On the viewscreen, the gray specks grew larger and more distinct with terrifying speed, until the Tholian ships’ triple-wedge hulls hove into view like an arrowstorm descending with deadly intent from the darkness. Khatami drew a sharp breath. She felt as if she were standing alone on a beach at night, waiting for a tidal wave to crash down and sweep away all in its path, knowing in her heart that it would be as unstoppable as it was inevitable.
She forced herself to exhale and clear her mind. Making a silent survey of her bridge, she was pleased to see that everyone remained focused and alert. Tensions were high, but her crew appeared resolute. Wiping the sweat of her palms over her black trousers, Khatami was almost hypnotized by the terrifying spectacle of the Tholian armada bearing down on Vanguard.
She couldn’t stand to sit still. She stood and paced around her chair as she addressed her bridge crew. “Listen up, everyone. In the next few minutes, any one of you might need to take over at any one of these stations. If the worst comes to pass, one of you might find yourself in command. No matter what happens, know that I have faith in you. Most important, I want you to remember this advice: Whoever’s on weapons control, fire for effect. Use the phasers to dimple enemy shields, then use torpedoes to break them. Don’t ignore an enemy ship because it’s damaged—it can still be used to ram us or the station. If its shields are down, destroy it. Last but just as important, stay alert for the retreat signal from Vanguard. When that sounds, we’ll have to beam out as many survivors as we can. The people on that station are counting on us to pull them out before it’s too late. I’m counting on all of you to make sure we don’t let them down.
“That’s all. Man your posts.”
As her crew returned to their duties, Khatami returned to her chair and beheld the hundreds of incoming vessels that now filled the forward viewscreen.
She gripped her chair’s armrests and grimaced.
Allah help us all.
Most of Vanguard was being maintained by a skeleton crew, but in the operations center, every console was manned. The wraparound screens covering the high walls teemed with images of Tholian warships cruising at full impulse on a direct interception trajectory. Red Alert panels flashed beneath every screen and beside every turbolift, though the wailing klaxon had long since been muted on Nogura’s order. The admiral stalked across the supervisors’ deck toward the Hub. “Dunbar! Hail the armada commander, tell him we want a parley!”
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 Cannella,” Nogura shouted across the deck.
Raymond Cannella, the station’s heavyset fleet operations manager, looked up from his space-traffic-control station, his fleshy face a portrait in stress, and retorted in his thick, northern New Jersey accent, “What?”
“How many ships are still docked?”
Cannella checked his auxiliary data screen, tracing a line across the monitor with his index finger, then called out, “Twenty-six.”
“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 gonna like it.”
“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. “Cannella?”
“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 gunners to start locking in targets. Take out the point ships first—those will be the leaders.”
Cannella bellowed, “All ships away!”
“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 channel to his four defending starships. “Vanguard to all Starfleet vessels: prepare to engage the enemy.”
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!”