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Sato’s eyes widened. “Not entirely. I’m seeing a pattern here. Right at the end of the flight recording, each of the Miracht’s vital systems spontaneously shut down, one by one.”

“As though somebody was turning each of them off, by remote control,” Reed said.

Sato nodded. “The Romulan hijacking weapon.”

“I’d bet on it,” Reed said. “I’ll tell the captain.”

Although he hated what he was thinking right now, Reed hoped for the sake of his whole species that the Miracht’s commander had had sufficient time to destroy his vessel before the Romulans managed to seize the prize of the Tellarite navy.

And that Enterprise reached her homeworld before the Romulans forced the very same horrible choice upon Captain Archer.

• • •

Once Enterprise was under way, Jonathan Archer left T’Pol in charge of the bridge and withdrew to his ready room.

He sat behind his desk and wasted no time composing and sending a quick dispatch to Admiral Gardner at Starfleet Command. Without a pause, he then opened up one of the special secure Coalition diplomatic comm channels. A few seconds later, a hirsute female humanoid with porcine features regarded him with undisguised suspicion from across the gulf of parsecs that separated them.

The Tellarite diplomatic attaché greeted Archer with a put-upon snort, then issued the formal greeting of, “What?”

“I need to speak with Ambassador Gral immediately,” Archer said. “About the Miracht.”

TWENTY-FIVE

Day Eleven, Month of Khuti

D’caernu’mneani system, Ahiuan sector

Imperial Romulan Annexed Space

ACCORDING TO THE NAV COMPUTER back aboard the Bird-of-Prey Dhivael, D’caernu’mneani—“great eye of red” in ancient High Rihannsu—was the name of the bloated red giant star toward which Commander T’Voras and his attack wing now moved at the agonizingly torpid pace of less than half of luminal speed.

Unfortunately, the dawdling crawl of T’Voras’s two ten-vessel squadrons was something he had no power to influence, any more than he could avoid the necessity of leaving his command, the Dhivael, on a long orbital trajectory just beyond the remote debris zone that marked the far boundaries of the red giant star’s planetary system. To bring the large mother ship any closer to her midsystem target world would be to risk immediate detection by the enemy outpost on Draed’ulhei, which enjoyed the protection of an automated early-warning grid whose subspace-transmitted alarms would be triggered instantaneously by the entry of any unauthorized warp-driven vessel.

A sublight Nei’hrr-class attack raptor, however, had no such limitations. Therefore the small assault craft that T’Voras now piloted, leading nineteen of his bird-of-prey’s finest flyers to coast ever deeper into the massive red giant star’s deep gravity well, had the best chance of catching the enemy unawares on the surface of Draed’ulhei, the innermost of the system’s two neighboring habitable worlds.

Provided, T’Voras reminded himself, that we succeed in entering the planet’s atmosphere at the proper coordinates, and at the appropriate angle.

And that Centurion T’Vak, whom T’Voras had left in charge of the Dhivael, took no action that might inadvertently reveal the large, T’Liss-class bird-of-prey’s presence at the edge of this system.

The planet, the middle child of a fertile family of thirteen worlds, hung in T’Voras’s forward port like a glowing aquamarine gem and grew steadily before his eyes. Even after the squadrons reduced their velocity for entry approach, the raptors would hit the atmosphere at multiple hundreds of mat’drih per eisae, and would have to endure hull temperatures of several thousand onkians as their deceleration continued. Under such unforgiving circumstances, there would be no second chances.

T’Voras keyed open the squadron’s scrambled EM-band frequency, a wavelength and transmission mode chosen for the purpose of avoiding detection by either ground-based subspace transceivers or those that comprised Caernu’mneani’s systemwide detection grid.

“Ehrie Hwi to Ehrie Squadron