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The three escape pods that Lieutenant O’Neill evacuated with the ship’s transporter yielded a total of fourteen living Andorians. Once the doctor had finished administering triage and first aid—with the able assistance of two Starfleet medical technicians and a MACO corpsman—Phlox decided that twelve of his new patients had a better-than-reasonable chance of recovery, despite the severity of their injuries. And although the remaining two were still critical even after being stabilized and sedated, they were not beyond all hope.

As the doctor carefully ran an osteoregenerator over the broken sternum of a bloodied and unconscious Andorian shen, he thought, I could get used to this level of efficiency. But as Phlox moved from patient to patient, he continued to cling to the likely forlorn hope that he would never get accustomed to the carnage.

Archer knew that there was always a chance of finding another escape pod, even after the recovery of the first three some six hours earlier. Malcolm had just found the Ka’Thelan Krotus’s log buoy. But Archer also knew it was a captain’s unpleasant duty to decide when the chance of rescuing any more survivors had become too remote to continue looking. Earth still needed Enterprise, and the two other Andorian vessels that were now minutes away from arriving could handle whatever rescue and recovery operations remained to be done.

“Prepare to go to warp, Ensign,” he said to Leydon. “Engage once Doctor Phlox finishes handing the Krotus’s survivors off to the Andorians.”

“Aye, sir.”

A boatswain’s whistle drew his attention to the arm of his command chair. “Archer here,” he said after opening the channel.

“Lieutenant Reed, sir,” the Englishman said. “I’ve been down in the armory reading out the data from the Krotus’s flight recorder.”

Archer frowned slightly. “I thought you and T’Pol had already confirmed the cause of the Krotus disaster.”

“We did, Captain. And what I’ve found since then doesn’t change that. At least, not exactly.”

His frown deepening slightly in spite of himself, Archer said, “Well, what exactly did you find?”

“It seemed to me that the Krotus succumbed to the Romulan hijack weapon a little too quickly. Same with the Miracht, come to think of it.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean, Malcolm.”

“I mean that the Krotus should have put up more of a fight than she did, even given all the damage those retreating Romulan ships had taken. So I asked Ensign Sato to convert all the time indexes from both the Andorian and Tellarite log buoys to Solar standard time. Cross-comparing those indexes with our own logs confirmed that all the system failures on both the Krotus and the Miracht happened nearly twice as fast as those that Enterprise experienced while the Kobayashi Maru was getting scuttled. It looks as though the Romulans have made their weapon almost twice as effective as it was only a few months ago.”

“Either that,” Archer said, “or else Andorian and Tellarite vessels are twice as vulnerable to this thing as our ships are.”

Regardless, the captain knew one thing: certain people needed to know about this immediately.

Heading toward his ready room, Archer said, “Ensign Sato, please get me Ambassador Thoris of Andoria.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

Dateline: Threllvia system

TRANSCRIPT FROM THE NOVEMBER 18, 2155, NEWSTIME JOURNAL SPECIAL COMMENTARY FOLLOWS:

This is Gannet Brooks, with all the news that’s under the sun and beyond, reporting from the Andorian Imperial Freight Service Vessel Shesh.

Imperial Guard forces from the remote Andorian colony world of Threllvia are reporting heavy ship-to-ship fighting, both in orbit about the planet and in the atmosphere. And the consensus among both military personnel and the civilian starfarers who have been pressed into emergency service—such as the crew of the freighter Shesh—is uniformly grim.

The Romulans now hold Threllvia IV, which they assaulted today in