Captain's Glory

18

U.S.S. ENTERPRISE, SECTOR 001

STARDATE 58567.2

Sleeping was the worst.

Each night, Picard and Beverly Crusher were locked into the captain’s cabin under visual sensor surveillance as three guards stood watch in the corridor. Each officer assigned to this mission was required to follow the same routine.

The enlisted crew slept on bunks in the hangar bay, using the emergency supplies the Enterprise carried for humanitarian aid and mass evacuations. There could be no privacy, not even in the heads and showers.

Despite the forced company everyone on board had to endure, Picard was not the only one to note how empty his ship seemed to be.

Worf, La Forge, Beverly-they all had commented on the eerie sense of abandonment they felt.

Even with the need for trios of security guards, the crew complement was less than half its normal number. There were no non-Starfleet family members on board. The science departments had been closed and all staff reassigned to Mercury. In engineering, La Forge had kept only enough specialists for three skeleton shifts. With the warp core shut down, there was no need for warp engineers.

That, more than anything else, Picard decided, was what made his ship feel so lifeless: the constant, almost subliminal vibration of the warp engines was gone, as if the Enterprise had lost her pulse, her heart.

She was no longer a starship, just another spacecraft.

Lying quietly in the darkness of his quarters, Picard felt as if a part of himself had withered along with his ship, and he feared that soon the Federation would follow in this slow descent into helplessness. Not even the comforting presence of Beverly beside him could dispel his apprehension and his growing sense of vulnerability.

At 0300 ship’s time, it was those dark thoughts and not Picard’s sleep that was disturbed when Worf called him from the bridge.

Picard felt Beverly stir, turned his head to look at the com screen by his bunk, no need to open his eyes. “Go ahead, Mister Worf. I’m awake.”

“Captain, there is a ship approaching our coordinates at high warp. It’s on course for Earth. It will reach our position in thirty-three minutes.”

Picard sat up, eyes now open, staring at the image of his first officer on the bridge. Beverly got out of bed, used to the hours of a ship’s captain, little different from those of a chief medical officer.

After three days on picket duty in the Oort Cloud surrounding Earth’s solar system, the Enterprise hadn’t encountered a single warp vessel. The other ships enforcing the embargo of Sector 001 had reported only a handful of vessels requesting entry. All available information indicated the inexplicable warp-core malfunctions had continued to propagate as Doctor Muirhead had predicted. Older and less powerful cores were being affected now, stranding even more ships in interstellar space, a new diaspora.

“Is it a Starfleet vessel?” Picard asked.

“Technically, yes.”

” ‘Technically’?”

“It is a Q-ship. A Starfleet vessel with civilian registry. The Belle Reve.”

Picard knew the name well.

“That’s Kirk’s ship,” Beverly said.

“So he claims,” Worf replied.

Picard headed for his private lavatory as Beverly stood by the cabin’s small replicator, ordering Earl Grey and coffee. He understood Worf’s skepticism. Under the current rules of engagement, no Starfleet vessel was to accept the identity of the crew or passengers of an approaching ship until genetic identity had been confirmed and somatic continuity had been established.

The lavatory door slipped open as Picard approached. “I’ll be on the bridge in a few minutes. Tell Captain Kirk I look forward to his arrival.”

“I don’t think he is planning on rendezvousing with us.”

Picard paused in the doorway, looked back at the com screen.

“Kirk does understand the current situation, does he?”

Picard couldn’t see Worf on the screen, but he heard his barely constrained frustration. Apparently, he had had a conversation with Kirk. “He was not… forthcoming. I believe you will have to discuss the matter with him yourself.”

“Understood. Ten minutes.”

Picard set the sonics for a quick, bracing shower.

He had a feeling he’d need to be on his toes.

When it came to James T. Kirk, nothing was ever easy.

The Belle Reve sped for Earth at battle stations.

Kirk had spent four days focused solely on events at Vulcan. Nothing had intruded on his quest to find Spock and to rescue his child.

And in that time, the Federation had been brought to the brink of collapse.

The details Kirk had received during his conversation with Worf had left him stunned. The situation seemed unreal. And yet Marinta’s words came back to him, giving him perspective, as if she had known the full scope of the threat they faced when he had seen only the personal.

“If you save Joseph and lose the galaxy, what will you have gained? What legacy will you have left him?”

The Federation in danger. The interaction of the entire galactic culture at an end.

The Totality was not just his enemy. It was everyone’s.

But even knowing that was not enough to change his plan.

“Jim, are you sure about this?” McCoy asked.

Kirk was at the navigation console on the bridge of his ship. Scott was back in engineering; the warp engines would likely need some adjustments in the next hour.

The Emergency Medical Hologram was at tactical. Doctor McCoy, who was one of the medical experts whose personality and knowledge had been used to help create the EMH, stood at Kirk’s side.

“If what Worf said is true,” Kirk explained, “then the Belle Reve could be the only warp vessel within twenty light-years of Earth. If we rendezvous with the Enterprise… as soon as we stop, we’re a target.”

McCoy frowned. “That’s assuming the Enterprise has been compromised or taken over. You don’t have any evidence of that.”

As far as Kirk was concerned, he had all the evidence he needed and was surprised McCoy didn’t understand. “Then where’s Jean-Luc? You saw the bridge crew when Worf hailed us-other than him, did you recognize anyone?”

“It’s ship’s night,” McCoy argued. “Worf said Picard’s on his way to the bridge.”

“Then when he arrives, I’ll reconsider. In the meantime, Bones, I want you and the Doctor to stand by on shields and weapons.”

The hologram spoke up from the tactical console. “I, for one, would feel more comfortable changing course to avoid the Enterprise altogether.” He shrugged at Kirk. “I will not direct lethal fire at a fellow Starfleet vessel.”

“Understood,” Kirk said. They had already had that conversation. If the need should arise, Kirk would take over the weapons, shooting only to disable.

“Then why ask for a confrontation?” the hologram persisted.

Kirk called up a tactical display on the right-hand screen. It showed the Oort Cloud-a spherical shell of icy material left over from the formation of Earth’s solar system, fully three light-years across. But it was the interior boundary of the cloud, stretching between thirty to fifty astronomical units from the sun, that Kirk was concerned with.

There, the collection of primordial material was the densest. Thousands of bodies, many larger than Pluto, and which would have qualified as planets in their own right had they been closer to the sun, moved in vast, slow orbits. It was from this shell that the majority of the system’s comets originated. Since the Romulan War, centuries earlier, it was considered Sector 001’s first line of defense against invasion.

After his initial brief conversation with Picard’s first officer, Kirk had used the Belle Reve’s powerful sensors to scan that interior shell of cosmic debris. Though it would take days and a much closer position to assemble a complete picture of the current structure of the shell, it was instantly obvious to Kirk that Starfleet hadn’t changed its tactics.

Sensors identified approximately eighty vessels positioned in the cloud, each about the same distance from the others, establishing a defensive network. And if Kirk could see eighty ships with a preliminary, long-distance sensor sweep, he suspected that meant hundreds of others were also in position, carefully hidden among the planetoids and smaller orbital debris.

Even a warp vessel attempting to pass through the Oort Cloud to enter the system could find itself under fire from those ships. And if that vessel stopped, as Worf had instructed Kirk to do, it would quickly be englobed-surrounded in three dimensions. Escape from such a trap was possible, Kirk knew, but could be costly.

The end result of the tactical situation was that, contrary to the holographic doctor’s wishes, it would not be possible to avoid confrontation. So, in his search for advantage, Kirk decided to maintain course toward the Enterprise, if only because a few members on that ship’s crew, like Worf, might still remember him, and that memory might result in a few seconds of doubt and delay before hostilities began. Battles and the fates of empires had been decided by less.

“I’m not asking for a confrontation,” Kirk said reassuringly to the hologram. “It’s just that of all the ships defending the system, the Enterprise is the one least likely to fire on us.”

“You mean, as long as Picard’s still in command,” McCoy added. He sounded unconvinced.

Kirk wasn’t open to debate. “Bones, I didn’t abandon Joseph on Vulcan to come here and waste time. We’re not stopping till we get to Earth.”

“Well, don’t waste time telling me,” McCoy said crossly. “Tell them.”

On the center screen, the sensors finally were in range to create the subspace image of the ship they bore down on.

At the edge of a cluster of tumbling ice and rock that in battle could be used to confuse sensors, the enemy waited.

The U.S.S. Enterprise.