The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [174]
But the constellations visible through the forward windows consisted largely of stars that lay ever deeper inside territory controlled— and presumably jealously patrolled—by the Romulans. Inside of an hour, one of those stars became much brighter, growing swiftly from a distant pinpoint lost among a myriad of others to a small disk, a foreground object that continued to increase sharply in size as the little shuttle approached. Trip and Terix darkened the shuttle, damping down its power in order to make it as undetectable as possible to whoever might be watching them approach.
A sensor alarm on Trip’s console began to issue a chorus of frantic bleeps and rhythmic flashes of light.
“What was that?” Ych’a asked.
Trip shrugged. “Not sure yet. Sensors picked up a flash of hull metal for a moment, then it vanished.”
“Curious,” Tevik said.
Ych’a did not seem impressed. “Not really. It could be an artifact of solar radiation interacting with local dust particles.”
“A sensor ghost,” Tevik said.
“Precisely,” Ych’a said, nodding.
“Maybe,” Trip said. “Or there might be another ship out here trying to keep a low profile, just the way we are.”
Much to Trip’s relief, no more sensor ghosts—or half-hidden ships— appeared for the duration of their approach.
“You weren’t kidding when you said the Romulans put the shipyard close to Achernar,” Trip said as he helped Ych’a bring the shuttle into as close a parking orbit as they dared and began making passive scans. The vast open spaces Trip detected inside the spherical, three-kilometer-wide duranium structure did indeed appear to be ideal for hangaring spacecraft, especially those that needed to be concealed. “But it seems strange to leave it out here without a lot of obvious protection.”
“Such protection might tend to call undue attention to the facility,” Tevik said. “The Romulans do not like to call attention to that which they prefer to keep hidden.”
Nodding, Ych’a added, “The brightness and hard radiation from this system’s primary star does a great deal to obscure its presence— unless, of course, one has spent months obtaining intelligence indicating the precise place to look.”
“Of course,” Trip said. “So... are we just gonna beam right inside, or what?”
No more than five minutes later, and much to Trip’s amazement, he, Terix, and Ych’a had not only done just that, but were standing in a small, pressurized observation chamber that provided a spectacular bird’s-eye view of the two mighty starships that floated near the center of the main hangar, surrounded by several small, inactive work-drone shuttlecraft. Although the two main craft floated in weightless freefall with the rest of the facility, they were also connected to it—and to its presently invisible central power generation system—by a complex bird’s nest of delicate scaffolding, conduits, and umbilical lines.
“Welcome to the Atlai’fehill Stelai complex,” Tevik said, his unaccented pronunciation of the Romulan place name sending a cold shiver through Trip’s nervous system. “That’s the Romulan name for this place.”
Trip returned his attention to the two vessels before and below them, both of which were illuminated only dimly in what Ych’a soon confirmed was night on the Romulans’ watch. They could have run duty shifts around the clock in perpetually simulated daylight, but the Romulans must have deemed it healthier for long-term deep-space crews to maintain a normal diurnal rhythm. Still, it seemed odd that there wasn’t at least a skeleton crew working.
The farthest away but most prominent of the two ships was a Vulcan military vessel whose dominant feature was its hoop-shaped outboard warp drive, through which the long, narrow, tapering crew compartment passed like a spear. Sh’Raan-class, Trip thought, impressed despite all the times he had compared the signature Vulcan design