• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“I didn’t hear anything,” she finally said at length, speaking quietly. “And I won’t believe it until Newstime picks up the story. And maybe not even then.”

Hoshi could imagine the debate that would consume the attention of the interstellar news media once this rumor was confirmed. Keisha Naquase would worry that Earth’s once exploration-oriented Starfleet was about to get itself onto a permanent war footing. Gannet Brooks would see the move as a temporary step backward, made necessary by the unfortunate but often inevitable circumstances of war.

Of course, the stately NX-class design wouldn’t disappear overnight. If the rumors were true, they merely meant that Starfleet and UESPA were shifting their expectations going forward; Earth would no longer be relying upon Enterprise and her sister ships as humanity’s primary wartime workhorses.

Starfleet probably expects the NX-class to disappear on its own, Sato thought glumly as she imagined the many battles that were certain to come. Losses would mount on both sides. The Romulans might well take out the few remaining NX specimens still flying, including Enterprise and the small handful of her sisters still being assembled in spacedock even now.

Sato looked down at the motto on her own sleeve patch. The lofty sounding phrase, cribbed from a seminal speech by Zefram Cochrane decades ago and translated into Latin to give it additional heft, seemed to mock her.

Ire audaciter quo nemo ante iit.

To boldly go where no man has gone before.

We humans are warriors now, not explorers, she thought with a sense of all but infinite loss. Starfleet just hasn’t got around to making all the formal announcements yet.

That wasn’t what she’d expected when Jonathan Archer had talked her into signing on to his initial mission to Qo’noS four years ago. And it still wasn’t what she’d expected this year, after the captain had barely managed to talk her out of leaving alongside Travis Mayweather.

All Hoshi could do for the moment was to cling to the desperate hope that the human species—starting with the crew of Enterprise— would one day find the road back once all the shooting finally stopped.

THIRTY-TWO

Thursday, November 27, 2155

U.S.S. Yorktown NCC-108

Proxima Shipyard, Proxima Centauri

HIS LIMBS TAUT with an almost electrical feeling of anticipation, Travis Mayweather sat behind the newly refurbished helm console, awaiting the order he knew Captain Shosetsu had to deliver any moment now.

A seeming eternity later, that moment arrived. “Clear all moorings, Mister Mayweather. Take her out.”

“Aye, Captain,” said the helmsman. A grin spread across his face, reflecting his commingled delight and relief as his hands moved swiftly over the still-slightly-unfamiliar console before him. But the fact that the arrangement of a Daedalus-class vessel’s standard helm controls differed somewhat from those found on the bridge of an NX-class ship was of no concern to him; he was still far too excited about his new posting for that.

Yorktown was getting under way at long last, now that her repairs were finally complete, and was leaving spacedock for the first time since Mayweather had joined Ketai Shosetsu’s newly reconstituted crew—a crew whose numbers had been cruelly reduced, his new shipmates had informed him immediately after his arrival, during Yorktown’s recent Romulan encounter near the planet Valakis.

“We’re clear, Captain,” Mayweather said a few moments later.

He heard the captain’s enthusiastic tenor voice coming from over his shoulder. “Very good, Ensign. Nice and smooth.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the helmsman with no small amount of pride. Having literally grown up in deep space, Mayweather had become used to achieving almost a Zen-like serenity that made a starship almost an extension of his arms and legs and eyes. “Standard patrol course entered, as ordered.”

“Execute course at warp two once we’ve cleared safe navigational boundaries,” said Commander Tyler Mendez, Yorktown’s executive officer. “One-quarter impulse until then.”

Mayweather