The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [99]
“Not so far, Captain,” Carpenter said. “Wait a minute.” Her eyes suddenly grew wide. “I’m reading a swarm of bogeys, headed toward the planet from outsystem. Moving at high impulse.”
“Romulans?”
Lieutenant Commander Brent shook his high-domed head and scowled at his tactical console. “I’m reading them as small ships, Captain, but not like anything I’ve seen the Romulans use before. If they are Romulan, they’ve got to be one-person fighter craft.”
“Tactical Alert,” Curtis said. “Polarize the hull plating.”
On the main screen before Mayweather, a swarm of birdlike shapes, replete with ventral markings that resembled feathers and claws, resolved themselves into view in Berengaria’s pitiless blood-red glare.
Not birds, Mayweather thought as the apparitions continued their relentless approach. Hawks.
Or Raptors.
“Picking up a new bogey,” Brent said. “Smaller than these ships. Metal.”
“Range and heading?” said the captain.
The main viewer abruptly flashed a blinding white, which was followed by darkness, screams, and a horrible tumbling sensation.
Wiping the blood away from his brow yet again, Mayweather watched in silence through the escape pod’s port as Discovery’s battered hulk receded into the distance.
Molecular fires blazed all across the hull of the brand-new NX-class starship, and had already nearly consumed the forward sections that had been closest to the nuke with which the Romulans had surprised them.
“I can’t believe we let them destroy her before the paint finished drying,” Brent said, seated on the narrow bench beside him. “Never thought I’d see the inside of one of these lifeboats except in a drill.”
“It’s better than hanging around for a warp core breach,” Mayweather said, though he couldn’t help but agree with the tactical officer. When he’d served aboard Enterprise, most hostiles had used directed energy weapons of various sorts rather than old-style nukes. Such weapons could be lethal when detonated within a certain radius of a starship’s hull, despite the latest in hull-polarization systems. In this case, the nuclear blast had blinded and crippled the ship just long enough to enable the pack of Romulan fighter craft to inflict mortal damage.
“Don’t worry, Travis,” Carpenter said from Mayweather’s other side. “The captain made sure the distress call and the log buoy got out, in spite of all the damage.”
Mayweather noted that Carpenter had pointedly avoided mentioning that Captain Curtis had died getting those final tasks accomplished.
Discovery blew herself into countless fragments amid an expanding cloud of superheated plasma and metal vapor that showered the entire vicinity with small pieces of tumbling debris. The only parts of the late NX-class starship that seemed to be at all intact were the red parallelogram-shaped shrouds that had covered the lifeboats prior to their hurried launch from the primary hull’s dorsal section.
As he watched a couple of dozen of the bright yellow, wedge-shaped lifeboats make their way toward the blue-green planet below, he wondered if anybody would hear Discovery’s final mayday calls in time to help any of her crew.
And if the Romulans would let any of them make it all the way down to the surface.
Attack Raptor Ehrie Hwi
”Preparing for atmospheric pursuit of survivors,” T’Vak said.
“No,” T’Voras said into his throat mic, throttling down his engines. He had learned much from the overeagerness he had displayed during his encounter with the Terran freighter he had destroyed during the test missions of the arrenhe’hwiua telecapture system. Besides, he already had more than enough explaining to do as it was, having misjudged the capabilities of this new Terran ship’s armor sufficiently to have destroyed it rather than capturing it for study in the