The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [169]
Instead, he held his ground and decided that this was the perfect time to do something completely unexpected: become the bearer of good tidings for a change.
“I have received some early reports of victory from our invasion force at C’pory, Admiral,” he said.
Valdore pressed the blade against the neck of the chief technologist, who shuddered as he felt a drop of blood beginning to exit from the tiny nick that the keen edge had made.
“I just received those reports, too,” the admiral said. “I have to wonder why the hevam forces are so thin at C’pory, but in light of the Andorsu disaster I will take any victory I can get.”
Lowering his blade, Valdore added, “You should consider C’pory the reason I’m in such a forgiving mood at the moment.”
FORTY-SIX
Dateline: Near the Beta Hydri system
The Borka system, home of the planet Capory
TRANSCRIPT FROM THE MARCH 11, 2156, NEWSTIME JOURNAL SPECIAL COMMENTARY FOLLOWS:
This is Gannet Brooks, with all the news that’s under the sun and beyond, reporting from close proximity to hell, on audio only today because of local difficulties with subspace bandwidth.
What should be a placid sky now probably looks like something that would have given Hieronymus Bosch nightmares, thanks to the detonations of Romulan munitions that are visible all the way to the outermost of this system’s several asteroid belts. Capory is a sparsely settled outpost world, noteworthy for little other than a native biosphere that consists largely of mold.
And for the fact that the Romulans have just seized it, giving them another beachhead even closer to Earth than the ones they have already established in the Calder and Berengaria systems. The faceless killers have commenced heavy aerial bombardments in an apparent effort to rid the planet of much of the apparently inconvenient life it harbors.
Including some two thousand human beings who never got an opportunity to evacuate, given Starfleet’s minimal presence here.
Now, thanks in large part to Starfleet’s no-show, the Romulan Star Empire has a staging post for war—one located only two-dozen light-years from the cradle of humanity.
This reporter has only a single question for Starfleet’s brass hats: Why do you appear to have fallen asleep at the switch?
Enterprise
Seated at her bridge station, Hoshi Sato shut off the Newstime feed to her earpiece in disgust. She turned her chair toward the forward viewer, which displayed the hypnotic Brownian motion of the superluminal starscape that lay on the current heading of Enterprise and the rest of the assault force bound for Berengaria.
She wondered, and not for the first time, whether Gannet Brooks’s reports, biased though they were in favor of Earth standing strong against the Romulans, was doing more harm than good.
FORTY-SEVEN
Saturday, March 13, 2156
Vulcan Cargo Ship Kiri-kin-tha, near Achernar
“ARE YOU SURE he’s really ready to go on an assignment like this?” Tucker asked as he studied the slumbering features of the Romulan soldier, who lay on his bunk in the freighter’s small cabin.
Sitting at the side of the bunk, Ych’a appeared to ignore Trip’s question as she moved her long fingers in delicate, spidery patterns against the sleeping man’s temples as the therapeutic mind-meld progressed toward its conclusion. Centurion Terix, like Trip, now sported the smooth forehead of a Vulcan or a human, thanks to a simple plastic surgical procedure. The only difference between the respective surgeries experienced by Trip and Terix was that the former’s had restored the natural appearance of his brow, while the latter’s had been undertaken to disguise an inborn Romulan trait. Now all three of them—a human, a Vulcan, and a Romulan—were Vulcan nationals bound for Achernar II, at least so far as their outward appearances, their official identity documents, and Terix’s telepathically