Story:Red Fire, Red Planet/Why Do You Fight?

Lieutenant Tiyerissel sh’Kreem Shuttle Ibn Yunus Beyond the Edge of Sol 1034 GMT

Like most Starfleet shuttles the Type-10 wasn’t originally designed to travel at high warp. For most of recorded post-warp history, full-size starships could fit much more powerful warp cores, letting them reach speeds upwards of warp 9.9 in some cases. Even one of the old Danube-class runabouts could handle warp 9.4 after then-Senior Chief O’Brien’s upgrades made it throughout the fleet. By contrast a first-run Type-10 shuttlepod could maybe hit warp 5 going flat-out.

But advances in miniaturization in the mid-‘80s had drastically reduced the size of the warp coils needed for such high warp factors, and Starfleet shuttles were now almost as fast as their motherships, if considerably shorter-ranged. Which was how Ty sh’Kreem was able to push the Ibn Yunus past warp 9 and into the asymptote with a sizable safety margin, arriving near their target coordinates in about an hour.

“All right, Bikog, let’s see what’s out there.” Ty stood up to stretch; his prosthetic was bothering him.

“There’s nothing there! Sir.”

“Bikog, is there something wrong with your cyber-brain? You’re really twitchy today.” The Andorian’s antennae quirked left as he squatted to stretch his leg out straight. “Start with a gravimetric scan and work your way down the list.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ty grunted as he pressed his leg against the floor, carefully controlling his breathing as Kybok had shown him, then felt something give in his hip. With that the pain all but vanished and he let out a breath in relief.

“No black hole, Eltee, and no abnormal gravity waves. Wait, hold that thought.”

“What? What is it?”

“I have a very slight anomalous signal about four thousand kilometers out. It’s like a … a dent in the fabric, like somebody’s pressing lightly on spacetime with a stick.”

“That’s weird,” Ty said, standing and leaning over the Choblik’s haunch to get a look at the data.

“What’s even weirder is it seems to be unidirectional.”

“The frak?” Bikog dragged a hand across the touchscreen and rotated the anomaly in place. Sure enough, the gravity anomaly uniformly pulled in a single direction, upward relative to the Ibn Yunus, at 1.23 gravities. “What in the name of Lor’vela could that possibly be?” That sense of unease he’d felt aboard the station was coming back. “What was number three again?”

“Cloaked ship coming out of warp?”

“Let’s eliminate the possibility. Fire a burst of antiprotons from the main deflector.” It was a tried-and-true method of detecting cloaked vessels that Starfleet had copied from the Dominion and refined.

“It’ll take me a minute, sir.” Suddenly Bikog shouted, “Eltee, look!”

Ty’s head whipped up to the main viewscreen in horror. There was a ripple in the blackness, as if reality itself was bending to allow something to come into existence.

Something much bigger than their shuttle.

Something shaped like a predatory bird and painted pale green.

“Take evasive action! Shields—”

Then the Bird-of-Prey fired its main cannons and Ty and Bikog died instantly.

Operations Specialist, Second Class Kybok Starfleet Listening Post 204RT Oort Cloud, Sol System 1045 GMT Kybok stared impassively at the plot as the Ibn Yunus’ transponder signal suddenly vanished. He reached for the communicator. “204RT to Ibn Yunus. 204RT to Ibn Yunus, please respond.”

“Kybok,” Chief Blackhawk ordered, “Sweep the area with a high-res burst from the hyperradar arrays on the two nearest microsats. I want to know what the fucking hell just happened.”

Kybok input the commands and waited for the telemetry. “Reading fine debris indicative of fusion bottle failure, and …”

“Yes?”

“I am unsure. A very brief bounce-back from another object, four thousand kilometers from the debris field. It has now disappeared.”

“Magnify and play it back.”

Kybok zoomed in on the anomalous reading. It resembled part of a wing. With a very large gun attached to it. He put it on the monitor.

“Kiopek oghlu,” Sherazi breathed. “That’s a Klingon Bird-of-Prey.”

Just like that, Kybok figured out what was really going on. The ripples in subspace? Fluctuations from a cloaking device in use at warp. The DeWitt? Either hijacked or destroyed, with a Klingon Defense Force vessel mimicking her warp signature in the latter case.

Chief Blackhawk hit the intercom key on her console and bellowed, “Battle stations!” into the microphone. Klaxons began shrieking as her hands danced across the board. Again, into the microphone she shouted, “Starfleet Command, this is COS. Sally Blackhawk of Listening Post Two-Zero-Four-Romeo-Tango, authorization Charlie-Papa-Oscar-3255-Alpha-Whiskey-24827! Case Zulu! Repeat, Zulu, Zulu, Zulu! Details to follow!”

And for that brief moment, Kybok’s Vulcan composure slipped. Case Zulu was a code phrase that had not been heard in Sol since the Breen attack thirty-four years ago. It was never, ever given during exercises to avoid crying wolf, and had only one definition: “Enemy invasion imminent.”

“Allah preserve us,” Kybok heard Sherazi whisper.

Fleet Admiral William T. Riker Nob Hill, San Francisco, California Earth 0248 PST

Will Riker was jolted out of a sound sleep by the squeal of an emergency signal. He struggled to disentangle himself from his sheets and Deanna and said, “Computer, get that,” pressing his fingers to closed eyelids. “What the hell time is it?” he mumbled.

A female voice came through the flat’s intercom. “Sir, this is Admiral Singh at HQ. We just got a Case Zulu from one of the listening posts in the Oort cloud.”

That woke him up. “Home Fleet?”

“What’s here is scrambling, but remember the exercises?”

Will grunted and bit back a curse as he got to his feet and looked for some clean underwear. A good three-quarters of the Sol defense fleet was on maneuvers four light-years away in the Centauri system and couldn’t get back for another twenty hours or so. Whoever set off the listening post had great timing. “Civil defense?”

“We’ve got every emergency service in the system going apeshit, sir, all the way down to SFPD.”

“All right, then, the important question: who’s out there?”

“The CPO who got off the message says it’s the Klinks, sir.”

Will frowned at the slur that had been making its way through Starfleet over the past decade as the Federation’s long, if rocky, alliance with the Empire collapsed. He’d served with more than enough Klingons not to use it himself and still hoped there was some way to mend fences.

Eh. That was Deanna’s department. She was, after all, the head of the Diplomatic Corps now, and she still kept in touch with Worf. His job was keeping the Federation physically intact so she could do her job. “Mr. Singh,” he said to the intercom, “I’ll be there in ten minutes or less. Try and hold it together for me.”

“You got it, sir.

He zipped up his jacket, leaned down and kissed his sleeping imzadi on the cheek. “Computer, when Deanna wakes up, tell her I got called to HQ.” He started to walk out the door but then realized he was missing something. Then he looked down. “Oh, dammit, pants.”

First Lieutenant Meromi Riyal Chel’toK House Fleet Bird-of-Prey IKS mupwI’ Sol System, Approaching Primary Target 1509 Qo’noS Central Time

Meromi turned off her screen and looked at her reflection. Why do I fight? Meromi thought to herself, as always before she went into combat.

I fight for my freedom.

Meromi wasn’t a slave so much as an indentured servant, as marked by the tattoo of the House insignia under her right eye. It was the deal the House of Chel’toK had made with her: She gave herself to their house fleet for five years—year one was up in four days—and they didn’t hand her to Imperial Security, who wanted her head, literally, for arms dealing. Once her term was up, she’d get a full pardon, and she’d even get citizenship for her military service.

Meromi had been one of the fifteen hundred, the slave girls given by the Queen Bitch of the Orion Syndicate, as she thought of Melani D’ian, as “gifts” to the Great Houses of the Empire at the signing of the Treaty of Ter’jas Mor. Two months of drunken pawing and post-coital trips to the infirmary had been her limit and she’d escaped to the First City underground. That was where she’d learned to fight. Klingon mok’bara. Andorian shan-dru-shaan. Human jujutsu. Any style relying more on finesse and leverage than brute force. When you weigh 43 kilos in one gravity, that’s the only way to fight.

I fight because of my captain.

“All hands, come to general quarters,” she heard Brokosh announce into the intercom behind her. She liked Brokosh’s pragmatism and trusted his ethics. She couldn’t have dealt with a Klingon captain; they were near-uniformly nuts, and a lot less restrained. Orion women had enough problems. And she liked his wife. Even though it was Ba’woV who had caught her hiding in the Chel’toK estate’s basement after Imperial Security broke open her smuggling ring, it was also Ba’woV who had gotten the house head to conscript her and save her from execution.

She filtered out the chatter on the bridge and focused on the task before her. “Coming out of warp in five, four, three, two, one.” The streaking stars flashed and danced as the Bird-of-Prey rapidly braked for a crash translation to normal space. This part Meromi considered beautiful, a spectacular light show as radiation and particulate matter was tortured and torn by the deflector and the collapsing forward lobe of the warp field and a blue-shifted sphere inflated into view.

They swiftly braked to 25,000 kilometers per second and the distorted colors faded, giving the Orion her first-ever view of a coppery red orb, capped on either end by white icecaps. The humans called it Mars, supposedly after some ancient god of war. Ironic.

She punched in a few commands to correct her vector to point her at the shipyard control center, dropped the wings into combat configuration, and remotely popped the ventral hatch on the cargo bay. “Strike package ready for deployment, Captain.”

“Deploy the package.”

For such a theoretically devastating weapon the “strike package” was incredibly simple. It was nothing more than a ten ton block of solid uranium-238, less than a meter on a side, with a crude gimbal-mounted chemical rocket and simple radar guidance that let it make minor course corrections (maybe a few degrees in any direction). And the mupwI’ was the only ship in the formation carrying it, which made Meromi feel rather special.

At 430,000 kilometers she activated a preprogrammed macro and the cargo bay tractor beam pushed it clear of the Bird-of-Prey.

“‘Strike package’?” the general wondered from his seat at the back of the bridge. “What is this?”

“Observe, General,” Brokosh said. “Meromi, come left, two one five, and continue deceleration to combat velocities.”

“New sensor contacts,” Ila’kshath said. “A flight of Peregrine-class fighters, sixty thousand kilometers and closing.”

A voice over the comms. “Qap’gargh to mupwI’, we’re on your wing. Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam!”

No, it’s not, Meromi thought. It’s never a good day to die.

“Meromi, you may fire at will,” Brokosh ordered.

She set the cannons into scatter mode and killed the impulse engines, diverting their power to the disruptors, selected a vector, and fired. A low-pitched thrum echoed through the ship as the main cannons went into rapid, continuous fire, sending a luminescent green hailstorm of energy packets into the oncoming fighters.

“Package impact in three, two, one,” Norigom stated. On the main viewer, the disc-shaped central control terminal of the Utopia Planitia shipyards was suddenly replaced by a momentary flash of white light. Seconds later an answering glow blossomed on the planet surface, part of the projectile overpenetrating its target.

The general bellowed with gleeful laughter behind her and she looked away from her screen. The computer was handling all the targeting at this range. “Wonderful! I shall take this weapon to the High Council!”

“Be sure to credit the jeghpu’wI’ who came up with it,” Brokosh mildly pointed out, gesturing in Norigom’s direction.

“What?”

“Basic physics,” the Nausicaan said. “High mass plus high velocity equals ouch. Hey, it worked on you jil’kresh during the Gorn War. That jinya on the HoSbegh never knew what hit him.”

The general’s expression darkened. “My grandson … commanded that ship.”

“Yeah, he died a warrior’s death; what are you complaining about?”

Meromi and their wingman flashed through the formation of Peregrines, firing as she went. The already dim lights on the bridge dimmed even further for a moment as answering fire impacted the shields. She started to turn the ship for another pass. “Norigom,” Brokosh said, “you will keep a civil tongue in that mouth when speaking to a superior officer or I will sew it shut. Do we have an understanding between us?”

“You don’t pay me to talk pretty. Just because—”

“NORIGOM!”

“Yes, Captain.” The Nausicaan meekly turned back to his screen.

“General, I respectfully request that if you have a problem with one of my officers that you take it up with me, and at some less hectic time.”

“Captain,” Ila’kshath said, “I have a Galaxy-class cruiser coming out of warp in sector four. Identifying. USS Abraham Lincoln, NCC-71187.”

“Oh, brother,” Brokosh groaned. “One of those carrier refits they did for the Dominion War. Meromi, try to disengage and take us after it.”

“Yes sir,” she acknowledged.

The general reached for his communicator. “Second and Third Wings, form up on the mupwI’. Qapla’!”

Despite herself Meromi felt the left side of her mouth curl into a teeth-baring smirk.

I fight … because I like it.

Author's Notes
The little infodump at the start of the chapter does two things. For me, it gives me an excuse for how a shuttle, limited to normal cruising speeds of warp 2 according to the various technical manuals, could reach the required location in the time allotted. It also gives a fanonical explanation for why a runabout was only gradually outrun by a Jem'Hadar attack ship on a few occasions in DS9 when the were supposedly limited to warp 5 according to. My reference to Miles O'Brien as "then-Senior Chief" refers to my fanon decision that by 2409 he's the Master Chief Petty Officer of Starfleet.

The language in which Crewman Yasmin Sherazi is swearing in the second section is transliterated, one of several languages used in (on the order of 12 million speakers there, according to the CIA World Factbook).

And, of course, "Case Zulu" is a shameless ' reference and I borrowed the bit where Brokosh threatens to sew Norigom's mouth shut from the ' pilot.