The Falcon groans, and damage lights flash on my command console. "Keep hitting 'em!" I yell. Redundant. Jhemyl is targeting the approaching Mogais, and I'm damn sure their damage lights are flashing more than mine are.
Phaser arrays flare golden, and then the Falcon darts between the two Hegemony ships, and the aft weapons systems blaze into life. "Hard about, two hundred mark zero, now!" I yell. One of the Mogais picks that moment to blow up. Fine by me. "Move, you bucket of bolts!" I shout at my ship. The Falcon swings round, hard and fast, one RCS assembly flashing red lights at me. Screw it, it's insured.
The remaining Mogai has turned, too, its plasma arrays blasting at us already. "Reinforce forward shields!"
"Holding at forty-one per cent," Ahepkur reports from the engineering station. "Hull breach on deck seven, sealing - plasma fires on decks eight through twelve, fire suppression in effect -"
We're taking a pounding. That's OK, these ships were built to take a pounding. "Hegemony vessel incoming on vector triple zero," Tallasa reports.
Straight at us. "Playing chicken? Never play chicken with the crazy chick! Hold course, full ahead, open fire!" At some point I've bitten my lip - I can taste blood. Jhemyl and Tallasa don't question me, they just aim the Falcon directly at the oncoming Mogai and start firing. Sometimes I worry that I'm a bad influence on those girls.
The Romulan comes at us, hard, guns blazing. We head for him just as hard, and my ship's shields are stronger, my forward batteries more powerful. Both ships tremble in the exchange of fire.
The Mogai is within three kilometres when its commander realizes we're not going to turn. Reaction mass geysers from its side as an RCS thruster ruptures, and the warbird twists and rolls frantically, managing just to clear our hull in the last few seconds - and, in the process, exposing its own hull to our beam arrays at point blank range.
So I fire. And the Falcon pulls away, hard, from the shower of white-hot shrapnel that used to be a Hegemony ship.
"OK, enough playtime," I snarl, "give me a lead on the nearest freighter."
On my console, a row of icons blinks... the comms ensign has set it up, images of the most important people I might want to talk to. Andorian High Command, not that that's much use now... Tylha, T'Laihhae, Obisek... T'Pia. Whichever side the Vulcan's on, the Hegemony's certainly acting like she's on mine; her science vessels are coming under heavy fire. T'Laihhae's Messalina has moved slightly out to defend T'Pia, Tylha is practically down on the deck in Andoria's atmosphere, running a last ditch defence against the freighters... that leaves me and Obisek in the middle, with the bulk of the Hegemony fleet to play with. Lucky us. And Tylha's icon is flashing -
"Face-ache. What's Tylha up to?"
"Um," the comms ensign says. "Spirits of Earth is pre-empting data channels - flooding them with what she says is a counter-agent for the Hegemony's computer virus."
"Awright." If Tylha's right - and her tame Ferengi white-hat hacker is pretty good, I recall - then the Andorians might just start to put their command and control back together... and we might start standing a chance again. The numbers on each side are still fairly evenly balanced - and we have, I flatter myself, an edge in quality - but our tactical options are constrained, always, by the simple fact that we have to chase down those freighters. Which means D'Kalius knows where we need to be....
And we don't know where he is, necessarily, because his warbirds, like Obisek's, keep slipping in and out of cloak.
But that might be about to change. I thumb Obisek's icon on the panel. "Be brief," he snaps at me.
"I'm going to take a chance on T'Pia in about five minutes," I say. "Better get your cloaked assets uncloaked and shielded then, just in case she can't tell the bad guys from the good guys."
"Very well," says Obisek, and laughs. "I am not used to being one of the good guys. Zdenia out."
"Andoria Spacedock has cleared the limb of the planet, sir," Tallasa reports. We've been at this fight so long, the space station's orbit has brought it round within sight of the battle. That should be a game changer - if ASD's weapons can be brought into play, if the station isn't still crippled by the Hegemony's computer virus.
If Tylha's countermeasures work... if T'Pia is on our side....
"Any signs of life from ASD?" I ask.
"Shields are up. No weapons active," Tallasa reports glumly.
"I have a line on a freighter," Saval says. "Range two seven two, mark five niner by three two two."
"Let's hit it." It will have company - cloaked warbirds. The Vulcan cruisers don't have cloaks, and they are taking a hammering from the Andorians. I'm guessing a number of the Vulcans will be regretting their choices just now. Falcon turns, dives down, towards the freighter -
And the Andorian High Command icon flashes on my console. "This is Vice Marshal th'Shral," a new voice says. "I have engaged command mode - without destructing. Requesting tac data feed for Imperial Guard engagement."
"Face-ache. Do it." I punch the icon. "Th'Shral, I'm transmitting now. Also -" Vulcan slot-machine eyes. Time to see if they thump-thump-thumped into three cherries or a big fat NO WIN. "Coordinating with the Kyllikki, sending data feed from the tachyon detection grid." My thumb comes down on T'Pia's icon. "Kyllikki. Transmit."
"Beginning data feed." The Kyllikki is surrounded by plasma fire, torpedoes slamming hard into her shields. T'Pia sounds like she's reading a weather report. OK, so she's a good unemotional Vulcan, is she a good unemotional Vulcan on my side?.
"Receiving data," says th'Shral's voice. "Thank you, Starfleet. Watch out, because things are about to change."
And change they do.
The Andorian ships wheel in space, turning with balletic grace, falling into formation... and, all of a sudden, where there was a tangled spread-out mess of a space battlefield, now there are rings of steel forming, contracting circles of Andorian ships - each one with an enemy freighter at its centre.
And then space fills with light, blinding barrages of blue-white light. Andoria Spacedock opens up with its phaser lances, aimed, not at the freighters, but at D'Kalius's main battle assets. The heavy ships, the Scimitars and Khnial-classes. The spacedock's lances blaze, and those ships die.
And some of them were cloaked, but they die anyway - as do others, scattered across the battlefield, as the Andorians' surviving defence satellites come back on line and open up. T'Pia is on the side of the angels, after all. Her tachyon grid works, the uplink to the Imperial Guard works - and, right now, every cloaked ship in Andoria local space is wearing the equivalent of a big sign saying "Kick me". And the Andorians are kicking, and they are kicking hard.
The icons for the freighters are winking out, one by one. The wreckage of the Hegemony's battleships is strewn across space.
"Raven's Heart has singularity-jumped, sir," Saval reports.
"Trying to run. Don't blame him. It won't work though." I hit T'Laihhae's icon. "T'Laihhae. Can you get me another back-door code into the Hegemony's comms net?"
"I believe so." The Romulan at least has the grace to sound harassed. "I can guess what you want it for.... All right. Setting it up now." A pause. "Go ahead."
"This is Vice Admiral Grau to the Hegemony fleet," I announce. "Andorian forces have re-established control over local space. This expedition of yours is over, and you have lost. Surrender, now, and you will be fairly treated." A wave of elation runs through me, washing away the official tone. "You can surrender to Starfleet, who are cross with you, or to the Remans, who are really cross with you, or to the Andorians, who are positively miffed. But surrender. It's the only choice you have left."
Silence, for a moment. Then I see some movement in the beleaguered remnant of the Hegemony fleet. Shields are dropping, warp cores are being ejected -
"Signal from the Raven's Heart, sir," the comms ensign reports.
"Let's have it." Not that I want to gloat. Much. Or rub D'Kalius's snooty Romulan nose in things. Much.
The Romulan nose appears on the viewer, flanked by a pair of glaring Romulan eyes, a twisted Romulan mouth beneath it. "Grau," D'Kalius rasps at me. "You think you have won. But the one thing, the important thing - that, you have lost."
I open my mouth to reply, but the screen goes blank. "Raven's Heart has singularity-jumped again," Saval reports.
"Where'd he go?"
"Re-acquiring." A marker flickers into life on the edge of the tactical display. "There," Saval says. "On the fringes of the battle zone."
"Andoria's defence net is still down in that sector," Tallasa says. "The only asset we have in range is... USS Hammersmith. One of T'Pia's frigates, anchoring one side of the tachyon grid."
"Damn, damn," I say. I hit T'Pia's icon. "Pull the Hammersmith out of there. No way a frigate can take on a Scimitar."
"I have some odd readings from the Raven's Heart," Saval says. "Power levels building, and some... unclassifiable... radiation spikes."
"Give me some sort of visual," I say, "let me look at what he's up to."
The image on the main viewer flashes, jumps, settles into a blurry picture, in which the fleeing frigate looks like a toy before the malevolent bulk of the Hegemony flagship.
"Radiation levels peaking," Saval reports.
Something emerges from the Raven's Heart, a twisting ribbon of colourless light, fringed with prismatic flashes of vague, nameless hues. It licks out towards the Hammersmith -
- and, in an instant, the frigate is gone, its hull reduced in the blink of an eye to a scattering of elementary particles that flares, once, and dissipates into space.
"Infinite preserve us," says Tallasa. "That was -"
"An isolytic beam," Saval reports, and even his imperturbable Vulcan voice is bleak. "I think it must have been a test firing. Power levels aboard the Scimitar have dropped, but are rebuilding. Sir, if the isolytic beam is fired at full power, and amplified through the Raven's Heart's weapons array -"
Two of Twelve has been quiet through most of the battle, drowned out in the flood of adrenaline filling my system; now, unbidden, she shows me what the subspace weapon could do, in pitiless detail. The isolytic beam kicks the bricks out from under the very structure of space; at full power, it would create a zone of non-existence two or three hundred kilometres in diameter. Fired at Andoria, it will take a gigantic hemispherical bite out of the planet, creating a pit a hundred and fifty kilometres deep. The sides of the pit will collapse immediately, under the influence of gravity... a ring of tectonic destruction will sweep out, the entire crust of the planet crumbling into an ever-spreading hole, expanding at the speed of sound. Perhaps some part of the antipodes might be spared - not that it would matter: the kinetic energy release will throw all lighter material into space at well over escape velocity. Andoria will shuck off its atmosphere like an old overcoat.
"We have nothing that can reach effective firing range inside... thirty minutes," Tallasa says in a dead voice. She reaches out without looking to take her sister's hand.
At warp speed, we would cross the distance to the Raven's Heart in the blink of an eye - and overshoot, and lose too much time turning about and coming back. Think, Ronnie, think. We'd need something like the Roms' singularity jumpers - only Obisek and T'Laihhae are both too far away, even with that - only -
My one eye opens wide. There is a way. "Helm. Engineering. Set up the transwarp drive, destination Andoria."
Tallasa turns to me, and there's a hint of her normal exasperation as she says, "We're already at Andoria, sir."
Ahepkur is quicker on the uptake. "Use the transwarp drive as a subspace jumper?"
"Don't tell me it's impossible. I don't want to hear impossible." The Raven's Heart is already swinging around towards the planet.
Another voice speaks for the first time: prim, cool and mechanical. "I believe it can be done," Ada says, "but you will need faster than organic reflexes to interrupt the safety interlocks."
Ahepkur turns to her with a glare. The android stands her ground, her metallic eyes expressionless. "Very well, then, machine," the Klingon grates, finally. "Do it. But get it right."
Jhemyl is already busy at the helm controls, her antennae twitching. "Coordinates... set. I think. Sir, I can't be sure - we might miss entirely, or reappear inside the Raven's Heart -"
"Then we'd blow D'Kalius up and get posthumous medals. Not the kind I'd wish for, but it'll do the job. Ada, are you ready?"
"I believe this sequence will be successful," the android says.
"All right, then. Charge up the weapons arrays, load all the photon tubes, get ready to throw tomatoes and use foul language if you can, we need everything we've got. Westminster Abbey or glory." Knew I could work a quote in somewhere. "Let's do it."
I swear I hear a crack as Ada's fingers break the sound barrier -
*/*errorerrorerror---
-ghd$^%%%%----itddywweeoidgb^^^---
---error---
---spatiotemporal transition---anomalous---neuromechanical disrupt---error---reconnect---error*/*
Oh, jeepers, that was rough. Things are going bang all over the bridge, the transwarp coils are all reading OFFLINE in big red letters, there's a haze either in my eyes or in the air, and I don't know which. I fight back the urge to vomit. On the screen, though, through the tears in my eye, I can see something big and black and ominous that's a Scimitar's wing.
"Fire! Fire everything, God damn it! Fire!"
The Falcon's weapons blaze, golden light striking from her phaser arrays, torpedoes shrieking out of the launch tubes. The image on the screen shows the devastation we're wreaking on the Raven's Heart -
Then the Scimitar starts to fire back. Conventional weapons only, but at this range, D'Kalius's plasma beams hammer our shields flat and carve flaming gashes into our hull.
"Hard about! Aft batteries, fire!"
Still hitting with everything we can bring to bear, we pull away from the Raven's Heart, both ships trailing flaming streams of debris.
"He's still there, sir," says Tallasa brokenly. "We didn't kill him. We didn't do it."
"Relax." I can see the sensor readouts, and I know I'm right. "We did enough. Remember the battle of the Bassen Rift? Where Shinzon's ship took everything the Enterprise-E could throw at it, was left a half-wrecked hulk in space, and yet that super-complex, super-experimental weapons system still stayed intact?"
The flanges and spines of Raven's Heart's weapons array are rising into position. On one wing. The one we didn't damage. On the one we did hit, those flanges stay well and truly down.
"Flukes like that don't happen twice," I say.
The Raven's Heart's power levels peak, and the energy floods into the wrecked weapons systems, and out through ruptured conduits and shorted circuits. The damaged wing glows sun-bright for a moment, before it puffs into vapour, blasting the rest of the ship into a million pieces. The flash of the singularity core breach is almost an anticlimax.
"And that really is it," I say happily. "They can't possibly have another painfully illegal secret super-weapon up their sleeves. Face-ache - no, wait a minute." I turn and focus one bleary eye on the comms ensign. "What's your name?"
He looks flustered. "Uh - Madena, sir. Leo Madena."
"Right. Right. I'll try and remember that. Well done, Mr. Madena, you've been a lot of help today. You deserve a raise, or a more appreciative boss, or something. Anyway. Signal, umm, anyone who needs signalling, tell them it's all over bar the shouting. Let's get back and see who wants to surrender to us."
Scorched and battered, leaking air and warp plasma, and completely victorious, the Falcon turns towards the last remnants of the Hegemony fleet.
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