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Star Trek: Pioneer Rating: R (For language, sexual references, and Sci-Fi violence) Chapter
9 Constantine The whole concept of the Caesar-class
is about brute force. Much like the
dreadnoughts they descend from, there is nothing subtle about their might. Anyone confronting one of these ships should
be swept aside by sheer awe if not their firepower. -Dr. Mark Forsythe: Chief designer Sol
System: Starfleet Headquarters, San Francisco Admiral Perry Richelieu strolled
through the opulent corridors of Starfleet Headquarters like a monarch. His pace was measured, he held his head high,
and his clear blue eyes unflinchingly regarded anyone in his path. He was a man accustomed to power. He was also a man of stylized tastes. He thought of his role in Starfleet as that
of a powerful minister in the court of powerful kings like his famous namesake. Much of his demeanor was affected to produce
a cultured, thoughtful appearance. The
casual observer could see at a glance that this Admiral was one of
extraordinary significance. All that said,
Richelieu took great pains not to appear arrogant. The three stripes on his uniform cuffs
denoted his rank of Vice Admiral, but that was the only flagrant admission to
his rank he would allow. The head of
Section 31 could not allow himself to crow his purpose from the rooftops as any
of the master spies in ages past could testify. The same could not be said of the man next to him. The man had only two stripes on his
uniform cuff, but the rest of the uniform was overpowering next to the simple
tunic of his superior. Rear Admiral John
Clay Forrestal had always loved opulent uniforms and wore the absolute limit
the law would allow. Gold epaulets,
crimson piping, clawed shoulder boards, and a com badge polished almost white
with brilliance adorned his proud frame.
It was the man beneath the glitter that made the figure pathetic. Forrestal hunched over even though he was
already short. He nervously wrung his
hands and refused to meet others in the eye.
It was the manners of a weasel put on full display walking next to a
lion in the prime of life. It wasn’t a
flattering comparison by any standard. “The operation has been clumsy,
Admiral,” Richelieu announced with a regal tilt to his nose. “You talk as though you could have
done better,” Forrestal muttered.
“Something on this scale is hard to keep quiet.” Richelieu regarded his subordinate
with formalized disdain. “As a point of
fact I could. Had Admiral Grinnell not
delegated the personnel problems to your command, I would’ve taken care of this
myself. I see that as a grave
miscalculation on both Thad’s and my judgment presently.” “So glad there is enough blame to go
around,” Forrestal growled. The older man ignored the comment. “You wanted out, Jean,” Richelieu pointed out with barbed emphasis on the Gallic
pronunciation of Forrestal’s first name.
He knew John Clay Forrestal stood on a great deal of ceremony whenever
he could, and the casual use of his first name would gall the arrogant son of a
bitch. “The general rule runs in stark
contrast to your wishes.” Irritated,
Forrestal almost spluttered his outrage.
“You agreed to allow me to retire!” Richelieu
nodded patiently. “Indeed I have,” he
allowed. “Your performance has all but
exposed our larger operations to Admiral Paris and Admiral Ross. I’m close enough to them to know how much
they’ve learned, but there’s that pesky Commander Porter asking some
embarrassing questions to deal with yet.” “He’ll
soon forget his time with me,” Forrestal said with a dismissive wave of his
hand. “I gave him his dream post after
all was said and done. That should put
his thoughts elsewhere until the Dominion is handled.” Richelieu
shook his head. “Or the Thunderchild is destroyed in this war,”
he said with a disgusted humph.
“Honestly, Jean, you’ve left
me with quite a mess. The only
difference between this and sacking you is timing.” “You
wanted those people processed,” Forrestal pointed out. “You also wanted loose ends tied up. I’ve done all that short of Peyter and his
people. For all I know they’re already taken
care of.” The
other man hid his alarm and outrage well.
“I would advise you to watch what you say in public, Admiral, or I shall
be forced to remove your memories of sensitive operations,” he said casually. “Don’t tempt me to lobotomize you out of
spite,” he added as if commenting on the weather. Forrestal
wasn’t impressed. “I’d like to see you
try, Perry,” he sneered. Richelieu
stopped walking and faced Forrestal.
“You have high blood pressure, Admiral,” he announced as if scolding the
younger man. “It would be a shame if you
were to suffer some health malady as a result of your inattentive concern for
your longevity.” Forrestal’s
confident gaze faltered. Soon his eyes
narrowed as a brilliant flash of pain seared his skull. Another enormous stab of pain filled his
chest and he went breathless. “You
see,” Richelieu explained to the dying man, “We can’t allow you to be
careless. Steps have been taken to
preserve your obedience even after you leave my command.” Forrestal
clutched at his collar struggling for breath. Richelieu
lectured on casually. “You’ll be allowed
to leave, and you’ll be allowed to live, Admiral. However, I’m not of a mind to let you get
away from us without some form of control.
You cross us, and you’ll end your time very quickly and very
painfully.” He stopped and placed a hand
on Forrestal’s shoulder. The younger
man’s knees buckled and he sunk to the floor.
“You’re ill, Jean. Are you suffering a heart attack? By all that is Holy, you must feel a
remarkable amount of pain presently.” Forrestal
groped helplessly at Richelieu for balance.
Never in his life had he suffered this magnitude of agony. “Stand
up, Admiral, this behavior is unseemly!” Richelieu snapped. The
pain slowly eased, and Forrestal drew an agonized breath. Slowly he regained his feet, but he was
unsteady on his legs and leaned heavily against a wall. “You… need… me…” he managed to gasp a moment
later. “Not
that badly, Admiral,” Richelieu said calmly.
“But if I need a scapegoat, you’ll do nicely. Dismissed.” Forrestal
marched shakily down the corridor.
Richelieu watched him go. He had
half a mind to let the fool die anyway. Another
man sidled up to Perry and watched Forrestal retreat from them. “God grant we never have to suffer his
arrogant ass again,” Admiral Thaddeus Grinnell growled. “We
mustn’t blame everything on him, Thad,” Richelieu pointed out. Grinnell
snorted. “Don’t spoil the moment for me,
Perry.” Forrestal
rounded the end of the corridor and was gone at last. “Shall we?” Grinnell asked indicating his
office. When they were securely inside,
Grinnell activated a scrambler device so they could talk openly. Anyone trying to listen in on their
conversation would get nothing but silence.
“Should we let Semmes loose?” he asked as he sat down behind his
desk. “She’s been begging to gun down
Koon directly for years.” “Let
her find Koon first,” Richelieu temporized.
“For all we know one of the others out that way will stumble upon him.” Grinnell
thrummed his fingers on his desk thoughtfully for a moment. “The others,” he mused quietly. “Damnit, how the hell did we let the
operation go this far awry?” It
was a point Richelieu marveled at as well.
OPERATION TARTAR was conceived under his guidance to overcome the
Dominion. The existence of the Bajoran
wormhole had been suspected for fifty years by Section 31 analysts. Artifacts from the Gamma Quadrant kept
cropping up in that sector. Shortly
after Deep Space Nine opened the wormhole for free transit, one of Richelieu’s
agents had quietly slipped into the Alpha Quadrant after an absence of over two
decades. The information in the agent’s
possession had Section 31 deeply concerned.
The military might of the Dominion could threaten the Federation. Since the spymaster wasn’t one to sit and
passively await developments, he launched TARTAR as a preemptive strike. In
theory it should have worked fairly well.
A fleet of Section 31’s biggest and most powerful dreadnoughts would
take the long way around through the Gamma Quadrant and drive the Dominion into
the wormhole where a larger, combined fleet of Section 31 dreadnoughts and
Starfleet vessels would crush the military might of the Founders. Richelieu would doctor the intelligence fed
to the Federation Security Council so that the ensuing battle would look like
they had blunted an invasion. The
transwarp drives on the Caesar-class
would allow them to transit the distance between Earth and The Great Link in a
little over a year, plenty of time to set the groundwork on the near side of
the wormhole. USS Diocletian, USS Trajan,
and USS Constantine were already on
their way towards the Delta Quadrant on a mission to monitor and overcome the
Borg. It would take little effort to
turn them 90 degrees to port and send them to the Dominion instead. USS Caligula,
USS Caesar, USS Hadrian, USS Nero, USS Augustus, and USS Justinian were deployed three years ago to meet up with their
distant sisters on the far side of Tholian space. They were to arrive in the unsuspecting
Dominion sixteen months after the Bajoran wormhole was seized by Deep Space
Nine. At
the time, the mission to destroy USS Pioneer
had been an afterthought. Her
unsuspected cargo couldn’t be allowed to survive inside the Alpha Quadrant, but
surely Section 31 could wreck the ship somewhere in the 3KPC arm. Unfortunately
Pioneer kept plodding along towards
the Great Barrier despite every effort to run her afoul of the cosmic detritus
inside the dust cloud surrounding the Galactic Core. One delay led to another until the timetable
was almost wrecked. To compound the
problem, the Dominion upstaged Richelieu’s plan by preempting the current
war. In the chaotic first months of the
shooting, OPERATION TARTER was quietly forgotten. To
further compound the problem, John Clay Forrestal had lost his nerve. When the flagship of the reinforcement
squadron arrived on the far side of Tholian space, the Diocletian, Trajan, and
Constantine were still scouring the 3KPC arm behind Pioneer. Forrestal, caught
with his forces deployed in the wrong sector of the Milky Way, ordered the
dreadnoughts to link up in the 3KPC arm, and see to the destruction of Pioneer.
His reasoning being he could deploy the united fleet of dreadnoughts
from this sector should the tactical situation decline in the Alpha quadrant. At the same time,
Admiral Grinnell was working the older Pharaoh-class
fleet to good effect against the Dominion.
While they couldn’t quite drive the Jem’Haddar back, the Pharaoh’s had slowed them enough in
certain sectors to ensure Section 31 remained a cohesive unit. Unfortunately they were all working
independently. It was the considered
opinion of Grinnell and his Captains that a combined action with the
dreadnoughts inside the Alpha Quadrant could land a telling blow against the
Dominion, but there was no way at present to permit it. Grinnell’s ships were running madly about the
Alpha and Beta Quadrants putting out brush fires and shoring up the tactical
situation so that they could recombine and face the Dominion head-on. Forrestal
vacillated with his tactical reserve while Grinnell kept dangling the go order
just out of reach. He’d almost recalled
the Caesar’s from the 3KPC arm a
dozen times in the past year, but he lost his nerve every time, convinced
OPERATION TARTAR would be reactivated under a new guise and he would find his
ships out of position again. In the mean time
Forrestal kept the Diocletian and her
sisters busy learning about the Great Barrier and the races around it. The Hirogen were emerging as a threat as
great, or potentially greater, than the Dominion. The race was almost as populace as the
Klingon Empire and dominated a region of space stretching from the unseen
hinterlands just beyond the Romulan border with the Delta Quadrant to Kazon
territories. They weren’t expansionist,
but they also lacked a central government.
The conditions were right inside Hirogen society for a revolution. All that was required was a charismatic
leader or a cause to unite the disparate clans into an Empire once again. In a nutshell,
Richelieu and Grinnell had the murkiest of pictures to sort out now that
Forrestal was gone. “I may have
something to settle things out that way,” Richelieu offered. Grinnell shook
his head skeptically. “The Khufu called in an hour ago. The damage Captain Morris sustained over Min
Hirrin is worse than they thought.
Estimates are ranging toward fourteen months to get her back into
action.” Richelieu
winced. USS Khufu was one of their precious Pharaoh-class
dreadnoughts. Her loss meant her
priceless and talented crew of 1,500 was effectively put out of action until
they could be reassigned or the ship redeployed. It was a net loss of five percent to Section
31. “Can you get
Hawthorn to make room for her?” Grinnell asked. Vice Admiral
Hawthorn Rand was the Master Shipwright of Mars Utopia Planitia Space Yards and
head of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers or SCE as it was more commonly
called. Richelieu had gone to the
Academy with Rand and as such he’d been able to pull a few favors with the
production and docking schedules including the entire production run of the Caesar-class. Richelieu shook
his head. “Mars is backlogged for the
next three years. We’d be lucky to be
served coffee there. Jupiter is out as
well. The accident board is still
reviewing that explosion over the Ganymede docks so the whole station is shut
down.” Grinnell put a
disgusted expression on his face. “I
wish we could tell them it really was sabotage so they’d get on with it.” “That would
reveal our source,” Richelieu said firmly. Grinnell nodded
wearily. The life of a spymaster was one
of incessant paranoia. The appeal of
being in Section 31 was that they were privy to all the fascinating secrets
that could change the destiny of mankind.
The irony was that they could rarely act on the information they managed
lest they wreck their interlocking network of informants. The moment they told someone about what they
knew, a secret (something they attended to with religious zeal) was destroyed. “How about
Venus?” Grinnell asked. “They can’t
handle something that big,” Richelieu pointed out. “And besides, I don’t trust them. Their people are accustomed to civilian
ships. We can’t trust them with one of
our computer cores.” “That leaves
Neptune and Pluto,” Grinnell mused.
“Does the guy out there repair ships?” “He has an old
spacedock he loans out to the other yards, but it’s just a junkyard orbiting
Charon.” Richelieu found himself shaking
his head in dismay. “I don’t trust
Triton Station, but they have the capacity.” Grinnell
chuckled, “How did they get that awful reputation?” “They’ve been a
clearing house for retirees and malcontents for twenty years,” Richelieu
explained. “I understand a sizable
percentage of their people aren’t fit to serve in the Fleets for some reason or
the other.” “On the other
hand we’re out of options,” Grinnell mused.
“I’ll tell Morris to cut the flight plan as soon as he’s underway.” Richelieu watched
his subordinate type out the orders while his mind wandered onto other
topics. At length he asked, “Can you
handle the extra load with Forrestal gone?” Grinnell’s
response was an absent-minded grunt while he continued to frame the message on
his desk. “Not a problem,” he murmured
as though the extra load was a trifling thing.
It wasn’t by any measure. By
assuming command of Forrestal’s only operational fleet, he was increasing the
size of his command by a third. “They’ve been
adrift out there for quite a while,” Richelieu warned. “I’ve been
thinking about that,” the younger man admitted.
“How about I promote Captain Jones to Rear Admiral in direct command of
those ships?” Richelieu liked
the idea. Forrestal had sent the entire
assembly of ships off without so much as a Commodore to oversee them. He’d explained this away by pointing out he
had direct contact with all the ships via pulse link so there was no need to be
on the scene with them nor was there a need to delegate the responsibility to
someone in the Fleet. Nobody was fooled
however. John Clay Forrestal was on an
ego trip with so much power under his command, and he loathed giving up even a
fraction of his authority. The choice of
Captain Howard Jones on the other hand intrigued him. “Why Jones?” he asked. “Command in
Control in all truth,” Grinnell said with a shrug. “The Constantine
has the most extensive communications array in the Fleet next to the Diocletian. I’d promote Sassak on the Nero, but he doesn’t have a suitable XO
to step in as Captain.” “You’re not
considering Semmes,” it wasn’t a question. Grinnell shook
his head and stifled a laugh. “I’ll put
her behind a desk in San Francisco, but I’m not about to put her at the head of
all that firepower in the field. She has
the ambition, but she lacks patience. We
can’t expect the other Captains to trust that sort of reputation.” The senior
Admiral nodded agreement. USS Pike’s Cutoff: Near the Great
Barrier Lieutenant
David Cabrillo dolefully regarded the view outside the shuttle as the spectacle
of the Great Barrier emerged out of the blackness. After a month aboard the shuttle with
Lieutenant Forte, he was missing Kree to distraction. Fortunately Forte was just as distracted as
David. As it was, the two young men had
run out of things to talk about during the second day into the journey. They tried to be civil, but the cramped space
of the cabin made privacy impossible.
David wished Kree were here to talk to and touch. He didn’t know it, but Forte was of the same
mind regarding Samantha. The subject of
their personal relationships hadn’t come up since David was afraid of being
discovered and Forte wasn’t one to discuss such things in the first place. It was a shame. Other than their recent success with women,
the two young men had almost nothing in common. Two
more different men could scarcely be produced from Koon’s crew. Darin Forte was short and muscular. David Cabrillo was imposingly tall and rail
thin. Forte was athletic and graceful. David was academic and awkward. Forte was at the center of the social hub
aboard Pioneer. David was an outcast. Forte was charming. David was shy.
Forte came from a broken home. David
came from a family steeped in tradition and closely bonded. Forte worked with Kree and loved Samantha. David most often worked alone and loved
Kree. It was a shame the only common
ground they shared, both discreetly sidestepped. Otherwise they might have had a better time
of it. “Halfway
done,” Forte said with a tone of mixed relief and resignation. The
realist in David felt the need to set Forte straight. “Actually, we need to find the antimatter
first. From our data banks from the
first time we passed through here, small pockets of a few i-grams are scattered all across…”
He trailed off when he noticed Forte glaring at him. “I
know, Cabrillo,” Forte growled. “Just
get started looking for the stuff so we can go home.” David
nodded and scanned his instruments absently.
Forte’s tone told him that Darin was at wits end with his companionship. It hurt his pride anew to realize Forte
considered David nothing short of inept.
After being with Kree almost every night for three weeks, his fragile
ego had begun to mend. A solid month of
frosty silence from Darin had all but erased his self-confidence again. “This may take a while,” he warned. “So
long a Spaulding is working on the problem, you work on the problem,
Lieutenant,” Forte growled before moving back to the rear of the shuttle to
prep the storage equipment. David
glanced out the shuttle canopy and thought he saw the tiny spec of the other
shuttle roving about the surface of the Great Barrier. Dr. Spaulding had volunteered for this job
surprising everyone. He and Lieutenant
Duggig were in the other shuttle. Duggig
was fresh out of Fahdlan’s sic bay and eager to get some more flight time
logged in before he got rusty.
Spaulding’s motives were a little less prosaic. With all the scientists swarming over the
Cove system, he wanted a chance to shine alone.
He said he wanted to study the Great Barrier up close again, and if they
wanted him to look for antimatter while he was at it, he was happy to
oblige. The chief scientist was
overqualified for the chore, but he’d come anyway. David suspected Spaulding still distrusted
him after he’d shown him up while they were approaching Cove. Cabrillo
returned his attention to his instruments and sighed. He was finding trace evidence of antimatter
in the slow fusion gases but only nano i-grams. Gathering it would be like moving a sand dune
one grain at a time with tweezers. Better get started, he thought. He wanted to see, and especially feel, Kree
again. After a month without her, he was
willing to move whatever mountains he had to in order to kiss her lips
again. The thought of her fingers raking
through his hair made him twice as eager to return and he slogged away at the
tedious chore for the next ten hours before letting up. When
Darin returned to the front of the shuttle for his shift at the controls, his
sour temper was somewhat mollified by all the diligent effort David had put
in. “That’s a good start,” he admitted
as he sat down. “Go get some sleep.” Cabrillo
was shocked at how exhausted he was when he moved to stand. He managed a quick pass by the head before
dropping into his bunk. He was asleep
before he hit the pillow. Darin
was chagrined, but he soon focused his attention just as fiercely on the job at
hand. He was going to smother Samantha with
kisses when they got back, he resolved.
A month without her after their brief time together was agonizing. He noted David had filled up a tenth of the
antimatter storage in a single sitting.
He had no idea what had motivated the kid to work so diligently, but he
knew what his reasons were. He set to
work just as hard as Cabrillo had. In
the end they spent five days near the Great Barrier. The two young men passed almost the entire
time in silence, fixed on gathering the traces of antimatter and their reasons
for getting back to the ship soon.
Spaulding lacked their motivation, but he had more finesse finding
larger pockets of the stuff. He finished
filling his storage bunkers with antimatter about an hour after Forte told him
they were done. The
two shuttles turned around, and slipped back into warp oblivious to the Hirogen
node that had been watching them the whole time. The node dutifully tracked their flight path
and sent the information out to the rest of the network. HPS Kresh: Levran surveyed
the reports from the Hirogen net thoughtfully.
He had to admit the information didn’t mesh with what he knew. All aboard the ship agreed he had a unique knowledge
of the strangers since he was the only one who had actually seen this USS Pioneer firsthand. He knew the ship was heavily damaged, heavily
armed, and surprisingly nimble. The
power output demonstrated was exponentially greater than anything he’d ever
seen. Since the Hirogen had hunted much
of the local civilizations to extinction, large, powerful ships of this kind
were rare. There were the Borg cubes of
course, but they avoided this region of Hirogen territory. The Hirogen held
the distinction of being one of the few races capable of surviving the Borg
even after centuries of sustained contact.
The reason they succeeded where others were assimilated was difficult to
understand especially to the Hirogen who considered the Borg nothing more than a
nuisance. Since the hunters measured
each race by their ability to avoid detection or face down them in individual
combat, the Borg figured poorly in Hirogen estimation. There was even a dubious sport in taking the
ugly Cubes down. All it took was inserting
a Hirogen adaptive sensor program into the Cube’s internal network to overload
the system in nanoseconds. Asking the
regimented brutes to adapt their senses to the full reality all Hirogen lived
with day to day quickly overcame Borg networks.
Even though they prided themselves (if any Borg could be said to have
pride) on adaptability, making this central feature of their psyche work
against them was something they couldn’t defend against. In a way neither the Borg nor the Hirogen
understood they were diametrically opposed.
The Collective represented the ultimate expression of the herd animal
where their power came from their concentrated numbers and organization. The Hirogen on the other hand were the most
refined expression of predation in the Milky Way. They were hunters forged on skills refined
over 80,000 years. The few Hirogen
who were assimilated couldn’t shed light on how to defend the Collective. Much like their net, the average Hirogen
didn’t understand how the program worked, and simply accepted that it did work
and worked well. So the Borg simply
avoided the Hirogen correctly assuming the race would soon destroy itself as
its culture fragmented into ever more powerless clans. Pioneer was something else
altogether. In the mentality of a
hunter, it was the classic example of an animal separated from its herd. Wounded and alone the ship, however large and
powerful, could be overcome by a determined predator. The only snag was finding it in the first
place. Then there were
the messages from this David Cabrillo.
Something bothered Levran about the man.
Trained from infancy to observe behavioral differences, Levran knew from
observing the conversations between Gnan and Cabrillo that the human was acting
strangely. To begin with, Cabrillo had a
distinctly feminine turn of mind.
Hirogen wisdom maintained the male mind tended to focus while the female
mind tended to multitask. Cabrillo had
kept Gnan off balance by shifting the subject often. While not unheard of in a male to have this
ability, the trait always took on a particular character that focused around
the emotional state of the man.
Cabrillo’s manner shifted with the facts he was discussing, and that
never happened in a man. Why would a
treasonous man drop his masculine thought process? The shift threatened his ability to reason
effectively. There were other
things that bothered Levran about Cabrillo.
Why would someone who’d narrowly survived a Hirogen attack appeal to his
attackers for protection? The human
didn’t have the leverage to pull off an escape.
What did Cabrillo stand to gain by baiting Gnan? Everything Levran knew from this sort of
behavior added up to an ambush of some sort.
Hirogen were adept at overcoming ambushes, so the notion of setting one
in place held little merit. Did Cabrillo
understand this and take precautions to protect himself? The human was too smart to believe he could
take down Hirogen alone. Then there was
the data coming in from the net.
Something large had flown past the Great Barrier a month ago. After examining the data carefully, Levran
knew the object was at least three times the size of Pioneer from the footprint of the warp drive. Not only that, but the warp signature was a
multistage pulse drive compared to the lower output of Pioneer’s continuous field drive.
Did Pioneer have sister ships
in the region? Certainly her behavior
didn’t support the notion. The strange
ship had fled into deep space instead of seeking out a possible star to affect
a rendezvous. Examining Pioneer’s warp signature in detail on
the net indicated the strange ship had fled at peril to itself much like an
animal chewing off a limb caught in a trap.
Pioneer’s warp drive was
decaying rapidly. With protection from a
larger ship, it made more sense for Pioneer
to sit tight and wait for the herd to gather around it while she licked her
wounds. Lastly there was
the appearance of the two shuttles near the Great Barrier. This data at least offered something less
ambiguous to consider. After consulting
with the Master Tracker aboard the ship, Levran presented a plan to Gnan. It made sense that the shuttles were
gathering antimatter off the Great Barrier; therefore it made sense that they
could lead them back to Pioneer. Even though this data didn’t concur with what
Cabrillo told them or the presence of the larger ship in the area, it did offer
something they could act on Gnan could understand. The trouble was
the shuttles were not in a terribly convenient place. Gnan had been on the way to the Dafli system
to consult with the rest of his clan and a few of the other clans in the
region. The sudden appearance of Pioneer along with the unforgivable
intrusion into the Hirogen net in recent months had every clan concerned. It didn’t escape their attention the distant USS Voyager in the Delta Quadrant bore a
familial resemblance to Pioneer. What little data they had on Voyager supported the notion the two
ships came from the same place. Captain
Janeway had manipulated the net without Hirogen consent and it wasn’t much of a
stretch to assume Pioneer was in the
region as a consequence. The Hirogen Clans
were outraged with Janeway. Chieftain
Fo’goro had sent all of his ships after her in the distant Delta Quadrant, and
was aggressively hunting Voyager. So far Fo’goro had not found the distant
ship. What he had found was something
even more tantalizing. The Kazon: vast
race of warrior clans at the far end of the Delta Quadrant and only a few short
light years from the reach of the Hirogen net.
The word from Fo’goro was that the Kazon were formidable in single
combat and demonically hard to find.
Fo’goro was powerless to stop his Clan (and himself) as the hunt for Voyager soon degenerated into a glorious
free-for-all in Kazon space. Even now,
Hirogen ships from almost all the other Clans were racing to the Kazon frontier
in the hopes they wouldn’t miss out on the glory. When reports from the Delta Quadrant came
back that Hirogen hunters and Hirogen ships were falling to the Kazon in the
fighting, every hunter rejoiced. At last
they had worthy prey! Chieftain Gnan
took in the news from Fo’goro without comment.
Levran suspected Gnan was disappointed Fo’goro had lost sight of what
was turning out to be the most elusive prey in the entire Galaxy: Voyager.
Furthermore, Gnan was growing concerned with the pressure from his own
crew to head out to Kazon space and join the hunt. Gnan was a hunter of principle and
patience. Relentless would be a more accurate way to describe him. Once he had a certain prey in his sights, Gnan
would not allow himself to be distracted until he had his kill. This trait had filled his trophy cabinet with
some of the rarest specimens in Hirogen culture, and he was not about to change
his ways without full consideration. The
trip to meet with the other Clansmen at Dafli was part of his way to fully
think through the dilemma. More than
anything, Gnan was outraged by the messages from Cabrillo. He was irritated he was being baited by the
whelp. He was angry with himself for
allowing Cabrillo to control their conversations. And he was furious the boy was using the
Hirogen net to single him out. The whole
affair kept Gnan’s thoughts with Pioneer
instead of the distant Kazon. Levran presented
his thoughts on Pioneer shortly after
he detected the shuttles roaming around the Great Barrier. Gnan, unlike Heartshock, digested the
information carefully; pacing the deck around the central hologram like an
animal in a cage. At length he asked,
“How long ago was Heartshock’s encounter?”
He paused then added, “I need an answer in standard days.” It was an odd
fact that all their prey lived on worlds that had a daily cycle of about the
same length give or take a few minutes.
The “standard cycle” day was divided up into 25 hours. The reasoning behind the specific nature of
the request was easy to explain. All
creatures were active and rested at intervals dictated by the cycle of a single
day. Only so much got done in a single
day. Even with the large crew aboard Pioneer, a fraction of that crew would
always be resting. A skilled tracker
could make innumerable estimations based on such a timetable. “Forty-one standard days,” Levran answered
without hesitation. Gnan paced the
deck thoughtfully some more staring at the holographic star chart in the center
of the room. He examined the course
headings carefully. He wandered round
and round the hologram until his finger jabbed at a pyramid shaped cluster of
stars. “There,” he said decisively. Master Tracker
Cark was surprised. “Sanctuary?” he
blurted before he could stop himself. “Where would you
hide, Cark?” Gnan asked with a smug grin. “They can’t know
about the legends of that place,” Cark protested. “That Cabrillo
boy knows an awful lot more than he’s telling us,” Gnan pointed out. The Master
Tracker was unconvinced. “How would he
find these things out in the first place without us to tell him?” “Does it really
matter?” Gnan asked. Cark considered
the notion carefully before shaking his head, “No, Chieftain,” he said with a
resigned sigh. Gnan surveyed the
bridge making eye contact with everyone.
“Does anyone see an alternative?” he asked. His expression and tone indicated he was
genuinely curious rather than challenging the others to defy his judgment. There were in fact three alternatives as he
went around the room, but they were all conveniently within reach of
Sanctuary. Gnan considered all of them
thoughtfully for a long time. “Maybe we should consider
where the other clans are,” Levran suggested. “We can’t use the
net,” Cark said firmly. “If that human
can contact us, he can monitor our inquiries.” “Yes but we don’t
need to tell them about our target,” Gnan said.
“I need to find out if the others are on the way to Dafli in any case.” Gnan motioned to
Cark, and the Master Tracker sent out the inquiry. The hologram lit up with hundreds of targets
each with a spindly tail of telemetry.
Cark frowned. “Inio and Safwan
have abandoned the meeting.” “Are they heading
for Sanctuary?” Gnan asked. “They’re moving
to intercept those small craft,” Cark said.
He studied the telemetry of the ships before clapping his hands
decisively. “Cabrillo will know about
this before we have a chance to intercept them.” “Then we must
move in ourselves before Inio claims all the trophies and Safwan takes all the
credit,” Gnan said. “We go to
Sanctuary.” USS Constantine: Near nebula RT11002 Newly
promoted Rear Admiral Howard James “Ward” Jones was not a happy man. To be sure he was satisfied with the two
stripes on his cuffs, and the fit of the uniform suited his thin frame. Nobody had ever accused him of meager
ambition. Even now he was thinking ahead
to the third stripe on his uniform cuffs, and the command he wanted above all:
SCE’s prestigious Utopia Planitia back on Mars.
The position offered a lushly appointed villa on the French Riviera, and
free run of any ship he wished to command.
That the position required him to be an engineer was a detail he was
confident could be sidestepped. Which
was beside the point: he was not happy. Jones
was a man of rigid habits. He insisted
on a tight schedule for his daily routine which included a half-hour nap after
lunch. His weekly agenda never wavered
right down to the minute. He insisted
his officers keep impeccable uniforms at all times. Once when his hemsman had gained five pounds
by working out, Jones had insisted he lose the bulk in his shoulders, “To set
the proper example.” Jones couldn’t
bring himself to say what really bothered him about the affair: the man’s added
muscle mass disfigured a perfect uniform. Jones
hated change. It frightened him though
he wouldn’t admit it. Why such a man
would want a career in Starfleet mystified his contemporaries. He saw his role as that of a lawman keeping
the peace. Section 31 had recruited him
on that basis. The
rumors circulating about the “mischief” (as he thought of it) aboard the Constantine were not exaggerations. Indeed what he allowed to be known about the
mutiny paled in comparison to the truth.
The mutiny had surprised Jones, but he’d cracked down on it with vicious
abandon driven by his unreasoning fear of change. Not only had he executed the leaders of the
mutiny, he’d executed all the
mutineers. Ninety members of his crew
had died by the time he felt secure in his command of the ship again. He almost killed another ten just to round
out the figure. In the restructuring of
his command after the “mischief” he drew inspiration from the ancient Royal
Navy. He moved the quarters for his
Marines next to his own so that anyone trying to capture him had to run a
gauntlet of fighting men to do it. He
insisted officers socialize only with officers and segregated the enlisted
crewman to the bowels of the ship. He
imposed a strict decorum for his officers, and harsh punishment for everyone
else. He’d even revived the practice of
flogging. As
archaic as it all sounded, it was working.
His crew was working at peak efficiency.
He took it as a sign of high morale.
He’d begun to notice a certain aggressive streak in his officers. They were finding more and more lapses in the
crew and were persecuting them with relish.
Others would consider the system barbaric. Jones could only point out this structure was
precisely the one that had triumphed at Trafalgar. He’d even taken the step of researching
Admiral Nelson in some detail. He found
the new (or rather the old) ways comforting.
They were simple and thereby gained elegance in their symmetry. What
made Rear Admiral Jones unhappy today was not his crew. USS
Constantine herself had betrayed him instead. “How often can we expect this to happen?” he
asked his chief engineer stiffly. The
man stood at rigid attention before the Admiral’s chair answered with brisk authority
even though he failed to produce a satisfying resolution. “That’s something I can’t answer with
certainty, Admiral.” Jones had made it
clear he was to be addressed in this manner. “Do
you have a remedy in mind?” Jones asked. The
engineer nodded, caught himself, and returned to his rigid posture. “Find a place to hide and shut down the cloaking
device for repairs,” he said. Jones
scowled. “That is a request beyond your
section, Commander.” The
engineer continued to stare at the space over Jones’s head. He could tell the man was struggling to
refrain from blurting a protest. “Request
denied,” Jones finally decided. “We have
our orders to return to the Alpha Quadrant with all due haste. You’ll have to repair the cloaking device
while it is operating.” “Aye-aye,
Admiral,” the man said. “Dismissed,”
Jones said. The
engineer marched off the bridge. Newly
promoted Captain Melissa Schubert spoke up once he was gone. “I should look in on the data we’re receiving
from the Hirogen net, Admiral.” Jones
felt a flash of annoyance. “You’ll
receive a report from them at 1600 hours, Captain.” “It
doesn’t hurt to be thorough, sir. The
breaks in the cloaking device may have alerted them to our presence.” Jones
didn’t want to think about it. If the
Hirogen did detect the Constantine,
there would be an unsettling disturbance to his routine. Besides, the Hunters were nowhere in
sight. If they did appear, Jones was
confident they could either elude or destroy any ship that happened by. The episode might not even slow him
down. “Your concern is duly noted,” he
said stiffly. “Continue your duties at
your post, Captain.” He glanced at his
watch and saw it was time for his weekly inspection of the main armament. He stood and the crewmen jumped to attention. “If there’s anything out of the ordinary, let
me know.” He
made his way towards the drive section of the ship flanked by four Marines. The crew down here knew his routine just as
well as he did. They stood ready at
their posts awaiting him. The
main armament of the Constantine was
certainly impressive to look at. The
type 606 phaser cannon was the largest single system ever made for a fighting
starship. Fully two thirds of the ship’s
length was required to hold the cannon and the diameter of the emitter took
sixteen people with their arms outstretched to encircle. The device gleamed like polished brass under
the lights. Jones wondered if he’d ever
get the chance to use the thing. The
irony of the type 606 was that standard phasers and torpedoes had a range twice
that of this weapon. The cloaking device
the Constantine had was meant to allow
the ship to sneak up on an unsuspecting opponent so that she could destroy them
at a single stroke with this almighty war hammer. Instead Section 31 had used the Constantine for marathon sessions of
stealth. Jones
was thoughtfully strolling about the cannon when it did something he’d never
seen before: it fired. With an unpleasant
buzzing CRACK the 606 phaser cannon processed an unimaginable amount of
energy. The noise was so loud it took
his breath away and left his ears ringing.
An instant later the deck under his feet shuddered and a red alert
sounded. The crew stared at the cannon
in stunned surprise for a full minute before any of them decided they should
tend to their posts. Under normal
circumstances Admiral Jones would have flogged all of them, but instead he
simply stared dumbfounded at the cannon until it fired again. The concussion from the second shot was more
powerful than the first since the emitter was getting hotter. A visible wave of air knocked Jones off his
feet as the 606 CRACK’ed off another blast. He
scrambled to his feet and brushed off his uniform in time to have the deck
heave under him again. He managed to
find a handhold, and at last his mind processed what a less regimented brain
would have allowed three minutes before.
He motioned to his Marine detail and he marched back to the bridge. His rage boiled ever hotter as he realized
his itinerary for the day was ruined. The
Hirogen were many things, but they were no fools. The first glimpse they had of the Constantine was enough to convince them
they would need all the ships they could muster to bring her down. Ships and clans willing to participate in a
hunt were not hard to find, but they were scattered across the 3KPC arm like
chaff to the wind. The temptation to
rally everyone using the net had been second nature, but the hunters quickly
reasoned it was not to be trusted. The
recent tampering could only mean they would give their position away before
they had their prey cornered.
Consequently, they relied on shorter range communications that spread to
the farthest ships slower than usual.
The result, to their minds, was chaotic. The
Constantine was travelling at warp
near a dark nebula. As she raced along
next to it she tried and failed to pierce its interior with her sensors. The gasses inside the nebula were very thin
and not even close to the embryonic stage of star formation. The swirling dust cloud didn’t even catch the
light of the surrounding stars. It acted
as a perfect blind. The Constantine had a crude Transwarp drive,
but it could only operate beyond the influence of gravity. The nebula had enough pull to effectively
neutralize the drive to a point several hours away. That hadn’t bothered Admiral Jones at the
time. His navigator was picking the
shortest route back to the Alpha quadrant and a stint at warp was acceptable. The
Hirogen ships gathered quietly on the opposite side of the nebula. With their net and their superior sensors,
they caught the intermittent appearances of the Constantine as her cloaking device faltered. Had Admiral Jones ordered the cloaking device
dropped for repair, the improvement in his sensor coverage might have been
enough to discover the warp trails converging on the opposite side of the
nebula. Instead the Hirogen managed to
slip into the nebula undetected. About a
dozen ships in all were in the first wave.
Another twenty were closing in, and another fifty were a few hours
out. In all 1,500 hunters had answered
the call, by far the largest gathering of Hirogen might in centuries. Carefully
they watched their sensors from the repose of the stardust. The crews spoke in whispers to one another as
if the approaching prey could overhear them and might start away from the trap
they were strolling into. They could see
the faint wisps of the warp trail that led to an empty point in space. They could detect something massive within a
space about 9,000 kilometers across. The
Federation engineers who designed the cloaking device in the first place would
have thrown childish temper tantrums if they knew their “perfect” cloak could
be detected at even that much. It
mattered little to the Hirogen. Not even
their combined firepower could guarantee a hit in a space that wide. It was like hunting for a bubble in a rushing
river. It could be found, but finding it
was more a matter of luck than skill. They
waited for most of the morning before luck abandoned USS Constantine. All it took
was a brief flicker in her cloaking device.
As fate would have it, she appeared directly under the sights of one of
the Hirogen ships. The ship fired
instantly. Before her weapons landed
against the dreadnoughts powerful shields, the Hirogen ship was destroyed. Captain Schubert
had the good fortune to have impeccable reflexes and the additional luck to be
looking in the right place when the Hirogen ships fired the first salvo. “Full spread phasers NOW!” she barked. The phaser cannon
ripped through space like a thin, blue needle.
It tore through the Hirogen shields, pierced the hull, raced through the
ship, and passed out the other side without so much as slowing down. The
explosion backlit the other Hirogen craft.
The shocking sight of eleven hunter ships so close snapped Schubert into
action. “Shields up FULL! Target everything in sight!” she
shrieked. Just as she saw the weapon’s
officer bring the tactical display up on the main viewer, the first Hirogen
shots bounced harmlessly off the shields with a dull boom. Even with the powerful weapons held bare
meters away from the Constantine’s
hull, the mighty ship scarcely trembled under the onslaught. The
Hirogen darted back into the dust spitting warheads in their wake. For an instant the nebula was quiet. The expanding bloom of the destroyed Hirogen
warp core cast a dirty red light across the smoky space. The Hirogen warheads bloomed against the
dreadnought’s shields like snowballs thrown against a wall a moment later. The Constantine stoically absorbed the punishment
as she searched for targets. The
dreadnought vanished again as her cloaking device managed to flicker back to
life. “Cloak back online,” the science
officer said. Her voice had risen at
least two octaves in her excitement, and she clenched at her station as if the
whole mess would pop out of the bulkhead at any moment. Schubert
saw in an instant the other woman’s near panic. Melissa wasn’t far behind on
her way to hysteria. However, the
frenetic state of mind she was in made her revert to training. Ordinarily she might have reverted to her
former role and defer judgment to Jones, but she was too surprised, excited,
and frightened to think through that process.
Instead she started barking out orders in response to any report given
her. “Helm, get us out of here!” she
snapped reflexively. Before
that could happen, more Hirogen appeared out of the dust and unloaded into the
empty spot where the Constantine had
been only seconds before. None of the
weapons hit their target, but the concussion from their warheads overloaded the
dreadnought’s cloaking device for good.
The singularity inside the device wavered, collapsed, and consumed all
the energy that powered the cloak with it.
Romulans had vast experience with this condition. Any Romulan engineer who allowed it to happen
on his ship was tossed into space summarily.
The bulk of the Constantine
would never vanish again from view, but there were other consequences she was
only now discovering. Maintaining
a singularity means keeping the crushing force of gravity in check inside a
very confined volume. Freed from the
draw of the singularity, gravity seeks equilibrium with the surrounding
space. There was no way, and no time, to
compensate for the backlash of the collapse.
The spin of the singularity imparted its inertia to the device around it
causing enormous torque. The cloaking
device inside the Constantine snapped
off its mounts and raced through the surrounding compartments like a rifle
bullet through a Kleenex. It plunged
through the bulkheads directly ahead of it tearing power conduits, breaking
down bulkheads, and crushing anyone hapless enough to be nearby. It emerged from the hull directly under the
main deflector dish, shattering it like a picture window. Nanoseconds later it winked out of existence,
crushed by its own momentum. The destruction
back on the Constantine wasn’t over
yet. The gaping hole in the hull was two
meters across and the pressurized air inside the ship exploded out of it with
the force of tons of air carrying more tons of debris torn lose from the
internal fittings. The hole widened. Seconds later containment fields slammed down
to stop the damage, but they faltered as a cascade of new ailments struck the
dreadnought. Captain
Schubert hadn’t ordered the helm to drop out of warp before the cloaking device
collapsed. When the main deflector went
off line, the warp field around the ship distended into an inverted cone. Safety routines inside the warp drive
automatically shut down the warp drive before the ship inadvertently snapped in
two. The emergency shutdown
unfortunately found one of the three warp cores, B drive, at the peak of its
output. With no way to disperse the
energy, the core started to overload.
The pressure inside B drive rapidly escalated to the rupture point. Another automated routine disconnected B
drive from the other two and ejected the twenty-story cylinder out the belly of
the Constantine. The core didn’t explode as anyone aboard might
have expected. Instead it ruptured its
output lines on the far ends of the cylindrical body and began to spew energy like
a massive sparkler. It began to spin
slowly then more rapidly sending wave after wave of radiation in all
directions. Some of these waves battered
the Constantine’s shields like a gale
in pitched storm. The force of the
energy was so great, the mighty ship veered drunkenly away. Exposed
and badly battered, the Constantine
dropped out of warp. The domino effect
the failure of the cloaking device had inflicted on the ship had never been
expected by her designers. Their Romulan
counterparts would have laughed fit to split.
Imperial ships had been doing this sort of thing for decades at odd
intervals, hence the summary execution of any engineer who allowed it to take
place. This was the first Federation
mishap of this kind. “We
lost something!” the science officer reported in a full-throttle panic. The
Hirogen, sensing the advantage, pushed the attack. Unfortunately the
inexperience Federation engineers had with cloaking devices and singularities
didn’t extend to the weapons systems. “Kill
them!” Schubert shrieked at her weapons officer. The Constantine
fired a single volley of phaser fire, cannon fire, disruptor, photon, quantum
and plasma torpedo shots almost as an afterthought. The eleven Hirogen ships vanished in a
blinding flash. It
took a moment for Captain Melissa Schubert to understand it was over. The shouts of the crew still deafened her as
reports of multiple disasters flashed across the boards. The entire battle had lasted barely four
minutes. She stared at the main
viewer. Stunned and expecting more
Hirogen ships to appear at any second, she barely noticed the shouts from the
security officer and the damage control teams screaming out of the
intercom. She had regained enough of her
senses by the time Admiral Jones stepped onto the bridge to wish the man a
miserable stint in Hell before her iron self-control stopped her from saying
something rash. “Report!”
Jones barked to the tactical officer.
The man was too busy to reply.
Outraged he turned to Schubert. She
could see already he’d require several minutes to digest what she had to tell
him. She didn’t even have the full
picture herself yet. The damage to the
ship was too extensive to catalog without hours of work. She tried to frame her words in a way he
could understand and turned back to the main viewer. Something was bothering her there. She stared at the main viewer for another
heartbeat before it dawned on her. She’d never seen explosions like the Hirogen
ships before. Instead of dissipating,
they bloomed wider and brighter like supernova.
In addition the ejected warp core was rapidly heating up the dust around
it into something equally visible. As a
result the dozen Hirogen ships were lighting up the dark nebula like spotlights
on their position. The spectacle was beautiful
to behold, a dazzling play of light and texture against the swirling dust. On any other occasion she would have stared
spellbound at the show in pleasant reflection. “Helm!”
she shouted. “Get us away from those
plumes before half the Hirogen in the Quadrant arrive!” “Belay
that order!” Jones snapped. The
Admiral was instantly obeyed. Schubert
wanted to scream at the man. At the
moment the tactician in her knew she had to run and hide if she expected to
live another day. She whirled on Warren
and leveled a finger angrily at the arrogant son of a bitch. “Get off my bridge, Admiral,” she ordered. “This
is my command!” Jones protested. “I-don’t-care,”
Schubert said spelling each word out.
She turned to the four Marines flanking Warren. “Secure the Admiral to his quarters.” The
four young men wavered. Jones was about
to protest again when fresh screams poured out of the intercom from a dying man
begging to be saved in one of the smashed compartments below. His face went suddenly blank. “I’ll expect a full report before breakfast,
Captain,” he said. His voice betrayed a
lack of any emotion. His hollow mettle
lay exposed for his senior officers to see.
He marched to his quarters and vanished behind the closed door. There
was a moment of silence on the bridge.
The officers cast stunned glances at one another wondering if what had
happened had stopped the egotistical maniac that had consumed them all for the
past seven years. Schubert
broke the trance first. “Helm?” she said
quietly. The
young man nodded and keyed the impulse engines to life. “Navigation,
plot a course out of here,” she ordered.
“Those hunters will be back soon.” She
turned her attention to damage control for the next hour, but gave up trying to
make sense of it all. After all this
time under Jones’s command, there wasn’t much spirit left in her. USS Diocletian Captain
Angela Semmes glared at her latest lover impatiently. The young man loomed over her
possessively. Tenderly he stroked her
hair from her eyes and bent to brush his lips past her ear. Angela would have none of it. She pushed him away and slid out from under
him with a self-disgusted grunt. It was
her fifth time with this boy and she was rapidly growing weary of his after-sex
habits. “That’s enough!” she snapped and
made her way to where her robe hung off her chair. She donned the terrycloth quickly before
sitting down. She didn’t want to look at
him. “What’s
wrong?” the boy asked. He sounded
genuinely injured by her cold shoulder. Angela
felt a smug wave of satisfaction. “Leave
me!” she ordered. The
boy was bewildered, hurt, and vulnerable.
He despondently gathered his clothes, and dressed. On his way out the door he tried to kiss her
again. “I
said, leave me!” she snapped. The boy
left both angry and impotent. Angela
loved it almost as much as he hated her need for the boy. When
he was gone she bathed the stench of him off of her and out of her. Of all the things this sport generated, the
mess was the most disgusting. Still she
knew she couldn’t do without a little sex now and then. The ancients had a phrase “The Seven Year
Itch” that pretty much summed it up for her.
Sex really was like an itch.
Refusing to scratch it only made relief all the more delicious though
she doubted she could tolerate seven years without it. At the same time she hated her need. After all, this was a very intimate act no
matter how you sliced it and she hated intimacy. Intimacy denied her the absolute control she
craved. Despite
being a lovely woman by any standard and despite the pains she took to enhance
her beauty, sex held little appeal to Angela.
Intimacy was a weapon she could use against the self-esteem of others. No more.
Gratification for her came in the form of dashing the euphoria of her
partners. She could draw out the
experience by being unresponsive, demanding, snippy, and intolerant. She wanted to dominate her lovers, dominate
her body, and never gave an inch of control in bed. Unfortunately her anatomy required she
receive rather than give. Had she been a
man she might have been of more moderate tastes, but as it was she had to be
creative. It only meant she had to play
more head games in the short run, but those could be frustrating after a while. The concept of a soul-mate with whom she
could share an enduring attachment brought a dismissive laugh to her
throat. She wasn’t so foolish as to
believe her proclivities could be shared with another. Take
the boy she’d just dismissed for example.
The decision process to take him had lasted all of fifteen seconds. That decision was based not on his anatomy or
his physical appearance, but by his manner.
She could tell there was a fierce pride under his professional
calm. She wanted to take that from
him. Foreplay had consisted of disrobing
and lying down. There was the
humiliating step of spreading her legs apart so that the boy could have access
to her. For reasons she didn’t
understand and therefore loathed, her body responded well to intercourse. The pleasant sensations buzzing through her
loins during the act could usually make her mind drift to peaceful
thoughts. She studiously refused to be
vocal during the act. If she did, she’d
be giving sharp instructions. It was a
turn-off few men could stand. The
ultimate experience for her was to upset her lover so badly he became
impotent. She was getting good at
it. After the act was done, she pushed
the boy off her and dismissed him. The
whole process could take ten minutes to several hours depending on how
determined the prospective lover was.
She preferred the shorter stints in bed since that meant she’d utterly
dashed her partner’s self-esteem. The
com on her desk chirped interrupting her reverie. “Incoming message from the Constantine, Captain.” “Patch
it through,” she ordered. The
face that appeared on her monitor was different from the man she’d
remembered. Aside from the Admiral’s
uniform, Ward Jones was looking paler and thinner than when she last saw him. Lines of strain fanned around his eyes. Embryonic jowls dangled from his cheeks and
jaw. His eyes had gained a soft
expression she didn’t care for. Always knew the man was a flake, but does he
have to show it off? She thought with a disgusted sniff. “You
look well, Captain,” Jones said with a refined, oddly accented voice. Where had he picked that up? The man hailed from Illinois, but the odd
clip to his words made him sound British. “It’s
been a while,” she said then added, “Admiral.” Jones
smiled. “Six years has changed a few
things in my favor.” Semmes
tried not to grind her teeth in outrage.
How dare he condescend to
her? The moron never could think on his
feet. He was a fine planner, but once
his plans started to break down he lacked the imagination to adapt. Luckily for him most of his plans were good
ones. “I suppose congratulations are in
order,” she said with a humor she didn’t feel. Jones’
smile turned smug. “It’s not like I have
much to work with out here,” he said trying to sound sage. Semmes struggled not to roll her eyes. “The more I find out about what we’re facing
out here the more I wish they’d picked someone else for the job.” Then why did they pick you in the first
place, shithead? Semmes thought with rising anger. “I’ll admit you’re not my first choice, but
you’ll do,” she said cheerfully. Jones
laughed. “We’re all our own favorites
for the promotion list, Angela.” At
least he wasn’t so foolish as to think she was happy about being passed over. “How
are the others taking the news?” she asked. “Well
enough,” he allowed with a hint of disappointment. She suspected some of the others in the
squadron had a few choice things to say to him he hadn’t cared for in the
slightest. Captain Nugyen Xuan of the
USS Hadrian was known to be rampantly
ambitious and he wasn’t shy about telling anyone who cared to listen about it. “I’d tell you more about it, but I need you
to abandon your current objectives and come here.” Angela
was genuinely surprised. “Really? Why?” “Our
cloaking device broke down yesterday during a battle with the Hirogen,” Jones
explained. “Our tranwarp drive is
inoperable, and our warp drive will be limited to warp 7 once we get it online
again.” Semmes
felt a smug smile drift over her face.
“That’s quite a lot of damage, Admiral,” she said. Jones
set his jaw. “I never had a chance to
explain my orders from Grinnell before this happened, Captain. We’ve been ordered back to the Alpha
quadrant.” “I
take it the Dominion war is not going well,” she said. “The
tactical situation is degenerating rapidly,” Jones admitted. “I shouldn’t have to explain what our
presence will mean to the war effort.” “What
about Pioneer?” Semmes asked. “We can’t let Koon get away.” Jones
tuned thoughtful. “How close are you to
finding him?” “Give
me two weeks and permission to fire when I find them, and I’ll have that
objective cleared,” Semmes said confidently. Jones’
expression darkened as he considered her request. He scrolled through lists of data on another
screen before nodding. “Approved, but
not one minute more, understood?” “Aye,
sir,” Semmes replied. USS Constantine “So?”
Schubert asked curtly. “I
gave Semmes two weeks to find Pioneer,”
Jones said meekly. “Captain Sassak and
the Nero should arrive sometime today
to give us a tow.” “What
about the others?” Schubert demanded. “They
should start arriving the day after tomorrow,” Jones said. Schubert
nodded. She’d decided to let Jones
believe he was in charge. He wasn’t, not
in any real sense did he command the Constantine
anymore. He’d lost the test of nerve against
her when he’d ducked into his quarters earlier instead of taking charge of the
situation. She knew she was treading on
dangerous ground by proceeding along these lines, but there was no helping it. Melissa
knew Jones had a first-rate intellect. He’d
graduated first in his class at the Academy and never let anyone forget
it. His work reflected his ponderous
thinking. He enjoyed tackling new
projects and sorting out details. He
maintained the studious attitude of the puzzle solver. In ages past the man would have been consumed
by crosswords, jig-saws, mind games, and riddles. Presently he had an ongoing obsession with
behavioral science that had resulted in the mutiny and the draconian code of
conduct aboard her ship. The man had the
knowledge and the skills to work wonders so long as he had the orderly time and
setting to do so. However, the events of
earlier today had shown a fatal flaw. In
the chaotic exchange of battle, the man lacked the force of character to
inspire. Fortunately
for Jones he’d created something well suited to the task at hand. The crew of the Constantine had been exposed to heretofore unimaginable brutality
for the sake of Jones’ stringent discipline.
Every one of the crew had been raised on a more “enlightened” standard stressing
civility and humanity. After a few
months of daily flogging and the summary execution of a sizable fraction of the
crew, everyone was well attuned to violence.
It was much like the old saying “familiarity breeds contempt.” Pain no longer frightened them. Inflicting agony on others no longer troubled
the refined conscience drummed into them since childhood. Jones had expanded their emotional ability to
cope with horror, and instilled a fierce aggression in everyone including
Captain Melissa Schubert. Somehow Jones
had left himself out of the equation. It
amazed Melissa to realize just how out of touch Jones was. He ignored the steely glares of hatred shot
at him all across the ship. He missed
the snide comments in the corridors. He
blithely ignored her warnings that the crew were about to do something drastic
again if he didn’t relent a little and allow the crew to relax. At
least she understood her crew. After all
she sympathized with them. “The
Nero should be here around noon
tomorrow. The Caligula should arrive around three in the morning after that,” Jones
explained. “We’ll
need a tow back to Starbase 113,” Melissa pointed out. “Did you explain that to them?” “I
figured the Nero should do nicely for
the job,” Jones reasoned. “She has the
most powerful Transwarp drive of any of us.” Melissa
had to agree he had a point. USS Nero had been a high-speed demonstrator
and as such had a very elaborate, very powerful tranwarp drive. It was believed at the time of her
construction that the added power would add up to a faster design, but she was
only marginally faster than all of her sisters.
The top speed of the Caesar-class
was around Transwarp 2. The top speed of
the Nero was Transwarp 2.12. In terms of warp drives the speed was the
equivalent of warp 31, but it fell far short of the targeted Transwarp 5
everyone had expected. It was a
frustrating development for the designers back home, but the crew of the Nero soon found a way to put all the
added Transwarp power to good use. They
soon discovered they could haul immense loads through their Transwarp conduits,
roughly five times the mass her sisters could sustain. While her designers balked at the notion of
turning the ship into, “The largest, most elaborate, most expensive tugboat in
history,” as one man put it derisively, Section 31 thought the craft had its
uses. One of its first missions was to
spirit away debris from the Wolf 359 battlefield. This included large segments of the Borg Cube
that had been shot off during the fighting.
With her large hangars and ability to drag massive objects through
transwarp, the Nero was one of the
more useful covert platforms Section 31 had at its disposal. A framed picture of the Glomar Explorer hung over Captain Sassak’s stateroom desk as a sort
of tongue-and-cheek admission of what the Nero
did for a living. While
that would solve many problems when the Nero
arrived, Melissa was still worried about the hours she would have to weather
alone. She glanced at a tactical display
on the armrest of her chair. She’d
ordered a full spread of probes launched once the fighting stopped. The probes launched without a hitch, but
unfortunately the subspace receivers aboard the Constantine had been damaged in the fighting. By the time they managed to fix the problem,
the probes had vanished, probably lost when the guidance from the ship
failed. She tried to launch a second set
of probes, but one exploded in the torpedo tube killing three crewmen and one
officer. The rest of the ordinance was
being inspected. With the cloak down,
the Constantine had an impressive
view of the space around her, but the probes would have extended their line of
sight around the dark nebula they were skirting. Their
current top speed was still limited to the impulse drive. The warp engines were badly out of phase with
only two cores to power it. The chief
engineer assured Melissa that any attempt to jump to warp would result in one
of the two cores overloading and being dumped just like the one they’d
lost. The problem could be resolved, but
it would take about a week to re-phase the engines. There was the additional problem of replacing
the main deflector dish. That chore
would be finished by the end of the day, but until then it limited their top
speed to about one-half impulse. Melissa
stared thoughtfully at the main viewer.
The image on it was dead astern.
The dozen Hirogen ships were still exploding in spectacular fashion. They looked like oddly shaped flowers of
incandescent blue and white. Where their
boundaries reached the damaged and spinning warp core from the Constantine, there was a smoky cloud of
red gas the churned like the wake of a steamship. They were still close enough for the light of
these distant explosions to tinge the hull of the Constantine a silvery blue.
While the ship was safe from the radiation, Melissa still thought they
were entirely too close to “the scene of the crime” so to speak. They’d
been in a minor scuffle, and yet they were limping away from it in plain
sight. They would remain in full view of
the carnage until the Nero
arrived. They were also partially
blinded. The far side of the dark nebula
could still hide Hirogen ships arriving in the area. If the hunters were smart, they’d move for
cover until a larger fleet of ships could gather. Melissa had few doubts they would do
precisely that. “I’m
wondering what you intend to do about hiding us, Captain,” Jones said. Melissa
shot an angry glare at the man. “Running
comes to mind, Admiral,” she snapped. Jones
recoiled as if slapped. “No need to be
rude,” he said evenly. Melissa
was about to vent her spleen at the man when a blip appeared on the tactical
screen. “Mr. Bittu!” she barked at her tactical
officer. “I
see them,” Commander Ibrahim Bittu said evenly.
“They’re on the fringe of the nebula.” “Don’t
lose them!” Schubert warned. “Tracking,”
Bittu murmured. “Tracking…” “Can
we target them?” Schubert asked. “Quantum
torpedo launcher is damaged. We can’t
guide a photon torpedo that far without a class 7 probe between us and them,”
the weapons officer explained. “Launch
a probe and a full spread of torpedoes,” Shubert ordered. It was a risk she knew, but they did have a
few probes inspected. “We’re
working on it,” the weapons officer said. “Explain
yourself!” Jones shouted. “Why can’t you
carry out those orders immediately?” The
weapons officer turned to face the Admiral.
“Because we’ve unloaded the torpedo racks to inspect the ordinance,
sir,” he said cooly. “The probes and the
torpedoes will have to be manhandled into the tubes. If you can lift two and a half tons by
yourself, get down there and show everyone the trick of it.” Jones
reddened in rage. His fists shook at his
sides as he stared at the insolent man.
He looked ready to lunge at the man’s throat, but instead he looked to
Schubert for help. Melissa ignored him. An
instant later there was a beep on the weapons officer’s console. He turned around and keyed in the
command. A faint, dull thud told
everyone aboard there had been a launch.
“Guiding,” the WO said. “We’re
losing the sight picture,” Bittu warned.
“They’re moving for cover.” “I
need more separation for the torpedoes to guide,” the WO explained. “Give me twenty seconds.” “Fire
the torpedoes,” Jones ordered. “I
advise against it,” the WO said. “It’ll
take us twenty minutes to load the tubes by hand again.” “Fire
the torpedoes!” Jones repeated. The
WO turned to Schubert for confirmation.
She shook her head. He turned
around and studied his instruments, “Ten seconds.” “They’re
gone,” Bittu announced. “They ducked
into the nebula.” “Will
the probe be able to find them?” Schubert asked. Bittu
was about to answer when his expression darkened. “I don’t think so,” he said and shifted the
main viewer to another image of the probe.
A thin white line of energy lanced out of the cloud and vaporized the
probe. “I
see you have everything in hand, Captain,” Jones said. “I’ll be in my quarters.” He turned and left. Melissa
was glad to have him gone. “Do we have
any cloaked probes available?” she asked the WO. The
man shook his head. “They take longer to
inspect. I’ve been putting those off
until last.” “Give
me three as soon as you can,” she ordered.
“About how long will it take to have them ready?” The
WO nodded. “Ninety minutes,
give-or-take. Do you want them launched
all at once or should I fire them as soon as each is ready?” “Why
so long?” she asked. Bittu
waved at Jones’ door. “The purges,” he
said. “We had five people qualified on
the diagnostics when all this started this morning. We’re down to one. The other fifteen… well…” “Understood,”
Schubert said crisply. She didn’t want
to dwell on the mutiny. Not now. “Launch each probe as it becomes ready.” “Aye,
sir,” both men said. For
the next several hours they watched Hirogen ships dart tantalizingly out of
their reach. Melissa suspected they were
testing her limits. The cloaked probes
did expand their vision around them, but there were still blind spots all
across the region. The science
officer managed to compile a more complete tactical map around them and Melissa
wasn’t encouraged. The area around them
was littered with dust. The same dust
that made up the dark nebula. Sensors
could only penetrate so far before their effectiveness simply petered out. The display denoting it all resembled a
heavily polluted lake with drifting debris scattered randomly across a wide
area. To complicate things, the
exploding ships were casting radiant energy onto the dust. This in and of itself wasn’t all that
alarming, but the resulting glare further blinded the Constantine’s sensors. It
was like shining a bright light into a dense fog where the sensors tried to
probe deeply into the soupy mess. Hour by hour the
tension both eased and tightened by degrees.
On the one hand they were repairing the damage to the ship. On the other hand they were catching fleeting
glimpses of Hirogen ships. Nobody
doubted the hunters were gathering for the kill. It took ten hours of excruciating anxiety to
plod along at half impulse while the main deflector was repaired. Melissa expected the Hirogen to strike once
they were running at full impulse, but the dust remained dark and settled. The torpedo tubes were repaired shortly after
that and the inspection of the ordinance was completed about an hour later. That left the
casualties and the bulk of the damage caused by the cloaking device
itself. The hole left in the hull by the
device had eventually widened to a gash five meters across with a nasty tear
along the pressure hull fifteen meters long.
It was manageable but the damage underneath was exponentially
worse. Crewmen were missing. It was assumed they’d been shot out into
space during the explosive decompression.
At least they didn’t suffer,
Melissa thought distantly. Between the
hole in the hull and main engineering was a shredded mass of bulkheads,
conduits, deck plates, consoles, and assorted smears of color here and there
where some unfortunate soul had been crushed and carried away. Counted among the missing were engineers, scientists,
two doctors, and every single one of the computer core specialists. Melissa hoped she could recruit a few off the
Nero once it arrived. Schubert watched
the clock count down to the appointed time when their sister ship arrived. Bittu noticed her
glancing at the clock for the fifth time in just as many minutes and managed an
amused snort. “Nervous, Captain?” “I have every
right to be,” Schubert said absently.
“Do you think we’ll be seeing them in this soup?” “Hard to say,”
Bittu admitted. “We’re having a hard
enough time as it is.” He watched the
clock thoughtfully for a minute before scanning his instruments again. “Anytime now.
We should see them once they come within hailing distance.” Schubert watched
the clock count down to the appointed time.
She watched it continue to scroll onward for a full ten minutes
afterward in silent concentration before turning to Bittu. Her new first officer shook his head at the
unspoken question. She sighed. She turned around and hung her head. Tears threatened. She hated feeling so vulnerable. “Enough of this!”
she declared. “Red alert. Power up all weapons. Let’s flush those hunters out of their blinds
before there are too many of them.
Weapons, fire the nebula.” The technical
term for what she proposed was called “fusion acceleration.” There was even a section of the tactical
manual devoted to this sort of operation along with a strict ethical
prohibition against using such a tactic.
To the tired, abused, and misused crew of the Constantine, the ethics of what they were being ordered to do
scarcely mattered anymore. Survival was
the key to everyone aboard, and pragmatism went hand-in-hand with that sacred
duty. The Constantine’s warp nacelles started to
glow brighter and thin blue clouds of hydrogen began to gather about the
ship. It pumped out this volatile gas in
a lethal concentration to a point just beyond the mighty shields that had
protected her from the Hirogen so well just a few hours before. The weapons officer then shifted the polarity
of the shields so that the hydrogen was attracted back down towards the
ship. Where the gas met the shields it
stopped creating a thick layer of pure hydrogen around the ship, and still the Constantine continued to pump out
more. Soon the concentration and
pressure was enough to compress the hydrogen into a liquid between the force of
the attraction to the shields and the stolid barrier those shields formed. Three seconds later the dreadnought was
enfolded in a brilliant white light. It
was spherical in shape and began to expand slowly. The pressure had been so great the liquid had
managed to ignite an almost perfect fusion reaction. As it encountered the dust of the nebula, the
sphere consumed it and converted it into more energy. Rarely had anyone tried this before, but even
then it wasn’t hard to accomplish.
Fusion on this scale was possible so long as the reaction was sustained
by enough fuel. As the sphere expanded,
it started to accelerate its pace. Soon
it was marching away from its origin by half the speed of light and casting off
a massive pressure wave ahead of it. Within minutes,
the Constantine was surrounded by
empty space. She still fed the
expanding, hollow star she’d created with thick clouds of hydrogen from her
reactors, but the dust had been swept away as though before a massive broom. Before long,
ships started to appear. The Hirogen had
managed to weather the shockwave and the fusion layer in fairly good
order. They appeared out of the white
light like startled vultures defending a carcass. They wasted no time attuning themselves to
their new circumstances. Once they
appeared, they opened fire. “Incoming,” Bittu
announced. “Evasive!”
Schubert ordered. “Return fire! Weapons are free! Fire at will.” Twenty-four
Hirogen ships faced off against the Constantine. Even with their disadvantage in size and
armament, they did have mobility on their side.
Their prey could only plod along at impulse. They could jump to warp which most did to
avoid being swept aside by the first volley sent their way. They appeared in
formation desperately close to the Constantine
starboard side to unload a devastating amount of firepower on the hapless
ship. Even with the dreadnought’s mighty
shields, the mass of impacts caused the ship to veer drunkenly to port. Schubert saw an
immediate opportunity. “Plasma
torpedoes! Full spread!” she barked. Romulan plasma
torpedoes were slow, short-ranged, and favored stealth to deliver them to
greatest effect. That said, they still
packed the heaviest punch of any torpedo the Constantine had. The green
specs of light dropped off the rim of the dreadnought’s saucer section and
charged towards the Hirogen scoring sixteen solid hits. All of those ships were either destroyed
outright or crippled beyond repair. The Constantine almost disdainfully
dispatched the survivors with the 606. The hunters scattered
again. They appeared once more off the Constantine’s fantail and delivered
another crushing volley. The shields of
the dreadnought held, but her tail was knocked viciously down by the exploding
warheads. The dreadnought
unloaded with every phaser she could bring to bear. The red lines lanced out and touched the
shields of all twenty-four Hirogen ships.
Five of the ships staggered under the punishment. Sensing an advantage, the Constantine focused on these ships for a few seconds more before
all of them exploded. Schubert further
ordered a few plasma torpedoes detonated in the Hirogen wreckage to disperse
their telltale reactor plumes. The rest
of the Hirogen scattered again. The punishment
was beginning to tell on the Constantine. “Shields down to fifty percent!” Bittu
announced in a shocked voice. “That’s
impossible!” the science officer blurted.
“We have four layers of redundant shielding!” Schubert made a
mental note to remove the science officer from her station on the bridge. The young woman was brilliant, but her nerves
were not holding up under combat conditions.
Having her panicking on the bridge might induce wider confusion among
her officers. Just the same, the science
officer had a point. “Rout auxiliary
power to the shields,” Melissa ordered. “I’ve already
done that,” Bittu explained. “The
Hirogen warheads and particle fire is wearing them down at a surprising rate.” The weapons officer
let out a groan. “We designed them to
withstand Klingon weapons,” he said as the answer dawned on him. “We forgot to tune them to Hirogen
standards.” “Can we
accomplish that now?” Schubert asked. “No,” the weapons
officer explained. “That’s something we
need a space dock for.” “Damn!” Schubert spat. Here she was in the most powerful ship in the
fleet, and she was finding out only now that it was obsolete because the
designers had built it to win the last war instead of this one. More Hirogen
ships appeared through the fusion wake.
They fired off a volley of purple torpedoes before jumping back to
warp. Much to everyone’s shock, the
warheads raced right through the weakened shields. Since they didn’t detonate, the shields
ignored them. Once under them, they
flashed across the hull and opened like clamshells. They sprinkled a silvery rain of metal strips
over the belly of the dreadnought. Each
strip was about a hand span long and magnetically attracted to the hull. Once it hit the hull, each strip flashed
white-hot as a pulse of energy was sent down it welding the strips to the hull
plates. As the strips
started to pelt the hull they made a faint tapping sound like a spider tapping
its forelegs on the glass of an aquarium.
When they flashed to incandescent life and began to cool, the tapping
turned into an eerie scraping noise like the claws of many-legged predator
digging through the duratanium to get at the tender flesh beneath. A series of
shrill groans shuddered through the ship followed shortly after by deafening
BANGs. As each of the metal strips
cooled, it contracted rapidly pinching the hull plates they had bound
themselves to along with them. The
smooth contours of the Constantine’s
hull made for perfect media for this work.
Already under tension from the internal pressure of the ship, the
external torsion on the hull plates made them first buckle then pop off as
their seams sheared apart. As they did
so, the atmosphere of dreadnought’s deck 1 exploded into space with enough
force to make the mighty ship buck violently upward a full kilometer. In one fell stroke, the Hirogen had destroyed
an entire deck of the ship. Luckily for
the crew of the Constantine, deck 1
was used mostly for storage. By sheer
luck, nobody was hurt. The Hirogen
weapon was called an arachnid warhead.
The reason why they hadn’t been deterred by the Constantine’s shields was because their detonators were magnetic
instead of something more complex.
Starfleet designers had made the shields to disperse energy, not deter
random objects from striking the hull.
That was the purpose of the main deflector which was pointing the wrong
way to do any good against this kind of weapon. Schubert wasn’t
finished. Not by a long shot. “Full impulse 270 degrees vertical!” She ordered. The Constantine dropped away like meteor
into a thin atmosphere. The next wave of
Hirogen ships appeared bare seconds later only to find their prey bare
kilometers away from them and rushing right at them. They scattered to avoid a collision. Half of them fell under the sights of the 606
phaser cannon. In six blinding shafts of
light, six Hirogen ships exploded. The
others barely managed to limp away with heavy damage. Another wave of
the hunters arrived and unloaded more of the arachnid warheads. Bittu would have none of it. “Target phasers on those warheads!” he barked. With casual
precision, the red lines of energy lanced out to the purple points of light and
wiped them out. Bittu wasn’t
finished. “Target quantum torpedoes on
those ships. Reel them in!” The quantum
torpedoes popped out of the launchers and jumped to warp. The Hirogen were stopped cold by the
onslaught as if they had run headlong into a wall. Their warp drives were shattered, and they
had no choice but to turn around and face their wounded prey. “Bring us about,”
Schubert ordered. “Charge them!” The Constantine
settled out and swung around to face her attackers head-on. Twenty Hirogen ships took the challenge and
raced for her firing white beams of fusion energy and warhead as they went. The Constantine’s phasers danced madly about
the incoming warheads while she pumped out every kind of torpedo she could
muster. It was a mad jousting game set
on a grand scale. The Hirogen
increased their rate of fire until the space between them and the Constantine was almost a solid curtain
of warheads, white rays of fusion, red lines of phaser fire, and the occasional
brilliant white flash of the 606. The
onslaught was beginning to tell on their quarry. The first chinks in the Constantine’s shields had finally opened up allowing some of their
shots to yield damage. One shot tore
away the portside turbolift tube on the drive stem. Another shot tore away the Captain’s yacht on
the bottom of the saucer section with an accompanying explosion that gouged a
hole three decks deep and two meters across.
Another shot shattered the buzzard scoop off the starboard nacelle. And one warhead managed to fly right into the
forward hangar destroying everything and everyone inside it. Melissa found herself
caught up in a full-throated scream as she watched the Hirogen race for
her. Others around the bridge took up
the war cry. The 606 fired
about once a second. From her perch in
the bridge, the din of the weapon sounded like dull clangs above the din of
dull and distant explosions and the frenzied commands of her officers. The steady, unhurried rate of fire was
maddening to Melissa. She felt a primal
urge to stand up and throw something heavy and devastating against the Hirogen
on the main viewer, and in doing so wipe them away in one almighty flash. Instead the 606 plodded along shot after
shot, erasing the Hirogen one at a time. Much to her
surprise and relief, the main deflector made short work of the purple arachnid
warheads crushing them with their own momentum against the steady force of the
deflector spike sprinting along ahead of the dreadnought across an area thirty
kilometers in diameter. The 606 pumped
out shot after shot, popping the Hirogen ships like balloons filled with
gasoline. The quantum torpedoes punched
the Hirogen hard, knocking them aside like a hard blow from a boxer. Photon torpedoes fountained out of the
launchers and wore down the Hirogen into nothing in about twenty hits each. And still they kept coming. The last six were fifty kilometers away when
the photon torpedo launcher fell silent along with the quantum torpedo
launcher. “Hard to
starboard!” Schubert ordered. The Constantine
laboriously heaved her bulk away from the Hirogen. The frame of the massive ship groaned
mightily under the strain and the personnel in the lower decks saw the floors
bulkheads and ceilings slowly flex and distend like taffy. The Constantine
had more than enough power to manage the sharp turn. To her Hirogen assailants she looked as
though she had pivoted as if on a hinge.
Unfortunately her frame was severely overstressed from the turn. Dozens of plasma conduits were ripped out of
the bulkheads, doorways were crushed, and every corridor and compartment was
wrenched out of true form. The crew
could only stare in amazement at the ship stretching and tearing itself apart
with incredulity. The inertial dampeners
were so strong, nobody so much as staggered and kept their feet. “Plasma torpedoes, full spread!” Schubert
ordered. Sixteen plasma torpedoes fell
out of the launchers right in front of the Hirogen. The Hirogen ships
frantically shot back at the Constantine.
They were too close to veer off before
they ran headlong into the plasma torpedoes and exploded. The shockwaves from the six exploding ships
slammed into the Constantine
broadside, sending the dreadnought into a rolling spin. She skittered along like that for a thousand
kilometers before more Hirogen ships arrived. By now the
expanding fusion wave had all but consumed the dark nebula and was beginning to
dissipate. Fifty Hirogen ships appeared
out of the darkness and surrounded the tumbling dreadnought from a respectful
distance. “Recover! RECOVER, HELM!” Schubert shrieked. Slowly the roll
stopped. Slowly the spin settled. The Constantine
sat motionless for a moment. The hunters
watched in awe of their prey. The
scattered remains of dozens of ships littered the former dark nebula like
splashes of bright color against a black canvas. They had to remind themselves this was only
one ship, but it was astonishing to see their clans slaughtered so
quickly. In barely ten minutes, the Constantine had killed forty of their
brethren ships and over 12,000 Hirogen.
And yet she was still ready to fight!
For the first time in 2,000 years, the hunters found themselves on the
losing end of a confrontation. Even as
they watched the mighty ship recover, they saw the stubborn, powerful shields
of the Constantine waver, stabilize,
and regenerate to full strength. It gave
all of them pause. The standoff
might have remained that way for several hours while the Hirogen conferred
amongst themselves had the Nero not
appeared. The Transwarp
conduit opened right between two Hirogen ships, and the Nero alighted out of it. Captain
Sassak had assumed speed was essential and thus had insisted upon arriving as
close to the Constantine as
possible. Regrettably that meant the
cloaking device had to be shut down since the singularity would collapse the Tanswarp
conduit prematurely. Sassak was late
because of another problem Transwarp travel imposed that was so far not
known. Because of the close proximity to
the Great Barrier, or more specifically to the quasar at the center of the
Milky Way, Transwarp conduits were drawn towards the Great Barrier. It wouldn’t have mattered had the Nero transited the area perpendicular to
the Great Barrier, but her course had taken her on a shallow tangent
instead. Inside the conduit, the
navigation sensors were useless and couldn’t see the conduit begin to arc away
from its intended destination. The
longer the Nero maintained the
conduit, the further the conduit bent away from where the Constantine was supposed to be.
So it was a huge shock when the Nero
appeared fifteen light years away from where she was expected to be. It took Sassak and his crew twenty minutes to
deduce what had happened and remedy the problem. Hence the Nero’s
tardy arrival. She’d barely
closed the conduit behind her when she was hit hard across the saucer section
by fully sixty arachnid warheads. Her
saucer section never had a chance. It
snapped off the drive section before it was crumpled like a tin can. The supplementary drives in the saucer
section breached as the bulkheads around them came crushing inwards to the tune
of screaming metal and terrified men and women.
Most of her crew, along with Captain Sassak, was killed instantly. Her chief
engineer was sharp enough to raise the shields of the drive section before the Nero’s saucer section exploded. When it did
explode, it made firing the dark nebula look like a minor pop by
comparison. The Caesar-class had a supplementary drive that rivaled the three warp
drives of the main section, but was far more efficient. The reasoning being the saucers were expected
to preserve the lives of the crew, not engage in protracted combat. It’s demise started when a supporting beam
was wrenched free from the bulkheads surrounding the antimatter containment
chambers. There were six chambers in all
arrayed around the top of a type 3 auxiliary warp core. The beam was blown across the room by the
explosive decompression of the compartments on the opposite side of the
chamber. Along the way it sliced right
through the control lines leading to the warp core. This caused the warp core to go into
emergency shutdown and shunted all the antimatter up into the containment
chambers. Intended to deal with an
operational accident, it had devastating consequences under the Hirogen
onslaught. The compartment was still
venting the atmosphere and everything not tied down (including bodies) out into
space when another arachnid warhead slipped into the gaping hole in the saucer
section and opened up inside the compartment.
The antimatter containment chambers were immediately coated in the deadly
metal chaff and shredded. When the
antimatter spilled out of the chambers it reacted to everything it touched in
nanoseconds. The saucer
section exploded in the typical three-stage detonation of an antimatter chain-reaction. The space around the saucer section contorted
as matter rushed in to react to the antimatter.
This created a space-time shockwave that sent every ship within two
light years spinning uncontrollably towards the source of the reaction. They were sent hurtling outward again a
second later when they slammed into the bright flash of energy generated by the
reaction itself. The final stage of the
explosion saw the typical formation of a wildly spinning debris field. The debris pelted the hapless ships like
needles fired out of a cannon. This last stage
was most significant to the Nero’s
drive section since it was barely a hundred kilometers away from it. Its shields managed to protect it from the
shockwaves, but her main deflector was jostled out of alignment to deter the
steel rain. In seconds the duratanium
needles shredded the Nero’s drive
section into Swiss cheese. Her hull was
all but peeled off her back and the crew still alive on the decks underneath
was turned into hamburger by the debris.
Containment fields slammed down across every deck, but this was an
automated function. The crew was just
seconds dead. The Hirogen saw
an opportunity and took it. As soon as
they regained their senses from the shockwaves, they beamed aboard the Nero and scavenged the bodies for
trophies. Most simply ripped the heads
off the corpses and returned to their ships.
Some couldn’t find anything remotely recognizable as a body and took the
odd artifact for their collection. Rings
were highly prized. The hunters knew the
Constantine would be on the way soon
enough to drive them away so they only spent a few seconds aboard the gutted
ship before returning to their own. One by one, the
Hirogen ships shot away into warp until the Constantine
was left alone with her dead sister and the flowery blooms of her Hirogen
kills. USS Nero: Several hours later Chief
Engineer Albert Kuali was not easily impressed.
For starters he was a big man and accustomed to looking down on others
from his lofty height. Next he was a
strong man and had gained renown among his peers for his ability to toss aside
hefty objects with casual ease. Last he
had that peculiar brand of callous detachment only the young and inexperienced
could command. By temperament he was a
stolid, serious man who held few sentiments sacred. So
it was a great shock for everyone to see Kuali staggering about the Nero’s decks gagging down bile. Melissa didn’t blame him for an instant. The
decks of the Nero’s drive section
were a scene from Hell. The ship itself
was amazingly intact. There were a few
plasma conduits breached here and there, but for the most part the damage was
limited to a maddening spray of holes through the hull and large plates of the
deck and bulkheads. They were maddening
because they all dripped a steady rain of blood in several colors. There were shredded bodies everywhere and not
one skull to be found among them. The
Hirogen had ripped the heads off some of the bodies so violently that their
spinal cords had snaked out of their backs leaving massive gashes in what was
left of the cadavers. The
stench of the place was overpowering.
The bodies hadn’t had the time to rot yet, but the smell of blood mixed
with excrement and the metallic tang of fear assaulted the olfactory senses
with physical force. Melissa’s eyes began
to water the instant she’d beamed aboard.
It would take days to get the taste out of her mouth from breathing the
vile brew. She
saw Kuali stagger to a corner and heave a few quarts of his guts onto the
deck. The additional stench of the vomit
only made her want to puke herself. She
managed to bite down the bile and moved up next to the engineer. “You alright, Chief?” Kuali
straightened wiping his chin against the back of his hand. “Sorry, sir,” he said in his rumbling basso
voice. A hint of his Zulu accent gave a
strange sing-song rhythm to his words.
He pointed hopelessly to a corpse on the opposite side of the
corridor. The hapless fellow had been
stripped of his head, spine and hands before being tossed aside. The slimy mass of his entrails slithered out
of his back as gas began to gather inside them.
It was like red eels, wet and wiggling, slowly inching their way through
the man. “That’s not something I was
expecting to see today.” Melissa
managed (barely) to keep her stomach from rebelling. She did it by quickly turning away from the
sight and staring at Kuali. “Look at me,
Chief,” she ordered. To her own ears she
sounded close to hysteria. To Kuali she
sounded determined. “Look at me and not
him.” Kuali
obeyed, and Melissa led the large man away from the mess on the deck to a clear
section of the corridor. Once there she
stared him right in the eye until she was satisfied he was going to be alright. “What about salvaging this?” she asked. Kuali
shook his head. “The hardware’s intact,
but the deck and bulkheads are shredded.
We’d spend months trying to chase down hull breaches and never get all
of them.” “Damn!”
Melissa muttered. “I was hoping for a
quick fix on this matter.” Her
plan had been to abandon the shattered drive section of the Constantine and mate the saucer section
to what was left of the Nero. If all went well she would have a
fully-functional Caesar-class
dreadnought in a few hours by doing so. Sensors
indicated that all the systems of the Nero’s
drive section were operational, but chasing down hull breaches for the next few
months and cleaning out the blood for the next few days and weeks made the idea
far less attractive. The additional
hazard of exposing the larger majority of her crew to the slaughterhouse the Nero had become would demoralize them to
a point that outweighed the benefits of the operational gear here. Stripping what she needed would take time she
dared not expend for fear the Hirogen would return with enough ships to finish
them off, but she saw no way around that.
The Constantine was too short
on spare parts to discard this opportunity. “What
about the cores?” she asked. “Haven’t
been down to Sherwood forest yet, sir,” Kuali admitted. Main Engineering in the Caesar-class was referred to as “Sherwood Forrest” because of the
small grove of warp cores growing through the ship. It was a term borrowed from the old ballistic
missile submarines from the Cold War to describe the missile compartments of
these grim vessels. The moniker was
appropriate even if the setting was entirely different. “Sherwood Forrest” aboard an Ohio-class or Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarine was a region of the ship
kept deathly quiet and largely unoccupied.
Main Engineering aboard the Caesar-class
was filled with people at all times and produced a teeth-rattling din while
underway. “Let’s
get moving then.” She turned to move
when one of Kuali’s massive black hands slipped over her shoulder and stopped
her dead. “I
better go first, Captain,” he said. “We
can’t afford to lose you.” Melissa
felt a flash of irritation. “I don’t
need to be coddled, Chief,” she snapped. Kuali’s
eyes softened. His other hand slipped
over her remaining shoulder and gently squeezed. The only thing she could compare it to was a
childhood memory of being hugged by her father when she was four. Those hands all but crushed her. His voice
dropped an added octave and rattled her frame right down to her toes. “I need to see it first,” he said.
She found herself nodding
despite her earlier reservations. “Alright,” she stammered. She followed Kuali down through the decks
passing the bodies littering the corridors at every turn. She drank up the sights and smells of the
mutilated corpses growing angrier by the minute. Kuali on the other hand studiously ignored
the carnage and focused on where he was going.
I suppose we have different ways
of dealing with this, she thought before reflecting, what’s going to be the price I’ll have to pay before I can put this
behind me? No doubt it would be a high price indeed. Faintly
she noticed she was still holding Kuali’s hand.
She tried to retrieve it, but the Chief viciously snatched it back. It was a gesture redolent with fear, and she
guessed the big man was maintaining his composure only by the slimmest margins. They
arrived in Main Engineering a few moments later. Gore was everywhere. The compartment was full of personnel at the
time of the Nero’s demise, and the
Hirogen had not spared it. Bodies were
tossed about the room like sopping wet dolls.
None of them had their heads.
What made it tolerable was that Captain Sassak had a largely Vulcan
engineering staff. Most of the blood
sprayed around the room was green and had an oddly sweet smell. Melissa tried to pin down the odor to
something recognizable and finally settled on orange blossoms. With an internal wince she realized too late
she’d never be able to smell oranges again without memories of this place
coming to mind. In
the center of the compartment were the three warp cores. They stood like obelisks of Egyptian lore
majestically presiding over the scene before them. They were pristine. They hummed quietly and indifferently to the
horrors around them like the steady rumble of distant thunder. It was as if the Hirogen had sacrificed
everyone inside the compartment to the cores like they were religious
icons. It was so surreal Melissa forgot
what they were here for. Fortunately
Kuali didn’t forget their mission and stepped up to the controls. Most of the controls were shredded in the
same way the decks and bulkheads were so he retrieved a tricorder and scanned
the cores for a few minutes. “They’re
all working perfectly,” he announced. Melissa
had allowed her mind to drift and stared at him uncomprehendingly. Kuali
patiently repeated himself and added, “We could take the B drive out of here
and install it aboard the Constantine
in twenty minutes, sir.” “Get
started,” Melissa ordered. “I’ll get a
team down here.” Kuali
flinched. “Just let me handle this end
of the operation, Captain,” he said. “I
don’t want my engineers exposed to all this.”
He motioned around the compartment to indicate what he meant. Melissa
grew irritated again. “Don’t second-guess
me, Chief,” she snapped before tapping her com badge. “Schubert to Constantine,” she called out. “Go
ahead,” Bittu replied. “I
need a team of engineers over here to salvage the cores off this thing right
away.” “Understood. I’ll have them on the way in five minutes,”
Bittu reported. “Bring
the ship alongside and prepare for transfer…” Bittu
interrupted her. “We have incoming
vessels, Captain!” “Damn!”
she hissed. “Hirogen?” “I
think so, sir. Time to intercept: ten
minutes,” he reported. “I don’t think
they see us yet,” he added. Melissa
turned to Kuali. “Can you get one of
those cores out of here in time?” Kuali
shook his head. “I need at least fifteen
minutes. I can dump all three right now,
but…” Schubert
cut him off. “So dump them. That’s an order.” “But,
Captain…” he tried to protest. “DO
IT!” Kuali
cringed away from her, but he obeyed. He
keyed a few commands into the nearest core.
Alarms sounded and the first core began to drop out of the ship. The second and third cores did the same. They were about halfway out of sight when all
three stopped cold with dull clanking sounds. “What
happened?” Schubert demanded. “Must
be caught on some of the damage,” Kuali replied. “I’ll have to clear it.” “Get
started,” she ordered. Kuali
obeyed and started scanning. “Uh-oh,” he
muttered. He climbed up a catwalk and
Schubert followed. The area above the
main deck was a total mess. The catwalk
was contorted and folded like origami.
Conduits dangled like spider webs.
Consoles had been ripped out of the bulkheads and lay in untidy,
obstructive mounds. Kuali scrambled over
one of the piles of debris and motioned her to follow. He moved up one more deck before he could
show her the problem. The three cores
were held in place by a sturdy frame that contacted the cores top, bottom and
middle. The top of the frame had been shattered
by something and had managed to tangle in the jumble of main lines coming out
of the top of the cores. The frame had
collapsed through one deck and caught on the bulkheads surrounding the cores. Even her untrained eye could see it would be
like untangling a knot of string made of steel and coated in glass shards. “Get
started on this,” she ordered. She made
her way down the catwalk about the same time the engineering team arrived. Three
of the dozen crewmen took one look at the carnage around them and were
violently ill. The others were taken
aback, but focused on her for guidance.
She sent them up the catwalk after Kuali, and beamed back to the Constantine. USS Constantine Schubert
didn’t spare an instant once she marched back to the bridge. “How far off are they?” she barked the
instant she stepped out of the turbolift. Bittu
stood up from the Captain’s chair. “We
have seven minutes,” he reported as she slipped into the seat herself. “Bearing?”
she asked. “They’re
coming in from all sides,” Bittu said.
He motioned at the main viewer and showed a ring of the Hirogen ships
steadily closing on the Constantine
and her crippled sister. Schubert
keyed the intercom. “Engineering,” she
barked. “Do you have warp drive yet?” “We’re
limited to warp 2, sir,” the man on the other end explained. “We’re currently fixing the buzzard scoop
that was destroyed in the battle.” Schubert
stared at the tactical display for a heartbeat.
“That’s enough,” she declared.
“Helm, set a course 10 by 35 degrees.
Best possible speed. Weapons,
fire quantum torpedoes and photon torpedoes at the Hirogen behind us and keep a
steady fire on them. We’ll swing around
the circle and destroy them in detail.” The
Constantine jumped to warp and left a
dozen quantum torpedoes in her wake. A
steady stream of photon torpedoes flew out behind her and raced away into the
darkness. The
new wave of Hirogen was better prepared than the first three waves to face the
dreadnought. Survivors from the first
encounter had taken the time to explain what the ship was capable of. The new clan to arrive on the scene was under
the direction of a chieftain named Yaga.
Chieftain Yaga was a bellicose, aggressive Hirogen with little patience
for carefully laid plans, but at the same time he was a brilliant
tactician. In an instant he realized
that massing his ships before the Constantine
would only allow the powerful ship the ability to mass its firepower against
him. He’d devised a plan on the spot
that was more concept than instruction and directed his ships to follow his
orders to the death if need be. The
quantum torpedoes were the first to draw blood from Yaga’s men. They were too fast and too accurate to dodge,
but they were not powerful enough to kill a single Hirogen ship at a
stroke. The dozen quantum torpedoes
knocked the Hirogen ships out of warp, but the photon torpedoes intended to
finish them off were too slow to give an effective one-two knockout blow. The Hirogen easily shot the photon torpedoes
down before they could do any harm. They
resisted the urge to band together and spread out even more as they jumped back
into warp and closed on the Constantine. By
this time the dreadnought was closing in headlong for the closest Hirogen
ship. The Hirogen was almost in range
when it darted away on a tangent at warp 3.
Schubert tried to stop it with a quantum torpedo, but the Hirogen jumped
to warp 9 and outran the warhead.
Schubert shifted her target to the next ship in line with exactly the
same results. She went after another and
was frustrated again. “Turn
us back around,” she ordered. “We’ll
cover the Nero, and draw them in.” It
was what Yaga wanted all along. He gave
the word and his ships spread out into an even line around the two dreadnoughts
just out of range. What he proposed was
easily grasped by the Hirogen, but not by Schubert. The art of the Hunter is to deliver a single,
lethal blow to its prey. The art of war
to which Schubert and her crew were trained, is about massing firepower to
overwhelm an enemy. In past human
conflicts, massing firepower meant massing both where the guns were located and
where the shots were delivered. A
smaller force could overcome a larger force by crushing a portion of the larger
opponent. Wars can be won by this
pattern and thus human ingenuity had struggled to find ways to mass more and
more firepower in one platform. Hirogen
had no such limitations. What Yaga and
his clan understood was that it wasn’t important where the weapons were
located. It was important where and when
their shots landed. Hirogen thousands of
years before had forged an Empire on this understanding before they lost their
common touch. Awakening the same
instinct again was surprisingly easy. The
Constantine arrived next to the Nero about the same time as the three
warp cores dropped out of her belly.
Seeing the Hirogen were out of range, she dropped the Constantine’s shields and had her
engineers beamed back aboard. Before the
shields came up again, the Hirogen darted forward and unloaded everything they
had. The dreadnought lit up as if set
aflame. Almost all the outer hull was
blown off in a flash. The shields came
up just in time before the Hirogen set off something vital. A
crushing din filled the bridge. The
noise was so loud it took Melissa’s breath away and made her knees buckle. Waves of intense heat radiated through the
superstructure soaking her in perspiration in an instant. “Get those warp cores!” she shouted when she
managed to regain her wind. “GET US OUT
OF HERE!” The
Constantine reached out for the three
warp cores with her tractor beams and drew them to her. She heaved her bulk away from the Nero in a skittish dance between
incoming warheads. Like a boxer blinded
by the blows of his opponent, she drunkenly dashed away from her sister
dragging the three warp cores with her. The
first warp core slipped under the safety of the shields right as a Hirogen
warhead smashed into the empty space where it had been. The shields deflected much of the energy from
the blast, but not the thermal pulse.
Instantly the warp core was baked to a white hot mass of
duratanium. The officer controlling the
tractor beams was oblivious to this turn of events and dragged the near-molten
mass into the starboard hangar. Crewmen
scattered at the sight of the thing and barely managed to escape the
compartment before the tractor beams were released. The warp core melted through the armored deck
of the hangar like it was plastic. It
plunged through to the deck below before it cooled enough to simply heat up the
bulkheads around it. Seventeen crewmen
were roasted alive before they could draw breath. The
Constantine jumped to warp still
dragging the two remaining cores with her.
Even if it was only warp 2 she was a more difficult target at such speeds. It allowed her to tuck the next warp core
into the portside hangar under much more favorable circumstances. The
Hirogen saw what she was trying to do and started trying to hit the remaining
core. “Turn
us back around!” Schubert ordered. The
Constantine whipped around back
towards the Nero. Melissa had just enough time to explain what
she had in mind before her officers keyed in the commands. The Constantine
dropped out of warp right next to the Nero, deposited the warp core and jumped
back into warp again. She fired a
quantum torpedo in her wake at the stranded core next to the dead ship it had
once beat life into. The
Caesar-class warp cores were based on the largest warp cores then in production
for the Galaxy-class. Even then the
cores were two thirds larger and sixty times more powerful. They achieved this by running hotter and at
peak output in pulses forty times a second.
This made them less efficient than the Galaxy-class by a sizable margin
and maintenance hungry, but they still managed to produce the required energy
to power the mighty Caesar’s.
Over-clocking these cores in this manner made them extremely fragile
even when they were new. The energy they
generated was marginally within the limits of the technology to contain
it. So when the quantum torpedo struck
this hot-rodded dynamo, it was unlike anything the Hirogen or even Schubert and
her people had ever seen. The resulting
explosion filled the former dark nebula like a supernova. The smaller Hirogen cores couldn’t compare to
this enormous flood of energy. Six more
Hirogen ships and the Nero vanished
in an instant. A subspace shockwave
raced away from the explosion’s focus and scattered the surviving Hirogen ships
like chaff before a gale. When it struck
the Constantine, she was almost
crushed out of hand. She barely managed
to escape with her frame severely twisted out of true and a few more of her
crew dashed to death against the bulkheads. Melissa
was thrown out of her seat along with everyone on the bridge. She smashed into the main viewer with a crash
before toppling to the deck in a heap.
Bittu landed on top of her breaking her arm and dislocating his
shoulder. She would spend the next several
weeks picking microfibers from the shattered viewer out of her face. With
shocking suddenness, silence thundered through the bridge. The rollicking tremors in the deck went
still. The smell of dust, soot, and the
unpleasant aromas of broken flesh filled Melissa’s nostrils. She tasted blood, and dribbled her top
incisors onto the deck. She tried to
look around but her eyes stung and wouldn’t focus. Her head rang. Her arm was savagely twisted under her and
she was certain she could feel the bone piercing the skin. Those
that regained their senses first, raced back to their stations. Once there they frantically worked the
controls until one-by-one they fell thoughtfully silent and still. Melissa had to be gently brought to her feet
to survey the damage. The bridge was
remarkably intact save for the main viewer and a panel that had exploded out of
the rear bulkhead. Little trails of
blood dotted the deck everywhere from broken noses and minor cuts. She noticed something dribbling onto the
front of her uniform tunic and saw a steady stream of blood running off her
chin. She assumed it came from her
missing teeth until a runnel of blood filled her right eye. “Captain,
you need to go to sick bay,” the navigator said with the hushed calm of the
onset of shock. She
tried to look herself over, but moving her broken arm sent a riptide of agony
up her side. She tried to wipe the blood
out of her eye, but she was suddenly too stiff to move. “Where are they?” she demanded quietly. “Where are the Hirogen?” “Gone,
sir,” the weapons officer replied in a near whisper. The core pushed them beyond our sensor range. “Very
well,” she said. She cast a wary glance
at the door to Jones’ quarters. The
weapons officer followed her gaze and nodded.
He acknowledged her silent order that the Admiral remain locked away,
and cast about the rest of the bridge officers for their agreement. Nobody dissented. To Be Continued |
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