“Maybe enough of the truth leaked out back then to influence his place in history,” Jake said. “After all, anyone with the power to rewrite history can use that clout for goodpurposes, too.”
“So, did he survive, or was this really his last hurrah?” Nog asked.
“You don’t know?” Jake said, teasing. He cuffed Nog on the arm, the way they used to do when they were kids.
“I told you I hadn’t watched it all the way through, hew‑mon,” Nog brayed, giving Jake a good‑natured shove. “You don’t believe me?”
Jake held up his hands in surrender. “That’s all the roughhousing these old bones can take.”
Nog snorted. “Oh, you’re suchan old man.”
Jake realized now how much he’d missed the banter and teasing he used to share routinely with his old friend. It really had been too long since they’d been in touch, and he resolved not to let so much time pass between their reunions in the future.
“All right, let’s see what happens next,” he said, his hand moving to reactivate the holo. “And let’s hope for the best.”
Forty‑Six
Sunday, February 23, 2155
Near Romulan space
TRIP REJOICED WHEN THE INSTRUMENTS confirmed that their ship had actually made it past the known boundaries of the Romulan Star Empire. Of course, his joy was mitigated by the grim realization that Admiral Valdore’s ships weren’t about to be stopped by a border arbitrarily drawn onto some stellar cartographer’s maps.
Trip could be thankful at least that he and Ehrehin had managed to widen their small lead over their pursuers, albeit only modestly. Or until the next time this rust bucket’s warp drive conks out,he thought, hoping he wasn’t tempting fate by visualizing that scenario.
Perhaps a minute later, as he spared as much power as he dared to scan the subspace bands, Trip’s earlier elation vanished entirely.
God, no. No, no, no.Trip’s heart plunged abruptly into a headlong freefall as he continued putting together stray bits and pieces of the farrago of highly agitated chatter that was coming through the console and echoing inside his suit’s helmet. A relatively small number of words and phrases predominated, and thanks to the translation gear the Adigeons had installed inside his ears, Trip heard them distinctly in what had to be at least a dozen human and nonhuman languages:
“–Coridan Prime–”
“–struck–”
“–Coridan Prime–”
“–projectile–”
“–Coridan Prime–”
“–impact–”
“–catastrophe–”
“–Coridan disaster zone–”
“–continents ablaze–”
“–dilithium fires–”
“–Coridan Prime–”
“–devastation–”
“–conflagration–”
“–Coridan Prime–”
“–billions dead–”
“–burning dilithium–”
“–Coridan Prime–”
All Trip could do was sit and imagine the ignition of the mother of all nuclear core meltdowns, touched off by a collision containing orders of magnitude more energy than the asteroid impact that killed off Earth’s dinosaurs. Coridan Prime’s rich veins of dilithium would have ignited as a result of the Romulan ship’s impact, a disaster accompanied by an enormously destructive, uncontrolled release of antimatter from the vessel’s engines.
Would the Romulans have sent a pilot on such a mission? Perhaps they’d been planning to use the kidnapped Aenar to remotely launch more such attacks against other worlds, using ever faster and harder‑to‑intercept ships. His stomach lurched at the thought.
Trip noticed belatedly that Ehrehin was standing beside his seat and leaning toward him, apparently trying to listen in via his own suit’s com system. “Tell me, Trip. What’s just happened?”
I wasn’t fast enough.That’s what’s just happened.
“The Romulans already launched their attack against Coridan Prime,” Trip said aloud, his throat suddenly feeling as dry as Vulcan’s Forge. “And it sounds like it turned out pretty much the way you’d expect. The Coridanites probably never stood a chance.”
I couldn’t protect them from the Romulans. Just like I couldn’t protect my sister Lizzie from the Xindi.
Trip felt Ehrehin’s gloved hand gently pressing against the padded shoulder of his environmental suit, in what Trip took to be a fatherly gesture of solace. He reached up and placed his own hand on the scientist’s arm.
It was only then that he noticed the length of cable that coiled away from his shoulder, leading down to the floor near Ehrehin’s seat to the not‑quite‑closed floor‑level compartment that housed the cockpit’s power relays.
“What the hell?” Trip tried to stand, but failed because of the unexpectedly hard downward shove the frail old man administered. Trip plopped awkwardly back down into his seat as Ehrehin scrambled away from him, retreating awkwardly toward the aft compartment. Trip struggled out of his chair again, laboriously regaining his feet as he tried to get hold of the cable that he only now realized was attached to the back of his own suit, rather than to Ehrehin’s.
But before his glove‑clumsy hands could get a solid grip on the cable, a brief flash of light sent blinding golden spots swimming before his eyes, and his muscles suddenly went rigid. Trip’s paralyzed body swayed, tipped, and finally crashed all the way down to the deck. He fell with a bone‑jarring impact onto his side, his body wedged ungracefully between the pilot’s and copilot’s seats.
The power relays,Trip thought woozily. He used the power relays to stun me.
Trip supposed it would have been worse for him had the old man opted to simply immolate him with some hidden disruptor pistol he easily could have picked up during the confusion of their hasty escape.
On the other hand, all he could do was look up helplessly through his faceplate as Ehrehin moved with evident caution back into view and began entering commands Trip couldn’t quite see into the pilot’s console. From the change in the vibrations in the deck beneath him, Trip could tell that the old man had dropped them out of warp.
Trip’s soul deflated as he struggled vainly to move a body that had essentially turned to stone. Soon Valdore’s ships would catch up to them, making his failure complete. Looks like somebody really oversold Spymaster Harris on how well I play with aliens.
Trip knew that his fate would soon be subject to the tender mercies of the Romulan military. And if Ehrehin could still be taken at face value on at least onesubject, Admiral Valdore wouldn’t be interested in taking him back to Romulus in irons. He fleetingly wished that Ehrehin hadjust burned him down with one of the Ejhoi Ormiin’s incendiary guns.
No. There’s no way I’m gonna let this happen.
Trip fought harder than ever to move his body. He was rewarded by a loud tapping sound that he quickly realized was one of his boots coming into sharp contact with the bottom of one of the cockpit chairs. He was elated to have achieved movement, albeit uncontrolled.
But Ehrehin must have noticed, because a second brief but crippling surge of current shot through the cable and into Trip’s body, penetrating his insulated suit as though it weren’t even there. As consciousness began to flee behind another salvo of bright, vision‑obscuring spots, his final coherent thoughts were of T’Pol, with whom he still shared an intimate if tenuous mind‑link. And whom he would never again see, nor bring any succor from the grief to which he had already subjected her.