Star Trek: Enterprise®: Kobayashi Maru by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels

Author:Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

Romulan Scoutship Drolae

ALTHOUGH THE SCOUTSHIP’S DAMPING SYSTEM effectively canceled out any noticeable inertial-acceleration effects, Tucker found he couldn’t keep his heart from lodging itself firmly in his throat. As he contemplated the velocity gauge on his copilot’s console, it occurred to him that he had never before traveled so fast in his life, not even aboard Enterprise. In fact, he might just have become the fastest human who ever lived.

Trip had picked up enough of the Romulan Empire’s dominant written language to understand the meaning of the text displayed on the speed readout before him. In his mind he pronounced the sounds that the blocky, angular Rihannsu script would make had he chosen to speak them aloud: avaihh fve ehr rhi.

Warp six point five, he thought, translating those alien sounds into English. Plasma flow is up to eight thousand kolem, with twenty-two thousand melakols of pressure in the intermix chamber. Damn.

Even during the Drolae’s swift voyage from Romulus to Cheron, Terix had not pushed the little scoutship’s warp drive nearly so hard as he was doing now. Once the Cheron mission had revealed Taugus III to be the most recent known location of the Ejhoi Ormiin cell responsible for Doctor Ehrehin’s murder and the theft of his warp-seven data, the centurion had seemed absolutely hell-bent on either reaching the dissidents’ enclave as quickly as possible or perishing in the attempt.

The little ship shuddered briefly, revealing what was probably an eddy of turbulence in the tiny, barely stable warp field that surrounded the vessel. He could only hope the unaccustomed vibrations didn’t portend some impending catastrophic failure; at such high speeds, a sudden warp-field collapse could reduce a vessel to a light-year-long string of vaporized debris in a matter of moments. And with the propulsion systems under so much obvious strain, the margin for error within that superluminal bubble of survival was probably too small even to measure.

“Do we really have to ride this poor beast so hard, Terix?” Trip asked, taking care to keep both Alabama and Florida out of his diction.

“We have no way of knowing for certain how long the Ejhoi Ormiin we seek will remain at the coordinates T’Luadh provided,” the centurion said. His gaze was focused straight ahead at the warp-distorted vista that rushed ceaselessly, and at unimaginable speeds, toward the scoutship’s forward windows. “We must reach the Taugus system before they find another hiding place.”

“All this speed won’t do us much good if we blow ourselves clear to Erebus getting there,” said Trip. “Besides, if we can generate this much speed with such a small warp core, I have to wonder why it’s worth taking such risks to recover the data these dissidents stole from Doctor Ehrehin in the first place.”

Terix turned to face Trip and looked at him as though he was being deliberately obtuse. “Look at the readouts on this ship’s support systems, Cunaehr.”

With a shrug, Trip did as the centurion asked. A moment later he realized that both the life-support and structural

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