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The communications officer punched commands into her console and shook her head. “They don’t acknowledge our hails, sir.”
Nogura cursed under his breath. Commander Cooper looked across the Hub at him. “Do you really think you can talk our way out of this?”
“I’d like to try,” Nogura said. He looked back at Dunbar. “Send the following to the lead ship: ‘Tholian commander, this is Admiral Heihachiro Nogura. I formally request terms of surrender.’” A hundred wide-eyed stares suddenly were aimed at Nogura from every direction. He looked at Dunbar and ignored the others. “Send it, Lieutenant. See if it buys us any time.”
Dunbar transmitted the message as she replied, “Aye, sir.”
“Commander Ca
Raymond Ca
“How many ships are still docked?”
Ca
“Tell them all to launch now,” Nogura said. “As in, right this second. I don’t care who or what they’re waiting for, they need to go. Anybody left behind will have to beam out with us.” The admiral shot an imploring look at Dunbar, who seemed to be listening to a reply. “Well?”
She winced. “You’re not go
“On speakers,” Nogura growled.
The universal translator parsed a screech that made Nogura think of a saw biting through metal bones. “There will be no parley. No terms. No prisoners. No mercy.”
The noise ended, and Dunbar said, “That’s all there is, sir.”
Nogura looked back at his bloated fleet ops manager. “Ca
“The last three ships just cleared moorings.”
On the towering screens, the Tholian armada split up into attack groups. Each wing of thirty or forty ships peeled off from the main force, shifting course while the rest of the fleet wheeled at high speed around Vanguard, like scavengers circling a dying beast they know will soon become carrion. Nogura steeled himself for the carnage to come. “Cooper, order all gu
Ca
“Raise shields!” Nogura ordered. “Damage control and fire suppression teams to action stations.” He opened an internal comm to the engineering levels. “Ops to reactor control. Increase power output to one hundred ten percent of rated maximum.”
“Roger that,” replied the station’s chief engineer, Lieutenant Isaiah Farber.
Cooper tensed. “The Tholians are locking weapons!”
Switching to a coded subspace frequency, Nogura opened a cha
Then came the bedlam of a thousand blows landing at once on Vanguard’s shields, and the station’s worst-case scenario became a reality: It was under siege.
Nogura knew the battle’s outcome was a foregone conclusion.
The only mysteries now were how long it would last—and how many would die.
33
An endless red storm of disruptor pulses converged upon Vanguard. “Evasive!” Nassir ordered, and zh’Firro counterintuitively steered the Sagittarius toward the incoming barrage to minimize the ship’s profile—and then she accelerated.
Jarring blasts hammered the ship. As the deck pitched and yawed, Nassir clung white-knuckled to his chair and shouted over the clamor of detonations. “Return fire, phasers only!”
The whoop-and-shriek of the ship’s phasers was deafening. Unlike larger ships, which had the luxury of isolating their weapons systems from the crew compartments, the Sagittarius’s two phaser nodes were just a few meters overhead, on the dorsal hull. Each salvo tortured Nassir’s eardrums with piercing, high-pitched noise.
A sudden flare on the main viewer made him wince and shield his eyes. Blue and white fusillades lit up the screen as Vanguard unleashed the full might of its fearsome—and until that moment, never tested—arsenal. Within seconds, the space within twenty kilometers of Vanguard became a hellish chaos of metal and fire. Several dozen high-power phaser batteries lashed the Tholian armada circling the station. Scores of brilliant white photon torpedoes—some in tight clusters, some in wide spreads—tore through the attacking Tholian battle groups. Ephemeral flares revealed the station’s shields as salvos of Tholian disruptor fire slammed home. Then tractor beams leapt from the starbase like golden spears, snared half a dozen Tholian cruisers, and dragged them into the station’s brutal kill zones of overlapping phaser and torpedo fire.
For a moment, Nassir swelled with irrational hope that the battle might not be futile, after all. Then a crushing blow pummeled the Sagittarius, and darkness swallowed the bridge as flames and acrid smoke erupted from the port bulkhead above the auxiliary engineering station.
Tactical officer Dastin attacked the blaze at point-blank range with a handheld fire extinguisher as Terrell hollered, “Damage report!”
Dastin waved a path through the smoke. “Secondary systems are fried!”
The battle on the screen was little more than a fiery blur as zh’Firro guided the ship through wild corkscrew maneuvers at full impulse. The daring young zhen raised her voice to compete with the screaming din of the phasers. “Impulse power’s down to eighty percent!”
Nassir opened a cha
“Main plasma relay’s been hit,” Ilucci replied, his voice barely audible over the clamor of shouting voices and straining machines in the engine room. “We’re ru
Another near-miss rumbled through the hull. “Make it fast. Bridge out.” Nassir closed the cha
“Not well,” the Vulcan centenarian said. “Her starboard shields are collapsing. She’s coming hard about to turn her port side to the armada.”
“Give her covering fire until she completes the turn,” Nassir ordered. To zh’Firro he added, “Sayna, swing us past the Panama, try to draw the enemy’s fire.” A punishing concussion stuttered the overhead lights and flickered the bridge consoles.
“I don’t think we’ll have to try very hard,” zh’Firro said as she changed course.
Theriault looked up from the sensors. “Bandits, twelve o’clock high!”
“Targeting,” Sorak replied. “Firing.” Another angry chorus from the phasers, and he added, “Attack group breaking off, heading for zone three.”
“Leave them to Buenos Aires,” Nassir said. “Find a new target and keep firing.”
Alerts and system failures cascaded across the Endeavour’s master engineering console faster than Bersh glov Mog could deploy damage-control teams. He switched from one internal comm circuit to another as he rattled off orders. “Team Four, hull breach on Deck Nine, Section Two! Team Seven, phaser coupling overload, Deck Sixteen, Section Four! Fire Team Alpha, plasma fire on the hangar deck!” He was looking at the status indicator for the secondary hull’s port defense screen generator as it toggled from green to red, indicating a failure, and he reached to open a comm cha
A godhammer of concussive force hit the ship and sent him and the other engineers tumbling. Despite his muddied hearing, Mog heard someone call out, “We’ve lost shields!” Another replied, “Hull breach! Outer sections!”
Mog pulled himself to his feet and stumbled like a drunkard across the heaving deck. “Air masks! Now!” He grabbed the respirator kit next to his station and strapped it on, then lurched across the compartment toward the lockers where the hazmat gear was stored, fighting every step of the way against the random pitching and rolling of the ship. Damn these weak inertial dampers, he cursed to himself. Down the length of main engineering, he saw other officers and enlisted men fumbling with their breathing masks.