• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

But outside, the infinite space that lay beyond the chamber’s metal walls had appeared to be nothing but airless emptiness. He remembered, from some dark and hidden well of memory, that a vacuum could not conduct sound.

Just as he remembered that hull metal could.

THUMP.

He moved swiftly toward one of the walls and found the control panel where he had discovered a set of illumination controls. Holding his pistol at the ready with one hand, he killed the ship’s interior lighting with the other.

Darkness enfolded him a half-heartbeat after he noticed a quick, furtive movement through an ostensibly empty window.

Something is out there. He clutched the pistol in a two-handed grip as he approached the wall that harbored a man-high oval that he had come to think of as a sealed hatch. A series of faint clanks, bumps, and reverberations seemed to be coming from the hatch’s other side. He wondered if he had sufficient time to don one of the chamber’s four pressure suits before whatever was outside succeeded in prying its way in. Galvanized into action, he began moving purposefully through the darkness toward the garment storage locker.

An explosive peal of thunder sounded behind him then, followed by a gale-force wind that sent him tumbling backward into a fathomless, inky void.

TEN

Monday, July 28, 2155

Coalition of Planets Headquarters, San Francisco

ERIKA HERNANDEZ HAD FOUND it humiliating to have to allow the Vulcans to tow Columbia home from Alpha Centauri. But after she’d heard Administrator T’Pau and Minister Soval present their “alternative strategic plan” in a classified closed-door meeting with the senior civilian and military leadership of the United Earth government, as well as the diplomatic delegations of Alpha Centauri, Andoria, and Tellar, Hernandez felt as though the Vulcans had intentionally rubbed salt into her wounds. And Administrator T’Pau’s swift and unapologetic beam-up to her orbiting diplomatic vessel immediately after the initial presentation’s conclusion had done little to improve Hernandez’s opinion of what she had just heard.

Once T’Pau had vanished from the council chamber’s central rostrum, Minister Soval stood alone, facing the unsympathetic mass of Vulcan’s allies, who sat in the room’s semicircular ranks of plushly upholstered chairs. As Soval braced himself against the rising tide of understandably dour glares and disappointed mutterings of some of the most august personages of Coalition space and beyond—Earth’s Prime Minister Nathan Samuels and Interior Minister Haroun alRashid, the Martian Colonies’ special representative Qaletaqu, Ambassador Jie Cong Li of Centauri III, Draylax’s observer Grethe Zhor, Starfleet’s Admirals Samuel William Gardner and Gregory Logan Black, and MACO General George Casey numbered among them— Hernandez almost felt sorry for the Vulcan foreign minister.

But only almost, she decided as she rose from her seat in the rear ranks and became one of the first of the assembled participants and observers to give full-throated voice to her initial reaction.

“So that’s your ‘alternative’ plan, Minister Soval?” Hernandez said loudly. “Your plan to assist Earth against Romulan invasion amounts to helping us install a colossal, interplanetary burglar alarm?”

Prime Minister Samuels scowled in her direction as he rose to speak, and neither of the admirals looked particularly happy with her when they turned their gazes in her direction. Hernandez sat, chastened at having spoken out of turn despite the grin she received from the MACO general. The chamber had already fallen silent except for the frantic whisperings being exchanged between the diplomats and their aides.

But instead of answering her with a reprimand of his own, Soval surprised her by tackling her question head on. “It is a warp-field detection grid, Captain,” he said, correcting her in tones that radiated an unexpectedly high patience-to-condescension ratio. “As Administrator T’Pau and I have already indicated, our