Star Trek: Enterprise - 016 - Rise of the Federation: Tower of Babel by Christopher L. Bennett

Author:Christopher L. Bennett [Bennett, Christopher L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, General, Action & Adventure, Media Tie-In
ISBN: 9781476749648
Google: j7EpAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1476749647
Barnesnoble: 1476749647
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2014-03-25T07:00:00+00:00

8

Janxor, Rigel III

THE WRECKAGE OF THE SHIP was spread out over half the mountainside. Travis Mayweather and Reynaldo Sangupta gazed up at the debris field from the base of the low, scree-covered slope, with Director Sajithen towering over them from behind. An even bigger Chelon, one of her security escorts, flanked the group, while the other escort, a Jelna exomale, worked his way gingerly up the slope, scanning the debris. “How awful,” the director rumbled. “I pray that your crewmates were not aboard this ship.”

That was a possibility Mayweather refused to contemplate. He had lost far too many crewmates over the years, first to the Xindi while aboard Enterprise, later aboard the multiple ships he’d had shot out from under him in the Romulan War. Now he had the added burden of being their superior officer. He had given Grev and Kirk the okay to visit the archive—and he had assigned Kenji Mishima to protect them. For the first time, Mayweather had to live with the knowledge that he’d ordered someone to his death. For now, he was coping with it by reminding himself that the First Families were the ones truly responsible, the rightful targets for his anger. But he knew it wouldn’t be that simple to live with his own responsibility in the long term. The one thing that could make it easier was to help bring Grev and Kirk back alive. The thought that some random malfunction or pilot error had precluded any chance of their rescue was unacceptable.

Fortunately, Mayweather had good reason not to believe it. “I’m not sure anyone was aboard that ship,” he told the director.

“I do not understand.”

The first officer spread his arms to indicate the territory around them, a largely barren volcanic island about the size of Greenland but much hotter. “Why would they have come here? The Chelons who provided the hypnoids live in the Hainali rainforest, clear on the other side of the planet.”

“There is a major spaceport at the eastern tip of the island, in the direction the ship was headed. It draws in traders from all over the system, even Rigel IV.”

“Yes, and that makes it a plausible destination—if we didn’t know about the rainforest connection. And we weren’t supposed to, because the evidence was supposed to be destroyed in the explosion. If they were going anywhere on Rigel III, they would’ve gone to Hainali.”

“Except they wouldn’t have gone there,” Sangupta said, “because that would’ve tipped us off to the very connection they were trying to hide.”

“That’s right. But if they’d avoided sending a ship to Three at all, that would’ve looked suspicious in itself,” Mayweather went on. “They had to make Three one of the shells in the game—but they sent us here, to the far side of the planet.”

“Yeah,” the science officer answered, nodding as he filled in the rest in his own mind. “And a crashed ship in a place like this—spread out over square kilometers of an unstable rock face—we could spend days trying to find organic remains or a surviving data module before we ruled this out as a decoy.

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