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By Root 628 0

than he had before. And his forlorn expression prompted her to wish, against all logic, that she could offer him something other than empty platitudes. The fault lines of stress she saw on his forehead and in the muscles of his cheeks and jaw seemed nearly intense enough to pull him apart. That small flash of insight made her wonder whether she had finally spent enough time among humans to begin to understand their peculiar predilection for metaphor, simile, and analogy—even as it made her ponder humanity’s apparently rather dim prospects of mustering sufficient unity to meet the escalating Romulan threat.

They must find that unity, she told herself. Colonel Lundy and Mister Shima notwithstanding. With the certainty of gravity, she understood that the only alternative would be the sundering and scattering that her own people experienced during the brutal wars the ancient Vulcans fought during the time of Surak.

And the fate of the ancestors of those who even now march beneath the raptor’s wing.

FIVE

Columbia NX-02, near Alpha Centauri

“THEIR TRACTOR BEAM has locked onto us, Captain,“ Lieutenant Karl Graylock said. The chief engineer’s German-accented words were muffled more than usual by the still balky shipboard comm system. “Hull stresses are staying within the error bars... so far. I’ve got my repair teams deployed preemptively, though. And Major Foyle and his MACOs are standing by to assist. Just in case the tractor tears our bumpers off.”

“Good work, Karl,” Captain Erika Hernandez said, brushing a few stray strands of her straight black bangs away from her eyes. Apart from her slightly unruly hair, she tried to set a textbook example of command comportment for her bridge crew, sitting ramrod straight in the chair at the center of Columbia’s busy A-deck nerve center. Four days after a Romulan sneak attack had left the starship crippled and adrift, the discipline of preserving appearances had become more important to morale maintenance than ever before.

“Keep the hatches battened down and tell our friends we’re ready to go home,” she said.

Hernandez’s exec, Commander Veronica Fletcher, stepped toward the captain and came to a stop alongside the command chair. “Back to Earth, to lick our wounds,” the fair-haired young woman said quietly in her New Zealand twang. “And we have to accept a tow from the Vulcans, no less. We’re never gonna live this down.” She shook her head ruefully.

Hernandez allowed a grim smile to cross her lips. “Maybe. But I’ll wager that the Vulcans have a hell of a lot more to be embarrassed about right now than we do.”

Fletcher’s brow crinkled like a dented hovercar fender. “How do you figure? We just discovered how easy it is for the Romulans to sneak right up onto the human race’s back porch. That’s a pretty damned mortifying thing, if you ask me.”

“Granted,” Hernandez said, nodding in concession to her exec’s point. “But we weren’t the ones whose ships got hijacked and turned into Romulan weapons.” Not eager to encourage her second-in-command’s tendency to accentuate the negative, she refrained from adding the word “yet.”

“I suppose that particular badge of shame would have to go to the Vulcans,” Fletcher said. “Still, I don’t see anybody sneaking up on them.”

That’s the nature of sneaking, Hernandez thought. Nobody sees ’em—until after they come up out of the weeds. Aloud, she said, “I think we can count on Starfleet and the MACOs to do everything possible from here on in to make sure humanity doesn’t get caught with its collective pants down again.”

“Saying that’s a lot easier than doing it,” Fletcher said, folding her arms before her. “And a lot of the doing could depend on our using something faster than the Pony Express to get our after-action reports in front of Starfleet Command.”

Hernandez leaned against the command chair’s right arm as she considered Fletcher’s words—and her unspoken implication that embarrassed Vulcans might not be entirely forthcoming to Starfleet about a Romulan seizure of Vulcan vessels. As things stood now, until Columbia