*/*you can run but you can't hide---
you can't even run---
better give up now---*/*
Oh, shut up, Two of Twelve. God, I preferred her when she was spouting Borg propaganda.
I huddle in my command chair and watch the lines on the screen. Insubstantial lines of light. Marking out spaces on a game board, a game board bigger than Jupiter.
*/*pawns in a game---
nothing but a pawn---*/*
Shut up. Anyway, R'j told us - at length - that "pawn" was the wrong translation. She is an enthusiast for her board games, it seems. Enthusiast being a fancy way to spell bore, if you ask me. Anyway. The better translation, she says, for my piece's name is the "merchant". Travels only on permitted routes, only at a permitted speed, but brings a precious cargo home at the end of the journey. King Estmere, apparently, is the "pilgrim", travelling a weary road and never looking back till the goal is attained. And the Klinks? Their pieces translate as the "guardian" and the "paladin". I think R'j really fancies herself as a paladin.
*/*a pawn---
expendable---
first to be sacrificed---*/*
"You should get some sleep, sir," says Tallasa, firmly.
"Can't sleep. Clown will eat me. What about this green line, then? When do we cross it?"
"Seven minutes, at current course and speed," Jhemyl reports. There is a dull annoyance about her voice at that last word, and I know why. My ship feels hobbled, crippled by this thing that is holding her to a snail's pace.
"Right. Right. So I have a nice refreshing sleep for another seven minutes, before whatever happens next... happens."
"Sensor scans are clear, sir," says Saval.
"There's no guarantee we will be jumped the moment we cross the green line, sir," says Tallasa. "If our - opponent - is playing thev lin with us, it will take time for them to set up an attack. It's a very slow-moving game, usually." She doesn't sound like she's a fan.
"I prefer games where there's a better chance to cheat," I quote, moodily. "What's the Goroke up to?"
"Scouting ahead," says Tallasa. "Coming about now, in fact - returning to our position." R'j has been using her battleship's unimpeded mobility to run constant patrol patterns around us. Like some sort of green, hostile, whispering mother hen. Now there's a mental image I didn't need.
*/*physical form of species is irrelevant---
any creature can be subsumed into the collective---*/*
Give me a break. I sit twitching in my chair, counting down the minutes, the seconds. The approaching line shows dim green through the yellow border of the game space. Somewhere to port and starboard are the red lines that say my ship's allowed to plod on down this route. The marker lines are holographic projections - we think, though we can't find a projector - and they have roughly the same diameter as Greater Manchester, and they're still so fine as to be barely visible, at the scale of this... board. It took us long weary hours to get this far....
The green line sweeps by, beneath us. "So," I say. "Enemy territory. Well, worse enemy territory. Look sharp, everyone."
"Sensors are still clear," Saval reports.
Yeah. Right. It took, what, half a microsecond for the entity to flick us clear out of the galaxy? Those sensors can fill up again any moment, I'm sure of that.
"Sensors clear. Maintaining constant vigilance and three-sixty degrees spherical scan," R'j's voice rasps across the comms channel. I don't think she's any happier about this situation than I am. Though how she expects to maintain constant battle readiness for the hours and hours it will take us to reach the centre of the game board, I don't know. Do */*species 10118*/* need sleep? Tylha didn't say. It's at times like this that one misses one's dependable Andorian sidekick. I suppose I've still got Tallasa and Jhemyl.
The Anar floats beside us, her weapons spines facing forwards, easily keeping pace with my hobbled ship. King Estmere follows a little way behind us. Since the carrier effectively can't reverse, our plan is to keep her back until we're damn sure we know which direction she needs to move in. Stupid damn game.
When it comes, the attack is instant. One second, space is empty but for our four ships; the next, the thing is there on the screen, on my tac console. I up the magnification, and the image leaps out at us. It isn't a starship, or at least it doesn't look like one. It looks like a dragon, long sinuous body and vast vaulted bat-wings, and golden light shining from its eyes and its mouth -
"It's emitting collimated high-intensity nadion radiation," says Saval.
"You could just say 'firing phasers'," I grumble. "Tallasa! Get me a firing solution! Leo - what the heck, we're supposed to be Starfleet, see if you can open a channel, OK?" Not that I think for a moment it'll do any good.
"Hailing on all frequencies, sir," says Leo like a good boy.
"Three minutes to engagement range at current speed," Tallasa reports. "Sir, Anar is moving forward."
The siege destroyer is not just moving, it's leaping. Cannon fire crackles from its disruptors, and light flashes from its forward torpedo tubes. At this range, the cannon fire is mostly for show, but the gravimetric torps mean business, all right. The Goroke is coming about. I'm not sure what R'j is up to, but I'd guess she means business too. Behind me, there are blips on the screen. King Estmere is launching her frigates. Previous experiments have shown us that the Mesh Weavers aren't restricted in speed like their mother ship, and now they're streaking forwards to add their firepower to the rest of the group's....
I don't like this. One - dragon - against four starships? Either it's a very powerful dragon, or it's some kind of set-up. Neither one's good news.
Then something else appears on the screen, and it's clear - set-up. For a moment, I'm not sure what I'm seeing - spines and tendrils seem to boil out of space, and at first it looks like an adapted destroyer or battlecruiser decloaking... but the tendrils stretch for kilometers, and there is no central warp core or main fuselage, just a writhing knot of what appear to be thorns - wrapping themselves about the Anar.
"What the hell are these things?" I wonder aloud. The Anar's shields flare, and the spines dig through them, tearing into the armour beneath. "Anthi! Commit your frigates to the dragon, and follow me in to cut the Anar loose!"
The Falcon turns, sluggish, crippled. King Estmere's frigates scream past us, tetryon beams and thermionic torpedoes slamming out at the monster before them.
"Some sort of biomechanical construct on a vast scale," Saval says. "I am unable to interpret these readings as yet. Sir, the spines are polycarbonate edged and vibrating at high ultrasonic frequencies -"
They will saw the Anar into chunks if we let them. Already, I am seeing air and flames spilling from gashes in her flanks. "Get me a targeting solution! Go for the roots of those things!"
Tallasa and Jhemyl cut in our weapons at maximum range. Tetryon beams glisten in the dark, striking at the impossible thorned tentacles, clawing at them. The Goroke is moving in, too, her Elachi crescent cannons sending scything bolts of destruction at the tendrils. Anar's own disruptors are hammering away -
"I think I see a weak point, sir," says Tallasa.
"Hit it."
The tetryon banks scream as Tallasa pushes the last erg of power out of them, trying to make them effective at this extreme range. Green fire blisters through space beside us as King Estmere brings her plasma arrays into play. The goat's-skull shape of the Goroke turns nimbly, her crescent weapons focusing in on the same spot. There is flame, and a haze of escaping air, and I'm sure it's not all coming from the Anar. Slowly, slowly, my ship draws closer.
Something gives. All of a sudden, the tendrils break apart and scatter, flaming fragments spraying through space. The Anar pulls clear, her armoured flanks sadly gouged and scored, but her disruptors still spitting defiance.
"Frigates are overpowered and must disengage!" Anthi Vihl's voice. "The dragon is turning to bear on the Falcon!"
I swear. Our turn in the barrel. "Reinforce forward screens, and put everything we can spare into the torpedo launchers!" The tetryon banks are in danger of overheating, but if we can feed this beast enough plasma torpedoes, that should keep it off us. Should do. I hope. I've never fought a dragon before.
The dragon plunges at us, seeming to knock King Estmere's battered frigates aside as it pounces. Golden phaser light sprays from its mouth. The Falcon shudders.
"Shields down to seventy-two per cent," Jhemyl reports.
"Fire!"
Tetryon beams stab through the dragon's breath. Plasma torps crash out of our launchers. The viewscreen is an abstract glare of coloured light - the tac console is sparkling with interference, too. The deck lurches beneath me, and there is the flash-bang of a transient overload on one of the consoles.
"Shields at forty-eight per cent."
"Keep hitting it!" It must be hurting worse than we are. It has to be.
It is. The interference suddenly clears, and the colours on the screen fade for an instant - then are wiped out in one dazzling glare of white. Apparently, dragons have warp cores. Who knew?
I try to take stock of the situation. King Estmere is moving to recover her damage frigates, the Anar is heading slowly towards her, trailing vapours from her hull breaches. The Goroke -
The Goroke is fighting something, and I don't know what. The battleship's crescent cannons are hammering out a constant barrage at something that looks like a cloud, a vast thunderhead blotting out the stars, illuminated fitfully by the green lightning of the crescent bolts. Something emerges from the cloud, a writhing ribbon of energy, something that clings to the Goroke's shields and tears at them.
"Steer three eight five mark four. Support the Goroke." I wipe my forehead. "Just aim for the middle of whatever the hell that is, and hope we hit something."
Fire lashes out from the tetryon banks again. The coolant is getting perilously close to the red line. The thundercloud is illuminated with lurid light now from both ships' weapons. I can't tell what's inside it, or even if there is anything inside. A line of light whipcracks against our forward shields, and my ship rocks.
"Fore shields down!" shouts Ahepkur from engineering. "Attempting to restore!"
"Hard about!" I yell. "Fire aft batteries!" I would drop web mines, too, but how do you capture a cloud?
The Goroke has deployed her auxiliary vessels, the two drone craft that nestle in her stubby forward wings. One of them is sending out a beam, some kind of sensor interference signal, into the centre of the cloud. I hit the tac console, feeding commands to the aft beam arrays, trying to target whatever that beam's aimed at.
Whatever it is, it blows up. One moment, dark cloud spitting lightning bolts - the next, a brilliant flash, and the clouds clear away, as if they had never been. Whatever we were shooting at, it's just a cloud of white-hot fragments, now.
"All ships!" R'j rasps across the comms channel. "Scan for an enemy inbound on vector six zero mark four! If I am right -"
She doesn't finish the sentence. "She's right," Tallasa reports. "Something coming in on that vector. Big, and moving fast."
"Get me a visual!" The main viewscreen blurs and judders. Oh boy. Get me a different visual, because I really don't like the look of this one....
The thing is round and glistening, and at least two kilometres across, and there is a dark pit in its centre that makes it look like a gigantic eye. Around its rim are shapes - distinctive shapes. An eye with antiproton cannon eyelashes. Heavy antiproton cannons.
"Come about!" I order, and "Get those forward shields back up!"
The thing is coming in hard and fast, on the line R'j predicted. I can see the dire glow of those cannons powering up. Scattered, battered and out of position, our four ships are going to have some trouble with this thing.
Then another voice sounds across the comms channel: Oschmann. "I've got this one," she says, almost casually, and the Anar moves forward as she speaks. Green light is flaring around the siege destroyer's weapons spines.
"Move in," I snap, "support the Anar." I can tell what she's planning - and it might just work; the giant eye is coming in fast, and that means its course is easy to predict -
Easy enough for Oschmann to get the Anar into position and fire the disruptor javelin.
Green light flows down the siege destroyer's spines and gathers into a bolt of searing intensity. It lashes out, spearing into the approaching monstrosity, hitting just at the rim of that dark pit that might be a pupil. The globe yaws wildly and veers off course, a yellowish cloud of something spilling from the impact point. Streamers of fire wrap around the Anar as she twirls back into her defensive configuration.
Our ships move forward. The enemy is damaged, but we don't know if the wound is mortal. Plasma torpedoes scream out of Falcon's and King Estmere's tubes; the bolts from the Goroke's cannons slash across space.
Scarlet light sputters back from one of the thing's cannons, splashing off King Estmere's screens, but the globe is already deforming and collapsing as our weapons pound it. There is an explosion, then another, as the antiproton containment in its cannons fails - and then it is all over, the globe breaking apart into flaming debris and a yellow cloud of matter spreading out across space.
"Scanning," Saval reports. "Nothing on screens except wreckage -"
"There will be no more, for the present," R'j announces over the comms channel. "The classic Shiran th'Kiv engagement - a risky stratagem, and costly if misjudged. Our opponent misjudged it," she adds with evident satisfaction. Well, aren't we lucky to have the resident chess nerd on our side? Bet she always got picked last for the netball team though.
"Anar has taken substantial damage," Oschmann's voice says. "If there is time to halt and make repairs -"
"There should be," says R'j. "We have eliminated our opponent's four most powerful pieces. The Shiran th'Kiv engagement is not often so one-sided - but, then, the game with live pieces is often different from the abstraction of the board game. Goroke, Falcon and King Estmere will be more than equal to the single mobile piece that remains. Make all necessary repairs."
"And then, on to the centre?" I say.
"On to the centre," R'j confirms.
*/*goal defined---
target specified and attainable---
bet you don't want to know what's in there though---*/*
Shut up.
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