Echoes of the Dead - MMolvray 1 Mia Molvray © 2014 epub ISBN: 978-0-9829518-0-4 Echoes of the Dead Echoes of the Dead - MMolvray 2 Chapter 1 The Enterprise slipped out of warp near Clare Four, a minor star named after a minor explorer. The crew in the control room worked with their usual efficiency, getting ready to check in with the archeologists’ camp on the planet below. Only Deanna Troi knew that the universe was suddenly screaming. She suppressed a gasp and glanced over the whole bridge. The minds around her were all calm. And yet she felt as if she was drowning in endless, wordless pain. Who felt that awful despair? She had to find out. If she didn't, she couldn't help. And if she couldn’t help, there was no way to stop the screams. In her agitation she stood abruptly and strode toward the turbolift. She felt First Officer Riker’s worried eyes tracking her, but she couldn’t stop for him. They’d loved each other once. They always would love each other, but she couldn’t stop even for him. Suddenly, the Klingon weapons officer, Lieutenant Worf, announced, “Orion ship approaching us at warp seven. Correction, approaching Clare Four. Coming into visual range now.” That stopped her. Maybe they were the source of the pain. Worf had a way of looking large and sounding fierce even when he was doing nothing but docking the ship, but if there were Orion pirates around, that was different. She herself, mild Deanna, Ship’s Counselor, couldn’t find it in her to be understanding to those scum. “On screen,” ordered Captain Picard. His eyes widened. “Very sleek. For an Orion ship. Whatever their racket is, it seems to take them to the Federation.” “We're being scanned by the Orion ship,” reported the android Lieutenant Commander Data. “They have seen us.” He was the one person Troi never felt anything from, and he himself studied feelings because, he said, he had none. And yet, as he reported the pirates’ suspicious moves, he continued in a quicker tempo, “Orion ship changing heading to point three three mark one point nine, moving away at warp eight.” “They don’t like what they see,” said Will Riker, eyes narrowed. “And judging by that ship’s looks, I’d guess that warp eight is really pushing their engines.” Troi saw the Captain frown. Usually his feelings were as controlled and disciplined as his face, but this time his hatred of the vicious slavers hit her Echoes of the Dead - MMolvray 3 like a wall. The Orions’ new course took them deeper into Federation space. The Enterprise would have to pursue, and that would delay bringing emergency medical help to the archeologists. The innocent would suffer because of the guilty. The Captain’s frown deepened. “Pursue that ship at maximum warp,” he ordered. Counselor Troi sat back down. The sudden pain had vanished when the stars turned to rainbow streaks. The Enterprise caught up with the speeding pirates easily, but the reason they’d slowed down here was obvious. Ahead, and coming up on all sides, was Balogh’s Ball Mill. The collision of two stars and their associated systems had left two different disks mixed into a broad swath of rotating, tumbling, crashing rocks. Standing still, it would look like empty space, but moving through it even at one tenth impulse meant plowing through a hailstorm made of rocks. The Orions were leaping through the obstacle course at near-warp. “Shields on maximum,” ordered Riker, “deflectors up.” The forward viewscreen filled with boulders, many bigger than the ship, careening straight toward the bridge before bouncing off at the last minute when they hit the deflectors. Every few minutes the whole ship shuddered from the larger collisions. Captain Picard stared balefully at the nimble ship ahead of them. “Look at them. It’s like watching a level 10 player of ‘Stars and Battles’ on the holodeck.” The sensors could barely track the Orion ship as it dodged expertly around and through all the planetesimals, asteroids and speeding boulders. “I’ll have to let Starfleet know this area isn’t patrolled well enough,” he continued. “Judging by their performance they come here at least once a week to practice.” He turned to Worf, “Still no answer to our hails?” “No, sir.” “Broadcast the following,” ordered Picard. Worf pressed a few panels on his board and nodded to the Captain to proceed. “Unknown Orion ship: you are trespassing in Federation space. If you do not respond immediately, you will be fired upon.” Still there was no response. Instead, they periodically shot at the Enterprise and ducked behind asteroids, forcing the Enterprise deeper and deeper into the Ball Mill to look for them. The shields deflected the hits, but on one occasion the dissipated power was briefly enhanced by a glancing asteroid. The sudden feedback created a momentary glitch in one of the artificial gravity generators. People in the area of the greenhouses and recyclers shot into freefall and then promptly smacked right back down into tables, floors and shelves, closely followed by any liquid or loose debris that had taken the same trajectory. Dr. Beverly Crusher was soon reporting a number of injuries, including several broken bones. Echoes of the Dead - MMolvray 4 Captain Picard scowled. They hadn’t done any damage at all to that miserable Orion ship, by the look of it. “Planetesimal ahead,” noted Data. “It will overwhelm the deflectors.” “Standard avoidance,” ordered Captain Picard. In the course of the maneuver, they lost the ship. It reappeared briefly overhead, from the point of view on the bridge. Then it appeared to the left, then overhead again. The infernal Orions were simply dancing around the Enterprise. “If you can get a good shot at them, take their warp engines out with precision phaser blasts,” added the Captain. “They are going to answer for this behavior if I have to tow them all the way back to a Starbase to do it.” Lieutenant Worf prepared the weapons at his control panel with grim satisfaction, like every Klingon before a fight. No amount of Starfleet training was going to change that. Time trickled slowly by in a standoff. The Federation’s finest tried to get a clear shot at the small Orion pirate ship, and it, with better success, tried to make sure they didn’t. Suddenly Lieutenant Worf’s voice boomed through the bridge, “Captain! Minor asteroid approaching forward shield. Strong magnetism. It could be a containment field concealing antimatter, sir!” The Captain was at Data’s station in an instant, his eyes scanning information almost as fast as the blur of Data’s android fingers could bring it up. “There’d be lots of magnetized debris, if it was a natural phenom —” the Captain started to say, when Engineer LaForge interrupted, “Shape of magnetic field and tachyon emissions exclude natural sources, Captain.” He ran another series of scans as his hands flew over the control board. “No doubt about it. Gravimetric readings consistent with a large metal containment core. That has to be a bomb. And if it’s as big as the gravity indicates, that thing will blow us to kingdom come as soon as it hits the deflectors.” The blind Engineer with his vision-replacing band around his eyes could see things invisible to everyone else. If he said the tachyon emissions were all wrong, they were all wrong. There was brief silence on the bridge. “That’s why those scum have been teasing us to go further in,” snapped Riker. “If we shoot at it now, its forward momentum will still carry exploding bombs straight into the shields. How about transporting?” Picard nodded. It was the only way. “O’Brien?” “O’Brien here.” “Lock onto Data’s coordinates and beam that asteroid as far away as you can. Maximum dispersion.” “Mass is too great,” O’Brien’s voice came back almost instantly, “unless you reduce power to shields.” Echoes of the Dead - MMolvray 5 “That would be unwise —” “Fifteen seconds to impact,” Worf reported. “It should be possible to transport only the central mass of explosives, sir,” noted Data. The Captain nodded. “I will recalculate the correct volume,” continued Data, as he did it. A heartbeat later, O’Brien’s voice was on the intercom. "Done." The asteroid collapsed when it lost its core but there was no explosion, only a faint flickering like distant sheet lightning. O’Brien’s dispersion kept the lethal antimatter to the size of its component atoms. The Orions must have been tracking the asteroid because their tactics changed immediately, even without an explosion to tip them off. They streaked away in the obvious hope that they could outmaneuver the Enterprise on this obstacle course. But Picard ordered all power to forward deflectors. The Enterprise tossed aside asteroids like beach balls. In moments Worf was shooting at the pirates, neatly severing their antimatter pods as ordered. The Orion ship spun crazily, a shot intended for the Enterprise went wild — “Another bomb-asteroid!” Worf thundered in warning. But it was too late. The Orions hit one of their own antimatter decoys. The explosions made shrapnel out of their now unshielded ship. Even the Enterprise deflectors barely withstood the blasts. Captain Picard nodded with finality, but looked dissatisfied. “Now we’ll never know why they were heading to a near-empty Federation planet at maximum warp. And I wonder how many of these boulders they’ve booby-trapped.” With a slight shake of his head he turned away from the viewscreen where the flecks of debris from the Orion ship were already invisible in the roiling chaos of much older destruction.