The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [85]
She knew only that he now had no place else to go.
Be safe out there, kid, she thought, despite a rising certainty that life was about to get far more dangerous for everyone, and particularly so for those headed ever deeper into the interstellar dark, as she was.
Clutching her small duffel to her side, she joined the boy’s vigil without moving a muscle, waiting in sympathetic silence for the next outbound transport.
TWENTY-ONE
Thursday, October 16, 2155
U.S.S. Yeager NCC-76
Kappa Fornacis III Deneva
ONLY A SPLIT-SECOND after their seeming emergence from nowhere, the three gaudily painted Romulan birds-of-prey had struck hard and without any warning whatsoever. Commander Julia Stiles hadn’t been surprised by the Romulan’s ferocity. She was flabbergasted, however, by the fact that they had somehow managed to catch the Deneva colony unaware.
How the hell did they get past that Vulcan warning grid? she thought as she checked the six other uniformed bodies that lay sprawled on the deck or across burning consoles for signs of life.
All dead. Every last one of them, including Captain Gerhard, whose corpse lay pinned beneath a fallen support beam. Coughing in the ozone-tinged air, Stiles acknowledged with a calmness born of equal parts training and shock that she was now in command of a Daedalus-class starship for the first and probably last time simultaneously.
Belay that kind of thinking, Commander, she told herself. She imagined the thought to have come from outside herself, in Gerhard’s voice, even though the rational part of her mind knew to a certainty that the captain would never issue another order. Instead of dwelling on such grim realities, she decided to take maximum advantage of whatever lucidity she might have retained since the sneak attack.
From the controls on the command chair, she ran a quick check on the ship’s internal communications grid, which appeared to be as dead as the bridge’s main viewscreen. At least the bridge’s death throes appeared to have stopped the ear-splitting blare of the emergency klaxons, which had activated when the dim emergency lighting came on, moments after the initial hull breach that had been reported from the lower decks.
Those decks had held the bulk of the mixed group of Starfleet, MACO, and civilian personnel who had been assigned to patrol, test, and, if necessary, make repairs to the network of sensor nodes in the outer Kappa Fornacis system.
A network that had evidently failed utterly in its purpose. Somehow, the Romulan ships had managed to get all the way to the asteroid belt beyond the orbit of Deneva, apparently making use of the dense metallic bodies of which the belt was comprised to conceal their presence until—literally—the last second before their assault on the Yeager.
At least the Romulans have stopped pounding holes through our hull, Stiles thought.
The pain in her ankle made her wince as she moved on to the forward tactical console, which smoldered in the absence of a functioning fire-suppression system. Then she stumbled and nearly fell as the gravity plating lurched nauseatingly. At the same moment the hull directly overhead groaned like an anguished ghost, providing an uncomfortable reminder that a hard vacuum lurked just beyond the top of the Yeager’s spherical primary hull.
After she’d tried and failed to access every major system on the ship, Stiles concluded that the Yeager was little more than a still-twitching corpse. The Romulans left us for dead, she thought. And it’s not because they’re being cocky.
She knew, of course, what else that meant: The Romulans must have already moved on to Deneva proper. With the Yeager no longer standing in the breach, that beautiful blue world, from Lacon Township to all the other human settlements and outposts that stretched across the paradisiacal Summer Islands Archipelago,