• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Instead of answering, Tevik came to an abrupt halt. In T’Rukh’s pale glow, Trip could see that the other man had closed his eyes, and that a pained expression creased his normally calm, faux-Vulcan features.

Uh-oh, Trip thought, suddenly visualizing a huge crumbling wall. “Tevik? Are you all right?”

Trip let his right hand wander a little closer to the phase pistol he had tucked inside his robe. With his left hand, he pulled out his personal comm device and sent a priority signal to Ych’a.

SEVENTY-NINE

Atlantis NX-05, near Tau Ceti IV

LIKE THE CITY from the ancient legends from his parents’ homeworld, Atlantis seemed about to succumb to a lethal deluge. The bridge was in flames, scorched conduits sagged overhead, and the structural beams that held the deck together groaned ominously.

And the crew of the fifth starship in Earth’s small NX-class fleet was powerless to do anything to halt the Romulans, whose landing craft were even now disgorging their shock troops less than two hundred kilometers below Atlantis’s disruptor-scarred belly.

Lieutenant Travis Mayweather remained behind the helm, where he struggled to halt the starship’s bucking, rattling approach to the green world that had already grown disconcertingly large in the main view-screen before him. Behind him, Captain Weiss barked a steady stream of orders aimed at preventing a fiery atmospheric entry. All around the battered bridge, the other members of the command crew ran, hopped, or limped to carry those instructions out.

“Main propulsion is still not responding, Captain,” Mayweather said, shouting to be heard over the wail of the emergency klaxons. “Warp and impulse power are both dead, and I can’t get enough out of the maneuvering thrusters to make much difference in our descent.”

“Understood. Keep trying anyway.”

While the captain harangued Chief Engineer Mirsky for more power, Mayweather dutifully continued carrying out his captain’s orders as best he could, though he didn’t try to kid himself that he was accomplishing anything other than staying focused on something besides the cosmic unfairness of the universe.

I finally find a ship where I feel at home, and look what happens, Mayweather thought. This is the first crew since I left Enterprise that didn’t treat me like some kind of albatross. He felt confident that nobody here regarded his “Kobayashi curse”—a phrase he’d heard colleagues on other vessels whisper when they thought he couldn’t hear them—as the cause of Atlantis’s woes.

Even though it looks like this will be the second time an NX-class starship goes down with me at the helm.

Finally Mayweather had received a promotion to lieutenant, only to discover that it had arrived just before an urgent summons from the Reaper. And death seemed very near indeed now, despite the merciful stroke of luck that had led the Romulans to ignore Atlantis, at least for the moment.

The Romulan fleet that had engaged the combined Starfleet-Andorian-Tellarite Tau Ceti task force had turned out to be much larger than the enemy battle groups at Berengaria, Altair, and Deneva. And while the latest countermeasures had neutralized the Romulans’ remote-hijack weapon, their plentiful complement of birds-of-prey and the smaller, nuclear-armed fighter craft had proved overwhelming to the Coalition battle group. In fact, the Romulans seemed to have overcompensated so much that the entire Andorian and Tellarite complements had already withdrawn to the system’s periphery. Starfleet was battered and bloodied. And the Romulans now had a beachhead less than twelve light-years from Earth.

Mayweather turned from his console to face Captain Weiss. “I’m still fighting too much atmospheric drag, Captain,” he said. “And engineering can’t give me enough thrust to cancel it out.”

“Get to the escape pods,” Weiss said, effectively pronouncing Atlantis’s epitaph. “We’re going to abandon ship and autodestruct.” Lieutenant Brenner, the comm officer, dutifully relayed the captain’s order throughout the ship.

Locking the