Collective Hindsight (Book 2) - Aaron Rosenberg [11]
“What?” Gold leaned forward in his chair—the crew liked to joke that they could remove the rest of the seat and he’d never notice. “Three engines, three comm signals? You’re telling me—”
“Faugh!” Tev snarled, having stepped over to one of the aft science consoles. He tapped in a few commands, and an enlarged image of the Androssi ship appeared on one of the side screens. The multiple engines and comm signals were highlighted, as were the multiple weapons systems Shabalala had noticed but had not yet had the chance to point out. Then, at another command from the Tellarite, the image split into three separate components. Three equal components—each one with all the makings of a full ship.
“Captain, it’s splitting!” Shabalala called out, and they watched as the image on the forward screen changed to match the one Tev had just created off to the side. “Now we’ve got three Androssi ships, each one roughly three-fourths the size of Overseer Biron’s. And all three of them still making a beeline for us.”
“How much time do we have, Shabalala?” It always amazed Wong that the captain could stay so calm at a time like this. He was perched on the edge of his seat, of course, but his voice didn’t waver at all, and his hands were resting on the armrests instead of clenching them. I doubt I could be that calm, with three Androssi gunning for me, Wong admitted to himself with a shudder.
“At current speed they’ll be within weapons range in three hours, sir.”
“Fine. Gomez, you’ve got two hours to figure something out. I suggest you get to it.”
“Yes, sir.” Gomez and Tev left the bridge, again moving together as if they’d practiced it. Wong just hoped that wasn’t the only thing their team had been practicing.
* * *
“Okay, we’ve got a problem,” Sonya told the team as she and Tev entered the observation lounge. “The ship is Androssi, and it turns out it’s some new modular design. It’s split into three separate ships now, and all three of them are headed for us.”
“If their sensors picked up the Dancing Star before this,” Pattie said, “they would have known it was enormous. Maybe they figured they’d need three ships to deal with it.”
“Could be,” Sonya said. “But why they sent them isn’t important right now. In two hours we’re going to have all three in our face. What are we going to do about it?”
She turned toward Fabian, and he managed not to grin or sigh. It was nice being the team’s tactical expert, and knowing they looked to him at a time like this. At the same time, he sometimes wished those expectant stares were focused on someone else.
“How big are these three, compared to Biron’s ship?” That was the one they were most familiar with, having encountered it twice already.
“Seventy-five percent,” Tev replied. Fabian wasn’t surprised that the Tellarite would know the size of Biron’s ship—he’d already demonstrated that he loved research, and that he’d read up on the S.C.E.’s previous missions, including the encounters with Biron at Maeglin and Empok Nor.
“Okay, so we’ve got three ships, each three-fourths of that size.” Fabian got up and paced while he thought out loud. “No way we can take them ourselves—the da Vinci might be able to handle one, though we’d come away in bad shape ourselves.”
“The Dancing Star dealt with that Cardassian ship, the Grach’noyl,” Soloman commented.
“True, and it could probably handle at least one of these. But I doubt it could take two, and that’d still leave one for us.” Fabian shook his head. “Sorry, Commander, but this is a fight we can’t win.”
“We can run,” Tev said, and glared back at them when they all turned toward him. “Valor in the face of overwhelming odds is simple foolishness.”
“No argument there,” Sonya admitted. “But I don’t think running would work. They’ve got three ships—they could send one or even two after us, while the remaining one or two lay claim to the Dancing Star. And we cannot let this technology fall into the Androssi’s hands.”
“Hell, they could focus all three on us,” Fabian replied, “blow us