Starfleet Year One Read online

  Matsura knew his atomics would get the enemy’s attention faster than another laser barrage. However, he had only half the eight missiles with which he had started out from Earth—and with even a portion of the Romulan’s deflectors up, an explosion wouldn’t destroy her anyway.

  As a result, he picked the only other option left to him—the one Captain Beschta had chosen a month earlier when it was Matsura’s vessel hanging in space, waiting for a grisly end. “Lieutenant Barker,” he said, “put us in front of that Christopher.”

  “Aye, sir,” came the helmsman’s reply.

  A moment later, the Romulan seemed to swing around on the captain’s viewscreen. But in reality, it was an Earth ship that was moving, interposing herself between the enemy and her battered wingmate.

  It was a maneuver that came with a price—and Matsura paid it. His vessel shuddered violently as she absorbed a close-quarters barrage. Still, he was in a better position to weather the storm than the other Earth vessel.

  And then it was his turn.

  “Fire!” Matsura told his weapons officer.

  As before, twin laser beams speared the Romulan. But this time, without its shields to protect it, it didn’t just lurch under the impact.

  It crumpled like a metal can under an especially heavy boot. And it kept on crumpling.

  Finally, the enemy vanished in a rage of pure, white light. And when the light was gone, there was nothing left but debris.

  But Matsura didn’t have time to celebrate the Romulan’s destruction. Turning to his navigator, a woman named Williams, he called for a scan report on the damaged Christopher.

  The navigator’s face told the story even before she spoke. “No sign of survivors, sir—and her warp core is approaching critical. It’s a wonder the damned thing didn’t blow some time ago.”

  No sooner had the woman spoken than the Christopher went up in a blaze of plasma. Captain Matsura swallowed and accepted the loss as best he could—though at this point, he still had no idea whose ship it was.

  Not Beschta’s, he thought. It had better not be Beschta’s. The big man had been his mentor, his friend.

  “Bring us about,” Matsura told his helmsman, “and find me a Romulan with whom I can work out my anger.”

  “Aye, sir,” came the response.

  But as the image on the viewscreen expanded to a wider view, Matsura began to wonder if there were any Romulans left. As far as he could tell, the only vessels around him were Christophers.

  His navigator confirmed his observation. “There’s no trace of the enemy, sir. Either they’ve fled or they’ve been destroyed.”

  The captain breathed a sigh of relief. “And the good guys?” he asked, steeling himself for the verdict.

  The bridge was silent for a moment. Then his navigator said, “Two down, sir. I make them out to be Captain Reulbach and Captain Stiles. That is . . . Captain Jake Stiles.”

  Matsura winced. They had both been brave men. He wished he had gotten the chance to know them better.

  “May they rest in peace,” he said awkwardly, never good with such things.

  Suddenly, Captain Hagedorn’s voice surrounded him. “You can stand down—the battle’s over. Transmit reports.”

  Matsura did as he was told. After a minute or so, he heard the wing commander’s voice again.

  “It could have been worse,” Hagedorn told them, his voice slow and heavy despite his appraisal. “On the minus side, we lost two of our wingmates. On the plus side, all enemy ships have been accounted for—and the vessels we’ve got left are viable enough to press ahead.”

  Matsura took a deep breath and let it out. He knew what the commander would say next.

  “Let’s go,” Hagedorn told them, never one to disappoint.

  Seeing one of the Christophers come about and head for Cheron, Matsura turned to his helmsman. “Follow that ship,” he said.

  “Aye, Captain,” responded Barker.

  And they resumed their progress toward the command center.

  Aaron Stiles knew he had two choices.

  He could die by degrees, wasting away inside under the crushing weight of his sorrow. Or he could try to put his brother’s death behind him and make the Romulans pay for what they had done.

  In the end, he chose the latter.

  Aaron Stiles followed his wing commander eighty million kilometers deeper into enemy territory, to the very brink of the command center orbiting serenely around the blue planet Cheron. And there, he did what he had set out to do. He made the Romulans pay with every ship they threw against him.

  Not just for his brother, he told himself, but for all the members of the Stiles family who had died to keep their homeworld free. For Uri Reulbach and a dozen others who had perished serving alongside him. For all the Earthborn heroes whose names he had never known.

  After all, he had enough hate and anger inside him to go around.

  It didn’t matter to him that he and his comrades were outnumbered two to one. Aaron Stiles plunged through the enemy’s ranks like an angel of death, absorbing hit after hit, wishing he could see the Romulans’ faces as they painted the void with the brilliance of their destruction.

  And when he looked around and saw that the enemy’s vessels had all been annihilated, he went after the command center itself. Of course, it wasn’t without its defenses—but none of them fazed Aaron Stiles. He hammered at the center with his lasers and his warheads and his rage, and eventually it yielded because he wouldn’t accept any other outcome.

  And when it was all over, when the Romulan command center was cracked and broken and spiraling down to the planet’s surface, when all his fury was spent and his adversaries smashed to atoms, Aaron Stiles did one thing more.

  He wept.

  CHAPTER

  5

  PRESIDENT LYDIA LITTLEJOHN SAT ON HER WINDOWSILL and watched the sun melt into the mists over San Francisco Bay. She rubbed her tired eyes. Littlejohn had always believed that if Earth could win her war with the Romulans, everything after that would come easy.

  As it turned out, she had been wrong.

  “They should have responded by now,” said Admiral Walker, a bushy-browed lion of a man in his early sixties. As usual, he was pacing the length of the president’s office. “The bastards are having second thoughts.”

  Clarisse Dumont, a diminutive, pinch-faced woman a bit older than the admiral, shook her head. “As usual, you’re jumping to conclusions. If you knew the Romulans better,” she said, brushing lint off the sleeve of her woolen sweater, “you would understand they’re just taking their time. They like to take their time.”

  Walker shot her an incredulous look. “I don’t know the Romulans?” he harrumphed. “I’ve only been directing our forces against them for the last four and a half years.”

  “As I’ve pointed out several times before,” Dumont told him with undisguised contempt, “fighting the Romulans and knowing the Romulans are two vastly different things.”

  “And how would you know that,” asked the admiral, “considering you’ve never knocked heads with them? Never traded laser shots? Hell, you’ve never even seen one of their birdships.”

  “I’ve never seen a quark either,” the woman countered sharply, “but I have no doubt that it exists.”

  Walker grunted. “You don’t have to remind me about your credentials, Ms. Dumont. But a Nobel prize in particle physics doesn’t make you an expert on alien behavior.”

  “That’s true,” said Littlejohn, interceding in her colleagues’ discussion for perhaps the tenth time in the last few hours. “But in addition to being one of Earth’s foremost scientists, Admiral, Clarisse is also one of our foremost linguists. And without her help, we would never have gotten this far in our negotiations.”

  Walker’s nostrils flared. “I don’t dispute the value of her contribution, Madame President. I just don’t see why she feels compelled to dispute the value of mine.”

  Littlejohn sighed. “We’re all on edge, Ed. W
e haven’t slept much in the last two days and we’re afraid that if we say the wrong thing, these talks are going to fall apart. So if Clarisse seems a little cranky, I think we can find it in our heart to forgive her.”

  Dumont shot a look at her. “Cranky, Madame President? Why, I’ve never been cranky in my entire—”

  “President Littlejohn?” said a voice.

  Littlejohn recognized it as that of Stuckey, one of the communications specialists who had been coordinating their dialogue with the Romulans from an office lower in the building. The president licked her lips. “Have we received a response?” she asked hopefully.

  “We have indeed,” said Stuckey. “Shall I put it through, ma’am?”

  “By all means,” the president told him.

  A moment later, her office was filled with the fluid, strangely melodious voice of a high-ranking Romulan official—not the individual actually in charge of Romulan society, but someone empowered to speak for him.

  Littlejohn was able to recognize a word of the alien’s speech here or there. After all, they had been negotiating the same items for days. But for the most part, it was gibberish to her.

  The message went on for what seemed like a long time—longer than usual, certainly. Also, she thought, the words were expressed in an emotional context she didn’t believe she had heard before. It sounded more contentious to her, more belligerent.

  Oh no, the president told herself. Not another step backward. Not when it seemed as if we were getting somewhere.

  Then the message was over. Dumont plunked herself down in a chair and massaged the bridge of her bony nose.

  “What did they say?” the admiral demanded. “For the love of sanity, woman, don’t leave us hanging here!”

  Dumont looked up at him. Then she turned to Littlejohn. “What they said,” she began, “was they accept our terms. The neutral zone, the termination of their claim to the Algeron system...the whole ball of wax.”

  The president didn’t believe it. “If they were going to give in across the board, why didn’t they concede anything before this? Why did they seem so bloody uncooperative?”

  The older woman smiled knowingly. “As I said,” she explained, “the Romulans like to take their time.”

  Commander Bryce Shumar stood outside the turbolift doors and surveyed his base’s operations center.

  The place looked a lot better than it had a couple of weeks earlier. Shumar and his staff had patched up the various systems and corresponding consoles and brought them back online. Even the weapons launchers were working again, though he didn’t expect to have to use them.

  Not with the war over . . .

  Of course, the commander reflected, it had been easier to repair their machines than their people. He had lost eight good men and women to the Romulans, and four more of his officers might never be the same.

  But they had won the war. They had beaten back the alien aggressor.

  Shumar understood now where the Nimitz had been while his base was under attack. The ship, like half a dozen others, had quickly and secretly been moved up to the front—all so the enemy wouldn’t notice that a flight wing had slipped away and made the jump into Romulan space.

  The commander couldn’t help applauding what that wing had accomplished. But at the same time, he resented having been left so vulnerable. He resented the deaths of the eight people who had given their lives for him.

  “Sir?” said Kelly, who was again ensconced at her security console.

  He glanced at her. “Yes?”

  “Commander Applegate has beamed aboard and is on his way up,” the security officer reported.

  Shumar nodded. “Thanks.”

  He would have met the man in the transporter room, but Applegate insisted that they rendezvous at Ops. Apparently, the new base commander got a little queasy when he transported.

  Abruptly, Shumar heard the lift beep and saw its doors slide open. A tall, fair-haired fellow in an Earth Command uniform stepped out of the compartment and nodded to him.

  “Good to meet you in person,” Applegate said, extending his hand.

  Shumar shook it. “Same here.” He indicated Ops with a gesture. “As you can see, we cleaned up the place for you.”

  Applegate nodded appraisingly. “If not for the burn marks,” he observed, “one would never be able to tell that this facility was the focus of a pitched space battle.”

  Shumar winced. People who used the pronoun “one” had always bothered him. However, he wouldn’t have to get along with Applegate for more than a half hour or so. That was when the Manticore was scheduled to leave...with the former commander of Earth Base Fourteen securely aboard.

  “I shouldn’t have too much trouble here,” said the new man. He smiled thinly. “Running a peacetime base shouldn’t be nearly as difficult as running it during wartime.”

  “For your sake,” Shumar told him, “I hope that’s true.”

  “Well,” said Applegate, “you probably have a few things to take care of before you go. Don’t let me keep you.”

  Shumar nodded, though he had already packed and said his good-byes. “Thanks. I’ll check in with you before I take off...to see if you have any last-minute questions, that sort of thing.”

  “Outstanding,” responded his successor.

  The commander winced again. He didn’t care much for people who used the word “outstanding” either.

  Making his way to Kelly, he leaned over and pretended to check her monitors. “He’s not half as bad in person as he was onscreen.”

  “You’re lying,” she replied. “I know you.”

  “You’ll be all right,” Shumar assured her.

  “I won’t,” she insisted. She looked at him. “Promise me something.”

  He shrugged. “What?”

  “That when you get your hands on another ship, you’ll take me along.”

  The commander chuckled softly. “What would I do with a security officer on a research vessel?”

  Kelly scowled at him. “I can do a lot more than run a security console and you know it. In fact, I was third in my high school class in biogenetics. So what do you say?”

  Shumar sighed. “It doesn’t pay very well.”

  “Neither does Earth Command, in case you haven’t noticed.” She glanced at Applegate. “Tell you what, I’ll work for free. Just promise me.”

  “You would do better to hook up with Captain Cobaryn,” he said. “Mapping expeditions can be a lot more exciting.”

  Kelly rolled her eyes. “Let’s make a deal. You won’t mention Captain Cobaryn and I won’t mention Captain Dane.”

  The commander’s stomach churned at the mere mention of the man’s name. In his opinion, the galaxy wouldn’t have lost anything if Dane had perished in the battle for the base.

  “I agree,” he said.

  “Now promise,” Kelly told him. “Say you’ll take me with you first chance you get.”

  Shumar nodded. “All right. I promise.”

  “Thanks,” said the security officer. “Now get out of here. Some of us still have work to do.”

  He smiled. “Take care, Kelly.”

  Patting her on the shoulder, he started for the turbolift. But he wasn’t halfway there before he heard Ibañez calling him back.

  “Commander?” said the communications officer.

  “Yes?” responded Applegate, who had wandered in among the consoles.

  Shumar looked at him and their eyes met. Then, as one, they turned to Ibañez for clarification.

  “Sorry,” the comm officer told Applegate. “I meant Commander Shumar.”

  The blond man smiled politely. “Of course.” And he resumed his tour of the operations center.

  Shumar made his way over to Ibañez. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Commander,” the man told him, “there’s a subspace message from Earth. It looks like you’ve got new orders.”

  The commander felt his brow furrow. “That’s not possible. My resignation was a
pproved. After today, I’m no longer in the service.”

  Ibañez shrugged helplessly. “There’s no mistake, sir. You’re to report to the president’s office.”

  Shumar looked at him. “The president... of Earth?”

  “That’s right,” said the comm officer. He pointed to his screen. “When you get there, you’re to meet with someone named Clarisse Dumont. Unfortunately, this doesn’t say what she wants with you.”

  The commander knew Clarisse Dumont. For a short while, they had served on the same university faculty. Of course, that was before she had won the Nobel prize for particle physics.

  But what did she have to do with Earth Command? And why was she summoning him to the president’s office, of all places?

  “Do me a favor,” Ibañez told him. “The suspense is killing me. When you get to Earth and you meet with this woman, give us a call and let us know what it’s all about?”

  Shumar nodded. “I’ll do that,” he said numbly, making another promise he wasn’t sure he could keep.

  * * *

  Ambassador Doreen Barstowe shaded her eyes.

  To the east, under a thin, ocher-colored sky that ran to a dark, mountainous horizon, a cleverly designed configuration of variously colored shrubs moved restlessly with the wind. With its twists and turns and sheer variety, it was the most impressive example of a Vulcan maze garden that the ambassador had ever seen.

  Barstowe turned back to the thin, elderly Vulcan who had shown her to this part of Sammak’s estate, and stood with her now on the landing behind his house. “Are you certain he’s out there?” she wondered.

  The attendant, who had identified himself as Sonadh, regarded the woman as if he had better things to do than escort an alien around his master’s grounds.

  “Sammak told me that he would be working in his garden,” Sonadh assured her. “As for certainty . . . it is said that such a state can only be achieved through investigation.” He lifted his wrinkled chin. “Would you like me to conduct one for you?”

  Barstowe smiled at the hint of sarcasm in the suggestion. “No. Thank you anyway. I’ll take a look around myself, if that’s all right.”