“Here it comes,” Aquila said grimly.
He was right. The ship was moving in pursuit of the Spectre. Not only was it keeping pace with no discernible effort, but it was beginning to close in. “We need more speed,” Lucius snapped at Aquila.
“We’re already at maximum!”
“Concentrate all remaining deflector power to rear shields,” Soleta ordered, “and all remaining available energy, reroute in the engine.”
“It won’t be enough,” Vitus called out. “We could stand and fight…”
“And get slaughtered,” Soleta said with conviction. “Maintain speed.”
For a good long time after that, nothing was said. The bridge crew of the Spectre watched with intense fascination as the larger ship continued to pursue them. It drew closer and closer with a sort of steady implacability.
“I wonder why it hasn’t fired at us?” said Lucius.
“I don’t know,” Soleta said. “But we’re not exactly in a position to question our good fortune.”
Closer it came, and nearer still, and Soleta fancied she could practically feel them breathing down her neck. She toyed with the idea of trying to open a hailing frequency, to perhaps talk terms of surrender. But she discarded the notion before it even had time to solidify in her thoughts. There would be no discussion of the Spectre being captured. She would be letting down the Praetor, her crew, and herself. Mackenzie Calhoun would never have entertained surrender options, and she would do no less.
The pursuing ship filled the entirety of their screen. Soleta felt as if their whole universe had been reduced to that ship. That there was nothing in all of existence except that vessel and them. “Aquila,” she said very softly, as the ship loomed behind them and she braced herself for the inevitable discharge of their weapons. “How far until the Neutral Zone?”
“Three hours, twenty-seven minutes,” he replied with a sense of inevitability, knowing—as she did—that it was hopeless. They would never get within sufficient range of home to expect to encounter other Romulan ships that might be able to aid them. That was probably a good thing. Considering how formidable their pursuer was, the chances were that anyone who did attempt to help them would suffer the same fate.
“Very well. Prepare to jettison my log at the first sign of—”
“They’re breaking off.”
It had been Vitus who had spoken, and he sounded appropriately disbelieving. Soleta couldn’t quite accept it either. She approached him, resting her hands on his tactical board. “Are you sure?”
“They’re slowing,” he said. “That much is definite. And I believe they’re beginning to change course.”
“Are you detecting any weapons activity?”
“No.”
They watched in stunned disbelief, afraid to accept their own good fortune. Vitus was right. It was becoming more evident on the screen that the pursuing ship was slowing down and veering off, allowing the Romulan vessel to depart without so much as another shot being fired.
“But…I don’t understand,” said Maurus. “They had us. Why would they not finish us?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” declared Vitus, his voice swelling with pride.
“Enlighten us, Vitus,” said Soleta.
“Why…they’re afraid of us, of course,” he said. “They do not know for certain our capabilities, and have decided that pursuing us could possibly lead to their destruction.”
“An interesting thought,” she said, “and I might be inclined to accept it if no other explanation presented itself. Unfortunately, one does.”
“And what would that be?”
She watched the screen grimly as the bizarre vessel swerved away from them, executed a large, leisurely U-turn, and headed back the way it came. “They let us go…because they’re completely unafraid of us. We pose no threat to them whatsoever. That this pursuit was a warning to stay away, and they didn’t obliterate us…because we simply weren’t worth the bother.”
There was quiet in the bridge for a long moment as the significance of her words sank in. She knew that Romulans were a proud race. Her crew would probably rather be blown to bits by a superior enemy than face the knowledge that they weren’t considered enough of a threat to be dispensed with.
“Commander,” said Lucius, “if what you suggest is true…then this new race, this ship…presents a vast danger to the Romulan Empire, should it eventually decide to spread its interests in our direction.”
“I don’t disagree, Tribune.”
“We have to find a way to fight them.”
“Not necessarily,” said Soleta. She sat down in her command chair, drumming the armrest with her fingers thoughtfully.
“We cannot shrink away from responsibility for the security of the Empire!”
“I wasn’t suggesting we do, Tribune. However, in war it can often be useful to let a cat’s-paw do your fighting for you, at least in the beginning. Then you can measure their success against your opponent, charting their successes and failures and learning without having to shed a drop of your own blood.”
“You’re saying,” said Lucius, “that we should arrange for someone else to fight them?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“I was thinking…Starfleet.”
“And how would you go about arranging that?” he asked.
“It would not be all that much of a chore,” she said. “Maurus…I assume you have a recording of the apparent demise of the Excalibur?”
“Of course, Commander.”
“Good,” she said. “Prepare to attach it to a blind communiqué. If the recipient knows it’s from us, that will cause greater distrust in its authenticity. But sent anonymously through subspace channels, it will be judged solely on the information itself. Can you do that for me, Maurus?”
“Of course, Commander. And the recipient would be…?”
“Admiral Elizabeth Paula Shelby,” she said. “Commanding officer of Bravo Station…and, for all we know, the newly minted widow of Captain Mackenzie Calhoun.”
Space Station Bravo
i.
The night sweats had been fearsome lately.
Elizabeth Shelby was dreaming that she was falling. She had no sense of what she had fallen off, or where she was probably going to land. It didn’t even feel as if air was rushing past her, but instead that she was plummeting through a void of pure, black nothingness. Not even stars shone toward her to provide guidance. She reached out desperately to try and find something to grab on to, and the gesture from her dream translated into an identical one in the waking world. The abrupt thrust of her arm snapped her back into wakefulness. She had swung out so forcefully with it that had anyone been sleeping next to her they would have received a solid punch in the head or upper body. As it was, she sat up abruptly, grasping at air. The bed-covers were soaked with perspiration, and her hair—normally curly—was hanging in her face. She brushed it back, squinting in the darkness, then closed her eyes in a vain attempt to shake off the terrifying images that her imagination had conjured.
It had been a disconcerting dream, to be sure. There was no coherent “storyline” to it, or if there had been, then she certainly couldn’t recall it. All she was able to retain in her awakening was flashes of images, a sense of jeopardy. Strangely enough, even though she knew she had been the one who was falling, she nevertheless had the oddest feeling that it was, in fact, her husband who was in danger. Perhaps (she reasoned) the sensation of falling she’d experienced represented how utterly adrift she would feel if Calhoun were gone from her world.
She had lost him once. When the previous model of the Excalibur had been blown to bits, Mackenzie Calhoun had been missing and presumed dead. She had mourned him, she had dealt with it, and she had moved on…only to have him return from the dead, the beneficiary of a miraculous escape. The realization of the Calhoun-sized hole he had left in her life had been part of what prompted her to marry him in the first place.
So even though she
knew that she was capable of surviving his loss since she had already managed it once, it did not make her especially anxious to essay the endeavor a second time. Especially since she wasn’t entirely confident she would be able to manage it again. Once a lifetime was sufficient; who should have to mourn the same man twice?
She remembered all the times that she had read stories in which brothers or sisters or spouses claimed that they had some sort of paranormal sense of it when something awful had happened to one of their loved ones. Shelby’s inclination had always been to dismiss such unscientific, unprovable intuition as pure nonsense.
Despite that, she sat there in her bedroom and braced herself, waiting to receive some kind of unexpected word that something terrible had happened to the Excalibur. That would, after all, be the most dramatic, wouldn’t it? Dreaming of danger and loss, and an instant later her aide walked in with some sort of horrible news?
It didn’t turn out that way. No one knocked at her door or rang the chime or interrupted over an emergency frequency to tell her grim tidings. Shelby slumped back on her bed and, even though she wasn’t able to fall into a deep sleep once more, she still managed to drift in an uneasy slumber that prevented her from dragging around the space station the next morning.
The transmission arrived at Space Station Bravo two days later. Shelby’s frightful dream had already faded into the farthest reaches of her brain, where useless information generally went to die a lonely death. She was working in her office when her aide, Lieutenant Kassir, entered. Round jawed and curly haired, he now looked unusually grim faced, and the moment she saw him, the dream came roaring back to her.
His description of the transmission’s contents was perfunctory, almost noncommittal. It had come into the com office, and he had immediately recorded it onto a data chip and brought it to her personally, rather than simply forwarding it to her. She downloaded the contents and watched it, and then rewatched it, without visibly registering any reaction.
“It’s some sort of trick,” she said finally, and even Kassir had to admit that it was a logical assumption. The source of the transmission was scrambled and anonymous. The very fact of its anonymity made it subject to suspicion and skepticism.
Furthermore, what it appeared to display was just…ridiculous. It purported to show the Excalibur overwhelmed by a huge vessel, and then being hurled into some sort of whirling energy portal that swallowed it up. By any reasonable interpretation of what she was being shown, it appeared that the Excalibur had been lost with all hands aboard…including her husband, Captain Mackenzie Calhoun.
“What planet is that?” she asked, tapping the small world upon the computer screen.
“We’ve identified it as a world in Sector 221-G called Priatia. It’s a—”
“Pri…Priatia…?”
“Yes, Admiral,” Kassir said.
Shelby didn’t move. Indeed, she stayed so frozen in place that Kassir looked concerned. “Admiral,” he asked tentatively, “is there some…significance…to that planet?”
She was surprised how steady her voice sounded. She supposed she shouldn’t be all that surprised. She was, after all, a professional. “The Trident,” she said, “was assigned to enter Sector 221-G…also known as Thallonian space…to investigate the possibility that some sort of technology, similar to the Borg transwarp conduit…was being developed or even in use. Although they did not discover any such device in active use, they did find traces of what could be termed a ‘sinkhole’ in proximity to the planet Priatia.”
“And you think that sinkhole could be the transwarp conduit they were looking for…and that ship is…”
“The only thing I’m thinking right now, Lieutenant,” she told him, “is that I want this forwarded immediately to Starfleet Command. No knock on our own people, but they have the experts who can break this thing down to its root command and tell us if we’re seeing something real or an invention of a sick practical joker with a holocreation program and way too much time on his hands. Beyond that, I’m not going to think a damned thing until I have to.”
“Yes, Admiral.”
She handed him the chip, and he turned and headed for the door. There he paused and turned back to her. “Admiral…” he said, but then became stuck for what to say next.
Shelby couldn’t blame him. What was there to say, after all? He hoped that her husband wasn’t dead? She put up a hand and said, “Save it, Lieutenant. This is all very…dubious. So it’s probably best if we save well-wishing or condolences until we know what’s what. All right?”
“Yes, Admiral,” said Kassir, who looked relieved that she’d said so, and headed out to do as he was ordered.
Despite her best resolve to the contrary, Shelby then proceeded to accomplish absolutely nothing for the rest of the day. No matter what she tried to concentrate on, her thoughts kept returning to the images she’d seen on the screen. What she wanted to do, more than anything else, was contact the Trident and send it to Priatia to examine the area and find out what the hell was going on. But she lacked the authority; she couldn’t issue starship assignments. And if there was one thing that Elizabeth Paula Shelby had respect for, it was the chain of command. God knew she’d had enough arguments with Calhoun over that very subject.
So she would wait. She would wait to hear from Starfleet, she would make her recommendations on the best way to proceed, and everything would progress according to the proper way of things.
When she slept, she kept waiting for dreams of falling or of Mackenzie Calhoun in distress to dog her slumber. That would also be dramatic, would it not? Recurring visions of her husband calling to her from some nameless void, either begging for her help…or assuring her that he was in a better place somewhere, across a great divide.
Instead she had only dreamless sleep…and that bothered her more than nightmares would have.
ii.
Admiral Edward Jellico looked at the image of Elizabeth Shelby on his viewscreen and wished that he could just reach through it somehow and pat the poor woman on the shoulder.
He had lost count of the number of times he’d had to inform wives, husbands, children, of the loss of their loved ones. It never got any easier, which was why nowadays he was grateful that he had subordinates who did that sort of thing for him. In this case, though, he felt it his duty to tell Shelby himself the bad news.
It wasn’t that he was insensitive to the losses of the countless other families. There were, after all, a thousand people on the Excalibur, and the odds were that every single one of them had families who would have to be contacted and given the awful news:
MIA. Missing in Action.
As far as Jellico was concerned, it was worse than being told flat-out that someone you loved had perished. At least you knew what was what in that instance. When it came to MIA, it condemned those left behind to a sort of twilight existence. They were asked to maintain infinite stores of hope for an eventual return, and in the meantime could not possibly go on with their own lives in any sort of direction. Couldn’t mourn, couldn’t remarry. A huge gaping part of their existence simply ground to a halt.
It wasn’t fair. True, anyone who signed on for Starfleet knew the risks. That didn’t make it any fairer.
Still, at least with Shelby, Jellico could be more brutally honest in assessing the situation than he was likely to be with a civilian. “I’m truly sorry, Elizabeth,” he said, his fingers interlaced and rested on his desk, “but as I told you, we’ve scrutinized the transmission extremely thoroughly—”
“He’s not dead,” Shelby said. She sounded surprisingly dispassionate about it. Jellico didn’t know whether to chalk it up to shock or superb restraint.
“Again, as I told you,” he reminded her, “we’re not officially listing Mac, or any of them, as dead. However, I’m telling you that the odds of them having survived that—phenomenon—are rather small.”
“We don’t know for certain what that phenomenon is. You said your own studies of the visual record
were inconclusive.”
“Inconclusive, yes, but the fact is that the Excalibur was being subjected to forces that…we don’t even have a name for them. The type of energies that were unleashed were beyond our abilities to measure…”
“You didn’t have sensor equipment on site, Admiral,” she reminded him. “It’s all conjecture you’re trying to make based upon what you saw on the screen, sent to us by an unnamed source. Do you at least have some idea who recorded the visuals we saw?”
He shook his head wearily. “Believe me, I wish we did. It might give us…something. More than we have now, certainly. The point is, the Excalibur was pummeled by unknown forces and hauled away who-knows-where, with no means back, to the best of our knowledge.”
“Oh, they have a means back,” Shelby said confidently. “They have Mackenzie Calhoun as captain. That’s their means back, right there.”
“Presuming they survived the trip.”
“I don’t presume it. I know it. There’s no way that…he wouldn’t…”
She stopped talking then and made a visible effort to control herself. Once more he felt sorry for her, but he wasn’t about to let that show. Elizabeth Shelby didn’t want anyone’s pity or sympathy, of that he was sure.
“He’s alive,” she finally said, nodding slightly as if to convince herself of it. “He survived a ship’s exploding to hell and gone. He can survive this. They all can. And there’s only one way to determine it. We need to send out another ship. The Trident. Mueller knows the area, she can—” She stopped as she saw that Jellico was shaking his head. “Why are you—?”
“We can’t.”
“We sure as hell can.”
“Shelby,” he said sharply, “I know this is a difficult time, but I have to ask you to remember whom you’re addressing.”
“I’m sorry. What do you mean ‘we can’t’?”
“I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, Elizabeth, but Thallonian space has turned into a free-fire zone. A civil war’s broken out.” He leaned forward, making no effort to disguise how disturbed he was by what he was telling her. “Si Cwan and his former allies are at each other’s throats. The New Thallonian Protectorate is currently in flames.”