the Chieftain interrupted.  “But audacity will take the day, I believe.”         Grivnash’s mood soured.  “You’re advocating a brawl,” he said.  His sensibilities were deeply offended by needless conflict.  Not that he didn’t want a share in the kill, he did, but a good hunt was elegant, tightly orchestrated violence not battle.  A good hunter could kill any time, but the prey never saw a master hunter even after its life escaped the body.  “Since when do we resort to such crude tactics?”         “You’re beginning to annoy me, old man,” Heartstock growled.  “Have you lost the killing instinct?”         “No,” Grivnash responded coolly, “but you’ve obviously abandoned all cunning.”  His tone and his eyes did not convey triumph or smug satisfaction as he pronounced the insult.  Rather his level gaze and flat tone revealed deep reproach and tired regret.  “Has your stock of trophies thinned down enough to quiet your name, Heartstock?”         This was a statement of the shameful trend the Hirogen faced.  For centuries, the race had hunted and killed from the Galaxy core to the mid reaches of the Delta Quadrant.  They had been so efficient doing so that most of their territory had been hunted dry.  “Dry” referred to the lack of appropriate blood available to spill appropriate blood meaning all but Hirogen.  The last few years had been so dry that reports of Hirogen tribes turning against one another were becoming common.         For traditional Hirogen this kind of hunting was a taboo ranking right up there with cannibalism and incest.  While not exactly a crime (for no absolute laws exist for minds driven by pure instinct) it was nonetheless alarming and revolting.  Hirogen were hunters not prey, and the distinction was at the core of their species’ identity.         But legends are written to honor deeds, and trophies of those deeds, be it mental or physical, enriched Hirogen life.  Heartstock may have had status, but his store of legend was wearing thin.  He had not seen a hunt in over two years, and the inaction chafed at his pride.  Who would remember his name a year from now?  How about ten or twenty?  In an effort to keep his name spoken, Heartstock had been bartering off his physical trophies (hands, skulls, weapons, and the like) to prove his aging exploits.  A less prideful hunter wouldn’t trade mementos to save his life, but Heartstock was of a new generation.  Born after the great migration, he had watched dozens of species evaporate before the new threat from the Borg.  Driven before this implacable race, much of the species not already hunted down to extinction fled before the advancing collective.  Most had vanished literally overnight leaving much of their possessions behind.  The Borg frightened those in their path like no other, and it left much of Hirogen space empty.         To the Hirogen, Borg were unimpressive prey.  They lacked the cunning only self-preservation could supply.  They lacked individual will.  When confronted or cornered, they resorted to bald bluster and unimpassioned attacks.  Hirogen could scarcely credit their conquest.  Were the worlds of the Galaxy really going to fall to these perverse, forever dammed brutes?  So many other fine species deserved their place ascendant over the Borg, and the Hirogen could appreciate that fact since they had hunted them.  With the perspective only hunters could possess, they felt the loss of their “prey” like the passing of loved ones and dear friends.  So acutely depleted were the hunting grounds that the younger generations of Hirogen now faced the unthinkable: life without the hunt or hunting Borg.  Surrounded by the lore of their glorious elders, many young hunters felt shame stab at their souls.  Despite the fact that it was the Borg not the young Hirogen that were to blame for the deserted space of their home, the shame missing their steps into legend frustrated many like Heartstock to no end.         In an angry shout Heartstock bellowed, “That’s easy for you to say…”         The Chieftain cut him off with a calming gesture.  “That’s enough, Heartstock,” he said gently.  “We can discuss our virtues like the honored hunters we all are.”  Dropping his voice to an iron note of resolve, he added with glowing eyes surveying the room, “but not right now.”  Turning to Grivnash he confessed, “I’m reluctant to charge in like this, but we may have no alternative.”         “We can track them, Chieftain.  Given time and application…” Grivnash protested.         The Chieftain cut him off, “Given time, the other tribes will arrive.  I looked over the net an hour ago.  This whole sector dropped offline three weeks ago,” he declared.  “Other ships will come to investigate this.  Are we in agreement?”  A hushed pause filled the bridge as the others digested the truth of the Chieftain’s thinking.  When he spoke again the sudden urgency he felt swelled in the hearts of the Hirogen, “We have no time,” he pronounced.  “Either we strike a fast blow, or others will get the kill.”         This was exciting.  Captain Koon found himself envying Lieutenant Forte.  In his day, Koon had been among the best pilots in Starfleet.  He was noted for improvisation and acute situational awareness.  He was that man in a formation that knew where everyone was after they scattered to hell and back.  In tight, claustrophobic situations, he was the man to call, and it showed in his early service record.  His first assignment had been a space dock pilot above Earth, one of the most congested traffic lanes known.  From there he moved on to an extended assignment to do much the same thing on Q’on’os.  Moving Klingons about their home world with fully laden warships proved to be more challenging and perfectly suited to his skills.         For a time his was the name used when Starfleet asked for its best helmsman.  Then Picard and the Stargazer stole the limelight.  Soon the young officer began to show his mettle in one skirmish after another.  When Picard made Captain, no one was surprised for the man had a knack for being at the tip of the spear.         Koon had been bitter about this ambitious upstart when he first heard of him.  His assignments had been calculated to make him rise rapidly through the ranks, but instead they became the unglamorous, tedious work the lion’s share of officers had to deal with most of their careers.  Nothing could shake this bad luck.  Koon sought out and got difficult and visible commands to which he applied himself with the last shred of his soul only to find out he was in the wrong place to shine.  In fact, a pattern emerged.  He began following Picard around.  Koon found himself negotiating the finer points of treaties, cleaning up after engagements, and soothing the hurt feelings of the people Picard encountered during his adventures.         Frustrated, bitter, and overworked, Koon would have ruined himself had another officer not pointed out to him that Koon had never met Picard.  Perhaps there was more to the man than the messes Koon cleaned up.  Convinced he was right about his rival, Koon made an appointment to see Picard to discuss business.         It was a revelation.         Picard tuned out to be engaging, charming, and mystified as to why Koon took on such thankless work.  He expressed his wholehearted sympathy for the problems Koon presented, and he discovered the two men shared an identical vision for Starfleet.  Soon the meeting turned into a working lunch.  Then lunch turned into the rest of the day.         Not to say differences did not exist, they did.  Koon was a pragmatist.  Picard was a romantic.  Koon tended to see problems in segments.  Picard looked at the big picture.  Koon could set his work aside at the end of the day.  Picard took his back to his quarters.  Koon took things personally.  Picard was aloof.  Koon was a man of contemporary tastes.  Picard was a man of the classics.  Koon enjoyed a good story.  Picard delighted in verse.  Koon had a shaky history with women.  Picard was a ladies’ man.         Another difference soon resolved into common ground before they parted ways.  Picard extolled the virtues of wine, while Koon preferred beer.  Picard insisted that Koon sit down and drink a bottle of Picard’s family label with him while Jean-Luc told stories from the vineyard.  Koon left the table both inebriated and convinced Picard’s wine to be the finest around.         After the meeting, Koon brought a bottle to the officer who had suggested it.  She sat down with him and helped him drink it while he told her about his encounter with his rival.  That day she became his trusted friend.  Two years later, she married him.         Koon never saw Picard again.  However, they occasionally corresponded, their careers managed to separate them.  But the affect of the meeting was striking.  Before the two met, Koon was on a self-destructive course.  Now relieved of a huge grudge, he felt out his own style of command without the distraction of trying to remain visible.         In the end, each man wound up with prime assignments at about the same time.  While Picard got the flagship of the fleet, Koon got another new ship and a much longer mission.  In a way, the tides turned on them.  Koon got Pioneer and a deep space mission.  In effect:: the tip of the spear.  Picard got the Enterprise and became the principle troubleshooter for the Federation.         In another way, each was ill suited to his appointed task.  Picard had no close family, but he remained relatively close to Earth.  Koon had a wife, herself the Captain of the U.S.S. Endeavor, and two daughters he was forced to leave indefinitely.         But before all that, he still considered himself a pilot of exceptional excellence.  He could squeeze a ship even as bulky as Pioneer into a class two space dock without scratching the paint.  Before he left, Jean-Luc sent him a letter where, among other things, he speculated about dogfighting the Enterprise against the Pioneer to settle who the better pilot was.  Koon knew the joke well.  Many of his graduating class sided with Picard’s sentiments only much more urgently.  His friends and colleagues were trained to be curious and finding out who was the best pilot was an irresistible topic.  It was only natural for everyone to desire a showdown.  In his day, he’d been the best, but no contest had granted the title, only professional consent.  The final, clinching proof was not there to be seen though, and it was with mutual reluctance that the two Captains never saw each other again.         So far, the command of Pioneer lacked any excitement.  With the exception of what Koon called “house keeping” his mettle had remained untested until the Lassen’s Cutoff smashed through the ship.  Until then the mission greatly resembled his former life before he met Picard, filled with unglamorous, numbing drudgery that might have broken another man by the sheer tedium of the chore.         Now he was riding a sub-space flare, on a ship only half put together, with an exhausted crew, and no safe place to shelter.  In another sense, this test should have broken him, but Captain Peyter Koon was just thrilled… No honored to be here with the people he knew so well.  His pride in them swelled in his chest as he watched them fly through crisis after crisis almost without his attention, much less help.  Watching Lieutenant Forte fly Pioneer like a demon, Lieutenant Kree navigate unerringly yet blind, Lieutenant Locke shoot like a bandit, and Commander Gordon nursing the engines like a doting parent assured Koon that he had the finest crew ever assembled.  In no small part, he felt privileged to be here.  It filled his spirit to overflowing.         “Willie, how far do we have to go?” Koon asked.         The science officer hesitated before he answered.  Unlike anyone else aboard he was monitoring the overall path of the Flare.  Totem and Spaulding were focused on the warp field and how to make it conform to their theoretical model.  Kree and Forte were limited to the path directly ahead.  Therefore, it was up to him to fuse the theories of science into the path they had to travel.  And that path right now was snapping about like the tip of a whip.  Any estimate of where or when this would be over was still very fluid.  “Soon, sir,” he said.         Koon was surprised.  Willie was a precise man, and did not speak in vagaries often.  That indicated an uncertain mind, which always meant an uncertain outcome.  To his right Commander Okuma bristled in preparation to chastise Willie for this, but Koon held up his hand.  Turning to her he murmured, “Don’t distract him.  I shouldn’t have asked in the first place.”         Okuma glared at him for a moment, then nodded agreement.  She looked tired enough to roll her eyes up and sleep for days, but her mind tenaciously continued to reason.  If this were not so important, he would have ordered her to sleep where she sat.         “Final IP in ten seconds,” Willie announced.  Somewhere on the bridge, a nervous cheer arose, but it was brief.         The final Initial Point had been intended as a harsh turn out to space, but it did not turn out that way.  The idea had been to turn away from the Flare and allow it to descend into the Great Barrier while Pioneer remained a safe distance away.  Well intended, but ultimately flawed.  The greatest amount of energy in the form of inertia, momentum, and quantum drive was at the tip of the Flare.  Pioneer lacked the resources to stop or disperse that energy, but she could draw and bend it.  She could even harvest it had her crew had the time to fathom the concept, but for now she would have to draw the Flare across the Great Barrier rather than plunge it directly into it.  That meant that they would have to fly very close to the surface of the Great Barrier at their current speed.  There was no telling what the energies would do at the moment of impact, but it meant that the IP was turned into a gentle curve rater than an abrupt about face.         It was almost too good to be true.         Lieutenant Sophia Shin monitored the Com array with increasing frustration.  Hers was a job almost obsolete in Starfleet.  Rumor had it that Galaxy-class ships had done away with her job altogether and given it over to the security or duty officer.  But Pioneer was just a little behind the trend in this regard.  Therefore, she sat at her station dutifully and uselessly in shift after shift of nothing.         Now was no exception.  While everyone else was frantically busy, she had nothing to do.  Their sub-space array had been repaired, but any communication from Earth would take months to receive.  It made for slow-damned days, and a feeling of hopelessness in a crisis.         What’s that?         Flashing across her screen was the undeniable signs of a sub-space transmission.  Two of them in short bursts tickled the array, but passed on by.  The transmission was not for them.  But who was it for?  For the last six years, Shin had only received the scheduled reports form Starfleet, and this was no time for one of those.  Was it an emergency call?  Was it Starfleet?         Checking the data logs, she examined the transmissions in detail.  The signature was neither Starfleet, nor was the source Earth or any Starfleet outpost.  Tracing the path of the transmission, she found it on a line almost perpendicular to the Federation… strange.  She almost brushed it aside so she could examine it in greater detail after the business with the Flare was over, but the second transmission stopped her.  Both transmissions were low power and faint, but the second one’s line of sight ran out of the Great Barrier.  What the hell?         “Captain, I have something…” she paused a moment searching for an adequate word, “strange.”         Koon turned to Okuma, “Go check on it.”         Okuma, already wound up, bolted from her seat.  In a heartbeat, she was at Shin’s side.  “What do you have?” she asked quietly.  Not wanting to distract the others any more that she had to she resolved to hunch conspirator-like over Shin.         Shin told Okuma what she knew while she displayed the data.         Okuma thought for a moment, a slow process after all lost nights of sleep, then told Shin to cross-link her data with their projected flight path.         Shin downloaded their course from Kree’s station and overlaid it with the path of the transmissions.  “You see, they go past us, but not at us, Commander.  I’m not sure if I’m being paranoid, but I thought you should see this.”         “You think it’s a threat?” Okuma asked.         “This is the kind of thing we would do to mask our transmissions at the procedural level,” Shin answered.  “Burst transmissions, in code, around or away from an enemy,” she elaborated ticking off her points on her fingers.  “The best way to keep communications secure is for the enemy not to receive them at all.”         “But who would be out here?  Could it be for us?” Okuma asked.  She spoke distantly, speculating aloud and mirroring Shin’s own concerns.  After another second, she slapped the consol and declared, “I won’t risk it.  Expand the view.  Let’s see were the sources are.”         Shin did so.  When the two women saw the second transmission’s source out of the Great Barrier, they knew Pioneer was in trouble.         Okuma spun around and barked, “Shields up full!”         Hurst almost fell out of his chair, “No, wait!”         Speer did as he was told and raised the shields.  It was both too late and too soon.  Almost at the same time he raised them, an intruder alert sounded on his consol.  Meanwhile the shields combined with the warp field caused an energy cascade just like the one Lassen’s Cutoff triggered seven weeks ago.  An enormous wave erupted out of the Great Barrier like a tidal wave, but unlike the Flare, this wave rushed across the surface of the Great Barrier rather than away from it.         Behind Pioneer, the rooster tail spiked a hundredfold higher then crashed down again in a broad, rolling avalanche chasing the ship.  The new wave drained energy from the Flare, and in a few seconds the wave consumed what was left of the Flare directly above the ship.         Totem and Spaulding began frantically jabbering and hammered the controls to the warp engines in tandem.  Hurst keyed in a new path for Kree, but she ignored it.  Forte noticed his controls amplifying his commands and the speed edging towards the fatal warp 10 then hover there only .00018 from realizing it.  Everyone was busy now, but the ship was holding.         “Intruder alert!” Speer announced.  He was surprised to say the least.  In seven years he had never seen the intruder alert unless during a drill.  Now five decks were positively screaming for security teams.  Com badges were being put on emergency beacon, the cue for transporters to beam personnel directly to sic bay.  Six… no seven… beacons flashed on in five seconds.  The newly restored transporters could only handle one at a time as it was.  What had happened?  “Decks five through ten, Captain, report alien humanoids firing disruptor weapons,” he said.         Koon took this shocking news with surprising calm.  “Are they dealing with them, or do we need to reinforce them?” he asked casually.         “We have seven… no nine, emergency Com badge markers set off, Captain.  Request permission to leave the bridge and reinforce my men.”         “Granted,” Koon said calmly.  “Lieutenant Shin, take over the security station.”         “Aye, sir,” Shin said and changed the mode of her station from communications to security.         Speer bolted from the bridge with his phaser drawn.         “Incoming!” Locke shouted.  Pioneer bucked like a derailed train a second later.         “Return fire,” Koon barked.  “If warheads are coming this way target them instead of the ship that’s firing.  We can’t take a beating.  Weapons free.”         Locke thought that was surprisingly sensible since it worked out in her favor.  The phaser banks were heavily damaged and depleted from the shot she had taken at the asteroid in their path and the beating the Flare had given them.  Any large target would consume the capacitors in only a shot or two.  But warheads like photon torpedoes, plasma warheads, or anything else like those were seldom shielded and predisposed to be touchy.  In five tidy shots, she destroyed just as many warheads.  If this kept up, she could fend off their attackers for hours if necessary.         Koon turned to Forte and Kree, “Can you two keep us going?”         Without taking their attention from their stations, they answered in unison, “Aye, sir.”         “Good.  Keep us running as fast as you can.”  Koon spun around and barked, “Locke!  Where’s that ship that’s firing on us?”         “Running along our port side, sir,” she answered.         “Can we return torpedo fire?”         “No, sir, torpedo bay two is destroyed, and the forward bay is inoperable.”         “Then we’ll have to outrun them.  Hurst, Totem, Spaulding, can you keep us going this fast?”         The two scientists stopped gabbing for a second to consider this while Willie stared at his station readout.  Spaulding answered with a blunt, dry authority, “Without a doubt, sir.”         “We have no choice, Captain,” Totem added.         “The rooster tail will crush us if we don’t,” Hurst concluded.         Had the three men not spoken with three separate voices, the cadence and tone of their answer could have spoken from a single mind.         On the lower decks, Speer raced along the corridors towards the fighting.  “Security team two, I’m approaching your position.”         As if in reply, a loud brrrraap thundered down the corridor with the concussive pressure of a sonic boom.    The wind whooshed out of his lungs and he was knocked off his feet.  A flash of blue light strobed his vision followed by the familiar whirring hiss of phaser fire in his ears.         His com badge squawked to life, “Shin to Speer.”         He slapped his badge, “Speer,” he croaked breathless.         “I’ve located all the intruders, and isolated them in security fields, but a few crewmen are trapped in with them,” she reported.         “Very well,” Speer said regaining his feet.  “I’ll take a team into each area and further isolate the intruders.  We may be able to save a few of our people that way.  For now isolate the security controls to the bridge unless I give the authority.”         “Understood,” Shin replied.         Rounding a curve, he tripped over a dead crewman and went sprawling to the deck.         Brrrraap!         At this range, the blue strobe blinded him while the sound of the weapon made his ears ring.  He had the vague notion he was screaming, but he could no longer hear himself.  The shot that should have killed him passed over his head.  Two loud, nasal hums, barely audible over his ringing ears, told him that someone was beating on the security field a few meters away.  Recovering from his fall, Speer rolled into a nearby doorway before another shot followed him along the floor.         Tapping his com badge, he shouted into the air, “Raise section C45E5 and drop C35E5.”         Clearly, whatever he had just avoided was trapped inside the field, but was spraying wild shots all over the ship.  The last shot had come through a force ten security field without question.  His own phaser could not do that, so in order to take a shot he had to trap himself in with the intruders.  Otherwise, the intruder could kill whoever passed by in relative safety while causing who knows what kind of damage to the ship.         Shin did as she was told, but kept Speer’s com line open.         Fortunately for Speer, the intruder was hammering the force field with all his weight.  When the field dropped, the Hirogen overbalanced for a split second.  Speer ducked around the corner in time to see his attacker, and fired a shot.  Though set to kill, the stranger only staggered from the blow.  Speer fired again.  A shot from another phaser joined his followed by a third.  Finally the Hirogen dropped.         An uneasy silence blanketed the corridor.  Slowly, almost timidly, Speer and the two other security personnel emerged from their cover.  Crouching they approached the body of the dead intruder.         Speer recognized the two men.  Case and Moritz were their names.  But Speer had never seen either so rattled.  Their eyes wide, their teeth bared in predatory sneers they looked crazed, on the verge of hysteria.  Then it dawned on him that he was clenching his own teeth hard enough to pain his jaw.  With a force of will, he relaxed his emotions enough to take in what he saw.  “There are more of them, men, we need to clear them out,” he said calmly.         Then something strange happened.  Case bent down and fired his phaser point-blank into the intruder’s head.  Moritz took a shot before Speer swatted their phasers out of their hands.         Shocked, Speer only stood there a second gaping at the two men.         Finally, Moritz said, “It took fifteen shots on full kill to drop him, sir,” his voice wavering with emotion.  “Forgive us if we’re a little…” he trailed off.         Speer kicked the weapon out of reach of the alien.  “Fill me in on how to drop them on the way down to the next deck.”         A security team made up of spare crewmen nosed cautiously around the corner.  “Is it clear?” a woman’s voice asked.         Speer realized that his com badge was open and Shin was trying to talk to him.  “Deck five clear,” he said.  “Shin, let us out of here then lock down this section until I can come back to investigate the body.”         Sounding relived Shin replied, “Aye, sir.”         Trotting down the corridor to the next turbolift, he asked Case and Moritz, “Can you two get a grip long enough to finish these guys?”         Case answered with, “Hell, yes!”         Had Speer not been so concerned with Case and Moritz’s state of mind he might have noticed his own.  For instance, the throbbing pain on the side of his skull he was ignoring.  Also left to oblivion was the fact that his right eye was blind, burned to a crisp by the Hirogen weapon.  From his shoulder to his wrist as well as about of third of his skull was beginning to blister with serious burns.  Faintly he noticed his uniform crackle under the motion of his swinging arm, and distantly he noticed a dull ache along his right side.  But he was so intent on his task that he never noticed the air breezing over his bare scalp, or his muscles begin to tighten under the shock of second and third degree burns.  For now, he did not have the time. To Be Continued Back to Chapter 1 Continue to Chapter 3

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