The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [140]
“Then we’ll just have to regroup and try again,” Archer said. “At least until we finally figure out how the hell the Romulans have been beating the warp detectors.” The captain knew that his tactical officer was preoccupied not with personal glory, but rather with preventing the Romulans from doing to Earth what they’d already done at Deneva, Berengaria, and Altair. “Don’t worry, Malcolm. We’re going to beat them at their own game.”
As he spoke, Archer never took his eyes off Sol, the distant bottom of the system’s deep gravity well. At this distance it looked more like an unusually bright background star than what it really was: a vast fusion furnace that ultimately powered every energetic process on Earth and all her planetary siblings—the central star around which the rest of the solar system quite literally revolved.
“So do you think this test will turn out like all the others?” Reed asked at length. “Do you think they’ll detect us before we get all the way to Earth?”
“Doesn’t seem likely,” Archer said. “The shuttlepod isn’t generating a warp field.”
“But Starfleet’s engineering people have done a lot of fine-tuning to the grid’s overall EM sensitivity over the past few weeks.”
Apparently that hasn’t made much difference in any of the static tests Starfleet has run this past month, Archer thought. Aloud, he said, “When we’re in silent running mode, the shuttlepod blends in pretty thoroughly with the interstellar background noise. That should make us nearly as invisible in the EM bands as our lack of a warp field makes us in subspace.”
Archer thought the odds of anyone making visual contact with the tiny shuttlepod before it got within striking distance of Earth were pretty remote. Even at subwarp speed the little craft was moving at a not-inconsiderable fraction of c, which would make a chance sighting highly unlikely. Besides, the shuttlepod’s precise location and angle of approach to its inner solar system targets had been deliberately withheld from Starfleet for the purposes of today’s war game. And added to that was the sheer scale of the space that the shuttlepod was now crossing. Although Archer had visited many unimaginably distant alien worlds, he was still staggered when he considered the vastness of even the much smaller volume of space contained with his own home system.
“Space is big, Malcolm. Even local interplanetary space. That fact alone will go a long way toward hiding us.” Just as it hid whole Romulan fleets at Deneva and Berengaria, Archer thought. And at Altair, until it was almost too late.
Apparently satisfied by Archer’s reassurances, Reed lapsed once more into a nervous but companionable silence. The resumption of the quiet allowed Archer to focus his thoughts inward as the distance gauges on his pilot’s console began monitoring and reporting each milestone the shuttlepod reached: the equivalents of the relative distances from Sol of the orbits of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, the asteroid belt, and Mars, with the shuttlepod maintaining an off-the-ecliptic trajectory that kept the vessel well away from any planet, minor planet, or asteroid.
The whole passage took nearly twenty-two hours, so Archer and Reed took turns. The captain was relieved at how uneventfully the time passed, though the back of his brain—not to mention the little hairs on the back of his neck—were increasingly charged with tension as Earth grew steadily nearer until the blue world of his birth looked close enough to touch right through the forward windows.
“We did it!” Reed said, grinning from ear to ear.
“Congratulations, Malcolm,” Archer said, not wanting to risk jinxing this success by saying anything cocky while they were still in the home stretch.
A red alarm indicator suddenly began flashing