Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War Read online

  A sheet of orange light suddenly overwhelmed Nijil’s vision, momentarily dazzling him before falling off quickly into impenetrable darkness. As his eyes adjusted to a much dimmer level of illumination, he saw that he was standing on a narrow, raised metal dais inside a small gray room.

  A familiar deep voice sounded almost directly behind him. “Hello, Nijil.”

  The chief technologist turned and faced the voice’s source. “Admiral Valdore. Why have you attacked my transport? Where are my people?”

  Though his expression remained humorless, the admiral chuckled. After dismissing the junior officer who had doubtless been present only to run the transporter console, Valdore strode toward the edge of the stage.

  “Which people are you most concerned about, Nijil?” the admiral said. “Those who accompanied you on the Eireth? Or the fellow traitors with whom you were expecting to rendezvous on your way to Glintara? We’ll have to relocate the Glintara facility, incidentally, since your radical friends no doubt know all about it now. The last thing we need is to lose another cutting-edge research complex to an unfortunate ‘accident.’”

  Nijil became conscious of the fact that his mouth was opening and closing but not emitting any sound. Doing his best to master his shock, he said, “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Admiral.”

  Valdore sighed, a look of disgust etched deeply into his craggy, battle-hardened features. “You insult us both by pleading ignorance, Nijil. I’ve been keeping you under close surveillance for more than a fvheisn now.”

  All at once, Nijil’s insides seemed to go into freefall. A fvheisn. The time it took the gravitationally entangled sibling worlds Romulus and Remus to complete a single revolution about Eisn, their mutual fatherstar.

  “I know all about your affiliation with the Ejhoi Ormiin,” Valdore continued as he approached Nijil with slow, stalking footfalls. The chief technologist was becoming hyperaware of the admiral’s considerable height and breadth at the shoulders. “You’ve been the principal reason all along that the Ejhoi Ormiin have succeeded in staying one step ahead of the military for such a long time. Not to mention the reason the fleet has yet to succeed in developing high-warp capability through the late Doctor Ehrehin’s avaihh lli vastam program.”

  “Admiral, that simply isn’t true,” Nijil said, knowing that his words sounded lame even as he uttered them. He took a step backward as Valdore continued his relentless advance.

  Glancing down at the admiral’s belt, Nijil saw the pommel of the razor-sharp dathe’anofv-sen—the Honor Blade—that dangled from it.

  “We shall see, Nijil. Those we captured from the Ejhoi Ormiin team that appeared to be on its way to meet you are being interrogated as we speak. Who knows, if they turn out to be innocent of any conspiracy or wrongdoing, then maybe you will, too. In that event, I will owe you a profound apology. Perhaps even a promotion.” Valdore smiled as he mounted the dais, forcing Nijil to shrink against the transporter stage’s unyielding back wall. “But somehow I doubt that.”

  “I look forward to clearing my name, Admiral,” Nijil said. He tried to project as much confidence as possible, but he knew that it was doing him precious little good; his back was up against the wall, both literally and figuratively. He tried to steady himself by placing his palms against the cold metal behind him as faintness and vertigo fought over which would sweep his feet out from beneath him first. Beads of sweat gathered on his brow as he contemplated how much the admiral might already know about his covert efforts to change the Romulan Star Empire’s expansionist paradigm. Was Valdore aware that he had conspired with First Consul T’Leikha in a failed attempt to assassinate him?

  “You will no doubt demand the Right of Statement,” Valdore said with a nod.

  A small runnel of sweat broke loose from Nijil’s deeply ridged forehead, stinging his right eye. “Of course, Admiral.”

  Valdore unsheathed his dathe’anofv-sen without breaking eye contact with Nijil. He was sorely tempted to look at the bright metal, but Nijil felt he couldn’t afford to look away from the admiral’s dark, penetrating stare.

  “You’ll be allowed to make your statement, Nijil.”

  “Thank you, Admiral.”

  “You may not have any reason to thank me. You will give your statement not once, but twice.”

  Nijil’s eyebrows both went aloft. “Twice?” “You will deliver your first statement in the traditional manner. You will then reiterate it while connected to a bank of mind probes.”

  Nijil’s guts turned to frozen slush at the mention of mind probes. He’d seen the damage they could do, especially at their highest settings. He’d participated in the interrogation of Vulcan’s erstwhile administrator, V’Las, after he’d fled his own planet in the hope of building a new life for himself on Romulus.

  V’Las was still alive on his adopted homeworld, but what remained of the ousted official’s mind was scarcely enough to keep a sessile, tubelike caotai’hhui alive and able to filter-feed at the bottom of the Apnex Sea.

  “Please, Admiral,” Nijil said, conscious of the quaver in his voice. “I’ve been nothing but loyal to you.”

  “Don’t worry, Nijil,” Valdore said, raising his blade so that the chief technologist could no longer avoid looking at it. “I won’t inflict anything on you that I’d withhold from your compatriots. You may consider this an opportunity to regain my trust. If, however, the mind probes reveal you to be in possession of special, hitherto concealed knowledge of, say, a previously unknown facility where your Ejhoi Ormiin colleagues are attempting to turn Doctor Erhehin’s theoretical work into a functioning high-warp stardrive—”

  Valdore paused, emphasizing his brief silence by placing his blade’s keen edge tightly against Nijil’s throat. Nijil felt something warm on his throat that he knew wasn’t sweat.

  “In that event,” Valdore said, resuming at a volume scarcely above a whisper, “let’s just say that things will go very badly for you.”

  And not necessarily quickly, Nijil thought as vertigo finally got the better of him.

  EIGHT

  Tuesday, October 19, 2156

  Enterprise NX-01

  Near Vissia

  HOSHI SATO THOUGHT THAT the decontamination chamber on D Deck was the closest thing Enterprise had to a sensory deprivation tank—a place where a person might find near-perfect solitude. Clad only in her blue Starfleet-issue undershirt and briefs, her eyes closed beneath the plastic shield that covered them, Sato stretched back across the padded bench and let the combination of radiation and cleansing dermal gel work their subtle magic of destroying whatever alien biomaterial still lingered on her skin. As on any other occasion when circumstance brought her here, she reveled in the sterilization field’s warm azure glow.

  Doing her best to ignore the residual burning of the tiny, still-healing bite wounds that crisscrossed her torso, she imagined herself floating. The gentle pressure of her back against the cushions faded and she became a thing of pure thought, singular and alone—and certainly immune to the predations of alien parasites of the kind that had made her presence here necessary in the first place.

  Then Major Takashi Kimura, the officer currently in charge of Enterprise’s detachment of Military Assault Command Organization troopers, ruined her illusion of perfect solitude by speaking.

  “It’s been twenty minutes, Lieutenant Sato,” he said. “Phlox said we’d both be done to a turn in fifteen.”

  Sato waited until the MACO commander was done chuckling at his own crude joke—he always seemed to think that drawing a comparison between the decon chamber’s radiocleansing function and Chef’s approach to grilling spare ribs was wildly funny and original—before replying.

  With a shake of her head that made the eye shields fall from her face, she said, “I’m fine right where I am, Major.”

  She opened her eyes in time to see his hulking form rise from a nearby bench. He was clothed much as she was, though his MACO-issue undergarments differed in that the
y bore a gray camouflage pattern.

  “I’m surprised you want to stay in such a confined space,” Kimura said as he draped a white towel across his shoulders and lingered beside the sealed exit hatch.

  This room would seem a whole lot less “confined” if I didn’t have to share it with a side of beef like you, Sato thought. She said, “Don’t worry about me, Major.”

  A crooked grin split his face. “I never ‘worry,’ Lieutenant. I just couldn’t help but notice that you were having a full-on panic attack before we got you off that wrecked Neethian ship.”

  “I wasn’t panicking,” she said with a tart scowl.

  He held up both hands in a placating gesture. “Sorry, Lieutenant. I must have jumped to conclusions prematurely because of all the screaming. Not to mention the master class on claustrophobia you’d given the entire boarding team by the time we got you back to the shuttlepod.”

  She pushed herself up onto her elbows and glared at him. “I think I’m entitled to a scream or two, Major. My environmental suit was losing pressure because thousands of microscopic alien creepy-crawlies had bitten all the way through it. And I was trapped inside my suit with those things when they started digging into me.”

  Kimura pointed at the angry red welt that ran diagonally across his lower belly. “I was on the lunch menu, too, remember? That’s why I knew there was more than a flare-up of neurosis going on.”

  Sato allowed her glare to soften, at least a little. “Thanks, Major. I think.”

  He shrugged. “I never said I thought you weren’t neurotic. Just that I understand why you felt you had to scream.”

  She looked around the room for something to throw at him; other than the flip-flops on her feet, she could find no convenient projectile anywhere within reach.

  “Well, you can stay in if you like. I’m getting out.” He turned his attention to the hatch mechanism. Then he pulled his hands back from the latch, making a show of hesitating as turned his face back toward her. “Unless, of course, you’d like me to stay long enough to rub a second coat of Phlox’s Flea-Killer Compound into your, um, back.”

  Sato grimaced. Any prolonged thought about the critters that had made her presence here necessary came close to prolapsing her entire gastrointestinal tract—perhaps even as much as would accepting any additional help from Major Kimura in applying dermal gel.

  “Thanks for the offer, Major. I can take care of it myself.”

  Kimura moved back toward the hatch. “Suit yourself, Lieutenant.”

  “And they’re not ‘fleas,’ Major,” she said as the past several hours of her suppressed ire came bubbling upward in spite of herself. “At least, not exactly.”

  He faced her again, then shrugged. “The word ‘flea’ describes these little bastards well enough for me.” He began ticking off points on his large fingers. “Whatever else Crewman Cutler might have to say about ’em, they’re tiny parasites. Evolution has not only specially adapted them for drinking mammalian blood, it has also optimized them for biting through any clothing that stands between them and a meal, environmental suits included. Hell, the little buggers might have chewed right through the polarized hull plating to get at us if Commander Reed hadn’t found a way to use the pulse cannons to sterilize the ship’s exterior. That qualifies them for an honorary membership in the order Siphonaptera. Which makes ’em fleas in my book.”

  Sato was impressed to discover that the MACO had evidently read a book or two in his time. It was a somewhat dismaying discovery, however, because she knew she wasn’t half the amateur zoologist that Kimura seemed to believe he was. But she also felt confident that her etymological expertise would more than make up for whatever entomological deficits she might possess.

  Besides, she had always intensely disliked imprecise language.

  “They’re not fleas, Major.” Shedding her flip-flops as she got to her feet, she began ticking off her own points. “No terrestrial flea species I’m aware of can live independently from an atmosphere the way these things can. Or chew through a space suit, or a ship’s hull. An Earth flea would freeze solid after a few seconds in a hard vacuum, and that would be that. If you have to compare these little critters to anything from Earth, you’d be better off thinking of tardigrades—those microscopic, eight-legged animals that schoolkids call ‘water bears’ or ‘moss piglets.’”

  “Except that these ‘moss piglets’ are superaggressive parasites in addition to being able to survive prolonged hard-vacuum exposure and lethal radiation levels,” he said as the hatch opened. “Maybe Phlox will name the little buggers after you. Exoaphaniptera sato.”

  “Don’t you deserve some credit, too? I wasn’t the only one they tried to eat.”

  He shrugged again. “I know. But you were the first to scream.”

  Kimura disappeared through the hatchway before she could reach for one of her flip-flops and aim it properly. Once the hatchway had sealed itself again, she lay back down on the bench and covered her eyes.

  She recalled that not terribly long ago she had petitioned Captain Archer for an Earthside transfer. At the time, she had felt that she had little to contribute to the success of Enterprise’s mission. But Archer had convinced her instead that her linguistic expertise would become increasingly crucial as the war against the Romulans escalated, and that he desperately needed to keep on her on his senior staff, a team that had already been much diminished by the death of Charles Tucker and the departure of Travis Mayweather.

  She resumed “floating” in the soothing blue radiance. “Exoaphaniptera sato,” she said, and contemplated the irony of achieving immortality not for solving a baffling linguistic puzzle, but because a swarm of space bugs had tried to eat her.

  She knew that what her senses reported was contrary as much to logic as to the laws of physics. However, T’Pol observed the walls and bulkheads of the captain’s mess as they spun very slowly around her. With an act of willpower, she brought the unwelcome, illusory motion to a halt. Discomfort, after all, was merely an artifact of the mind. A mind as trained as hers could be controlled by means of discipline, focus, and mental effort.

  No sooner had the room’s unsettling appearance of movement subsided than she noticed that both of Enterprise’s Neethian guests were watching her with quiet intensity.

  As was Captain Archer, whose brow had furrowed with concern. “Are you all right, Commander?”

  Silently cursing herself for her weakness, T’Pol straightened in her chair. How could she have allowed herself to run out of her olfactory-numbing compound? She had mostly adapted to the odors of the eighty-some humans who lived and worked aboard Enterprise. The scent of the Neethians, however, was another matter entirely.

  Squaring her shoulders as though she were responding to a surprise inspection from the Vulcan High Command, T’Pol said, “There is no need for concern, Captain. It has merely been a long day.”

  “Indeed it has,” said the nearer of the two Neethians, both of whom were seated opposite T’Pol and Archer. Their inflexible, almost crystalline features made their moods more difficult to interpret than those of most other humanoid species she encountered. “It has been a long and eventful day.”

  The other Neethian continued. “You have accomplished much on our behalf, Captain Archer.”

  Archer drank from his water glass, then set it beside what little remained of the meal he had just shared with their visitors. “Don’t mention it, Captain Thenir. We’re just happy we were able to provide what little help we could.”

  “Oh, you’ve done a good deal more than help us,” said the other Neethian, Cerebrar, Thenir’s exec.

  “I wish we could have done more,” Archer said. “But by the time we reached that derelict Neethian passenger transport, it was too late for everyone aboard.”

  “Unfortunately, we did not discover that the vessel’s distress signal was automated until after we dispatched our boarding team,” T’Pol said as she unobtrusively steadied herself by placing her palms on the smooth
tabletop.

  “It was unfortunate indeed that your team was exposed to the voreborers, however,” said Thenir.

  “Voreborers,” Archer said. “The microparasites that attacked our boarding party.”

  Thenir moved his head in a manner that T’Pol could only interpret as a nod. “The voreborers are a most persistent pest, Captain. They have plagued us since the earliest epoch of Neethian star travel. I hope they have inflicted no permanent harm upon your people.”

  “Doctor Phlox has assured me that everyone who was exposed to them has already been treated. They’re all expected to recover completely,” Archer said. “We’ve even managed to get rid of the parasites we discovered chewing on our hull.”

  “This gratifies us,” Cerebrar said. “As does your discovery of a thing we have sought in vain for centuries—the voreborers’ main breeding ground.”

  “Breeding ground?” Archer said, looking perplexed.

  “The region where you found the derelict vessel is evidently where the voreborers gather to mate and reproduce,” Thenir said. “Some of the spatial anomalies you have charted in this sector may be the very places where the voreborers evolved in the first place.”

  “But I thought the voreborers came from your home-world,” Archer said. “And that they followed you into deep space.”

  “No, Captain,” said Cerebrar. “The voreborers can live only in deep space. They are uniquely adapted to it.”

  “Life evolving independently of any planet?” Archer said, stunned. “Forgive me, Cerebrar, but that sounds unlikely.”

  “The phenomenon is merely outside Starfleet’s present realm of experience,” T’Pol observed. “Doctor Phlox has documented several such species, as has the Vulcan High Command. The term Phlox has applied collectively to these life-forms is ‘cosmozoa’—creatures capable of carrying out all their life functions in deep space, independent of a planetary environment.”