STAR TREK® VOYAGER™ INVASION! by DAFYDD AB HUGH

Author:DAFYDD AB HUGH
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: POCKET BOOKS
Published: 1996-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

15

“THEY MUST HAVE PLANNED THIS INVASION FOR CENTURIES,” muttered B’Elanna Torres. She sat backward in a chair in engineering, resting her chin on the back and staring at part of the schematics of the moon. Centuries! The thought frightened her human half—and awed her Klingon side.

“You think so?” asked Captain Janeway from behind Torres. The chief engineer jumped; she had thought she was alone on the deck.

“Captain! I didn’t hear you come in.”

“You said they’ve been planning this for centuries. How do you know?”

B’Elanna said nothing for a moment; then the Klingon forced out the information deduced by the human. “Because of the mathematics of it,” she said; “twenty-seven billion Furies, figure a thousand—no, ten thousand in a ship, they would need a fleet of two-point-seven million ships.”

“That’s a hell of a fleet.”

“That’s a ridiculous fleet! Compared to that, the entire Federation has only a handful of starships, and none of them can carry anywhere near ten thousand people. The Federation, Klingon and Cardassian Empires, and everybody else in the quadrant have combined fewer than fifty thousand ships of any type, maybe a total carrying capacity of twelve-point-five million people if we pack them like Klingon fish.”

“So you figure the Furies were planning on sending their entire planet all along.”

Was Janeway making fun? No, she’s not the type. “Right. I mean, yes, Captain. This isn’t a desperation maneuver; it’s what they always intended to do. The other invasions were just attempts to establish a beachhead.”

“And it would have taken more than a century to build all this technology?”

“Captain, they had to develop it from scratch. If they’d had the ability to send their planet through a hundred years ago, they would have. They were planning this decades years ago, when they met the first Enterprise, and they must have planned it for decades before that.” B’Elanna stared at the warp core, watching it pulse red, fade, pulse. The regularity comforted her in the face of timeless, implacable enmity— “vast, cool, and unsympathetic” stuck in her mind from somewhere.

“I wish we could plan that far ahead,” said Janeway. “So what do we do about it? What’s my third option, Torres?”

B’Elanna ground her teeth. She had thought for a couple of hours; at least, still stumped, she had finally hooked up with Lieutenant Carey, Maquis cleverness combined with Starfleet thoroughness.

Together, they had come up with one possibility—but it was impossible. Carey was back in his quarters racking out; Torres could not sleep herself, so she was left to bear the torch herself.

“Well, Carey and I have only a vague thought. Frankly, I can’t see how we would implement it.” Pulse, fade. Bright red, and the control console behind her was cold, hard.

“It is?”

“Destroy the moon. Blow it up somehow. No power—no wormhole.”

Janeway absently toyed with her hair, distracted. The captain’s eyes flicked across the instrument readouts behind B’Elanna; she never stops, not even for a second, thought the engineer. B’Elanna felt the rough fabric of the chair against her chin; she felt an old dream stir, the dream of command and four pips on her collar.

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