Chapter Text
“May I presume you’ve had the chance to look over our working hypothesis, Commodore?” The comm-link to DS2 was much clearer this time, as Trujillo had moved Reykjavík out of the Abemeda system in order to make the call.
Jiemba inclined his head in acknowledgement. “I have, Captain. It’s an intriguing theory, but your evidence is circumstantial at best.”
“No arguments here, sir. However, it’s the best we’re going to get without launching a probe of our own. Given the situation, that might instigate the very confrontation you’d warned me against.”
The commodore sat back in his chair, his expression thoughtful. “You believe the second planet to be inhabited, despite multiple probe scans and Esau’s own sensors saying otherwise?”
“We think it likely, yes.”
“Some kind of underground civilization, or are they spoofing our sensors?”
“Impossible to say,” Trujillo admitted. “I’d almost hope for the subterranean option. The power requirements necessary to effectively trick our sensors on a planetary scale would be tremendous. Hell, at that rate, you might as well just cloak the whole thing for as much energy as they’d be expending.”
“It sounds very much as if someone or something down there wishes to maintain their anonymity badly enough to kill to prevent even the possibility of discovery,” Jiemba countered. “We’d ought to leave well enough alone.”
Trujillo gestured expansively with her hands. “I’m absolutely prepared to warp out of here immediately if that’s your order, sir. However, if you’ll allow me to play devil’s advocate?”
The hint of a smile crossed Jiemba’s features at her request. “You always entertained my arguments aboard the Phobos, Captain. I’d be happy to return the favor.”
“In that case, sir, I’m sure you’re aware that there are at least two other systems in this sector that have been provisionally selected for colonial settlement. Now, given that Esau is bristling with sensor arrays, I think we can agree that nobody simply snuck up on her. The attack likely came from one of two places. Either she was surprised by a cloaked vessel, or the attackers transported directly from the planet, over three and a half AU away from the ship. Either way, we have a potential hostile force that could soon be in striking distance of multiple Federation colonies. Are we prepared to simply roll the dice and trust that whatever attacked Esau will simply ignore colonies just a few light-years away?”
“The Bureau of Colonization may have to reassess its priorities in that sector,” Jiemba offered.
Trujillo cocked her head with a raised eyebrow for emphasis. “Do you want to be the flag officer who informs the bureau that they’ll have to scrap decades of survey efforts and years of planning and logistics prep for an entire sector because Starfleet is afraid to send a probe down to what at least appears to be an uninhabited planet?”
Jiemba sat with that idea for a long moment, clearly not savoring it. “I see your point,” he finally conceded. “What would you like to do?”
“I want to maintain battle readiness and attempt communications with the planet. I’ll leave a reconnaissance probe behind to monitor our progress so that if we’re ambushed unexpectedly as Esau was via some means we’re not able to defend against, at least you’ll know how it happened this time.
“If there’s no response to our hails, I intend to launch a probe from two AU out from the planet. If the probe is destroyed or its telemetry is jammed or appears to be altered, I’ll take Reykjavík into orbit and begin full sensor sweeps at maximum power. Let’s see them try to jam that.”
Jiemba cleared his throat. “That seems very aggressive, Captain. Very provocative.”
“I disagree, sir,” Trujillo returned. “It’s a proportional response to the murder of two-hundred and forty Federation citizens engaged in a mission of peaceful exploration. Killing those people without warning, without giving them the chance to leave or prove their non-belligerency was the provocation in this equation.”
The commodore sat in silence, a pose Trujillo remembered well from his days as her XO. It was Jiemba’s habit when weighing the potential outcomes of a course of action on those occasions when he had the luxury of time.
“And if they attack, Captain?” he prompted cautiously.
“We’ll defend ourselves, of course,” she answered. “We’ll use only the amount of force necessary to repel the attack. I will continue to try to open communications throughout, in hopes of averting further unnecessary violence. Failing that, I will withdraw Reykjavík from the system and tow Esau back to you. Then, at the very least, we’ll know.”
Jiemba nodded as though to himself. “Understood.” He tugged unconsciously at the bottom of his uniform blouse to straighten it, another old habit of his she recognized. “Captain Trujillo, I hereby authorize your proposed course of action. May fortune favor you and your crew.”
“Thank you, sir. I hope to speak to you again, soon.”
Trujillo leaned back in her chair, deep in thought. She silently vowed to try and keep an open mind, whatever happened next. Despite her warrior ethos, she had a duty to her crew, to the fallen aboard Esau, and to the Federation to try and make this situation right somehow. In the coming confrontation, that might take the form of listening rather than acting, or perhaps withholding fire in circumstances that seemed to call for retaliation.
Yes, she was a soldier, and Reykjavík was a warship, but Trujillo was convinced they could both be more.
* * *
“Bridge to captain.” Glal’s voice over the intraship brought Trujillo instantly awake on the day bed in her ready room.
“Go ahead, Commander.”
“We’re at two hours, sir. We’ve broadcast over everything from subspace to old RF channels with no response.”
“On my way,” she said. Trujillo stood to pull on her uniform jacket over her white command undershirt, belting it at the waist and fastening the shoulder clasp. She smoothed out any wrinkles in the fabric and then checked that her braided hair was still in place. She picked up a phaser pistol from atop her desk, checked its setting, and attached it to her uniform belt via magnetic coupling.
After a quick double-check in the mirror, she headed out onto the bridge.
She stepped around a heavily armed security officer holding a phaser rifle across his body-armored chest plate.
“Captain on the bridge,” Glal called.
“As you were,” she replied by rote, sliding into the command chair Glal had just vacated.
“Class-I sensor probe ready to launch in forward tube one, Captain,” DeSilva advised as Trujillo seated herself.
“Thank you,” she replied. She activated the ship’s PA from her swing-arm LCARS interface. “This is the captain. There has been no response to our hails, and now we will launch a probe towards Abemeda II. This may provoke a violent response. All hands should have been provided phaser sidearms at this point. Make sure those are set to level nine, and report to your battle-station assignments. Security personnel armed with phaser rifles have been stationed in all mission-critical areas of the ship. Stand to red alert.”
The alert klaxon warbled three times as the status indicators throughout the bridge switched to red.
“Weaps?” she called out.
“Shields up, weapons hot, sir,” Jarrod replied.
“Engineering?”
“Nominal, sir,” answered Kura-Ka from his station.
Trujillo turned to examine Garrett at the Science station. “Ensign, status of the probe’s comms array?”
“We’ve uploaded the latest encryption matrices into its array, sir. It should prove very difficult to jam or for its telemetry to be altered. The Klingons and Romulans would have a hard time with it, at any rate.”
That brought a slight smile to the captain’s lips. “Very good."
She cast a quick glance around the bridge to ascertain her people's readiness. "Launch probe,” Trujillo ordered.
“Probe away,” Jarrod advised.
“ETA to planetfall is two hours, fifty-two minutes,”
“Well,” Trujillo remarked, “this could take a whi—”
The ship lurched slightly, buffeting the crew in their seats.
“Hold that thought,” Trujillo added.
“Shields registering kinetic impacts,” Jarrod noted from the Weapons station.
From Ops, DeSilva called out, “Multiple impacts detected along the shield perimeter, but no sensor contacts with incoming ordinance.”
Reykjavík trembled again, a series of jolts with a noticeable increase in intensity.
Trujillo stood and moved around the perimeter of the bridge’s upper level to Garrett’s station. “Ensign, let me see a visual representation of those impacts.”
The younger woman took a moment to enter a series of commands into her station, producing a rotating graphic of Reykjavík encased in her ovoid shield bubble. At random points across the shield blister blossomed waves of kinetic energy, the surges lasting less than a second each.
Trujillo turned her gaze to Garrett. “What’s causing that?”
“A trans-spatial energy transfer, but it’s not transporters,” Garrett observed. “At least, not as we traditionally understand them.”
“Shields holding firm,” Jarrod offered, swaying back and forth at his standing workstation.
Garrett pointed to a sensor display showing energy analysis equations. “The energy signatures from those ‘blooms’ suggest some kind of trans-dimensional extrusion into our subspace domain.”
The next series of impacts felt like the blows from powerful energy weapons against the shield grid, forcing Trujillo to lose her footing and grasp the safety railing behind the Science station for purchase.
“Can you predict their appearance based on the pattern we’ve seen so far?” Trujillo asked.
“I’ll try, sir,” Garrett said, setting to work.
Trujillo turned to send a concerned look towards Jarrod at the Weapons station.
“Holding at eighty-eight percent, sir,” he replied to her unasked query.
“DeSilva,” Trujillo called to Ops, “if the attacks continue growing in intensity at the same rate, how much time do we have before shields are overwhelmed?”
DeSilva ran a quick series of calculations. “Six minutes,” she said. Another powerful jolt shook the ship, causing a number of bridge consoles to flicker troublingly. “Possibly less,” she added hurriedly.
“We are experiencing some moderate power interruptions in secondary systems throughout the ship,” Kura-Ka said from his place at the Engineering station. "EPS feeds are beginning to show some strain, but primary systems are being given priority allocation.”
“I… I think I have a working predictive algorithm,” Garrett spoke up, calling Trujillo’s attention back to her console. “It’s a bit rough, sir, but I—”
Trujillo cut her off. “Can we use it to fire a phaser burst through one of those blooms before it closes?”
“I’d have to slave phaser control through the algorithm at my station, but yes, sir.”
“Do it,” Trujillo said before using the railing to navigate her way safely back to the captain’s chair.
She sat down and activated the safety restraints in her chair that extended across her waist and shoulders to secure her in place as the ship bucked around her.
“Engineering, route all auxiliary power to shields and the structural integrity field.”
There were more impacts, this time powerful enough to challenge the ability of the inertial dampeners to compensate. Standing crew or those not strapped into their seats were thrown to the deck.
It took a considerable amount of self-control to prevent Trujillo from staring expectantly at Garrett. She knew the talented young woman was working as hard and fast as she could. Adding more pressure in a critical situation wasn’t going to help anyone. Trujillo pulled her swing-arm console interface to her and began working on her ‘Plan-B’ in case Garrett couldn’t deliver.
As Trujillo pondered the probability of surviving an in-system warp jump to near orbit of Abemeda II, Garrett called out, “I think I’ve got it, sir. It may take a couple attempts, though, to get the phaser emitters synchronized with the appearance of the blooms.”
Trujillo wondered silently at the ‘I think’ part of Garrett’s pronouncement, but kept her reservations to herself. She was sure she must have qualified a few statements of her own in her time as a junior officer, decades prior.
Trujillo gestured towards the ensign. “Execute.”
The Weapons board’s customary warbling came from the Science station this time, indicating out-going weapons fire. On the viewscreen, blazing twin bursts of phaser energy shot out just an instant too late as a vortex of energy along the shield’s perimeter vanished. Another bloom assaulted the shields just after a phaser discharge had terminated at that spot a second before.
“Shield strength at sixty-four percent and falling.”
Phasers lashed out yet again just as a bloom erupted and the blazing twin beams vanished into its swirling maw.
There were two more blows against the shields, both of considerably lesser magnitude than before. Then the bridge was suddenly silent and still, bereft of anything but the continued trilling of the active phaser alert.
Trujillo looked around and found confused expressions staring back at her. “Cease fire,” she ordered.
DeSilva finally spoke up. “Negligible hostile activity, Captain.”
Determined to take advantage of the situation, Trujillo said, “Mister Naifeh, lay in a course for the second planet and engage at full impulse.”
She didn’t know if Reykjavík had hurt their attackers or merely outlasted them, but she decided it was time to take the fight to Abemeda II.
Glal left his customary place at an aft auxiliary station and stepped over to Trujillo. He moved close and spoke in a low tone, asking, “What now?”
“Now we go and pay them a visit in person,” she replied coldly.
“At this speed we’ll get there long before our probe does, sir,” Glal noted.
“I trust our full sensor suite will burn through any sensor trickery,” Trujillo said with what even she had to admit was exaggerated bravado.
Glal shot a glance at the doors to the ready room. Trujillo nodded fractionally and stood. “Mister Kura-Ka, you have the conn. Keep me apprised of any changes to our situation.”
Glal followed her into the ready room, but Trujillo didn’t move to the desk, instead rounding on him as soon as the doors closed.
“What is it, Glal? We haven’t much time.”
“We’re two AU from the planet, an hour away at full impulse,” he countered. “We have time.”
She sighed impatiently. “Proceed.”
“We’ve ascertained what we set out to, sir,” Glal pressed. “It’s clear by what means and for what reason Esau was attacked. We've even tried to talk to them, and they refused. If we go further, we become the aggressors here.”
Trujillo met the old Tellarite’s eyes. “I have to know why, Glal. Walking away at this point means leaving with more questions than answers. Captain Ngư and his crew deserve better.”
“Will adding the lives of this crew to that equation make it balance out, sir?” he asked sharply.
She turned away, bracing a hand on the front of her ready room desk. “What you’re asking…”
“Walking away goes against everything you hold sacred,” he finished for her. “I know you well enough to realize that.”
Trujillo straightened, turning back to face him. “Glal, I’m taking the ship to that planet. The Federation has plans to establish colonies out here. If we don’t claim these systems, someone else will.”
“It appears someone has, Captain,” he rejoined.
“Perhaps,” she allowed. “Depending on what we find when we get there, I’m planning on leading an away team down there.”
Glal’s tusks quivered. “I would argue against that in the strongest possible terms, sir.”
“I knew you would.” She reached out to place a hand on his upper arm. “Glal, I trust you implicitly. I’m… trying something new on this mission. If I fail, I need you up here to carry on. Fight them or walk away as you see fit if I’m… removed from the equation.”
“Now it’s you that’s asking me to go against my better judgement,” he observed.
“So it is, Commander.” Trujillo looked to him expectantly. “Will you?”
“You’ve never had to ask, sir, and I’d rather you didn’t start now.”
* * *
Trujillo pulled on her durable landing party boot, tucking the pant-leg of her sturdy cargo pants into the footwear. The locker room adjoining the transporter room had been filled with landing party members gearing up for their forthcoming excursion to the surface. The last of them were now donning their specialized clothing and equipment.
Upon entering orbit, Reykjavík had encountered a sensor scattering field that attempted to fool their scanning equipment into registering no sentient life-signs on the surface. The starship’s robust sensor suit had burned through this ruse and revealed a humanoid pre-industrial agrarian society of some fifty-million individuals spread across the planet. There were no signs of any technology more advanced than windmills apparent in this seemingly peaceful society.
The sole high-output energy reading they had detected was coming from a cavern system located under the foothills of a large mountain range. The readings were sporadic, as if the energy source was damage somehow.
Trujillo stood and turned to find Garrett struggling with her science kit. She stepped over and helped the young woman to place the various equipment properly into the carryall. Trujillo then checked Garrett’s phaser and the placement of her other gear onto her away team field jacket.
Garrett blushed fiercely. “Thank you, Captain.”
Trujillo chuckled. “No problem at all, Ensign. Everyone aboard gets a little mother-hen treatment on their first few away missions, isn’t that right Mister Jarrod?”
The security officer looked up from calibrating his phaser rifle, speaking in his peculiar, Oxonian-English accent. “Oh, yes indeed, sir. I remember it like it was just yesterday. I had my phaser holstered backwards and my pants on inside out before the captain fixed me up. It was awkward. I may have cried.”
Garrett burst out laughing and Trujillo rolled her eyes. The captain gestured to the ensign and pointed at the doors to the transporter room. “Off with you, young lady. I’ll catch up.”
After Garrett had headed out of the compartment, Trujillo looked to Jarrod, her expression softening. “I need you watching out for everyone down there today, not just me.”
Jarrod slung the rifle over his shoulder and busied himself servicing his assault phaser pistol. “Are you suggesting I don’t know how to perform my duty, Captain?”
“I’m reinforcing that I need you at your most professional, Lieutenant.”
He stepped over to her, looking down into her brown eyes with his piercing green counterparts. “Is this a captain and lieutenant conversation, or a Nandi and Gael conversation?”
“Fine,” Trujillo said with a pronounced sigh. “Nandi needs Gael to get everyone back in one piece.”
“Gael needs to get Nandi back aboard safely so that the XO doesn’t blow Gael out an airlock,” he replied with a smirk.
“That’s fair,” she responded.
“This isn’t like you. You’ve never commandeered one of Glal’s landing parties before.”
“New situations, new solutions,” she countered.
He holstered his phaser pistol and held his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I’m capable of safeguarding the team and professional enough to put my feelings aside for the duration of this mission.”
“Thank you,” she said. Trujillo opened her mouth to say something else but instead she turned abruptly and walked through the hatch into the transporter room beyond.
Jarrod closed his eyes briefly, emitting a sigh of his own as he rested his back on the bulkhead behind him. Captain Trujillo was an easy captain to follow. Brave, daring, and forthright, she inspired loyalty from her crew. Nandi Trujillo, however, was a difficult woman to love. And yet, love her he did.
* * *