STAR TREK: NEW EARTH - CHALLENGER Read online

  DIANE CAREY

  NEW EARTH CONCEPT BY DIANE CAREY AND JOHN ORDOVER

  POCKET BOOKS

  New York London Toronto Sydney Singapore Belle Terre

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com/st

  http://www.startrek.com

  Copyright © 2000 by Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

  STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

  This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc., under exclusive license from Paramount Pictures.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-7434-2224-4

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Epilogue

  Epilogue Two

  Look for STAR TREK fiction from Pocket Books

  “KIRK HERE. WHAT’S GOING ON?”

  “Bridge, sir—hull breach on deck eight.”

  “Alert security and damage-control teams. Get visual confirmation. Clear those areas and seal those breaches.”

  “Aye, sir!”

  “I’m heading to deck eight.” Kirk bolted toward the turbolift at the far end of the shuttlebay.

  Spock didn’t wait. He crossed to the shipboard terminals and cued up the graphics of ship’s integrity. Even he couldn’t contain a reaction as the graphics showed him what was happening. Across the bay he called, “Rupture now on deck nine, Captain!”

  Boots skidding under him, Kirk spun around. “Are you sure?”

  “Another one . . . deck ten,” Spock called. “And deck eleven . . .”

  This novel, our 41st, is dedicated to

  Barc Lavengood and Dan Thorsby

  of “Tullamore Dew”

  to Mary, Cathy, Keith and all our friends

  at the Rathskeller,

  where much of this book was written.

  What else can we say, but . . .

  “McINTYRE!”

  Chapter One

  “HOW COULD threat vessels get so close without tripping our sensors?”

  “What do you expect from me? Look at the monitors. Completely gamma-seized.”

  “Then we better saddle up and learn to ride blind.”

  The sci-deck of Starfleet Cruiser Peleliu stank and smoldered. Part of the carpet was on fire, but nobody was bothering with it. Hot damage crawled like parasites through the mechanics under the sensor boards’ tripolymer skin. Burst connections caused tiny volcanoes of acid in ripped-open sheeting. A third of the pressure pads and readouts had quit working or were crying for damage control.

  Nick Keller swiped his uniform’s dirty sleeve across his forehead, bent over the sensor boards, and tried to focus his stinging eyes. A fleck of insulation hung from a wing of his briar-patch-brown hair and blocked part of his view. For an hour they’d fielded attacks from enemies they couldn’t see, couldn’t target, and hadn’t expected. How had any hostiles known they were on their way out to Belle Terre? Or was this some new enemy that nobody in Starfleet or out at the colony even knew about yet?

  The question went unanswered. Sensors couldn’t see through the bath of gamma radiation spewed by a pulsing neutron star so far away that even working longrange sensors wouldn’t have picked it up.

  Beside him, Tim McAddis dribbled sweat from his pale forehead onto the sensor dials. His blond hair glistened with a frost of perspiration. “I’m used to seeing things a solar system away, not a lousy five hundred yards. Now that our deflectors are on full, we can’t even pick up phantom data like before.”

  It was a hard thing for a science officer to admit.

  Keller pressed a hand to McAddis’s hunched shoulder. “Look at the bright side. You’ll get the blame instead of me.”

  McAddis grinned nervously. “The mighty second mate stands defiant.”

  A knock on the cold-molded lattice grid near his knee got Keller’s attention. He found the first officer’s reassuring face peering up from the command deck seven feet below, through the lattice fence that prevented crewmen or tools from falling under the sci-deck rail. “What’ve you two got up there? How’d they come up on us?”

  Without a good explanation, Keller knelt to meet him under the rail and handed over the unhelpful truth. “Derek, they must’ve cruised in cold. No engines. Coasting, like the old days of rocketry. We were looking for exhaust signatures, not solid objects. All I can figure is the bad guys are accustomed to blackout action and know how to maneuver on inertia. Without engines, they’re really invisible.”

  “Mr. Hahn,” the communications officer interrupted, “sickbay reports thirty casualties.”

  “How many dead?” Derek Hahn asked.

  “They just said casualties. I don’t think they want to tell us.”

  Kneeling up here in only a pretense of seclusion, Keller gripped the rail at the tremor in Tracy Chan’s voice. Everybody was shaken badly. They weren’t even sure yet how many of their shipmates were dead. Suj Sanjai at tactical had been killed in the first hit less than an hour ago. That grim hello had brought in critical seconds of attack before the Peleliu got its shields up. Since then, the minutes had been long and bitter, landing percussion after percussion on them from unseen foes who understood better than Starfleet how to fight during Gamma Night.

  “Phasers direct aft,” the captain ordered. “Fire!”

  Both Keller and Hahn looked at the command deck.

  Staccato phaser fire spewed from the aft array, at targets no one could see, jolting the ship much more than normal. That was the damage speaking. The cruiser convulsed under Keller’s knee.

  Keeping his voice low, he murmured, “What’s he targeting? He can’t possibly know where they are.”

  Hahn shook his head, but said nothing. He watched Captain Roger Lake, stalking the center deck.

  From up here on the half-circle balcony, Keller clearly saw the command arena below except for the turbolift. The science and engineering balcony where he knelt rested on top of the lift’s tube structure, a design meant to maximize use of the cruiser’s support skeleton. Two narrow sets of ladder steps, one to his left and the other to his right, curved down to the command deck on either side of the lift doors. Below, Crewman Makarios at the helm and Ensign Hurley at nav both hunched over their
controls, staring at the main viewscreen, which stubbornly showed them only a static field interrupted every twenty seconds or so by a grainy flash of open space, fed by McAddis’s tedious attempts to clear the sensors. The largest screen on the bridge—on any Starfleet bridge—was their window to eternity. The two fellows at the helm were hoping for a lucky glimpse of the attackers, maybe get off a clean shot with full phasers.

  To port of the helm the half-demolished tactical station was still unmanned, with Captain Lake’s stocky form haunting it as he tried to keep one eye on the main screen. Why hadn’t he called for somebody to replace Sanjai? Why was he so moody?

  To starboard, Chan’s communications console was the only board on the bridge that had so far evaded damage, either direct or repercussive. Everybody else was struggling just to make things work at half capacity. Those first hits had done some nasty work.

  Up here the engineering console on the balcony’s starboard side beeped madly, reporting dozens of damaged sites all over the ship, but there was no one to answer. The engineers had split for their own section as soon as the attack came, and behind him the environmental and life-support board went wanting too. Keller and McAddis were up here alone.

  Almost alone.

  The sci-deck offered a certain amount of privacy. Sound insulation and clever design of the ceiling shell prevented travel of much conversation from up here to the lower deck, where command conversations were also taking place. The two sections, then, could be functionally close, but not interrupt each other. Usually, Keller liked it up here. This was second-officer territory if ever there had been any. During this voyage, though, an added presence haunted the upper deck.

  He glanced to his right.

  There she was. That Rassua woman, Zoa, along for the haul. A cross between an ambassador and an inspector, she wasn’t in Starfleet, but she was here most of the time anyway, fulfilling her mission of “determining whether the Federation is up the standards of the Rassua.”

  She stood on the upper deck as if someone had leaned an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus against the console, both legs braced, her gold face and thick hair in a waterfall of severe skinny plaits, her lined lips giving nothing away. In the months of travel, Keller had only heard her voice a couple of times. If she was any indication, the Rassua weren’t talkative.

  Dressed in woven strips of leather that left her heavily tattooed shoulders bare, Zoa was markedly disparate from the Starfleet crew in their black trousers and brick-red jackets. If only she had boots on. Instead, she wore only some kind of crisscross thong sandals with thick soles, allowing her two-inch toenails to curve down like a hawk’s talons hooked over a branch.

  And she never moved her face. Her blue-dot eyes followed the crew action here and below. It was like having a sphinx watch every move they made. Keller wished he could order her off the bridge. Roger Lake wanted her here. He liked showing off to an alien who was being courted by the Federation. The UFP wanted the Rassua alliance to guard their zenith borders.

  So here she was, observing. If they got out of this, she’d have a real story for somebody back home.

  Keller had hoped she’d get the hint and go below when the battle started, but apparently this was what she’d been waiting for all along and she wasn’t about to leave. He tried to ignore her. His skull throbbed.

  Derek Hahn reached up and caught Keller’s wrist. “You okay? Your left eye’s dilating.”

  His swollen temple ached under Keller’s probing fingers. “Feel like I got mule-kicked.”

  “You got ship-kicked. For a minute there I didn’t think we’d come out of that spin. Harrison’s hands are full in sickbay, but I’ll have Ring come up here.”

  “No, don’t. Savannah’s a passenger this trip. She shouldn’t have to be on the bridge.”

  “Won’t hurt a Starfleet medic to work her passage. She wants to start a Special Services Rescue Unit at Belle Terre, she can start right here.”

  “Were you a drill sergeant in a previous life?”

  “Everybody needs a hobby.” Hahn looked under the sci-deck balcony toward the communications post. “Tracy, call Savannah Ring to the bridge with her bag of tricks.”

  “Aye, sir. Medic Ring, report to the bridge with a field kit. Medic Ring to the bridge, please.”

  “Nick!” McAddis erupted from the science board. “I’m getting a shadow! I think they’re coming in again!”

  Without even attempting to confirm the readings, Keller glanced at the stocky form of their captain, pacing the lower deck between the helm and the command chair. “Tell him, Derek.”

  Accepting Keller’s instincts, Hahn spun around. “Captain, brace for another pass!”

  On the command deck, Captain Roger Lake didn’t order the crew to brace or any other preventive action. Instead he made a completely unexplained order. “Thrusters on! One-eighth impulse power!”

  Hahn stepped away from the rail and croaked, “Sir, we shouldn’t be moving during Gamma Night!”

  Lake shot him a glare. “We’ve got to outrun them while we can. I know how these people think.”

  Keller pushed to his feet and spoke up, “Sir, I agree with Derek. One full-power hit from Peleliu would demolish any ship in this sector. They don’t have anything that can match—”

  “They’ve got everything we’ve got. Fire!”

  Lake’s eyes were fixed on the forward screen, as if he saw something there. But there was nothing. Only a clicking blue cloud of static. Yet he was shooting, over and over, depleting their weapons, sending unthinkable destructive power racing through space behind them without effect.

  Hahn came back to the rail and peered up at McAddis’s scanners. “If only we could go to warp speed . . .”

  Gamma Night laughed in his face.

  Hahn turned to watch Lake from behind, analyzing the set of the captain’s shoulders, the quick breathing, the cranky movements, the petulant glances. “We’re dead if we keep moving.” He jumped to the nearest ladder, climbed it, and joined Keller at the suffering sensors. His voice was very low. “He’s snapping, Nick.”

  Cold dread washed down Keller’s spine. He glanced to his side, afraid the science officer had overheard, but McAddis had moved down the sensor bank and was preoccupied.

  Keller’s hands turned icy. “Now, let’s not pick our peaches before they’re fuzzy.”

  “We gambled,” Hahn said. “We lost.”

  “We don’t know that yet, Dee,” Keller downplayed.

  “His judgments are sluggish, he’s irrational—this stuff about how they’ve got everything we’ve got—who does he think is out there?”

  Desperate to hold together whatever they had, Keller resisted the urge to face him and obviously be having a conversation that might get the captain’s attention. Quietly he said, “Harrison did a psych scan two weeks ago for chemical abnormalities. The results were indeterminate. This is just stress. He hasn’t been in battle for years.”

  “Neither have I, but I’m not—”

  “Hey, I’ve got blips on the short-range,” McAddis interrupted. “I think they might be moving away!”

  Keller spoke past Hahn. “Captain, they might be moving off.”

  “If we hold off on weapons fire,” Hahn added, “they might lose us. Sir!”

  “Don’t believe the equipment!” Lake whirled around, meeting everyone’s eyes one by one. “They’ve done something to our sensors! Sabotage. We have to rely on instinct. We know they always attack in a wedge formation. Like bees.”

  At that, Hahn stepped forward. “Captain, how can you recognize something we’ve never encountered before?”

  “Don’t joke around, Dee,” Lake said. “It’s typical Klingon formation. Hurley, did I tell you to stop shooting?”

  Beside Keller, McAddis bent forward as if he’d gotten a cramp. “Klingons.”

  “Shh. Anybody can misspeak. He means Kauld.”

  But he peered past Hahn, down to the command area. A few steps to their right, the Rassua woman no
w had her inkdot eyes fixed not on Lake, but on Keller and Hahn. Gold face, a zillion little braids, and eyes with no pupils, just solid blue, grilling them with an angry message.

  This could get out of hand. Turning away from her, Keller pressed a couple of fingers gingerly to his aching head and used the other hand to play the suffering sensors, but he overturned the dial and lost the image.

  McAddis nudged him. “All right, Nick?”

  Beside them, Hahn complained, “What’s taking Ring so long?”

  Keller waved them off. “Swamped in sickbay. I’ll just put a patch over the dilated one. You can call me the Santa Fe Bandito.”

  McAddis smiled, then murmured, “I’d feel better if she just wasn’t here all the time.”

  “Captain likes having her here, watching,” Hahn reminded, almost casting a glance back at Zoa, then changing his mind at the last second. “Her people have a taste for frontier living. They weren’t interested in the UFP before Belle Terre broke wide open.”

  “Funny,” Keller commented. “Nobody wanted to go out there when it was peaceful and pretty. Now hell’s broke loose, they discovered stable olivium, and all bets are off.”

  Uneasy, McAddis sighed. “Those colonists are in for a shock with people like the Rassua prowling around.”

  Keller peered at the reflection of Zoa’s stiff face in the polished rim of the number-two scanner. “Naw, she’s just going out there to open a young ladies’ academy. Zoa’s Charm School and Small Engine Repair.”

  Though he managed to get chuckles out of the two other men, that was all the relief they would get. On the engineering console, across the sci-deck from where the three men huddled, the severe-malfunction lights came on with a corresponding alarm. An instant later, half the board exploded in what was obviously not another hit, but internal damage finally blowing.