Enigma - Michael Jan Friedman [38]
In the meantime, the Gibraltar had been left adrift—blinded, silenced, and paralyzed. None of her systems were working except a couple of backup generators, and they were barely enough to maintain life-support.
Of course, it could have been worse. In the end, everyone had survived. And as badly as the enemy had incapacitated the ship, the crew had still managed to get the com system on line.
Without it, they would have been looking forward to another day, maybe more, before a rescue vessel could locate them. As it was, Captain Reynolds and the Zhukov would reach their coordinates in a matter of hours.
It wasn’t that Rodriguez wasn’t grateful for these things. It was just that she thought of her ship as a friend—a very old and dear friend, after fourteen years of sitting in her center seat—and the captain hated to see her gutted this way.
It made her want to strike back at the ones who had done this, to punish them for what they had done. Unfortunately, the Gibraltar was in no shape to accommodate her wish. Besides, there wasn’t any reason to think a second clash with the enemy would produce better results than the first.
Rodriguez still didn’t understand how it had happened. No adversary had ever slipped her phasers that way, or eluded her torpedoes, or pierced her deflector shields. But this enemy had done all those things.
And yet they weren’t nearly as impressive in close-quarters combat. They weren’t especially strong or fast, and their hand weapons didn’t seem to have either the range or the accuracy of Starfleet’s phaser pistols.
The only reason they managed to take over the ship was that they outnumbered the defenders. Had it been an even fight, the crew would have prevailed—Rodriguez was certain of it.
But why had the enemy attacked at all? Not to destroy the Gibraltar, certainly, or to make off with crew or cargo or even data. The computers had been pretty much disabled by the time the aliens beamed aboard.
Then why had they bothered? To avenge some slight of which Rodriguez was unaware? Or to test their military strength against that of a starship, in preparation for a bigger move—maybe a full-scale invasion?
She wished she knew.
“Captain?” said a voice behind her.
Turning, she saw that it was Baskind, her chief engineer. His face was a mask of soot and grime, but he was smiling through it.
“Good news?” Rodriguez asked.
“I’d say so,” Baskind replied. “We found some sensor records from the time of the attack.”
She looked at him disbelievingly. “They weren’t destroyed?”
“Not all of them, apparently. The sonuvaguns missed a few.” He turned over the padd he held in his hand. “As you can see, we got some interesting readings.”
They were interesting, all right. Apparently, the ship that attacked them hadn’t been alone. It was just the front-runner in a far-flung quintet of ships, four of them arranged in a diamond shape twenty kilometers long.
And unless Rodriguez was mistaken, the vessel bringing up the rear wasn’t even a warship. It was too massive, too unwieldy, for the invaders to take into battle.
Because the ships were so far apart, the crew of the Gibraltar had noticed only the one attacking them. But it was clear now to Rodriguez that the aliens were adhering to a formation—a distinctive one, unlike any she had seen before.
If they remained in it, Starfleet might be in luck. It could pinpoint the aliens’ location with long-range scans, and maybe prevent them from attacking anyone else.
“Good work,” she told Baskind. “Command will want to see this as soon as possible.”
His smile widened. “I had a feeling you’d say that. Why don’t we send it to them right now?”
The captain agreed that that would be a good idea. And anyway, she had accomplished what she had set out to do when she came up to revisit the bridge.
Accompanying Baskind into the turbolift, she punched in engineering as a destination. That was where they had resurrected the com system,