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“You’d be surprised what we pinkskins can accomplish when we really put our minds to it.”

“Endlessly surprised. Your fleet includes only one of Starfleet’s most advanced vessels.”

“Unfortunately, the NX fleet is stretched pretty thin these days,” Archer said glumly.

Columbia had been due to join the fleet six days ago, once her convoy duty in the Onias sector was finished. But no trace of the starship had turned up. The last time Archer had heard from Erika Hernandez had been exactly a month ago. His queries to Starfleet Command into Columbia’s status and whereabouts had revealed only that the mining convoy she’d been guarding had been destroyed, reduced to an expanding debris cloud several astronomical units in diameter. But analyses of the detailed sensor scans had revealed absolutely no trace of Columbia.

“We’ll just have to make do with what we have, General,” Archer said.

“I shall count on your leading us to victory,” Shran said. “We will split a bottle of Fesoan grainwine on Deneva, Archer, to toast our victory. Shran out.”

“No pressure,” Archer said quietly to the warp-distorted starfield that replaced the general’s image.

Ensign Leydon took Enterprise out of warp ten minutes before crossing the outer edge of the Kappa Fornacis system’s warp-field detection grid.

Six and a half minutes later, nine large, horseshoe crab–shaped Romulan vessels screamed in at the Deneva-bound fleet while it was at the system’s periphery. Enterprise rocked and trembled as disruptor fire raked the polarized hull plating, melting sections of it, parts of which ablated away into space. Reed wasted no time returning fire, freeing Archer to coordinate the Daedalus fleet even as the Weytahn roared into the midst of the Romulan crossfire, every tube blazing.

“The communications countermeasure is active, Captain,” Hoshi reported, her consoles and readouts all aglow with flashing alarm indicators. “We’ve intercepted a subspace transmission. It’s a communication between ships in the Romulan fleet.”

“Does this transmission carry anything else besides the message?” Archer said. The latest work of the Cochrane Institute’s countermeasure team was built around the idea that the Romulan remote-hijack weapon worked by slipping malicious software code into its victims’ vital systems through their communications grids.

“According to the new protocols, yes,” Hoshi said. “Some sort of malware is embedded in the Romulan message. But it’s been completely contained in the new protected memory buffers.

T’Pol examined Hoshi’s readouts over her shoulder. “Copy the code onto external media for analysis, Ensign,” she said. “Then purge the buffers.”

“Aye, Commander,” Hoshi said as she got to work.

“A Trojan horse,” Archer said. The Romulans have been turning our own ships into their weapons against us with a damned Trojan horse.

Had Columbia run afoul of this same maneuver out in the far reaches of the Onias sector, the way Enterprise very nearly had out at Gamma Hydra? But if Columbia really had met with such a fate, then why had no trace of her turned up along with the remains of the convoy?

Praying that the Romulans hadn’t captured Columbia, Archer tried to put the matter out of his mind and savor today’s victory. But he knew it wouldn’t do to let that apparent triumph make him overconfident. After all, the fleet still had to fight its way down Kappa Fornacis’s gravity well close enough to set the MACO landing craft down on Deneva. And a hell of a lot could happen in the meantime.

The ship-to-ship clash had concluded quickly and decisively—and in the Coalition fleet’s favor. The Romulan troops on the ground had ultimately succumbed to the MACO landing force’s superior numbers, and they had to have been demoralized by the amount of orbital force that was bearing down on them.

Captain Archer studied the image of the blue world that turned slowly on his ready-room terminal, its skies and ground including the scorched