All the thousands of people who had been running toward the transports turned and fled in the opposite direction, oblivious of the fact that they were being herded into the center of New Boulder. Vinueza watched in horror from her second-floor vantage point as the colonists’ pursuers came into view.
Vaguely humanoid obsidian giants moved like whirling dervishes, obliterating stone and metal with the same ease that they pulverized flesh and bone. Their snaking arms ended in vicious conical points and punched with enough force to pulp people’s torsos, scattering their orphaned limbs. Bodies flew apart in front of the titans with each blow, and the walls of the city fell to dust under their relentless advance.
There were hundreds of them. They came from all directions, laying waste to the colony, reaving its people with merciless precision. Blood ran in the streets. The percussion of the storm devoured the screams of the dying.
Vinueza grabbed Panganiban by his collar and pulled his face to hers. “We’re trapped! Get on the comm and get me Reyes, now!”
Reyes’s eyes burned with fatigue. Reports were coming in at every station in Starbase 47’s operations center, and even with all his senior personnel and watch officers summoned to duty in the middle of gamma shift, it seemed as if there weren’t enough eyes to monitor every task.
He stood in the middle of it all, hunched over the hub on the supervisor’s deck. Gathered at the octagonal console with him were T’Prynn, Jetanien, Cooper, and Lieutenant Isaiah Farber, the station’s chief of engineering.
“Endeavour’s reporting moderate damage, sir,” Farber said. “Shield failures, power loss in the warp drive.”
Reyes’s thoughts were moving quickly. “What about the Klingons? Did they get hit?”
Cooper called up a tactical grid on the hub’s flat, central display. “One ship dusted in the first salvo; the other looks like it got hit the same as Endeavour.”
As usual, Jetanien focused on the bigger picture. “Are the Klingons moving against the Endeavour?”
“No,” said Cooper. “They’re pulling out.” The first officer widened the scope of the display. “Endeavour’s falling back to regroup with the Lovell.”
T’Prynn studied the situation report and the tactical display with trademark Vulcan reserve. “Commodore, based on the scope of the attack and the greater power levels involved, it appears that our adversary has mounted a much larger offensive than what we encountered on Erilon.” Reyes looked at her and was met by her icy stare. “A decisive counterstrike, made swiftly, could inflict significant damage upon our attacker.”
“What my esteemed colleague neglects to mention,” Jetanien interjected, “is that any counterstrike we might make would fall first and foremost upon the colonists of New Boulder.”
“I omitted that detail because it is irrelevant,” T’Prynn said. “Our principal objective remains—”
“Commodore!” shouted Lieutenant Commander Dohan from the main deck of the operations center. “Emergency signal from the New Boulder president’s office!”
Reyes lurched away from the hub toward the railing that circled the edge of the supervisor’s deck. “Onscreen!”
A static-hashed scene from a nightmare appeared, spanning nearly sixty degrees of the circular compartment’s wraparound video display. The image trembled, colors blurred together, flashes of fire and lightning whited out portions of the screen every few seconds. In the background was a parade of carnage. Goliaths as black as tar tore through crowds of civilians and transformed squat buildings into mounds of debris. Storm clouds trailed writhing twists of indigo energy that snagged even the smallest ships from the air and crushed them into sparking, burning husks. The sound was scratchy and intermittent but clear enough for Reyes to make out every horrified scream.
But all he could see was Jeanne—the woman he’d once loved, the woman part of him still loved, despite all that she had done to him—her face all but pressed to the video transmitter. “Damn you, Diego!” she cried. “Why didn’t you tell us the truth?” Terror and rage were united in her tears and in the bitter fury of her voice. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Struck dumb with guilt and horror, Reyes had no defense. Risking the colonists’ lives had been an abstraction, a game of numbers, but watching them die in real time—the reality of it sickened him to his core. He didn’t know what to say. Groping futilely for words, all he could muster was her name, and even that caught in his throat as tears overflowed his eyes.
“Jeanne…”
She screamed. A fearsome blur ripped her body in half, then obliterated her completely in a whirlwind of slashing blows.
Weak, wordless sounds issued from Reyes’s throat. His knees buckled. He slumped over the railing, unable and unwilling to catch himself. His fall was arrested by Jetanien’s scaly manus from the right and T’Prynn’s pale hand from his left. They pulled him from the railing and turned him away from the screen.
He felt as if he were suffocating; he couldn’t make himself breathe. The desperate choking sounds of his strangled grief echoed in the sudden, profound silence of the operations center. There was no strength in his legs; only his friends’ support kept him upright long enough to plant his hands on the hub and slump forward.
The signal from Gamma Tauri IV ended, and the great screen behind Reyes turned blank and dark gray. Long seconds of heartbreaking emptiness pressed down upon him. He reached up to palm the tears from his cheeks and eyes; his hands, normally so warm, were ice-cold.
One breath followed another. Focus returned. He knew what had to be done. Swallowing to clear his throat and steady his voice, he turned toward his first officer. “Coop,” he said, “get Captain Khatami onscreen.”
“Aye, sir,” Cooper said. He relayed the order, which traveled the deck in swiftly whispered acts of delegation.
Several seconds later, as the main viewer blinked back to life with an image of Captain Atish Khatami, Reyes regained his weathered mask of stoic resolve. “Captain,” he said. “Is your ship still combat-ready?”
“Yes, Commodore,” Khatami said with a curious double-take.
Everyone around Reyes was silent as he continued. “Then these are your new orders. I want the Endeavour and the Lovell to fall back to maximum photon-torpedo range from Gamma Tauri IV. From there, you will execute General Order 24 against the planet immediately. Is that understood?”
Khatami looked taken aback. “General Order 24, sir?”
“You heard me, Captain,” Reyes said. “Glass it.”
It had been several minutes since any outgoing transmissions had been detected from Gamma Tauri IV, and Atish Khatami knew that in all likelihood it was because all the colonists—including the Klingons—were dead. Pondering the commodore’s invocation of General Order 24, however, she mourned the countless indigenous species that thrived on that world—plants, bacteria, insects, complex terrestrial and marine animals, and others so unique that they had as yet defied classification. Part of Starfleet’s credo echoed in her thoughts: “to seek out new life…”
In moments, she would be exterminating it.
This isn’t right, protested her conscience. It’s a sin against Allah, a crime against science. She clenched her jaw and reminded herself that Commodore Reyes would not have given such an order lightly. She pictured the shadowy killing machines that had rampaged across the New Boulder colony and imagined them finding their way to Deneva…and bearing down on her husband and daughter. That notion made Reyes’s order easier to follow.
Lieutenant Estrada turned from the communications station. “Captain Okagawa confirms the Lovell is set to fire on your order, Captain.”