Harbinger

Anonymous eyewitness statements corroborated one another’s accounts of the bizarre powers Mitchell had displayed during the ship’s transit to Delta Vega. The unattributed statements of these alleged witnesses also had exposed several small but inexplicable discrepancies between Kirk’s own official logs, the death certificate filed by Dr. Piper in the Vanguard operations center, and the account of helm officer Lee Kelso’s death on Delta Vega.

Smack-dab in the middle was Kirk’s glib verbal evasion: “My answer is in my report.” Opposite the rest of Pe

The bottom-line conclusion of Pe

I suppose I should be grateful he cast himself only as my judge and not as my jury and executioner to boot, Kirk brooded. He clicked off the monitor screen, rose from his desk, and collapsed onto his bed. It irked him that members of his crew had spoken without permission to Pe

Kirk had considered those good words to live by then, and he still did now. He resolved not to issue any prohibitions to his crew regarding Pe

He was about to lower the lights and settle in for a much-needed night of rest when his door signal buzzed. “Come.”

The door swished open. Scotty barreled in, a portable data display clutched in his hand. The look on his face was a mix of horror and righteous rage, and his anger thickened his brogue. “Captain!” He waved the data device at Kirk. “Have ye read this? That daft bugger Pe

“Scotty, calm down. It’s—”

“—a travesty! That’s what it is! I swear to ye, Captain, if I find him, he’s goin’ head-first into an impulse vent!”

“Mr. Scott, that’s not—”

“Of all the bloody nerve! Who does he think he is? And who the bloody hell was he talkin’ to? Not my people, I’ll tell you that fer nothin’…”

As Scotty’s tirade continued, Kirk settled into a chair and waited for the chief engineer to pause for breath. Suspecting it might take a while, he made himself comfortable.

9

“Helm, move us into a standard orbit,” Captain Ga

Ga

Her alpha-shift team was on the bridge. Milonakis drifted from station to station, ever vigilant for potential problems and eager to keep everyone in synch. Lieutenant Oriana D’Amato was at the helm; beside her, navigator Ensign Berry was already hard at work plotting the ship’s fastest route to its next urgent task. Lieutenant ch’Sho

Lieutenant Susan Nave pivoted away from her communications console. “Captain, we have audio contact with the outpost.”

“Patch it through.” Ga

The teasing voice of Commander Dean Singer came through loud and clear. “Well, well, if it isn’t the hardest-working ship in Starfleet.” She could hear his teammates in the background, laughing and making other sounds of relieved jubilation. “You have our new coffee machine, yes?”

Coffee machine? Ga

“You can say that again.”

“It comes with a free pound of whole beans. Do you want the Colombian, the Denevan Mountain Roast, or the—”

“Captain,” ch’Sho

“Confirmed,” Milonakis said from the opposite side of the bridge. “Boosting power to the sensors.”

“Batten down the hatches, Dean,” Ga

“Heavy trace elements in their impulse exhaust…” He and ch’Sho

“Local subspace dimpling indicates rapid deceleration from relativistic velocity,” ch’Sho

“Reading unusual energy surges on all six ships…”

“Comparing against the databank…”

Milonakis looked up, alarmed. “They’re Tholian.”

Lifting his eyes from his sensors, ch’Sho

“Yellow alert, raise shields.” She swiveled toward Nave as the warning lights on the walls began to flash. “Hail them.” Ga

Nave entered the commands and nodded back to Ga

“Attention, unidentified Tholian vessels. This is Captain Hallie Ga

Anxiety leached the moisture from Ga

“Helm, break orbit, start evasive maneuvers. Get us out of here.” The Tholian cruisers took shape on the main viewer. Ga

My God, Kevin Judge thought. Has she gone mad?

Main engineering on the Bombay was a madhouse on the best of days. Now the red-alert klaxon was wailing, crimson lights were flashing from every corner and flat surface, and his engineers were scurrying every which way in a frantic race to escape the cold hard fact that they were in the part of the ship that any smart foe would target first and hit the hardest.

He waved down the attention of a team of engineers as they jogged past, each clutching a breathing mask in one hand and a toolkit in the other. “Dump anything noncritical,” Judge told them over the din. “Power down secondary systems, route everything to shields, sensors, and tactical!” Working at his master console, he pieced together new circuit paths, desperate to distribute the stress loads that combat-power demands would place on the already sorely overtaxed starship. He felt the impulse engines rumble overhead as the ship broke orbit and accelerated into battle.