Enterprise: Broken Bow Read online

  “The worst part is how they pretend they didn’t,” Archer commented drably, “as if we’re too silly to know the difference. I’ve been waiting thirty years for them to open up, and it’s never really happened. They just keep dangling that carrot.”

  With one hand on the helm controls, Tucker held out the other palm and said, “But look what we’ve done anyway. There she is!”

  Archer smiled, heartened, and drew a deep breath. “Yes, there she is… .” He gazed for a moment at the underbelly of the meaty, stubborn-looking ship’s wide saucer section, then turned a grateful regard to Tucker. “With you around, who needs a ship’s doctor?”

  “We do.” Tucker whirled the inspection pod around sharply as they came to the neck section and speared downward toward the nacelles. Beneath, the planet Earth gleamed mightily in a sheen of sunlight that made Spacedock glitter. The old Earth and the new ship moved together through the solar system that had given them both life. Magic!

  “The ventral plating team says they’ll be done in about three days,” Tucker offered when he saw where Archer’s eyes were leading.

  “Make sure they match the color to the nacelle housings.”

  “Planning to sit on the hull and pose for postcards?”

  “Maybe.” Archer smiled again, and sighed happily. “God, she’s beautiful… .”

  “And fast! Warp four point five on Thursday!”

  Archer shivered with awe. “Neptune and back in six minutes! Let’s take a look at the lateral sensor array.”

  Before the last syllable was out, the pod vectored ninety degrees on its port seam and spun aft, dropping fifty feet like a stone. Only at the last second did Tucker wheel out of the fall.

  Archer closed his eyes and swallowed a moan. These stupid utility pods—smaller than they had to be, and definitely faster than they had to be.

  “If I didn’t know better,” Tucker chided, “I’d say you were afraid of flying.”

  “If I’m afraid of anything,” Archer said, “it’s the scrambled eggs I had for breakfast.”

  “Pretty soon, you’ll be dreaming about scrambled eggs. I hear the new resequenced protein isn’t much of an improvement.”

  Archer skewered him with a meaningful look. “My number one staffing priority was finding the right cook. I think you’ll be impressed.”

  “Your galley’s more important to you than your warp core. That’s a real confidence builder!”

  “You’re a great engineer, Trip, but a starship runs on its stomach. Slow down—there. Those are the ports that buckled during the last test. They need to be reinforced.”

  Tucker released the controls, picked up a padd and a stylus, and scribbled notes to himself, checking the numbers on the hull plates and poking the identifiers on a schematic of the section that came up on his padd. With one passion competing with another, the pod drifted sideways and—

  Ponk—struck the body of the new ship, then made a lazy yaw to starboard.

  “Sorry …” Tucker kneed the controls and the pod stiffened to a more stable position.

  Archer pressed forward in his seat and craned to look out the viewport. “Great. You scratched the paint.”

  Tucker took a breath to make his presence known, but the com chirped and cut him off. He tapped the button. “Orbital Six.”

  “Captain Archer? Sir?”

  Oh, well, they’d found him. Arched leaned back. “?Go ahead.”

  “Admiral Forrest needs you at Starfleet Medical right away.”

  He looked at Tucker, but the engineer just shrugged.

  “Very well,” Archer called to the com. “Ask him to stand by. I’m on my way.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Tucker was still looking at him, even though he was also now spinning the pod out of the presence of Spacedock and heading toward the planet. “Who’s sick?”

  Archer shrugged. “It can’t be personal. Everybody I care about is up here.”

  “Come on, John,” Tucker sighed. “Don’t be bitter. Not today.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not. It’s just the truth. A little truth never—”

  “You and the truth. Can’t we have a little old-fashioned social disguise from our captain? Fool us some? Lull us into complacency?”

  Archer laughed again and dropped a hand on the engineer’s arm. “Tucker, you are plenty complacent enough! Speed up, will you?”

  “But the approach vector limit here is—”

  “They can give me a ticket. Whatever Forrest’s got, I want to get it over with and get back here while the getting’s good.”

  “That’s a lot of ‘gettin,’ Captain. I’m on it! Hang on!”

  “Trip! Holy—!”

  “Who was chasing him?”

  “We don’t know. They were incinerated in the methane explosion, and the farmer’s description was vague at best.”

  “How did they get here? What kind of ship?”

  “They were using stealth technology. We’re still analyzing our sensor logs.”

  “I’d like to see those logs.”

  “The Klingons made it very clear. They want us to expedite this.”

  “It happened on our soil.”

  “That’s irrelevant.”

  “Ambassador, with all due respect, we have a right to know what’s going on here!”

  “You’ll be apprised of all pertinent information.”

  “And just who gets to decide what’s pertinent?”

  Jonathan Archer knew exactly what was going on before he ever entered the ICU at Starfleet Medical. There were five voices—Admiral Forrest and that other funny little admiral who always reminded him of Grandpa’s golf partner … Admiral Leonard was his name. Commander Williams as well. The other two—well, he knew Ambassador Soval’s voice well enough, curse him, and the other was clearly a Vulcan, too. That snooty tone of voice, the precise diction, and the shield of parentlike solemnity—Archer almost made an unpleasant sound, but decided to just walk in instead. Probably the same effect.

  He was still in civilian clothes, but he didn’t care. If they wanted formal, they could invite him to a dinner party, not demand that he interrupt his shakedown inspection to visit a sick—

  What the hell was that?

  Big, that’s what. And noticeably hairy. And toothy. The massive humanoid form was hooked up to just about every co?traption this place had to offer. Life support? Was it dead?

  “Admiral,” he spoke directly to Forrest and made eye contact with the other two humans, deliberately leaving out the two Vulcans, who now gazed at him with mixed disapproval.

  “John, I think you know everyone,” Forrest mentioned, whether it was true or not.

  “Not everyone.” Archer studied the big sick guy through the isolation window.

  Admiral Leonard tried to help. “He’s a Kling-ott.”

  “A Klingon,” one of the Vulcans corrected.

  Archer looked at the Vulcan, picking up an underlying joy in correcting a human admiral. Now he remembered this one. Ambassador Tog? Tos?

  He started to say something, possibly rude, when a movement behind the two Vulcans caught his eye. Another Vulcan. A woman. Wasn’t anybody going to introduce her? Or were the Vulcans so advanced that courtesy didn’t involve women?

  He decided their protocol was their own problem, and put his attention back with the Kling-On.

  “Where’d he come from?”

  “Oklahoma.”

  “Tulsa, right?” Archer moved closer to the glass.

  “A wheat farmer named Moore shot him with a plasma rifle,” Forrest filled in. “Says it was self-defense.”

  “Fortunately,” Tos added, “Soval and I have maintained close contact with Qo’noS since the incident occurred.”

  Archer turned. Oh, what the heck—just ask. “Qo’noS?”

  “It’s the Klingon homeworld,” Admiral Leonard said, proud that he could pronounce it now.

  Forrest eagerly added, “This gentleman is some kind of courier. Evidently, h
e was carrying crucial information back to his people—”

  “When he was nearly killed by your ‘farmer,’ ” Soval stuck in.

  Uh-oh. Archer’s back stiffened. He knew that tone, that inference. Your farmer. Good thing he was well enough educated to understand the subtle nastiness as wielded by the pointy among us.

  He turned, faced them all, tilted his head just a little, and waited for the other shoe to drop.

  Carefully Admiral Forrest finally admitted, “Ambassador Soval thinks it would be best if we push back your launch until we’ve cleared this up—”

  “Well, isn’t that a surprise?” Archer snapped. He looked directly at Soval with what he hoped were his father’s eyes. “You’d think they’d come up with something a little more imaginative this time.”

  Soval’s face was impassive. “Captain, the last thing your people need is to make an enemy of the Klingon Empire.”

  “If we hadn’t convinced them,” Tos filled in, “to let us take Klaang’s corpse back to Qo’noS, Earth would most likely be facing a squadron of warbirds by the end of—”

  “Corpse?” Archer broke in. “Is he dead?”

  That would change things, but he had no idea how. What was an alien agent or courier doing bumbling about on Earth anyway? If Archer understood the general layout of this part of the galaxy, Earth wasn’t particularly easy to stumble onto, which was why nobody had stumbled here?until Zephram Cochrane sent up his big flare.

  The Vulcans were annoyed at his questions, but Archer wasn’t about to be swayed by that. Where was it written that humans had to be polite and accommodating to Vulcans and everybody else, but nobody felt obliged to be polite back?

  Starting today—

  He stepped past Soval and Admiral Leonard to the ICU door, opened it, and cued a passing physician. “Excuse me—is that man dead?”

  Though in hospital garb, the physician was some kind of exotic alien breed, nothing Archer recognized, but his delight at getting to work on this patient was downright human. “His autonomic system was disrupted by the blast, but his redundant neural functions are still intact, which—”

  “Is he going to die?” Archer pestered. Yes or no. Just yes or no.

  “Not necessarily.”

  Close enough.

  Without amenity, Archer turned back to the five musketeers. “Let me get this straight. You’re going to disconnect him from life support, even though he could recover. Where’s the logic in that?”

  “Klaang’s culture finds honor in death,” Soval explained. “If they saw him like this, he’d be disgraced.”

  “They’re a warrior race,” the other Vulcan went on. Did these two always share lines? “They dream of dying in battle. If you understood the complexities of interstellar diplomacy, you would—”

  “So your diplomatic solution is to do what they tell you? Pull the plug?” Archer heard his temper rising in his tone. Why not? The putrid lesson in diplomacy betrayed the Vulcans’ own ignorance. What Earthling hadn’t heard about a dozen cultures on his own planet with that Viking morality of dying in battle? It wasn’t exactly new, and Earth was only one planet. So the Klingons carried it to an extreme—all it did was guarantee that they’d be at war with somebody all the time and they’d fight each other if they couldn’t find some stranger to fight. And the Vulcans called Humans primitive? But this they respected?

  “Your metaphor is crude, but accurate,” Tos said.

  “We may be crude, but we’re not murderers.” Archer turned a cold shoulder to the Vulcans and faced Forrest. “You’re not going to let them do this, are you?”

  And he asked in a way that made them all understand that he wasn’t going to let this happen and the admirals could help if they wanted to. As he waited for their decision—whether to agree with him now or in a few minutes—he glanced at the enormous form on the ICU bed, its legs hanging off the bed from the calves on down. This Klingon hadn’t even had the chance to die in battle. He’d crashed and was running. What kind of battle death was that? Better he live and pick something better.

  Maybe a hand-to-hand with Tucker. Or Soval. Yeah …

  Soval leaned a little toward them. “The Klingons have demanded we return Klaang immediately.”

  “Admiral?” Archer prodded, ignoring the ambassador.

  Forrest fidgeted. The sight enraged Archer. That the Vulcans and Klingons could reduce a Starfleet admiral to nervousness—some things just shouldn’t happen. It was time they stopped happening.

  “We may … need to defer to their judgment,” Forrest attempting, trying to make everyb?dy happy.

  Boy, was it ever time for this guy to retire. Brave new world, that has such marshmallows in it.

  “We’ve deferred to their judgment for a hundred years,” Archer snapped.

  “John—”

  “How much longer?”

  His bluntness did the trick, not to mention the clarification that he really wanted an answer. This wasn’t rhetorical. He was making a demand not for himself, not for Klaang or the new ship, but for Earth, to establish itself a stake separate from the Vulcans. If they wouldn’t come up to the plate, Earth would come up without them. Archer was ready. Why weren’t these others? When would there be a better chance to demonstrate what humanity was all about, among these people who thought silly things were important? How you died instead of how you lived, for instance.

  The Vulcan female stepped forward, quite suddenly, right through the two elder ambassadors. She was the only one with the guts to say what she was thinking.

  “Until you’ve proven you’re ready.”

  Archer bristled. The Vulcans kept chanting that mantra, but they were never interested in letting Earth people do anything that might just prove readiness. Who did these stiffs think they were anyway? Interstellar schoolmarms?

  “Ready for what?” Archer asked, even though he knew. Hell, everybody knew, but he wanted to make her say it.

  “To look beyond your provincial attitudes and volatile nature.” The elegant female had a firmness in her eyes. She was playing his game. She darn well comprehended the triteness of her own declaration. Maybe she was waiting to see how far Archer could be pushed.

  “Volatile?” Archer mocked with a little lilt. “You have no idea how much I’m restraining myself from knocking you on your ass.”

  Eyebrow raised, she looked at him in near enjoyment—was that right? There was a glint in her eye, despite her mosaic stillness. He got the idea she might not like what she heard, but did like hearing it. Very few humans talked back to Vulcans … yet.

  I think I’ll start doing seminars. “How to Talk Back to a Vulcan and Spit in an Admiral’s Eye 101. You, too, can learn this in ten easy lessons.”

  Oh, forget it. He pivoted back to Forrest. “These Klingons are anxious to get their man back. Fine. I can have my ship ready to go in three days. We’ll take him home. Alive.”

  “This is no time,” Soval interrupted, “to be imposing your ethical beliefs on another culture.”

  Archer just cast him a look of deadly irony, and waited while Forrest turned to Leonard.

  “Dan?” Forrest asked.

  “What about your crew?” Leonard asked. “Your com officer’s in Brazil, you haven’t selected a medical—”

  “Three days. That’s all I need.”

  Okay, everybody always said “Three days,” so Archer had picked it out of a hat, hoping they’d think it had a good ring.

  “Admiral,” Soval protested. No doubt he was having nightmares about a crew full of Neanderthals shooting through space into “civilized” areas like the Klingon culde-sac.

  “We’ve been waiting nearly a century, Ambassador,” Forrest said at last. “This seems as good a time as any to get started.”

  “Listen to me,” said Soval, his voice noticeably louder. “You’re making a mistake.”

  Archer’s reply was calm, but there was no mistaking the condescension. “When your logic doesn’t work, you raise your voice? You have be
en on Earth too long.”

  The debate was over. Forrest had found what might be his last tidbit of resolve and made a decision. Archer tried not to puff up too much. Not too much.

  The female was watching him. Well, maybe puff a little more.

  Oh—there they went. The renowned ultrasophisticated civilized nonprimitive Vulcan turn-and-stalk-in-a-huff. Archer almost smiled, but managed to bury it. Score one for the amoebas.

  Forrest waited until they were gone, then winked at Leonard and spoke to Archer. “I had a feeling their approach wouldn’t sit too well with you, John. Don’t screw this up.”

  Archer restrained his comment. The last part must be meant as a joke, because nobody would say it to a captain and be serious. Maybe Forrest had invited him here just to provoke this very outcome. Possible? Was there some deck officer in the old boy yet? Better give him the benefit of all doubts and not fiddle with success.

  Archer just smiled and pretended to get all messages.

  As Forrest, Leonard, and the rather bewildered Williams exited the ICU window chamber, muttering a discreet continuation of the whole argument, Archer moved to the glass partition and rapped a knuckle on the window. The alien physician and a couple of nurses flinched, looked at the equipment, then noticed Archer motioning.

  He gestured to the alien. Psst. Come here.

  The young alien paused. Me?

  The labyrinth glowed dimly with mysteries and technology provided by even more mysterious presences. The room was bisected by a huge archway that contained unexplained energies, a rippling barrier between here and elsewhere, unidentified, a crossroads between the concrete here and the vague there.

  Silik stood on one side, in the here, at the podium that sent pulses of energy through the archway to identify him. He was Suliban, a senior of the Cabal, here reduced to childhood by the being who floated on the other side of the archway. The creature there was as unidentified as the place from which he broadcast himself. They were a mere arm’s length away, but they were separated by the ages. Silik felt the privilege of his position eaten up by the smallness of his power.

  “Where’s Klaang?” the milky being in the portal spoke. There was a preecho that obscured the creature’s words. Even his form was obscure, though he had a head and arms and legs like Silik, like most of the creatures who had achieved intelligence in this galaxy. But perhaps that creature wasn’t in this galaxy. Anything could be true, and Silik was at this person’s disposal for facts or deceptions. As he stood here, a lifetime’s achievements in the Suliban Helix were subordinated to this glowing individual beyond the archway.