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Although the hour was late, Archer took the time to change into a fresh duty coverall, though he still hadn’t bothered to shave. The intercom whistled just as he was stepping through the hatchway into E deck’s outermost corridor. The brisk, no-nonsense tones of the gamma-watch commander, Lieutenant Donna O’Neill, followed half a heartbeat later.

“Bridge to Captain Archer. We’re receiving a real-time priority subspace communication from Starfleet Command.”

“Thanks, D.O. Go ahead and pipe it down here.”

A moment later he was seated behind the small desk in his quarters, staring anxiously at a gold Starfleet crescent-Earth-and-chevron standard.

The gray, careworn visage of Admiral Samuel William Gardner soon displaced the graphics. “Jonathan. Sorry I wasn’t reachable when you called. I’m glad to see I’m not disturbing you by getting back to you so late in the ship’s day.”

Archer smiled wryly. “Don’t worry about that, Admiral. I’m not real big on sleeping these days anyway.”

“Or on shaving, I can see. Looks like you’re running a pirate ship.”

“Reprimand received, Admiral. I’ve been a bit preoccupied lately, and it’s only going to get busier once we reach the Tarod IX outposts and start picking up the survivors. Can you talk about the current tactical situation?”

Gardner nodded. “Starfleet Command agrees with your assessment that the Vulcan ships that attacked the Calder II outpost were under the control of the Romulan Star Empire. The Romulans are obviously in the process of perfecting a new weapon capable of remotely hijacking the starships of their adversaries.”

Archer thought that “perfecting” was an excellent choice of verbs; the Romulans almost certainly would have destroyed or captured Enterprise had this new weapon already successfully made it through its shakedown phase prior to the attack on the Kobayashi Maru.

“Maybe the Romulan attack against Alpha Centauri was only a feint, Admiral,” Archer said. “I think what they really wanted in the short term was Calder II, which is much more strategic for them in terms of relaying their supply lines from their own core planets to the heart of Coalition space.”

The admiral idly stroked his neatly trimmed gray beard. “Agreed.”

“The Romulans are probably building a rapid-strike base on Calder II even now,” Archer said. “From there they’ll be getting ready to take on Andoria, or Vulcan, or even Earth. And if they go after Earth, they’ll be gambling that we won’t have enough of the new NX-class ships ready in time to stop them.”

Gardner frowned. “Even using Calder as a matériel base, it’ll take the Romulans some time to get their supply lines up and running and secure. Their new weapon notwithstanding, they’ve dealt with Enterprise enough to understand how formidable our NX-class starships can be. They’re taking a gamble that we won’t be able to meet them force for force before they get can use their new beachhead to maximum advantage.”

“Maybe it is a gamble on their part, Admiral. But unless you know something I don’t, it’s a damned good gamble. You know as well as I do that Enterprise and Columbia are still the only NX-class starships Earth has in service right now. And nobody’s heard from Columbia in nearly four days.” For perhaps the thousandth time, Archer prayed silently that Captain Erika Hernandez and her crew hadn’t fallen into the very same Romulan trap that Enterprise had so narrowly avoided.

The admiral’s fair skin grew even paler, until it was nearly a match for his crewcut and close-cropped facial hair. Archer could see immediately that he didn’t need to remind Gardner that Enterprise’s next two warp-five sister ships—Challenger NX-03 and Discovery NX-04— were both still a good month away from being ready to leave San Francisco’s orbital shipyards. Nor did he need to mention that the launch dates of Atlantis and Endeavour were several months further down the calendar still, and that was assuming that the construction teams experienced no setbacks.

“I wish I could say you were wrong, Jonathan,