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The science officer wore a grim expression of concentration as he consulted his scanner and console displays.

“No signal traffic from the surface,” Valerian said.

Hernandez slammed her fist on the arm of her chair.

“That might not mean anything, Captain,” Fletcher said gently. “The nuke aboard that bogey detonated at one-hundred and thirty-two klicks above the planet’s surface. But the blast cloud is still spreading upward and outward. It could ionize the atmosphere quite a bit before it finally dissipates. And that doesn’t even take the detonation’s electromagnetic pulse into account.”

Hernandez stood and approached el-Rashad’s science station. “Kalil, can you scan through the ionization effects?”

“Working on it, Captain,” said el-Rashad. After another seeming eternity, the science officer looked up from his scanner and smiled. “All of the Altair VI outpost’s structures appear to be intact. The prevailing winds are carrying the fallout and other remnants of the blast away from the outpost.”

Hernandez returned to her chair and sagged into it as Lieutenant Akagi shepherded Columbia back up into a safe standard orbit, whereupon Valerian announced that the outpost’s chief administrator was hailing Columbia, in order to discuss her ad hoc plan to throw a victory celebration before Columbia’s eventual departure. Meanwhile, Fletcher and el-Rashad delivered their reports on all the damage the ship had sustained, which turned out to be minimal except for some minor thermal damage to the ventral hull plating and the impulseengine power relays.

So the folks down there want to throw us a victory party, Hernandez thought. Even though what she had just endured felt far more like a catastrophic near miss—a disaster avoided as much by luck as by skill—than the work of a conquering hero. The colonists’ relief was understandable, but the fact remained that the Romulans had nearly caught everybody by surprise, including Columbia.

If they did it once, they can do it again.

Just as Hernandez directed her exec to politely decline the hospitality of the colony’s leadership, Lieutenant Graylock’s hard-edged Teutonic voice came over the bridge comm system.

“Engineering to bridge.”

“Hernandez here.” She allowed a small smile to escape onto her lips. “What’s new down in the engine room, Karl?”

“Captain, I’d like to meet with you at your earliest opportunity to discuss the proper care and feeding of this ehemals schön schiff—this once beautiful ship.”

Preferably in a meeting room that’s been thoroughly soundproofed, Hernandez thought.

“Let me make a deal with you, Lieutenant,” she said aloud. “I’ll agree to take an entire remedial engineering course from you—once you and Lieutenant Commander el-Rashad figure out exactly how the Romulans managed to penetrate the Altair system far enough to do as much damage as they did.”

THIRTY

Place de la Concorde

Paris, France, Earth

ON DAYS LIKE TODAY, Prime Minister Nathan Samuels found himself wishing that he had never entered politics. A lowly clerical job inside some nice, quiet bank looked very appealing right now.

As the impromptu meeting unfolded before and around the massive hardwood desk that dominated the prime minister’s main-office-cum-reception space, Starfleet’s Sam Gardner took the floor momentarily while assorted high-ranking Starfleet and MACO officers, along with key officeholders in the United Earth government’s parliamentary and executive branches, listened attentively.

“We might as well have built a fortress out of rice paper and cotton candy,” the admiral said as he leaned forward on one of the office’s antique straight-backed chairs. Through the window behind him, Samuels could see the towering stone spire of the Obelisk of Luxor casting its long, late-afternoon shadow alongside the Seine River in Paris’s eighth arrondissement. “We have to face an unpleasant reality: the Vulcan early warning systems just don’t work worth a damn.”

“I’m not sure that’s entirely true,” said Minister Lydia Littlejohn, one of the