The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [87]
Trip could only shake his head at that, since he preferred to believe that the main reason that the maneuver had worked when employed against Enterprise’s crew was the fact that Captain Archer and Malcolm Reed were both in on Section 31’s plot to fake his death in the first place.
An hour passed with agonizing sluggishness while the Branson continued to cling to the deep shadows of one of the larger bodies in the system’s extensive asteroid field. While Phuong effected repairs to the ship’s various damaged systems- he’d insisted that he knew the ship better than anyone, including its many one-off modifications, and therefore declined Trip’s offer of assistance- Trip continuously checked the passive scanning devices, only to find no evidence that any Romulans were still present. But he knew that there was no guarantee that a bird-of-prey wasn’t simply hanging out there somewhere, using yet another asteroid for cover as it patiently waited for its prey to reappear….
It was Phuong’s patience that wore out first. “Well, we can’t stay here forever, Commander,” he said, breaking the near total silence that had engulfed the cramped cockpit for more than an hour. “Let’s move out.”
Trip nodded, and the two men began silently entering commands into their respective sections of the conn and navigational consoles, quickly powering up the little Rutan-class ship and getting her back under way through the asteroid field and into the emptier spaces that lay beyond its orbit.
Trip was tempted to use the Branson’s active sensors to determine whether or not the Romulan patrol vessel was still lingering nearby, but decided against it. Such a move might risk giving away their position, even if the other vessel had already moved on but was still near enough to detect the Branson’s presence.
“See any sign of sensor contact?” Phuong asked.
Trip studied his console readouts yet again and shook his head. “Nobody seems to be scanning us.”
“Then it’s Rator II or bust,” Phuong said, laying a new heading into the navigational computer with quick, practiced motions.
It occurred to Trip that Phuong was once again taking him to a destination that he knew next to nothing about. I hope I don’t start getting used to this, he thought as the little ship shuddered and lurched into warp.
Fortunately, Rator II wasn’t far away from where the Branson had been waylaid by the Romulan patrol; it took only the better part of a day to reach at the Branson’s maximum speed of warp 4.5.
On the other hand, the fact that this obscure Romulan colony world was so easy to get to filled Trip with worry that the very patrols they thought they’d eluded were quietly following, just waiting to pounce on them as well as on Phuong’s local Ejhoi Ormiin contacts, whom he assumed would be harboring the much sought-after Doctor Ehrehin.
Trip watched the pleasantly blue world as it grew in the forward viewports until the warm radiance of its cloud-dappled sunlit side dominated his view. The planet seemed extraordinarily Earth-like, although its ocean-dominated surface was punctuated by long chains of volcanic islands rather than large continental masses. The view became distorted for several minutes as Phuong guided his vessel into the atmosphere on a landing trajectory, atmospheric friction superheating the air around the craft until it ionized and gave off an almost blinding orange glow. Then, almost like a light turning off, the inferno dissipated, replaced by a view of a steadily approaching ocean, replete with a chain of black, mountainous, and vegetation-rich islands.
Following an apparently preprogrammed approach path, Phuong set the Branson down on a relatively flat stretch of obsidian-like rock, only a few hundred meters from what appeared to be a concrete Quonset hut-type structure that seemed almost to have been extruded directly from the glassy stone that surrounded it.
“The local Ejhoi Ormiin union hall, I presume?” Trip asked wryly, gesturing through the front viewport toward the nearby structure.
“So say our best intelligence files,” Phuong