enthusiastically. “Aye, aye, Admiral. Transmitting now.”
Janeway looked at Kirk questioningly. Kirk pointed to a battered communications console. Paint was flaking from its side.
“Joseph,” Kirk prompted.
“You’ve gotta see this, Admiral,” Joseph said to Janeway as she followed him to the console. He pressed his thumb on a small control that looked like anything but a biometric reader, then he tapped a code into an out-of- date keypad. A moment later, a back panel on the console opened to reveal a translucent control surface of the latest Starfleet design.
“Enter your code here,” Joseph said grandly, “and the message will come up here.” He pointed to another panel as it slid sideways and a small viewscreen rotated up from the new opening.
Janeway thanked him; then, at his father’s beckoning, Joseph joined Kirk, McCoy, and Scott as they gathered by the turbolift doors at the back of the bridge, to allow the admiral her privacy.
The message Janeway received took her less than two minutes to read. She returned to Kirk, cheeks flushed, skin pale. Her summation was succinct. “The Cochrane Institute has been attacked. Completely leveled. Starfleet’s top engineers were there for a critical test. Authorities aren’t certain if there’re any survivors.”
Even Joseph picked up on how serious this development was, just from the adults’ reaction.
Janeway held her hand to her combadge. “There’s nothing covert about what’s happened, Captain. The Federation is at war.”
She tapped her badge. Kirk understood. The admiral’s mind was already elsewhere. Her body would be as soon as she could beam it there.
“Janeway to Sovereign. Tell conn to prepare for immediate departure. One to beam back….”
Kirk nodded to Janeway as she quickly faded into the golden glow of the transporter effect. It felt odd not to be heading to the center of the action. But he still had a mission of his own. Spock.
Kirk’s friends shared his conviction. Once, they, too, had been indivisible from whatever concerned the Federation. But they were individuals, now. Others had taken, and would continue to take, their places on the front lines.
McCoy found a new station to sit at. “They’re doing it again: telling us too little, too late,” he grumbled.
“D’ye actually think it’s possible they’re on to something?” Scott asked. “Could they really help us find Spock?”
Kirk considered the question as he watched Joseph hurry to the conn station and adjust the visual sensors.
“More than a hundred people have disappeared… there’s got to be something to that,” Kirk said. He just didn’t know if that something was what Janeway and Starfleet Intelligence said it was.
On the three-part screen, the impressive silhouette of Janeway’s flagship appeared-the U.S.S. Sovereign, the original vessel that had given rise to the class that now included Jean-Luc’s Enterprise-E.
“They’re powering up,” Joseph reported.
Kirk looked over at his son-his child. As most children did, Joseph was going through a stage in which he was utterly consumed by starships. He could recite the statistics for almost half the Fleet.
“They’re establishing their warp field….”
Joseph was also an avid student of the Belle Reve’s sensors and scanners. A Starfleet career wasn’t out of the question, though Kirk was determined not to force any decisions on him until the child’s own interests had had more time to develop.
“Standard power curve,” Joseph announced, correctly interpreting the tactical screens at his station.
Kirk saw Scott grinning.
“Takes after his father,” Kirk said.
Scott frowned. “I was thinkin’ he took after his Uncle Scotty.”
Kirk’s laugh was lost as the bridge filled with light.
The three viewscreens flared with the silent destructive explosion that struck the U.S.S. Sovereign.
Janeway’s ship was torn apart.
The war had come to Vulcan.
6
S.S. BELLE REVE, VULCAN
STARDATE 58552.2
Before the destruction of the Sovereign had even registered in his conscious thoughts, Kirk dove to the tactical console to raise shields.
There are few safer places for a spacecraft to be than in orbit of Vulcan, so shields for most ships are routinely set to the lowest navigational settings-enough to deal with any errant orbital detritus that has escaped detection by Vulcan Space Central.
But a seven-hundred-meter-long starship exploding within a kilometer of the Belle Reve would produce debris of a different magnitude.
The bridge of the small ship vibrated as her power plants ramped up from standby to full output. In those few seconds, Kirk stared at the terrible image on his main screens: Janeway’s starship was so large, it appeared to disintegrate in slow motion.
The explosion had begun in the lower engineering hull, almost in line with the wide, winglike pylons that anchored the nacelles.
That location instantly told Kirk that something had gone wrong with the Sovereign’s warp drive.
Kirk could only watch as secondary detonations raced along the pylons, twisting them and the nacelles they supported. The port nacelle cracked open as streams of antimatter vented through its blue Cerenkov emitters, triggering multiple explosions wherever the hypervelocity clouds of antiprotons made contact with the physical structure of the ship. A glowing haze began to form around the nacelles as the antimatter continued to react with the great ship’s lost atmosphere.
For the first few moments of destruction, the main saucer remained intact. Kirk saw a string of smaller explosions-evenly spaced bright pinpoint flashes-stitch across the saucer attachment points.
That meant automatic separation had been triggered-a desperate maneuver under the conditions Kirk saw. There would have been no time to warn the crew. Whoever was in the corridors or turbolifts when the separation charges detonated would already be dead, blown into space the instant the saucer detached.
In just those few seconds that time seemed to slow, Kirk felt the ship’s death as if it were his own. He knew what he had to do. So did his friends.
Kirk’s hands worked the flight controls to move the Belle Reve in through the expanding vortex of tumbling debris.
Scott was at his engineering station, bringing the sensors and tractor beam online.
“I’ll be in sickbay,” McCoy said, no quaver in his voice, no hint of complaint.
Kirk kept his eyes on his controls, addressed his son. “Joseph, get to the transporter. Whoever Scotty beams in, you take him to Bones.”
Kirk heard a hoarse “Yessir.” Then the turbolift doors puffed shut and it was just the captain and the engineer. Their mission: to save whomever they could from a crew of more than one thousand.
Over six hundred died that day.
In two hours of rescue operations, the Belle Reve beamed in twelve survivors.
Kirk located one in space and Scott beamed her aboard in time. She’d managed to get partially into an environmental suit, sealing her helmet, but having no time to don her gloves. Registering the loss of atmosphere from her open sleeves, her suit remained pressurized by inflating emergency cuffs around her forearms. Exposed to vacuum, the soft tissue of her hands had swollen grotesquely to twice its normal size.
Two more were discovered located in an intact compartment, once part of the hangar deck. The pressure door had slammed shut the instant the separation charges blew. No hope existed for their friends who’d been on
