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Yet.

Without standing, he glanced around the bridge. Commander Riker paced in front of his chair, sweat staining his shirt. Lieutenant Christine Vale at security just looked angry, and Troi fidgeted in her chair, the strain of the last few hours showing clearly on her face. Only Data, his emotion chip turned off, seemed as unruffled as ever. Picard envied that android calmness at times.

“They’re powering weapons again, Captain,” Data said.

“Target those weapons and fire before they do!” Picard ordered.

Picard could feel the Enterprise bump slightly as the phasers fired.

A small section of the alien ship’s shields flared bright red.

The alien weapons cut through the redness, pounding the Enterprise hard. The inertial dampers fought to stop the rocking and shaking the impact had caused. As he had been doing for hours, Picard held onto his chair with both hands, keeping himself seated.

“Forward shields at thirty-two percent,” Lieutenant Vale said. “Holding.”

“Slight damage on three decks,” Deanna said, glancing at the monitor on her chair. “No injuries.”

That fire-return-fire scene had repeated itself at least fifty times over the last two hours.

“We have got to find a way to end this,” Picard said, standing and taking a step toward the main screen, staring at the black alien ship facing him.

It was a monster, more than fifty times bigger than the Enterprise , and at least as deadly. It was round, like a small moon, and its surface was covered with what looked to be some type of control housing. Two smooth rings circled the outer hull of the ship, each attached to the surface at only four places. The rings were as thick as the Enterprise saucer section and twice as wide, with one ring circling around the alien ship’s equator, while the other ring went around the ship’s poles. Picard had no idea what the rings were for.

Or who had built this strange ship.

Or what powered it.

Or even, for that matter, what was the front, back, top, or bottom of it. The sensors could tell when the alien ship was powering weapons, but little else. The alien shields had blocked every attempt they had made to find out more.

He stared at it, studying the black, equipment-covered surface of the alien ball, trying to come up with any way at all to put that ship out of commission. They had been able to punch through its shields in small areas, but the damage they had done to the surface of the ship seemed to make no difference at all.

And the shields reacted like no shields he had seen before. It was almost as if they were alive, healing damaged areas like water flowing back into a depression. Picard would give anything to learn how they worked.

An hour ago, he had even attacked one of the intersections where the two rings met, hoping that would cause the alien ship problems. They had managed to punch through the alien shields twice, hitting the surface of the ship’s rings and blowing hunks out of one area of one ring. The alien shields quickly healed. Nothing changed.

The alien ship attacked, they attacked back.

Stalemate.

Over two long hours of the same thing.

However, for the residents of Blossom IV, the fourth planet of this system, the Enterprise had to win. The Enterprise had been nearby when the distress call had come in from the agricultural colony. The message said they were under attack from a massive black ball, and taking heavy damage. It had only taken the Enterprise fifteen minutes to be on the scene, but Picard didn’t want to think about the damage the alien ship had caused to those farmers in those minutes.

The Enterprise had come in firing, and the alien ship had turned its attention away from the planet. But if the Enterprise was forced to retreat, or was defeated, there was no other help for those colonists. No other Federation ship that could stand up to this monster was nearby.

Picard also couldn’t figure out why it had attacked this planet. Blossom IV had no resources, nothing worth taking from the two hundred thousand people farming