Starfleet Year One Read online

  Then something hit him in the chest with bone-rattling force, pounding the breath out of him. Opening his eyes, he saw that he was draped over a console, a warm, metallic taste in his mouth.

  The taste of blood, Shumar realized.

  Pushing himself off the console, he winced at a redhot pain in his side. Broken rib, he thought. Maybe more than one. But even if that was so, it was the least of his problems.

  Ops was littered with the bodies of his officers, some of them dead or unconscious—and the rest perhaps wishing for the same result. As those capable of moving groaned and pulled themselves to their feet, the commander happened to look up—and saw the erratic, red crackle of energy above the crazed surface of their dome.

  He knew what it meant. Their shields had been battered down, or very nearly so—and the next missile that detonated anywhere near the base would vaporize it from top to bottom.

  Worse, the two surviving Romulans were wheeling, coming back for another pass. The insignia on their undersides loomed like gargantuan birds of prey, eager to tear their victims apart.

  Unfortunately, Shumar didn’t know if any of his weapons officers were still in one piece—and there was no time to find out. All he could do was establish a link between his controls and the base’s tactical array and try to stave off the enemy by himself.

  Cursing, ignoring the agony in his side, he attacked the toggle switches on his console. A moment later, one of his monitors showed him a green and black schematic of the base’s weapons systems. One of the missile launchers was still operational, it seemed—though it was incapable of being loaded again. It would only accommodate the missile already inside it.

  His fingers stabbing the keys like manic insects, the commander slaved the launcher to his controls. Then he tried to target the Romulans before they scattered his atoms across space.

  All the while, he knew in his heart that he would be too late. The base’s launch system simply wasn’t fast enough to respond in time. But he couldn’t just stand there and wait for the inevitable, could he? He had to try to beat the odds.

  Then something happened—something Shumar didn’t know quite what to make of at first. There was a flash of something big and blue in the heavens above him, something that seemed vaguely shiplike in form and structure.

  It reminded him of a Rigelian transport vessel. But that was impossible, the commander told himself. Cobaryn had left already, entire minutes before the Romulans arrived.

  Before he could get a better look at the thing, before he could tell if his initial impression had been at all correct, the object slammed into one of the Romulan warships.

  For a moment, the two vessels slid sideways, locked in a hateful embrace. Then an explosion ripped through both of them like heat lightning. Shumar couldn’t tell where the chaos had begun, but by the time it was over both ships had been reduced to atoms.

  Cobaryn, he thought, his heart sinking. The Rigelian hadn’t left them after all. He had only gone far enough to keep the enemy from noticing him—then sacrificed himself and his vessel to save the Earth base.

  But for all the transport captain had done, the battle was far from over. The last of the Romulans, diverted from its target by Cobaryn’s timely intervention, was looping around to make another run.

  Gritting his teeth, the commander did his best to place the enemy in his sights. Unfortunately, he wasn’t a soldier by trade. He was a scientist who had never imagined he would be shooting at anyone, much less doing so with a hundred lives hanging in the balance.

  The Romulan completed its loop and headed directly for the shieldless operations center. His heart slamming against his ribs, Shumar worked his controls until he had drawn a bead on the vessel. Then he reached for the square red stud that would serve as his trigger.

  But just as he was about to release his single missile, he saw a slender black shape come hurtling overhead. Only then did he realize that the Romulan wasn’t headed for Ops at all—it was closing with Dane’s Cochrane.

  But this time, the enemy didn’t have to worry about hitting its sister ships. It could fire at the Cochrane all day. And eventually, it would impale the smaller vessel on a laser beam.

  Then it would finish off the defenseless base.

  It didn’t seem fair, the commander told himself. Not after what Cobaryn had done. Not after Dane’s valiant maneuvers. Not after some of his people had manned this place for the last five years, taking a chunk out of their lives to help Earth win its war of survival.

  He would be damned if he was going to let all that courage and sacrifice go to waste. Glaring at the monitor he had assigned to the weapons function, Shumar fought to reacquire his target.

  Meanwhile, the Romulan’s lasers found the Cochrane, shivering it with a direct hit to its shields. And before it could twist out of the way, it took a second solid blow to its underbelly.

  Dane couldn’t take much more of that, Shumar noted. If he was going to help the Cochrane pilot, if he was going to make any difference at all, he was going to have to do it quickly.

  Come on, he told himself, perspiration pouring down both sides of his face. Stay with it, for godsakes. If Kelly can do this, so can you.

  Then, all of a sudden, there it was. The Romulan was right there in his crosshairs. The commander was so surprised, he almost forgot to press the square red stud.

  Almost.

  As Shumar watched, fascinated by the event he had himself set in motion, the base’s lone remaining missile cut a path through starry space and detonated near the Romulan’s bow.

  It wasn’t enough to destroy the enemy vessel. It wasn’t even enough to punch a hole in her shields. But it was more than enough to buy the Cochrane some time.

  Taking advantage of the opportunity, Dane brought his needle-thin ship about in what must have been a gut-wrenching U-turn. Then he hit the Romulan with all the laser power at his disposal.

  His electric-blue beams raked mercilessly at the enemy’s deflectors, sending tendrils and shoots of energy radiating from each point of contact. The Romulan tried to shake its pursuer but the Cochrane hung on, matching the larger vessel tack for tack and spin for spin.

  Then the improbable happened. The enemy’s plasma trail... vanished.

  The vessel didn’t lose velocity—not there in space, where there was no friction to slow it down. But the Romulan was proceeding along a straight line, making no effort to evade the Cochrane.

  Because it couldn’t, Shumar realized. Because its engines had gone offline, leaving it dead and powerless. It had become a sitting duck for its adversary, not unlike the Earth base.

  The Cochrane’s attack hadn’t hit the Romulan’s propulsion system hard enough to blow it up. It hadn’t started a chain reaction. It had simply knocked something loose, making the system useless for the moment.

  But as unlikely as that seemed, what happened next was even harder to believe. As the commander tried to activate his console’s comm function so he could speak with the Cochrane, he caught the opening of the lift doors out of the corner of his eye.

  He turned to see who was there. As fortune would have it, he found himself staring at Alonis Cobaryn.

  “Commander,” said the transport captain, his voice taut with urgency, “you cannot let Dane destroy that ship!”

  Shumar looked at him. “How did you...?”

  And then it came to him. The transporter.

  Cobaryn must have set his vessel’s controls on heatseek and beamed himself off sometime prior to impact. And he had been on the base ever since, making his way up to Ops.

  “Tell him not to fire again!” the Rigelian demanded, joining the commander at his console. “He must not destroy it!”

  Shumar shook his head in confusion, his throbbing ribs a distraction he couldn’t ignore anymore. “Why not?” he asked.

  Cobaryn’s crimson eyes opened wide beneath his brow ridge. “Because none of us have ever seen the inside of a Romulan ship, much less one of the Romulans themselves. This i
s our chance to learn something about them—probably the only chance we will ever get!”

  It took a moment for the import of the Rigelian’s statement to sink in. He was right, the human realized. This was an unheard-of opportunity.

  “Give me a laser pistol,” Cobaryn suggested. “I can beam aboard, look around—take some scan readings. The data will be invaluable.”

  Shumar had a feeling the transport captain wasn’t talking about strategic data. Nonetheless, a little reconaissance might go a long way toward furthering their understanding of Romulan technologies. Earth Command would be salivating if it knew what kind of treasure they held in their hands.

  He flipped the toggle that would make his communications function operational. “This is Commander Shumar,” he said into the grid. “Come in, Captain Dane. Repeat—”

  But before he could finish his sentence, the Romulan began to come alive again. Its nacelles started glowing with scarlet plasma fire, indicating that the problem it had experienced was only temporary.

  My God, the commander thought.

  But luckily for them, Dane hadn’t relaxed his guard. Before the invader could bring its shields up all the way, the Cochrane speared it amidships with a devastating burst of laser fire.

  It took a moment for the electromagnetic beams to pierce the Romulan vessel to its heart—but only a moment. Then the enemy exploded in a dazzling display of prismatic light.

  “No,” said Cobaryn, real pain in his voice. “We were so close . . .”

  Shumar turned to him. The scientist in him couldn’t help sympathizing with the Rigelian. “Their engines were coming back online. There was nothing else we could have done.”

  Cobaryn looked at him, the skin around his eyes pinched with distress. “To get a look at the Romulans, to see how they lived . . . I tell you, I would have given a great deal for that.”

  “But not your life,” the commander assumed.

  The transport captain didn’t answer. He just sighed and looked away, dealing with his disappointment as best he could.

  “Sir?” said a feminine voice.

  Shumar turned in the other direction and saw Kelly standing there. There was an angry red swelling at the point of the woman’s brow that cried out for medical attention.

  “I’m sorry I blacked out,” she said in an emotionladen voice. I—” Her voice caught and she looked down at the floor, embarrassed. “I wish I could’ve been more helpful.”

  The commander looked at his security officer. “For godsakes, Kelly... you did all you could. Like anyone else.”

  But he could see she wasn’t satisfied with that. Kelly was a fighter, after all. In her mind, she had let him down.

  “Have someone see to that injury,” he told her.

  Kelly nodded. “Aye, sir. After I help some of the others.”

  “I will help, too,” Cobaryn suggested.

  The security officer looked at him. “Suit yourself,” she said.

  As the two of them retreated, Shumar looked around his battered operations center. In the aftermath of the battle, most of his people were still rising to their feet or helping others to do the same thing.

  But a few were still lying on the deck, unmoving, their heads lying at angles no living being could tolerate. The commander felt a lump in his throat and swallowed it back.

  So much death, he thought numbly. In all the years Shumar had spent on the base, he had never seen its like. Not with the Nimitz and other ships like it patrolling Earth’s perimeter.

  What the hell had happened? he asked himself. Where was the Nimitz? Why hadn’t it answered his calls for help?

  Suddenly, a voice cut through the miasma of shock and suffering. “This is Dane,” it said.

  Cobaryn looked at the console. He had forgotten about the Cochrane pilot. “Dane,” he echoed. “Are you all right?”

  “Not a scratch,” the man shot back. “Now, somebody want to beam me back to that godforsaken base of yours...or am I going to have to crack open my victory bottle right here on the ship?”

  CHAPTER

  4

  CAPTAIN DANIEL HAGEDORN STUDIED THE STARS STREAMING by on his forward viewscreen, wondering how many Romulan warships he was bypassing in his passage through subspace.

  Thanks to the people at research and development, this was the longest faster-than-light jump he had ever made. In fact, it was the longest faster-than-light jump any Earthman had ever made.

  And it couldn’t have come at a better time. They had finally pushed the Romulans back far enough to get some sense of their military infrastructure, some idea of how to cripple their war effort.

  Hence, this mission to take out the enemy’s number one command center—the nexus for all strategic communications between the Romulan fleet and the Romulan homeworlds. Without it, the Romulans would quickly find their forces in disarray. They would have no rational choice but to withdraw instantly from Terran space.

  Hagedorn frowned ever so slightly at his eagerness. He didn’t like to let himself think too far ahead. Captains got into trouble that way. It was better to focus on the objective at hand and let the results take care of themselves.

  He turned to his navigator, positioned at a freestanding console to his right. “How much longer, Mr. Tavarez?”

  The man checked the monitors on his shiny black control panel. “A little more than a minute, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Hagedorn told Tavarez. Then he looked to his helmsman, who was situated at the same kind of console to his left. “Ready to drop out of warp, Mr. St. Claire?”

  The helmsman tapped a couple of studs to fine-tune their course. “Ready when you are, sir.”

  Finally, the captain addressed his weapons officer, a petite Asian woman who was seated directly ahead of him, between helm and navigation. “Power to all batteries, Lt. Hosokawa.”

  Hosokawa’s fingers crawled deftly over her instruments. “Power to lasers and launchers,” she confirmed.

  Hagedorn took a breath and sat back in his padded leather center seat. Since his Christopher 2000 was still tearing through subspace, there was no point in trying to contact the captains of the half-dozen other starships who had been assigned this mission under his command. Still, like any good wing commander preparing for an engagement, he reeled off their names and his impressions of them in the privacy of his mind.

  Andre Beschta. A rock; a tough, relentless warrior—willing to put his life on the line for any one of his friends. Seeing him in combat, one would never suspect what a clown the man could be when he was off-duty... or how well-loved he was by his crew and colleagues alike.

  Uri Reulbach, quiet and studious by nature but utterly ruthless in battle. Reulbach was their point man, their risk-taker, the one who took the heat off all the rest of them.

  The Stiles brothers, Jake and Aaron, both of them fiery and determined. No Earthmen had shown as much courage against the Romulans as the Stiles family—or gotten themselves killed quite as often. All in all, three cousins and an uncle had perished at the hands of the invader. It had gotten to be a grim joke between Jake and Aaron as to who was going to die next.

  Amanda McTigue, thoughtful and compassionate, who by her own admission felt every blow she struck against the enemy. Fortunately, it didn’t stop her from demonstrating a predatorlike ferocity that none of her wingmates could ever hope to match.

  Finally, there was Hiro Matsura—the newcomer in their ranks. The youngster had joined them only a couple of months earlier, but he had earned the respect of his wingmates right from the start. Matsura seemed to do best when paired with Beschta, who had taken the tyro under his wing.

  And how did Hagedorn see himself? As the glue that held them all together, of course. He wasn’t the toughest of them or the fiercest or even the most effective—nor did he have to be. His job was a simple one—to make his wingmates work as a single unit, tight, efficient, and economical in achieving their goal.

  If they succeeded, it was because they had been strong and
deft and courageous. If they failed, it was because he had failed them. It might not have been fair, but that was the way Hagedorn’s superiors looked at it—and as a result, the way he had come to look at it, too.

  “Permission to leave subspace, sir,” said St. Claire.

  The captain nodded. “Permission granted, Lieutenant.”

  As they dropped out of warp, Hagedorn saw the starry streaks on the viewscreen shorten abruptly into points of light. Of course, he observed silently, a few of those points were actually nearby planets reflecting their sun’s illumination.

  And unless they had badly miscalculated, one of those planets was Cheron, the barren world deep in Romulan territory about which their objective spun in blissful orbit. But not for long, if Hagedorn and the others had anything to say about it.

  “Confirm our position,” he told his navigator.

  “Confirmed,” said Tavarez. “We’re on the outskirts of the target system. Cheron is dead ahead.”

  Before the man could finish his advisory, Hagedorn saw one of the other Christophers become visible off his port bow. A second later, one of her wingmates joined her.

  Then the subspace radio checks began coming in. As Hagedorn knew, they were more of a ritual than a necessity—like a pregame cheer before an ancient football game—but that didn’t make them any less important.

  “Beschta here. You can’t get rid of me so easily.”

  “Stiles, Jake... present and accounted for.”

  “Stiles, Aaron... right behind you, sir.”

  “McTigue, on your starboard flank.”

  “Matsura here.”

  Hagedorn waited a moment. “Captain Reulbach?”

  No answer.

  He bit his lip. “Uri?”

  Suddenly, the last of the Christophers rippled into sight above and slightly forward of Hagedorn’s vessel. He breathed a sigh of relief.

  “This is the Achilles,” said Reulbach. “Sorry about the delay. We had a little trouble with our port nacelle. Fortunately, it won’t be an issue until we reenter subspace.”