Heresy 48

Tylha

I stagger back to my feet, my ears ringing - I don't know how much is the wailing of alarms, and how much is just coming from inside my head. The air tastes hot and burnt in my antennae. The corridor is a vision out of nightmare, the lights flickering, dark oily smoke seeping from a dozen cracks, sparks spitting from a ruptured substation console -

My communicator chirps at me. "Grau to Shohl. Grau to Shohl. Tylha, come in, will you?"

I take a deep breath of the hot smoky air. Technically, I've been closer than this to thermonuclear explosions, but it's always been with deflector shields in the way.

"Shohl here," I said.

"Thank God for that. Though we'd lost you for a minute there, kiddo."

"What's the situation?" I look around. I can't see the second tech. I can't see much, the smoke is getting worse.

"Big bang under the dome. Temperature and radiation high enough to clean out all the muck, but there's still trouble on the way -"

"We can handle a little radioactive fallout," I say.

"Yeah, if you live that long. A whole lot of stuff's been happening. First thing is, get out of there, the atmosphere down there is bad for your health. The inhibitor field is down."

"I'll contact Spirits of Earth - wait." I try to think. "If the field's down - that means those drones must be out of action." I look down the corridor. I was sure I'd seen one of the damned things - There is a lump, on the floor, about thirty metres ahead. It might be one... I head for it.

"Yeah, well, that's the good news, Tylha," Ronnie's voice carries on, "but there's plenty of bad."

"Tell me." The lump is, indeed, one of the drones. I pick up my pace, hurrying towards it. Transporter inhibitors, weapons, self-replication gear... whoever designed it packed all that in, but had to skimp on the electronic hardening needed to withstand the EMP from the nuclear explosion. One stroke of luck. I kneel down by the drone, check with my tricorder. It's dead. For good measure, I yank its power supply, so it's definitely dead.

"My guess," Ronnie carries on, "is that you hit some kind of computer tripwire, probably when you scanned that toxin from the console. It triggered some sort of polymorphic computer worm, which has got right through Andoria's data networks. Cascade failures damn near everywhere. Most of the planetary defence grid is down, and the bits that aren't are hanging on by the skin of their teeth."

"OK." I pick up the wrecked drone, cradle it in one arm while I slap my combadge with my free hand. "Shohl to Spirits of Earth."

"Good to hear you, skipper," says F'hon's voice.

"I need transport, fast. And get Klerupiru to meet me in the transporter room." The Ferengi data-warfare expert just might be able to salvage something useful from the drone's memory chips. "Can you get a transporter lock?"

"There's a lot of interference still, sir. We'll need to get in a bit closer. Five, maybe ten minutes."

"OK." I look around, and cough as the smoke thickens. "Make it five if you can, but don't take any risks."

"Tylha." Ronnie's voice on the wrist com, sounding hard and urgent. "Bad news. Also good news, I guess - but mostly bad."

"Let's hear it." I cough again, discreetly. Storm Command is going to have to be rebuilt completely, I think.

"There's movement at the edge of the system. How much, I'm not sure, because the data network is so badly scrambled... but it can't not be a Hegemony fleet. In force. And - hang on." A pause. "I'm now tracking two high-energy radiating plasma flares, travelling at a hair under lightspeed and aimed slightly away from Andoria itself."

It takes me a moment to realize the implications. "C-fractional strikes?"

"That's the one piece of good news," says Ronnie. "The data worm hasn't got through to your Enfilade network, and that defence system actually works. Someone at the fringe of the system is pegging ice asteroids at Andoria, hard, and Enfilade is picking them off as they come in. For the moment. If one of those things hits, though, it's gonna be game over."

"As soon as the Hegemony forces realize we've got a defence, they'll start working out some way around it. We don't have a lot of time."

"You said it. Imperial Guard is mustering all available ships in Andoria orbit now. I'm guessing they'll want our help."

"Anything we can give -" I'm interrupted by the blue-white glare of the transporter beam. Spirits of Earth is moving fast. I step off the pad, and thrust the drone at Klerupiru. "See what you can get from that," I order her.

"What is it?"

"Transporter inhibitor drone. Hegemony design. Check its memory and its command interfaces." Samantha Beresford is coming at me with a medical tricorder and a grim look. I ignore her and head for the bridge. Behind me, I hear Klerupiru muttering something about not being a miracle worker.

The bridge is already at battle alert. I drop into the command chair and start to take stock. "Marshal ch'Haras is on general address in two minutes, sir," Anthi Vihl reports crisply.

"OK. We have an assigned position with the Imperial Guard fleet, I take it? Get us into it."

"Already on our way, sir." Anthi never misses a trick. Klerupiru, still muttering, settles herself into an auxiliary science station, and starts scanning the drone.

"Ships on approach vector," Zazaru reports from main science. "A lot of ships, sir."

The approaching Hegemony force shows as an ominous compact mass at the edge of my tactical display. To one side, there is a brilliant line of light - another mass of ice, thrown at near lightspeed, intercepted and blasted into plasma by the Enfilade satellites. They're still working. The fragmentary bursts of noise from the orbital defences, though, suggests that nothing else is.

But our fleet is there. The Andorian Imperial Guard, in force and at battle readiness, wing after wing of Kumari, Charal and Khyzon-class vessels, the main force gathering around the flagship now. The supercarrier IGV Krotus, four times the length and three times the beam of my ship, quad phaser cannons on both sets of wings, a spinal phaser lance, omnidirectional beam arrays, three full-size hangar bays and MACO standard resilient shielding... the flagship is a fleet in itself.

And now, the main viewscreen flashes, and Marshal ch'Haras speaks from its bridge.

"All ships," he says in unhurried, businesslike tones. "We can confirm that Andoria is under attack, and we're at full invasion alert. The relativistic strikes prove that the Hegemony will stop at nothing, and our estimate is that their entire fleet is in-system already. It's even bigger than our estimates thought it would be. But they're up against the Imperial Guard today, and I know you people will prove that that's the finest fighting force in space. They've given us some technical problems, but that is all they're going to do. We're about to engage their fleet, and when we do, we'll kick them so hard, the pieces will fly back to Vulcan without needing warp drive." He glances down. "So much for the pep talk - you people don't need it anyway. Engage under defence plan Daleth, all units to assigned stations. Coordinate your tac nets with flag central command. Engaging full tactical command mode now."

And the screen goes abruptly blank. I stare in bemusement for a second, before my eyes turn to the tactical display. The dot marking the Krotus is gone, replaced by a gradually swelling, red-flashing globe... the icon for a warp core explosion.

A voice sounds across the communicator. "This is Vice Marshal zh'Threv! The flagship is down, I repeat, the flagship is down! I am assuming tactical command -"

And she falls silent, and another dot on the tactical display swells and is gone.

I curse, and slam at the panel, setting up a broadcast of my own. "All Imperial Guard ships! This is Vice Admiral Shohl of Starfleet! The Hegemony have logic-bombed your computers! Do not attempt to assume tactical control - you'll lose antimatter confinement if you do!" I look at F'hon. "We should have Imperial Guard combat libraries on file -"

"Sir." Anthi's voice and face are stricken. "Sir - when we entered Andoria local space - I accepted and approved a routine update package on our control software from Andoria Spacedock."

I gaze at her in mute horror. So, Spirits of Earth's computers could be infected too....

The sick silence on the bridge is broken by Klerupiru. "Well," she says in conversational tones, "it's another datum point to work with, anyway." She tugs fretfully at her collar for a moment, before turning her attention back to her console.

I slump, defeated, in my command chair. Without tactical coordination... without computer control to compensate for light-speed lag, to update out ships on the rapidly-changing events of a space battlefield... the Imperial Guard, no matter how superbly trained, how desperately motivated, is nothing more than a rabble. One that the approaching Hegemony ships will brush aside with ease -

"Wait a minute," I say. "We've got one resource left."

"Sir?" says Anthi blankly.

"Two, actually, but we can't use the Messalina. But the Imperial Guard can use Starfleet protocols... and the Falcon wouldn't have updated with Andorian control software, even if Ronnie Grau was as conscientious as you are. All ships," I thumb the comms panel again, "coordinate tactical control on Starfleet data transmission protocols, and run them through the USS Falcon's command net."

On the private channel, Ronnie's voice is suddenly fraught. "Hold on a sec," she says, "hold on. You're giving me control of the defence of Andoria?"

"Looks like you're the only one who can do it." I lean forward in my command chair, without adding the unspoken rider: don't mess it up.