The Last Stand - Brad Ferguson [5]
“Of course. Can you decipher it?”
Worf looked at his console. “Doubtful, sir. The transmission appears to have been enciphered and compressed using several random number sequences. It could take us years to decompress and decipher the message.”
“The signal must have been about us,” Riker said. “The burst occurred just after we dropped into normal space near the probe.”
“Perhaps it was only a coincidence,” Troi said. “The probe may issue regular status reports on a set schedule, and we just happened to be there for its latest. After all, we’re shielded. We should be undetectable.”
Riker shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t believe in coincidences. Whoever put that probe here knows we’ve arrived—or they will, once they receive that signal. Captain, may I suggest yellow alert?”
Picard thought about it for half a second, and then nodded firmly. “Make it so.”
The heavy, bombproof doors of a shaftcar rolled open slowly, and Kerajem and several of his assistants stepped onto a narrow gangway that lay far below the surface of the capital city. They walked down the passage a few meters to the VIP entry gate of the Shrine, their footsteps echoing oddly off the polished metal walls. The soldiers on guard duty at the gate came to attention and saluted as the First and his party passed through. Kerajem’s assistants followed the leader through the gate one by one, like ducklings following their mother.
They all headed quickly to the War Room, which was located at the center of the Shrine. The Planetary Defense Complex, as it was more formally known, was located in a series of caverns three hundred meters below a nondescript building located across the city from Government House.
This was the second Shrine. The original had been built on the same spot more than a millennium before, shortly after the caverns had been discovered by explorers. There had been an actual shrine here then. The Shrine had served as the Holy See of a totalitarian theocracy that controlled the planet at that time and for centuries thereafter. The many generations of monks who had lived, worked, and died at the first Shrine had spent their entire lives praying to ward off the day when the enemy might find their world and destroy it.
When the revolution came, the Shrine had been abandoned in the belief that it was no longer needed and never had been, that the threat it was designed to counter had never been more than the fever dreams of deranged prophets. The monks who had lived and worked here had been secularized and sent away, never to return.
Not quite a generation ago, when the world had discovered the terrible truth about its impending doom, there was suddenly a need for a planetary defense headquarters immune to any imaginable form of attack. Strategy had demanded an invulnerable location, and tradition and convenience had suggested the Shrine.
The facility no longer looked anything like a monastery. All traces of that sort of thing were gone. Years of effort and billions of work units had been expended to build a fully modern facility. The new Shrine was staffed not by monks but by military personnel, skilled civilian technicians, and a gaggle of bureaucrats.
The Shrine was now a fit fighting machine. It would do the job, if anything could.
Kerajem’s people would not run.
Not this time, and never again.
Defense Minister Hattajek was standing in the command well, talking quietly with several top officers. All of them straightened a bit as Kerajem approached. The First nodded to them in greeting. “Status report?”
The chief of staff, General Blakendet, stepped forward. “Sir, Blue Ultimate is in force. Force Red continues to decelerate, course unchanged.” He gestured at the wide display screen at the front of the War Room. “As you can see, sir, there they are.”
“Well done, General,” Kerajem said quietly. “All we can do now, I suppose, is wait—”
Suddenly there was the low, insistent sound of an intrusion alarm. Heads turned to study the main screen.
There was a glowing red disk