Oh, my. What a burden it is to be popular, to be sure.
"Sir." Tallasa, my long-suffering Andorian exec, speaks up in her best I am taking no nonsense from my commanding officer tones. "I will remind you formally that it is not Starfleet policy to comply with demands of this nature."
"Oh, did I look like I was brimming over with sentiments of noble self-sacrifice?" I hit the comm link to the Tapiola again. One good thing, this laser beam link-up is virtually impossible for the Gorn */*species 1643*/* to hack into. "T'Pia. You're logical. If it starts to look like Ssurt's offer is the sensible deal, let me know, will you?"
"Starfleet policy in these matters -" T'Pia begins.
"I know, I know, I got that from my exec already. Just... consider it logically, will you? I've got my own opinions, but I'm sort of biased." I study the tactical display. It's telling me there are a whole lot of Gorn ships out there.
"Noted," says T'Pia. "Our tactical options seem to be limited, however. We are at a distinct disadvantage."
"Yeah, I spotted that."
"The Gorn battle group consists primarily of cruiser-level and heavier elements. This is unusual. I would have expected a higher proportion of frigates and other light craft."
"Oh, Ssurt has frigates, and I'll even tell you where they are." She's such an innocent, sometimes. "They laid this darn minefield, and then they shot off to lead King Estmere and our frigate groups a merry dance all over that nebula. The distress call was a fake, and we fell for it beautifully."
"Ssurt could not have anticipated our exact response," says T'Pia.
"He covered a bunch of options. If we'd hared off in different directions, he'd have picked Falcon off individually. If we'd all moved out as a group, we'd have run into his minefield and got pounded by that until his battle group turned up to finish the job."
"That implies that the mines are concentrated around our probable departure vector towards the nebula," T'Pia says. "If we attempt to leave in another direction, we will encounter fewer mines."
"Yeah, maybe."
"Your ship, like mine, has refracting tetryon armament. A wide-area barrage should be sufficient to clear a gap in the minefield, through which we can escape at warp speed."
"Again, yeah, maybe. But we can't do that. Tylha's still on the station, and we can't throw her to the Gorn, either." The Gorn ships are getting awfully close, and I am short on inspiration.
*/*individual initiative and creativity insufficient for task---
consult central tactical libraries for effective countermeasure procedures---
reconnect--- priority--- reconnect--- reconnect--- reconnect---*/*
Quiet, you. Let me think.
"Awright. We need to neutralize Ssurt's numerical advantage. We need to hold him off until we're missed, until King Estmere realises she's chasing sensor ghosts, or Starfleet notices we've missed a check-in, whatever." I look again at the tactical map, and inspiration, finally, strikes. "Horatius at the bridge."
"I am not familiar with the reference. We need a plan of action, urgently."
I sketch in a course on the tac console. "Here. Hide in the asteroidal debris. Like Horatius at the bridge, we hold choke points - the gaps between the asteroids - where they can only come at us singly. Lars Porsena of Clusium, by the nine gods he swore - sorry, rambling. Let's do it."
"Tapiola should be able to accomplish this. Is the Falcon sufficiently manoeuvrable, though?"
I look over to Tallasa's sister Jhemyl, at the helm. She gives one brisk, competent nod. "Oh, yeah," I say. "Falcon may look like an old-fashioned Excelsior-class cruiser, but she's got a lot going for her. We can do this."
"Lead Gorn cruisers in weapons range in one minute, sir," says Lieutenant Haloy at the science station.
"So let's move. Now."
Falcon swings around, her RCS arrays flashing warning lights already as we push them to the limits. The triple-dagger shape of the Tapiola is sleek and graceful by comparison... and T'Pia is already closer to those asteroids than we are. OK, that might be good, she can cover us as we come in... maybe.
"Leo. Any contact with Tylha yet?"
"No response yet, sir," says Leo Madena from the comms station. Damn. Not that Tylha would have any great insights into the tactical situation, but it would be nice to know she was in the picture. As it is, I can just see her opening the doors for some Gorn hit squad when they land on the station.
"Tactical. We're not moving too quickly, so let's lighten the load... like, a couple of web mines' worth."
"Rolling mines," Tallasa responds. I'm hoping T'Pia's thought to do the same - anything which slows the Gorn ships down, and maybe scatters them around a bit, works to our advantage. Legends of ancient Rome keep whistling through my head, the Horatii and the Curiatii... it's not, necessarily, any help. The commander of that battle group is not Lars Porsena of Clusium. He's someone altogether more scaly, and more up to date.
"Lead Tuatara in weapons range in ten," says Tallasa. Some Gorn captain is pushing his luck, there, a bit, wanting to be first in for the kill. Or the takedown. Whatever they want.
"So, lemme see," I say, "doesn't that sort of put him in our weapons range too?"
"Thought you'd never ask, sir," says Tallasa with a feral Andorian grin. "Aft arrays targeted."
The squat armoured shape of the Gorn cruiser comes into range, and virulent green disruptor light spits from its forward beam banks... and Cherenkov-blue glares shoot back from our aft beam arrays. The fire from the Tuatara gnaws at our shields - but our tetryon barrage is no love-tap, either, and I can see the Gorn's forward shields weakening. A secondary beam snaps off the Tuatara's hull, to strike an approaching Phalanx science vessel. At this range, it won't do much more than rattle his fangs, but it should at least warn them we won't go easy.
And then the Tuatara triggers the web mines, and is suddenly enclosed in a mesh of golden light. Our beam arrays snap shots into it, but the cruiser's drive is offline, and it dwindles and drifts out of our effective range as we continue to race for the relative safety of the asteroid cluster. A flash of light announces that the short-lived forcefield meshes have collapsed. The energy release from that will drain his shields and scar his hull....
So far, though, it's nothing more than a skirmish - cosmetic damage only, a little bit of a scratch, for both sides. My aft shields are still solid, but the cruiser is wounded in little more than its pride. It's when the rest of the Gorn ships close in that things will start getting serious.
"Tapiola is inside the asteroid cluster," Haloy reports.
"Good. How long till we join her?"
"Three minutes," says Jhemyl.
"Three minutes is a long time in politics. What are the Gorn doing?"
"The cruisers are... hanging back," says Tallasa. "But there's some movement - Sir, two of the support vessels are heading off at an angle, at high impulse speed."
Planning to swing wide, curve back in, and get between us and the asteroids. At least, that's what I'd do if I were in their shoes. "Do we still have the laser link to Tapiola?"
"Sorry, sir," says Leo. "I think it's blocked by asteroid debris."
So T'Pia is, at least, safely tucked in among the asteroids. Everything now depends on her situational awareness... or whether we can take on those support ships by ourselves, and finish them before the cruisers catch up with us. Hmm. This is not shaping up to be a good day.
"Battleship Zo'ar," I muse aloud. "Didn't say IKS or GHV... conclusion, this is not an operation sanctioned either by the KDF or the Gorn government. Entirely some private shenanigan on Ssurt's part.... Can you have just one shenanigan, or is it one of those words that's always plural?"
"I don't think that gets us anywhere, sir," says Tallasa, tight-lipped. "One Draguas and one Varanus vessel now on intercept course. Intersecting our trajectory to the asteroid cluster in one minute."
Oh, boy. "Any chance of evading?"
"Not without turning away from the asteroids."
"Right, then. This is where the shooting starts, in earnest. Target the Varanus first off, plasma torps and tetryon beams. Hold the wide area tetryon barrages in reserve, we'll need them later." There are a number of nasty tricks we can play with the tetryon armament, but they won't be enough to finish all Ssurt's ships, not by a long chalk.
I can see the two Gorn support craft on the tac display now. Unlike the squat and chunky Tuataras, these ships are long, almost elegant in their lines. Proper spaceships, like they used to have in the comic books when I was young. All that time ago. They look graceful, they move gracefully, too... in a sharp, sweeping curve... towards us... with weapons hot.
"Stand ready!"
Disruptor beams explode across space, and our forward screen flares under a punishing barrage. Our forward banks spit back blue-hot defiance, and the plasma torpedoes howl out of the launchers. I wince. We're at maximum effective range, and already the Gorn firepower is making my shield strength dip alarmingly -
"Sir!" Haloy's voice. "I have ships on sensors! They're - they're Starfleet, sir!"
"Don't get too cheerful," I say. "They're not real. T'Pia's brought her holo-emitters into the fight, that's all." Still, it's a good sign. The little ginger Vulcan is on the ball, after all.
Vessels like T'Pia's Orb Weaver are fitted with elaborate holo-imagers, and they can - briefly - channel a fair chunk of power through them from the main warp core. Using this offensively - say, by creating holo-images of combat starships - is a relatively new wrinkle. Since my time, anyway. The phantom ships can dish out punishment like the real thing, but they can't take it - the holo-matrices destabilize under weapons fire. And, of course, they fade out anyway once the holo-emitters reach their limits.
But, for the moment, a substantial amount of firepower is hitting that Draguas from an unexpected angle, and that's good news for me. Better news still comes when its Varanus companion is suddenly wrapped in a cage of glowing golden light. Not web mines, this time, but a full-on Tholian web, from the Orb Weaver's emitters. Lines of dazzling blue reach out from among the asteroids, hitting the caged ship - T'Pia's own tetryon banks. And there's a fuzzy white something that I realize, after a second or two, is a Tholian thermionic torp -
"The Varanus is trapped! Hit it! Before it gets free!"
Falcon pours tetryon beams and plasma torps into the web, hammering at the ship within. The web seems to pulse, to flare - and then, suddenly, it collapses in a burst of dazzling light. The Varanus hangs for a moment, scorched and battered - then it vanishes in the far brighter light of a warp core breach.
The nearby blast is too much for T'Pia's holograms, they wink out like so many candle flames in the shockwave. But it's too much, too, for the Draguas. Shields stripped to nothing, hull breaches marring her graceful lines, the support vessel turns to flee - but there is no other target for my forward batteries and T'Pia's, now. Caught in the crossfire, the Draguas shatters and burns.
"OK, guys, nice work. Now, Jhemyl, do your stuff, get us in among those rocks."
"On it," the Andorian says tersely. I nerve myself. I don't like what's going to come next.
Falcon turns and swoops like her namesake, hurtling into the group of asteroids. The deflectors complain as small pieces of rock whang off them, and suddenly the proximity alarms start a constant screaming. On the screen, I see slabs of stone, millions of years old, looking so close I could reach out and touch them -
"Trying not to scratch the paintwork, sir," says Jhemyl in abstracted tones, her hands moving with nerveless precision on the helm console. "Tucking us behind that big chondrite mass ahead, and coming about."
"The cruisers are closing," Tallasa says. "I don't know if they're agile enough to follow us in -"
"They shouldn't be," I say. "But then, we shouldn't be agile enough for this. By rights. We really do have to pull Tylha off that station, you know. It's mostly thanks to her that we got set up with all this classy gear."
"We owe her a drink, then, at any rate," says Tallasa. "Sir, it looks like at least one cruiser is going to try to follow us in -"
And those squat, chunky, compact Tuatara cruisers are better suited to nipping between asteroids than a Starfleet ship. Damn.
*/*structural designs inefficient in both cases---
simple cubical or spherical structure utilizes space more effectively---*/*
Oh, who died and made you Mies van der Rohe? Tallasa's right, a cruiser is speeding towards the asteroids, with a sleek Phalanx science vessel in support. They're undergunned, compared to me and T'Pia, but they don't need to kill us by themselves. All they have to do is flush us out.
"I have contact with the Tapiola, sir," says Leo Madena. "Also - message from Vice Admiral Shohl. Just says 'apprised of situation', sir, that's all."
Well, that's a load off my mind. Not that Tylha can do very much about the situation, but at least she knows it's happening. "Get me T'Pia, then. And then, let's drop some more web mines, and come about... if we've got room to come about?"
"Technically, no, sir," says Jhemyl, "but I'll see what I can do. Can someone kill those proximity alarms? I think they're going to start getting noisy."
I thought they were already noisy enough, but I see what she means, as Falcon twists and turns, threading her way through the masses of rock. I only imagine a brief tremor as the web mines are launched.
"T'Pia here," says a businesslike voice. "What are your requirements?"
"We've got Gorn on our tail. Need to shake them off."
"Logical. My photonic emitters are still in cooldown mode, but -"
Tetryon fire flashes past us from somewhere - I can't make out where, the screen is full of whirling rocks as Jhemyl flings the ship into the asteroid cluster. I can't make out what T'Pia is shooting at, either. She can't possibly have a firing solution on the Gorn.
And indeed she doesn't. What she does have is a line on one of the asteroids, which becomes two asteroids fairly neatly as the tetryon barrage hits home. Fragments of rock fly in all directions - big fragments, some of them. The approaching Phalanx's deflector flares with a massive overload as the ship is hit by a piece of rock roughly the size of the Eiger. As for the approaching Tuatara, its desperate course changes send it straight into our web mines, where its hapless commander has the indignity of sitting still and helpless while his ship is pounded by debris fragments. By the time the shrapnel has stopped flying, our route into the asteroid cluster has been decisively closed behind us.
We worm our way in among the big rocks, near the spiky shape of the Tapiola. "Nicely done, helm," I say, with some feeling.
"Thank you, sir," says Jhemyl.
"Yeah, well, don't feel too grateful, because next time I need to get a grand piano up a spiral staircase, I am totally calling you. What's our overall status? Anyone know?"
"No injuries, no significant damage, just some minor stress on shields and RCS thrusters," says Tallasa. "I'm counting... four, maybe five feasible approaches to our current location, for a Tuatara-sized ship." She gives a little tight-lipped smile. "We can cover those. Between us and the Tapiola -"
"- we can play Horatius at the bridge," I finish for her, cheerfully. "Just so long as no one gets any ideas about acting like Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's son."
"Sir?"
"Never mind. Character in human history - had an advantage like this, and threw it away. Moral of the story, don't be that guy."
"You'd prefer us to be this... Horatius, instead, sir?"
"Oh, yeah. He won." I lean back in the command chair. Life is good. Or, at least, life is not imminently in peril. Probably.
"We're being hailed, sir," says Leo Madena. "Subspace frequency... it's the Gorn commander again."
"Happy, happy, joy, joy. Let's hear him."
The slate-blue features of General Ssurt appear on the screen. "Sorry," I say, "just can't come out to play, not in such nasty weather, I'd catch my death of cold."
"You have found a bolt hole," says Ssurt. "You believe yourself to be safe? That is only temporarily the case, I do assure you."
"It's a big rough universe out there, nobody's safe all the time, General. General in whose army, by the way? You didn't say."
"It is not relevant."
"Oh, but I think it is. You're not claiming to be KDF, or Gorn Hegemony... that makes this a little piece of private enterprise on the side, doesn't it? In which case, General, you need to start thinking about your bottom line. You've lost two ships and taken damage on several others already, that's a whole lot of red ink in your ledger to start with. How many more do I have to smash up, before this enterprise of yours becomes too expensive to turn a profit?"
"More than you can destroy," says Ssurt bluntly. "In any case... we are Gorn, not Ferengi. The cost of the operation is not of paramount importance. We have taken losses, yes... and that makes us the keener to achieve victory. In that way, we will honour the dead."
"By making more of them?" Ssurt is making me feel tired, tired and angry. "I promise you something, General. I am personally going to turn you into luggage."
He seems unmoved. "Other humans have made similar threats. It is evidently some part of human culture... you must explain it to me, when you are my prisoner."
"Don't hold your breath. Anyway, what do you want me for? Who's paying you for this, General?"
"Beam aboard my command ship, and you will find out."
"No, thanks. Momma told me never to get into cars with strange Gorn."
"I regret that you must soon learn to ignore your parent's advice. In the meantime, I will address myself to the commander of the USS Tapiola. Are you receiving my transmission?"
"This is Vice Admiral T'Pia aboard the Tapiola." T'Pia's voice is rigidly professional.
"Excellent. Your presence here is an unanticipated factor, and it is a complication I can do without. I do not need you here, Vice Admiral T'Pia, and you do not need to involve yourself. It is of no matter to me if you choose to depart. Of course, you are not covered by the stipulations of my contract, so it would be no problem for me to destroy you."
"You are attempting to kidnap a Starfleet officer. It is my duty to prevent you," says T'Pia. "As to my destruction, I intend that you should find that a problem of insuperable complexity."
"Very well." Is that amusement in Ssurt's yellow eyes? I'm not enough of a reptile to be able to tell. "It seems we have no more to say to each other, for the present. We will talk again, though, and soon. You may depend upon it."
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