The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [141]
“Incoming,” Archer said, still studying at his console. “Four vessels. Tactical alert.”
Malcolm nodded. “Powering up weapons system. Armed and ready.”
A moment later, two of the bogeys appeared in the shuttlepod’s forward window, approaching swiftly from behind the western limb of the planet. Though still distant, Archer could see that both possessed the spherical forward sections that clearly identified them as Daedalus-class vessels. The third and fourth bogeys rose together perhaps three seconds later, rising out of the darkness that lay beyond the eastern limb. One of them quickly resolved itself into the sleek, flat profile of an Intrepid-class starship.
The fourth ship bore the unmistakable profile of the NX-class.
Columbia.
With a grin, Archer touched the fire control panel to his right, enabling the launch switch.
“Essex, Archon, Intrepid, and Columbia are all ordering us to stand down,” Reed said, his attention held by the copilot station’s comm indicators. “They’re all powering up their phase cannons. Getting ready for a crossfire.”
So Uttan, Bryce, Carlos, and Erika had made it to the party after all, after having been caught with their pants down; had they detected the shuttlepod even a few minutes earlier, they would have had time to surround him significantly farther away from Earth. Shuttlepod One had obviously surprised them, sent them scrambling.
“Too late,” Archer murmured. Quietly savoring a moment of triumph over his peers, he gave the “launch” button a firm tap. The shuttlepod rumbled as the inert payload in its belly exited at multimach speed, on a straight-line, perpendicular course for Earth.
The captain watched the descending payload sprout a rooster tail of yellow-orange plasma as it began to burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere. Columbia and Intrepid chased after it, phase cannons blazing.
Then the pulse cannons of Archon and Essex struck the shuttlepod in tandem, ringing her hull like a bell.
San Francisco, Earth
The debriefing that followed at Starfleet Headquarters went pretty much as Archer had expected. After unanimously (if reluctantly) awarding the war game’s kill to Enterprise, Admirals Black and Gardner expressed both gratitude and chagrin at having had such a gaping vulnerability in Earth’s defenses pointed out to them. Though he never mentioned it, Archer sympathized with the admirals. They must have felt at least as foolish as he did never to have imagined before that the raptorlike Romulan ships had no warp capability; the success of Reed’s penetration of the security grid confirmed this hypothesis as the only plausible explanation for the Romulan sneak attacks.
But now that Starfleet Command clearly understood both the extent and the likely cause of its vulnerability—one that had apparently afflicted all Coalition worlds and their colonies from the outset—one critical question remained unanswered: Could Starfleet find a way to neutralize this vulnerability before the Romulans made effective use of it here in the Coalition’s very heart?
Captain Archer could not avoid worrying that a Romulan mother ship might be lurking deep in the weeds of this system’s Kuiper belt even now, just beyond the ability of the grid to detect. At any moment Earth could be facing a large, virtually undetectable armada of small but lethal sublight fighter craft. Archer could only hope that the number of vessels would make them vulnerable to early detection. But space was big; it could hide a multitude of ships, perhaps until it was too late.
On his way to an informal dinner with his peers at the Lotus Blossom restaurant, Archer’s mind continually revisited his concerns. With his tactical officer at his side, the captain passed through the restaurant’s familiar glass doors about thirty minutes late. The establishment’s diminutive and impeccably dressed Asian maître d’, Tommy, delivered his customary enthusiastic greeting and conducted