A sample of my work (fanfiction)
Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2019 5:42 am
So recently I had talked about rewriting Voyager. I figured I'd show you guys a sample of how I write speculative fiction. I was greatly inspired by Matt Stover from the Legends EU, and so, here you go! It's incomplete, but I hope you enjoy nevertheless.
Galactic Conquest
DISCLAIMER: I don't own Star Trek or Star Wars.
CHAPTER 1: First Impressions
In the far reaches of the universe, in a galaxy far, far away from the Milky Way, at the edges of a remote, insignificant star system far removed from the major hyperlanes, the folds of space parted open in a swirling vortex of light and energy. From this gaping maw emerged a lone starship. Behind the starship, the swirling vortex vanished, fading into nothingness with a seemingly melancholy sigh, as though the phenomenon itself knew of the fate that awaited its brief passengers. Marooned in the system, alone and without support, the starship could not survive very long, nor could its many inhabitants. The starship slid across the plane of the ecliptic, illuminating it as bright as day, and in that eternity-spanning second that light passed over the saucer's hull, black lettering shone dark as polished obsidian. To any being who understood the English language, they would instantly recognize the words:
USS Enterprise NCC-1701-E.
And then it was gone, dark shadows etched across the surface of the hull chasing away these phantom particles of light, engulfing it darkness.
On the bridge of the Enterprise-E, Captain Jean-Luc Picard sat, bald and commanding, though at present he appeared more confused than anything else. This expression was mirrored in those around him; the bearded man sitting beside him; the long-haired woman on the other side of that; and in the many ensigns, lieutenants, and enlisted personnel strewn about the smoothly contoured bridge.
Then the bridge came alive with activity again. Ensigns and other supernumeraries resumed their duties, sifting through sensor logs and data charts. The Captain blinked, and this overly simple act seemed to jog him to his senses. Sitting up straighter in his seat, Captain Picard directed his gaze to the pale-skinned man sitting at the Ops console; he seemed to be the only one least affected by the abrupt maneuvers. It was to him the Captain spoke.
"Mr. Data, what happened?" he demanded in a thick British accent.
The pale man — who was in fact an android, as much a part of the crew as anyone else, a valued and seasoned officer whose loyalty to the Captain and the Federation was beyond any doubts — studied the readings on his monitor intently, eyes flicking to take in the scrolling information.
"I am uncertain, Captain." When Data spoke, his expression never faltered, his eyes never wavered, and his voice never skipped beat. He spoke with exact, machine-like precision and clarity. No detail, ma'am; just the facts. Picard sometimes envied that about him. "It seems there was a high buildup of verteron particles outside the hull before the blackout in sensors and communications, sir." He swiveled his chair around to look directly at his superiors. "I estimate that we have traveled through some form of spatial anomaly, most likely a wormhole or a temporal rift."
"Data, how is that possible?" William Riker demanded with a touch of asperity. He hated being kept in the dark and he was hoping that Data would clear that up as soon as possible. "Last time I checked, there weren't any wormholes or other significant spatial anomalies in this sector."
"I do not know, sir," Data responded, turning back to face his console. "I will, however, need to wait a minute before running a full scan."
"Well, figure it out soon," he said, directing his attention to the long-haired woman sitting on the opposite side of him, a small smile drifting across his face. "Because we've got somewhere more important we need to be," he added with a slight wiggling of his eyebrows.
Next to the Captain, Deanna Troi smothered a laugh. Captain Picard gazed sadly at the both of them. Before the unexpected detour, the Enterprise, his ship, had been on its way to Earth so that they could participate in the Earth-based ceremony of Troi and Riker's wedding. He had come to think of them both as family, and he would be very sad to see them go, but they had made their decision and he respected it. As a Starfleet officer, it was his job to perform this final duty for them. Still, they seemed to have a mystery on their hands, and as Captain he required all crewmen to focus on the task at hand.
"One step at a time, Number One," Picard reminded him with a slightly remonstrating smile. Riker looked sheepish all of a sudden and nodded his assent. "First we need to find out where we are. Mr. Data?"
"Sensors are coming back online, sir," Data reported promptly. "I will get a more a more in-depth scan of our current location." He checked his displays, head tilting in that curious manner the android got when he was particularly intrigued by something. "This is puzzling... according to our astrometrics data, the closest star is NGC-5101. In the Keagan Spiral."
Picard shared a dumbfounded look with his first officer. No, I cannot have heard him correctly. He couldn't have said what I thought he said...
"The Keagan Spiral? Data, that's..." Riker had trouble finishing the sentence.
"One hundred and three thousand, eight hundred sixty four point seven billion light-years outside the Milky Way Galaxy," Data replied.
Picard was tempted to curse in French or one of the various multitudes of languages he knew. The last time he could recall this happening they had traveled to the far-distant Triangulum Galaxy, or M33, and that hadn't exactly ended with favorable results. Judging from the mingled expressions of awe and dread on his senior staff's faces, he knew they were having the same thoughts.
"What about that wormhole or rift or whatever the hell it was we just passed through?" the Captain demanded, starting to lose some of his patience. If their experience with the wormhole was merely an isolated affair and it had collapsed or they could not use it again, they would be stranded in the recesses of space, and their chances of ever returning to the Federation, or indeed, anywhere else in the Alpha Quadrant, would be null. In that event, they might as well resign themselves to finding a habitable planetoid and settling down, eliminating their last ties to a galaxy long lost and the only home they had ever known.
"It is no longer there, Captain. Sensors show the wormhole collapsed shortly after we exited." Before the Captain or Riker could interrupt, he added: "However, I am detecting a high concentration of supercharged particles in the area. I believe it would be possible to reconstruct the wormhole, but it will require further study."
Before the Captain or Riker could say anything, however, Lieutenant Knightly — the security officer whom Picard had chosen to replace Worf with when he transferred to Deep Space Nine, a dedicated combat officer, veteran of the Cardassian border skirmishes, the lynchpin to the Enterprise-E's success against the invading Borg Cube during the Battle of Sector 001 five years prior, and chief strategist for their engagements throughout the Dominion War, a likeable and well-respected man of solid bearing, 5'10 height, stocky frame, and German descent — piped in from tactical.
"Captain, long-range sensors are picking up a vessel approaching our current position," he said, disbelief evident in his voice. "Bearing one oh seven mark two one five."
"What?" Riker said, starkly incredulous.
Picard was equally flabbergasted. "How can that be?" They were at the farthest fringes of the known universe, beyond the range of even the fastest warp-capable starship. How was it possible that a ship had turned up on their scanners? It was then that the Captain wondered... was the ship indigenous to this galaxy? Did that mean it supported life, perhaps highly advanced civilizations capable of their own faster-than-light travel, traversing the stars, seeking out one another and new worlds...? This changed everything in Picard's opinion. Starfleet's policy was and always would be — to him at least, first and foremost — the exploration of new lifeforms and new civilizations. This more than certainly qualified.
"The ship is now entering visual range," Knightly's excited voice broke into Picard's thoughts, returning him to the present.
The Captain of the Enterprise-E, flagship of the Federation, got to his feet, plastering on the well-worn diplomatic face that had served him so well in the past: his features carefully arranged in an attentive but neutral mask, giving no outward indication as to what lie beneath the calm exterior.
"On screen," he ordered. The main viewer flickered to life. A white speck was just barely visible in the starfield. "Magnify."
The image of an immense colossus of a starship filled the viewscreen, slicing neatly through the blackness of space. The ship was a mottled white color, giving it a dull, unassuming appearance, if a little intimidating. Dotted across its arrowheaded-shaped superstructure were sharp little protrusions that looked suspiciously like weapons emplacements. A long, horizontal trench split open the sides of the ship like a ripe melon. And at the back of the ship stretched a vast collection of upraised platforms, all connected to a T-shaped tower that reached high above the stern, as if intent on watching over the vessel from its lofty position. All in all, the ship was quite unlike anything the Captain and his crew had encountered to date.
"Analysis, Mr. Data." Picard's voice betrayed none of the conflicting anxieties he felt upon seeing the vessel in all its majestic glory.
Data called up pertinent sensor information on his console, brows furrowing in puzzlement as he did so. "I am having trouble scanning past the outer superstructure. I will attempt to compensate." Data reworked the sensors to scan past the density of the ship's hull, but getting a precise scan proved much more elusive. His eyes roamed over the monitor, absorbing every piece of data in microseconds as his positronic brain analyzed the data to correspond with what he knew. "I am still having difficulty in getting a clear reading, but I am learning much from my endeavors."
"Data, just tell us what you know," Riker said exasperatedly as the starship drew ever more near.
"Aye sir," Data replied, and then he cocked his head back. "Fascinating. According to my readings, power generation is operating at several orders of magnitude higher than our own, sirs. The energy output for this one ship exceeds anything currently found in the Alpha Quadrant."
"How so, Data?" Picard asked. The ship was looming larger on the viewscreen now and Picard wanted to know everything about it that he possibly could. He hoped they were peaceful, but one never knew what to expect from first contact encounters. He hadn't planned on this and despite the unease growing in his stomach regarding this whole affair, he held out hope that perhaps this ship and its crew could help him and his people return home.
"I am still having difficulty in getting a precise scan, most likely due to the dense materials composing the space vessel's hull," the android explained. "However, sensors indicate a power rate of ten to the fifteenth power measured in gigawatts. It seems the ship apparently utilizes some form of a highly sophisticated quantum or slipstream ion drive which as a result, when in effect, would propel the vessel to an excess of tens of millions of times faster than the speed of light at maximum velocity."
"They could cross the galaxy in a matter of days, depending on the right conditions," Riker stated, eyeing the approaching ship with newfound admiration and a hint of some disbelief. Such advanced technology was beyond anything in the Federation's database.
"That is indeed the case, sir," Data confirmed, calling up new information on his display screen. "Sensors are also picking up the presence of dozens of protrusions across the surface of the hull which, if the computer's readouts are to be believed, are defensive batteries capable of generating energy-based weapon discharges in the gigaton range."
Picard did a double take. "Did you say gigatons?"
"Yes sir," Data responded promptly.
"Unbelievable," Deanna stated softly.
"She's a warship," Picard breathed.
"Raise shields," Riker ordered, turning to the helm officer.
"No, Number One, we cannot," Picard said, moving closer to the viewscreen, his eyes never leaving the image of the steadily enlarging ship. "They are clearly much more advanced than we are and we can only hope that they are benevolent. No, we must not provoke them. Raising the shields could be construed as a hostile act. We will watch them and see what they will do."
Picard hoped he was making the right choice. Of course, it was highly unlikely they could survive against them for long even if their intentions were less than honorable. Such power was virtually unheard of in the Alpha Quadrant. Not even the Borg were as powerful as this single starship. He was going to be interacting with a species that came from a future the Federation couldn't even begin to conceive. What else was there to be done? At best, this was a ship that was heavily armed only as a precaution against aggressive races. At worst...
Riker echoed what was in Picard's thoughts. "And what happens if they do become hostile with us, sir?"
The vessel loomed larger and larger on the screen, until it looked like they were going to have a head-on collision; then, before it could tear through the Enterprise and rip her to shreds, the ship slowed down, decelerating until it had achieved simultaneous orbit with the Enterprise, holding position one kilometer off the starboard bow.
"Then God help us," Picard murmured.
________________________________________
The massive monstrosity that was the other vessel hung motionless in space, suspended in the interstellar void only by its powerful ion drives and the physical laws that apply in a weightless environment. Its unimpressive white hull gleamed dully with the reflected light of the system's primary. Within its hypermatter reactor core churned the compressed fusion of enough power to sustain an entire civilization, providing the ship with an immeasurable supply of energy and the very useful function to remain self-reliant for an extended period of time. Alone, this virtual city of a starship fielded enough armament to subjugate an entire world in a very short period of time. This was no lightly armed scout ship on a mission of peaceful exploration; it was a destroyer, nothing else, and no efforts were spared to conceal its true design.
Atop this mountain of hardened alloy and armor plating stood the bridge, the ship's command nexus, nestled in between two spherical shield regulators. Inside the bridge, sealed off to the harshness of the vacuum by super-reflective transparent metal, Captain Jerec Tano of the Star Destroyer Razer stared out the viewport at the other ship. He was a short man, only 5'7", but he carried himself with an officious grace that denoted very high rank or privilege. He possessed unremarkable black hair and sported a simple, nondescript gray tunic over gray trousers with a matching gray cap to finish the look. Men of similar attire and status worked diligently in the bridge's crew pits and work stations behind him, giving the whole room the feel of controlled order combined with the ever-present atmosphere of military discipline.
Captain Tano was not a young man, now approaching his sixty-seventh standard year, yet this wasn't what he had been expecting to find when he had been ordered to change course and venture into this virtually deserted system. In his twenty-three years of serving in the Imperial Navy, he had never witnessed any other starship like this one, although it reminded him strongly of those damnable star cruisers that the Mon Calamari brought into battle against the Empire's formidable battleships. While scarcely larger than a Corellian CR90 corvette, the opposing ship was long, smooth, and sleek, with an angular saucer section and swept-back nacelles that definitely bore a striking resemblance to the Y-wings the Rebel scum used in their raids on Imperial facilities, which was enough to give the Captain pause and lead him to wonder whether or not this was a Rebel ship he and his crew had happened upon.
"What have you found, Captain?"
Captain Tano froze immediately upon hearing the voice, the same one that had been responsible for his change in course heading. The voice was deep and conveyed a synthetic bass rumble laced with dark overtones, as though a man were speaking from behind a mechanical apparatus, and, indeed, that was precisely from whence it came. With a palpable feeling of dread, the Captain turned to face Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith. The cybernetic being towered menacingly over him, bulbous, fish-eyed goggles glaring ominously into him with razor sharp attentiveness. The familiar cadence of his mechanical breathing accompanied the Sith Lord's every word, and was arguably one of the most feared sounds in the galaxy. At this moment, staring directly into the Sith Lord's hollow mask and feeling as though he were staring into an empty void, the Captain could not disagree.
He snapped up smartly and slid his heads behind his back with expert precision. "My lord, we've come out of hyperspace at the coordinates you have given us. Unexpectedly, we have come across a ship the likes of which we have never encountered before, though it does bear more than a passing similarity to Rebel ship designs."
The huge, black form of the Sith Lord strode past the Captain and approached the viewport, presumably to gaze at the starship himself, and Captain Tano felt himself barely restrain a sigh of relief, the only outward indication of the state of his emotions the slight relaxing of tension around his clasped hands.
"I must know more about that ship," the Dark Lord muttered softly, indecipherably, almost as though he were speaking to someone standing outside of the range of his perception. He turned his head back towards the Captain and spoke more boldly, as if he was just coming out of a trance. "Have your men compiled a detailed sensor analysis, Captain Tano?"
"I am about to receive a report, lord," Captain Tano responded crisply.
As if in response to this statement, a junior lieutenant walked up beside his commanding officer and handed him a datapad. The Razer's Captain took the pad and briefly inspected its contents, studying the information collected by his ship's powerful sensor array and committing that information to memory. After he had finished with this minor task, he moved down the bridge and offered the datapad to Lord Vader. The Dark Lord of the Sith accepted the pad without a word and examined it, Captain Tano wordlessly falling back into a military stance.
"You're sure of your findings?" Vader demanded after a moment of perusing the pad.
Tano turned to the junior officer, who nodded once, and returned his gaze to Vader. "We are, my lord."
Lord Vader was silent for a long moment, and Captain Tano stiffened, feeling the faint ghost of tension work itself around his throat, and he brutally suppressed a nervous gulp. What was so important about this single ship that could have the famed Dark Lord of the Sith so quiet and introspective? From what he'd read through on the datapad, this ship was nothing special. In fact — while it was more streamlined and efficient in a couple key areas, such as subspace harmonics — it was actually quite inferior in so many more such as weapons, sublight and superluminal propulsion, and power generation. He and his crew could easily destroy this inferior space vehicle with a broadside barrage from their antifighter batteries, to say nothing of the enormous ship-to-ship turbolasers which the Razer wielded, which were so powerful in and of themselves that it was within their capacity to reduce the surface of an entire habitable planet to molten slag in less time than a standard day without reinforcements.
He was about to tentatively venture a question when the Dark Lord turned, facing the viewport once again, and his orders flowed smoothly from the vocabulator, strong and without hesitation. "Captain, prepare boarding parties. I want you to use the ion cannon to disable that ship, and once she is dead in the water, I expect you to send over boarding craft to capture the enemy vessel intact."
"Intact, my lord?" the Captain offered meekly, surprised by this sudden turn of events and why Vader would insist on sending boarding teams when it was all the more simpler to just destroy them. He would never dream of questioning a Sith's motives, he was much too loyal an officer for that, but boarding an alien ship which they had no intel on was tactically unsound.
"You have your orders," Vader reiterated firmly. "I sense something about that ship. Something I have not felt before..." Suddenly, Vader straightened up, and with a very precise movement he turned and stalked off the bridge. "I must investigate it." And with that, the Sith Lord was gone.
"What do we do, Captain?" his junior lieutenant asked.
"We will do as he has instructed us, Lieutenant," Captain Tano replied curtly. "Follow his orders. Order the weapons crews to stand by. Prepare to fire a full spread of the forward ion cannon. Leave no part of that ship untouched. Lord Vader wants it captured."
And as the crew moved off to comply with his command, the Captain stepped up to the viewport for the third time, staring at the mysterious ship that had somehow managed to catch the Dark Lord's attention. A brief flash of pity overtook him for the inhabitants of that ship, as their fate had been sealed and they were now at the mercy of the notorious Darth Vader, but it was quickly dispelled, and hard resolve swelled up inside him.
"And I intend to give it to him."
________________________________________
"Have they responded to any of our messages?" Picard asked his second officer.
For the past several minutes, the Enterprise, on Picard's orders, had been transmitting standard subspace greetings and tentative inquiries in all known languages — a vain hope, the Captain knew, for any initial first contact between the opposite ships would inevitably be hampered by a communications barrier that, by the time of the 24th century, had become so little of an issue due to cultural exchange and interstellar commerce among the various powers and sundry groups of the Alpha Quadrant as to be nonexistent, but the bald-headed Frenchman had persisted nevertheless, believing it better to try and open with the formal procedure given the armaments the other ship had at its disposal rather than provoke them, not that the Federation flagship had a dispute with the advanced race that had built this curiously overpowered spacecraft at any rate.
"Negative, sir," Data reported, working his fingers over the terminal, and then his neck twitched as his eyes scanned with lightning speed to take in the new data now compiled on his display screen. "Correction, sir! Sensors are detecting a large energy buildup in what I believe to be the starship's forward weapon array. Magnitude, ten to the twelfth power. Discharge is imminent!"
In a flash, Picard was on his feet, his mind reacting to this blatantly aggressive and completely unexpected hostility with a combination of shocked horror, the snap-quick readiness born of trained precision and combat experience, and obscured deep within his subconscious in the places he had only barely begun to fathom a profound sadness at the sure knowledge of their momentary demise, trying to piece together what on Earth it was that they had done or might have said that so greatly offended the apparently irritable species guiding the alien vessel, what written text had caused them to lash out, the misspoken word that had led them to bring doom to a people they hadn't even met...
"Shields up!" he belted out desperately, even while knowing in his heart that it would offer no shelter against the superior craft and yet feeling that he had to protect his crew regardless, even if such defense for the lives of those under his command were insurmountable, "and hail them! We simply cannot allow this to —"
But it proved to be too late, for on the screen the white-armored vessel shot off a wave of strong energy which impacted against the forward shields of the Enterprise, as suddenly their systems were overwhelmed by the sheer power of the blast. Coruscating electrical tendrils danced about from the viewscreen which leapt from computer terminals to inlaid wall panels with reckless abandon — consoles blew out, sparks exploded all across the bridge, and ejected conduit wires shredded the poor souls of those ensigns and other bridge personnel unfortunate enough to be close to them into so much raw and bloody meat, as the main viewer went completely black and smoke and the metallic tang of ozone and fried circuits filled the cramped space.
Coughing into his shirt sleeve, feeling as if he had just had the wind knocked out of him and surprised to still be alive, the Captain moved about the bridge, trying to make some sense out of the chaos his ship had so rapidly descended toward. "Mr. Data! Report! What the hell is going on?!"
"I am getting no readings, sir!" Data called back, and a note of fear now crept into his synthetic voice, one made possible by the emotion chip he had implanted in his positronic brain only a few short years ago.
Off to the side, Commander Riker was checking on Deanna to make sure that she had sustained no serious injuries in the attack which had disabled the bridge, and found that aside from a minor bruise stained with crimson blood, she was relatively unharmed.
"I'm all right..." she insisted, waving off his ministrations.
"Captain, we have complete failure of the main computer!" Lieutenant Knightly barked from tactical. "We've lost power to everything!"
Data reported back from Ops.
"We are dead in the water, sir," he informed his superiors.
Reflexively, Riker tapped on his combadge. "Geordi, can you hear me? Geordi, respond!"
But now that the tension of the moment had cooled, now that most of the acrid fumes and the blackened stench of superheated electronics had for the most part cleared the chamber, Picard laid a hand upon Riker's arm, trying to restore order to the situation, for with an enemy vessel only kilometers astern, they couldn't succumb to irrationality; the fate of his crew, his beloved ship, and perhaps even the entire Federation, depended upon their actions here, how they handled this crisis, and what they learned from their encounter, and it was Picard's duty to see this through to the end no matter what the outcome was.
"One step at a time, Number One," he told him. "We mustn't panic. Mr. Data, conjecture. What on Earth happened to us?"
"If I were to speculate, I would say that the enemy ship hit us with some form of ionized particle ray," the chalk-skinned being theorized. "The effect when coming into contact with a ship's central computer network would be the complete destabilization of those systems."
Suddenly, Deanna Troi leaned forward in her seat, long hair spilling out over her shoulders as her eyes went wide, pupils dilating from an inexplicable emotion, shock and perhaps fear as well, as if she had just unearthed some hidden and thoroughly unforeseen revelation among the background hum of the universe which would have devastating consequences on the world around her, important news that her superior officers had to know about immediately.
"Captain! Commander!" she stated. "I sense a wave of incoming thoughts and sensations... and they feel so bleak and cold. So utterly lifeless. It's like... whoever these thoughts belong to were bred for death and destruction."
"An imminent arrival?" Picard ventured, his brow furrowed as he struggled to process his thought patterns more fluidly, to construct and ascertain possible motives for this seemingly erratic behavior, all the while fighting the unexplained dread that had somehow risen up behind his breastbone. "So they blow out our power systems, then dispatch their own away teams? But why would they...?"
And total, abject understanding dawned so suddenly that horrified realization swept through him, erasing everything else in its wake and leaving behind only mind-churning numbness and a paradoxical sense of concerned apathy, as though he were disconnected from the events unfolding around him, and in an instant the Captain had moved to the ship's intercom system which had thankfully remained separate from the main computer and thus could transmit his fresh orders to the complement of the Enterprise, the words spilled from his mouth in a gasped and strangled outcry of grim but desperate determination.
"All hands, this is the Captain! Prepare to repel boarders!"
________________________________________
Lieutenant Pogrin raced through the corridors, heavy boots thudding upon the steel deck plates and passing short-circuited wall interfaces on his hasty beat through the hallways until he and his small company of yellow-shirted security officers had made it to Section 21-A Charlie near one of the secondary docking bays. A pig-nosed man with a shaven head, rumpled skin of a leathery complexion, and luxurious mane of swept-down beard, as well as two jewels of beetle-black obsidian shining in his eye sockets, Lieutenant Pogrin was a Tellarite, and at moment sweat was trickling down the sides of his temples as he and the men and women as well as all the other nonhumans in his security detachment assumed a defensive position arrayed out around the sealed door leading into the bay, so that he and his subordinates could form a chokehold beyond which any intruder hoping to gain access into the dimly-lighted hallway would have to pass by them, making it a simple matter to stun and possibly kill as many of the enemy as they could get within the targeting sights of their phaser rifles.
Pogrin resisted the urge to wipe his forehead as dulled clanging sounds and banging scrapes echoed all around them, as though the ship itself were creaking and groaning like some ancient seafaring vessel made of iron under the stress of water pressure, and he glanced downward with a satisfied nod to find that the safeties had been detached on his weapon. A long-time crew member of Captain Picard's ship, Pogrin had served as an ensign aboard the USS Enterprise-D and then later a full lieutenant aboard the E. Despite serving aboard the flagship for going on close now to sixteen years, having withstood and lived to tell the tale of numerous encounters with the godlike Q, hostile indigenous races, and even the Borg, Pogrin couldn't help but feel nervous every time he was expected to go into possible battle, even though it should have been second nature to him by this time. The adrenaline rush, the pounding of blood in your ears, the thunder of your heart, racing, the fear that in the ensuing conflict you and everyone around you would not live to see the sun rise and set on another day... while he had been through so many firefights that had claimed the lives of his friends, survived through situations that quite frankly had seemed impossible to endure, the condition these events had on his physicality affected him, distracted him, made it hard to concentrate upon when at any moment the enemy would come storming in either to kill, capture, or in the worst case, assimilate him.
Still, Pogrin had full confidence in his comrades to do their job, and he made a slashing-forward gesture with his arm as the clanging bumps of groaning metal reached a crescendo, the signal for get ready to fire. His men leveled their weapons at the bay door, and more than a few double-checked to make sure that their rifles would function well when trouble came knocking at their door. The thudding booms intensified, so loud that Pogrin could barely hear his own thoughts, silence for a few seconds, as the air itself seemed to fold inward, like a child withholding their breath in anticipation, and then...
With a blast of charred durasteel and exploding conduits, the wall three meters off the left and down the hall to their current position blew outward with extreme concussive force, hurling those standing too close to the blast to the deck plate, while others were lifted off their feet and tossed down the hallway like limp rags, even as Pogrin felt his heart sink with shocked dread — They're bypassing the bay completely! he realized from strangled horror — but before he could gain his bearings, white forms spilled out into the corridor, decked out in plastoid armor and raining down a hail of blasterfire on the hapless security officers. In such a confined space, the area rapidly crumpled from the might of their assault, with blaster bolts piercing through wall panels, cutting vital computer components into lethal shards of flying shrapnel, and blowing out ceiling light fixtures to the point that it felt as though the tiny, poorly-lit hall had heated to several degrees higher than it normally was within seconds of their entrance into the vessel.
And the blasters found their marks with unerring precision.
Pogrin reeled, his mind a chaotic mess, overwhelmed by the raw intensity the enemy had brought to the fore, but quickly making its way to the forefront of his being to replace the blind panic that had so nearly threatened to undo him years of Starfleet training recessed in the dark corners of his soul finally kicked in and he unleashed his payload of deadly phaser fire upon the white-suited bodies now clogging the hallway, as more of the scattered security team, now recovering their resolve, emptied their weapons alongside him. With a thrill of terror in his heart, Pogrin observed as though in a haze that the phaser beams didn't appear to be penetrating the body armor worn by the invaders, even as his own officers were mowed down by the opposing force, red hyphens of lancing energy smashing into cloth and flesh as the mass to whom it had belonged was torn apart, either by the collapsing corridor or the plasma being pumped into the miniscule area.
"The stun setting isn't working!" Lieutenant Pogrin shouted wildly above the rising din. "Set to maximum! Kill them, kill them!"
The Starfleet security personnel moved further down the embattled space, stepping past the burnt and in often cases still-smoking corpses of their former colleagues, torn to tatters, limbs jerking where they lie dead or dying on the floor, reduced to animal cries and pathetic, gasping exhalations and Pogrin felt as far removed from the evolved and enlightened Federation as he could possibly be, as if the veneer of civilization that divided thinkers from beasts had been stripped away with their entry into this new and foreign galaxy on the edge of the universe, allowing a brief glimpse to the barbaric past of the Alpha Quadrant's sentients as those base instincts that had been rendered useless by thousands of years of building upward returned clawing and screaming to the front of his psyche, the urge to flee, run away and hide, survive, kill or be killed...
The intensified phaser beams struck at the stormtroopers, and Pogrin made a horrible discovery that only with very prolonged phaser fire did the concentrated beams finally perforate layer upon layer of protective shelling to fell one of their adversaries, and as the situation switched from terrifying to full-blown desperate, with their team running harried and frantically down the hallway to try and put more distance between them and the mysterious boarders, just when Pogrin felt that things could not possibly get any worse...
Hsss.
With a snap-hiss of energy, a bar of bright crimson light materialized in the gloomy hallway, as if the figure attached to it had transported in out of nowhere, and, before the Tellarite Lieutenant could really grasp or ponder the true depth of what was really going on, the shadow now threw itself into the fray, slicing through security officers left and right, as if they were hot butter, and before Pogrin could register it he found the phaser being yanked away from his hands, as if directed by some otherworldly entity, like the darkness surrounding them given form, a primitive specter born of the feral streak within all sentient beings, or perhaps some living nightmare that had haunted civilization for untold eons come to life to exact its revenge upon the living, and Pogrin lost it completely.
"Retreat! Retreat!" Pogrin screamed, his voice quite unlike his own.
Suddenly, as the whirling fan of red energy crisscrossed and hatched the hallway like some dark angel of vengeance, two of his men were sent spinning to the side, crashing into the sides of the corridor with a loud and painful-sounding wet smack, as a sudden constriction latched onto Pogrin's throat, as though his neck had been caught in the grip of a hydraulic vice, and his hands flew to his larynx, attempting madly to restore the ability to breathe to his suffocated airways.
As the remnant of the security detachment under Pogrin's command succumbed to blasterfire or the red energy blade, more than a few dropped their own weapons, spun around on their heel and fled the scene, yammering in gibberish that ranged from frenzied screams to incoherent sobbing to inarticulate begging for their own lives as the shadow ruthlessly ended it for them in one fell swoop, however, through the pitiful wheezing gasps as his life was choked from him, Lieutenant Pogrin observed a select handful of brave souls, resolute in their steadfast courage and stubborn defiance to keep resisting until the very end, continued pumping phaser fire into the heart of their enemy, so that despite the dizzy fog clouding his vision and the tingling sensation spreading across his extremities, the dedicated Starfleet officer couldn't help but feel a sense of proud kinship with the sentients he had led into their last, final engagement in the farthest corners of his dying mind.
And then once they had been felled, the shadow turned to stare at Pogrin as he got his first clear glimpse at the dark colossus and in the second that passed between them, with his back arching and his limbs flailing about, when all that filled his ears was the creaking of his own slowly cracking bones, the blood in his veins turned to ice, and for the first time since Pogrin had witnessed the Borg's assault and the utter annihilation they wrought, he realized that they truly weren't the most horrifying force within all the finely-spun infinite cosmos of creation.
This being, whatever dark power swayed its hand and guided its actions, was — and, as if ushering him into the same hellish nether-world from whence this phantom had sprung, a loud snap that was the sound of his own breaking neck heralded the finality of his corporeal existence as the darkness descended on him forever...
________________________________________
The situation was not encouraging back on the bridge. From the centralized command nexus that connected the Captain's position to the vast passageways which linked the engineering chambers, control sections, and tactical hubs to one another like blood vessels through the interior of his ship, reports now filtered in like the tendrils of icy fingers slowly spidering their way around his heart with every new status update as from all account the heavy boarder contingent had spread like an infection to nearly every deck across the Enterprise.
"They've taken Section 17-C Tango!"
"Squad five has fallen back to secondary position gamma!"
"Explosive charges have gone off on deck twelve, section nine!"
"Captain, we can't hold them off! Our losses are too great!"
"Security reports that handheld phaser beams are having very little effect on enemy boarders — it's like they're shooting blanks, sir!"
Picard settled into his command chair, bald scalp gleaming with the glistening sheen of pearly-oval sweatdrops while the room itself stank of the suffocating staleness that was their cramped oxygen supply, the wispy smoked-ash quality of charred computer circuits, and the damp musk which was a byproduct elevated human stress hormones.
"Suggestions?" Picard offered to the assembled crew members.
"Call back our men, and we could vent the affected sections out into space," Will Riker said crisply. "It might slow them down a little."
"Make it so," the Enterprise's commanding officer barked, and as the bridge crew rushed off to carry out his orders, he still felt compelled to add, "however, as you said that's just a temporary solution, Number One."
But before the second-in-command could reply, Deanna breathed sharply, a startled gasp of rattled inhalation and her pupils went doe-eyed wide while beads of sweat gathered on her brow, hands flying up to her temples as she shook her head to and fro — as if she had seen something awful, picked up a high-pitched whine gradually building up at the back of her consciousness in the dark places beyond the realm of basic comprehension, a frightening revelation that to lesser mortals would have driven into the tender embrace of all-too-easy madness.
"No, no..." she whimpered as a severe case of trembling seized her upon its grip and refused to let her be for within seconds she was now shaking like a delicate leaf being blown in the wind. "No, Captain..."
The two ranking officers glanced in her direction, feeling suddenly concerned for her.
"Deanna?" Riker inquired, with a tentative step towards her, clearly worried that she might be in need of medical assistance.
"No, no... no, please, no!" she cried out, as if she were in physical pain. "Not that, not that, please! It's too terrible!"
"Counselor, are you all right?" Picard urged as he reached out to place a warm hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off a second later.
"C-Captain, there is, a... a dark presence on its way here!" she reported, still clinging to her sense of duty even as the high-pitched whine morphed and remolded itself into the shape and energy texture of a warped lifeform filled to bursting with hot burning fury and cold, methodical precision with the psychological imprint and all of the companionable warmth as that of a cadaver, icy and dead, far past what her limited senses were able to perceive, and Troi jerked, fingers prying into her skull so that a trickle of red liquid seeped between her hands, and she screamed. "It's so horrible! It's… it's coming to destroy us all! Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop!"
And she thrashed, a desperate, primal paroxysm of most base fear.
"Deanna... Deanna!" Commander Riker said, taking her by her shoulders and shaking her. "DEANNA! Calm down! Deanna!"
But it appeared to be no use for whatever it was that had latched onto
Galactic Conquest
DISCLAIMER: I don't own Star Trek or Star Wars.
CHAPTER 1: First Impressions
In the far reaches of the universe, in a galaxy far, far away from the Milky Way, at the edges of a remote, insignificant star system far removed from the major hyperlanes, the folds of space parted open in a swirling vortex of light and energy. From this gaping maw emerged a lone starship. Behind the starship, the swirling vortex vanished, fading into nothingness with a seemingly melancholy sigh, as though the phenomenon itself knew of the fate that awaited its brief passengers. Marooned in the system, alone and without support, the starship could not survive very long, nor could its many inhabitants. The starship slid across the plane of the ecliptic, illuminating it as bright as day, and in that eternity-spanning second that light passed over the saucer's hull, black lettering shone dark as polished obsidian. To any being who understood the English language, they would instantly recognize the words:
USS Enterprise NCC-1701-E.
And then it was gone, dark shadows etched across the surface of the hull chasing away these phantom particles of light, engulfing it darkness.
On the bridge of the Enterprise-E, Captain Jean-Luc Picard sat, bald and commanding, though at present he appeared more confused than anything else. This expression was mirrored in those around him; the bearded man sitting beside him; the long-haired woman on the other side of that; and in the many ensigns, lieutenants, and enlisted personnel strewn about the smoothly contoured bridge.
Then the bridge came alive with activity again. Ensigns and other supernumeraries resumed their duties, sifting through sensor logs and data charts. The Captain blinked, and this overly simple act seemed to jog him to his senses. Sitting up straighter in his seat, Captain Picard directed his gaze to the pale-skinned man sitting at the Ops console; he seemed to be the only one least affected by the abrupt maneuvers. It was to him the Captain spoke.
"Mr. Data, what happened?" he demanded in a thick British accent.
The pale man — who was in fact an android, as much a part of the crew as anyone else, a valued and seasoned officer whose loyalty to the Captain and the Federation was beyond any doubts — studied the readings on his monitor intently, eyes flicking to take in the scrolling information.
"I am uncertain, Captain." When Data spoke, his expression never faltered, his eyes never wavered, and his voice never skipped beat. He spoke with exact, machine-like precision and clarity. No detail, ma'am; just the facts. Picard sometimes envied that about him. "It seems there was a high buildup of verteron particles outside the hull before the blackout in sensors and communications, sir." He swiveled his chair around to look directly at his superiors. "I estimate that we have traveled through some form of spatial anomaly, most likely a wormhole or a temporal rift."
"Data, how is that possible?" William Riker demanded with a touch of asperity. He hated being kept in the dark and he was hoping that Data would clear that up as soon as possible. "Last time I checked, there weren't any wormholes or other significant spatial anomalies in this sector."
"I do not know, sir," Data responded, turning back to face his console. "I will, however, need to wait a minute before running a full scan."
"Well, figure it out soon," he said, directing his attention to the long-haired woman sitting on the opposite side of him, a small smile drifting across his face. "Because we've got somewhere more important we need to be," he added with a slight wiggling of his eyebrows.
Next to the Captain, Deanna Troi smothered a laugh. Captain Picard gazed sadly at the both of them. Before the unexpected detour, the Enterprise, his ship, had been on its way to Earth so that they could participate in the Earth-based ceremony of Troi and Riker's wedding. He had come to think of them both as family, and he would be very sad to see them go, but they had made their decision and he respected it. As a Starfleet officer, it was his job to perform this final duty for them. Still, they seemed to have a mystery on their hands, and as Captain he required all crewmen to focus on the task at hand.
"One step at a time, Number One," Picard reminded him with a slightly remonstrating smile. Riker looked sheepish all of a sudden and nodded his assent. "First we need to find out where we are. Mr. Data?"
"Sensors are coming back online, sir," Data reported promptly. "I will get a more a more in-depth scan of our current location." He checked his displays, head tilting in that curious manner the android got when he was particularly intrigued by something. "This is puzzling... according to our astrometrics data, the closest star is NGC-5101. In the Keagan Spiral."
Picard shared a dumbfounded look with his first officer. No, I cannot have heard him correctly. He couldn't have said what I thought he said...
"The Keagan Spiral? Data, that's..." Riker had trouble finishing the sentence.
"One hundred and three thousand, eight hundred sixty four point seven billion light-years outside the Milky Way Galaxy," Data replied.
Picard was tempted to curse in French or one of the various multitudes of languages he knew. The last time he could recall this happening they had traveled to the far-distant Triangulum Galaxy, or M33, and that hadn't exactly ended with favorable results. Judging from the mingled expressions of awe and dread on his senior staff's faces, he knew they were having the same thoughts.
"What about that wormhole or rift or whatever the hell it was we just passed through?" the Captain demanded, starting to lose some of his patience. If their experience with the wormhole was merely an isolated affair and it had collapsed or they could not use it again, they would be stranded in the recesses of space, and their chances of ever returning to the Federation, or indeed, anywhere else in the Alpha Quadrant, would be null. In that event, they might as well resign themselves to finding a habitable planetoid and settling down, eliminating their last ties to a galaxy long lost and the only home they had ever known.
"It is no longer there, Captain. Sensors show the wormhole collapsed shortly after we exited." Before the Captain or Riker could interrupt, he added: "However, I am detecting a high concentration of supercharged particles in the area. I believe it would be possible to reconstruct the wormhole, but it will require further study."
Before the Captain or Riker could say anything, however, Lieutenant Knightly — the security officer whom Picard had chosen to replace Worf with when he transferred to Deep Space Nine, a dedicated combat officer, veteran of the Cardassian border skirmishes, the lynchpin to the Enterprise-E's success against the invading Borg Cube during the Battle of Sector 001 five years prior, and chief strategist for their engagements throughout the Dominion War, a likeable and well-respected man of solid bearing, 5'10 height, stocky frame, and German descent — piped in from tactical.
"Captain, long-range sensors are picking up a vessel approaching our current position," he said, disbelief evident in his voice. "Bearing one oh seven mark two one five."
"What?" Riker said, starkly incredulous.
Picard was equally flabbergasted. "How can that be?" They were at the farthest fringes of the known universe, beyond the range of even the fastest warp-capable starship. How was it possible that a ship had turned up on their scanners? It was then that the Captain wondered... was the ship indigenous to this galaxy? Did that mean it supported life, perhaps highly advanced civilizations capable of their own faster-than-light travel, traversing the stars, seeking out one another and new worlds...? This changed everything in Picard's opinion. Starfleet's policy was and always would be — to him at least, first and foremost — the exploration of new lifeforms and new civilizations. This more than certainly qualified.
"The ship is now entering visual range," Knightly's excited voice broke into Picard's thoughts, returning him to the present.
The Captain of the Enterprise-E, flagship of the Federation, got to his feet, plastering on the well-worn diplomatic face that had served him so well in the past: his features carefully arranged in an attentive but neutral mask, giving no outward indication as to what lie beneath the calm exterior.
"On screen," he ordered. The main viewer flickered to life. A white speck was just barely visible in the starfield. "Magnify."
The image of an immense colossus of a starship filled the viewscreen, slicing neatly through the blackness of space. The ship was a mottled white color, giving it a dull, unassuming appearance, if a little intimidating. Dotted across its arrowheaded-shaped superstructure were sharp little protrusions that looked suspiciously like weapons emplacements. A long, horizontal trench split open the sides of the ship like a ripe melon. And at the back of the ship stretched a vast collection of upraised platforms, all connected to a T-shaped tower that reached high above the stern, as if intent on watching over the vessel from its lofty position. All in all, the ship was quite unlike anything the Captain and his crew had encountered to date.
"Analysis, Mr. Data." Picard's voice betrayed none of the conflicting anxieties he felt upon seeing the vessel in all its majestic glory.
Data called up pertinent sensor information on his console, brows furrowing in puzzlement as he did so. "I am having trouble scanning past the outer superstructure. I will attempt to compensate." Data reworked the sensors to scan past the density of the ship's hull, but getting a precise scan proved much more elusive. His eyes roamed over the monitor, absorbing every piece of data in microseconds as his positronic brain analyzed the data to correspond with what he knew. "I am still having difficulty in getting a clear reading, but I am learning much from my endeavors."
"Data, just tell us what you know," Riker said exasperatedly as the starship drew ever more near.
"Aye sir," Data replied, and then he cocked his head back. "Fascinating. According to my readings, power generation is operating at several orders of magnitude higher than our own, sirs. The energy output for this one ship exceeds anything currently found in the Alpha Quadrant."
"How so, Data?" Picard asked. The ship was looming larger on the viewscreen now and Picard wanted to know everything about it that he possibly could. He hoped they were peaceful, but one never knew what to expect from first contact encounters. He hadn't planned on this and despite the unease growing in his stomach regarding this whole affair, he held out hope that perhaps this ship and its crew could help him and his people return home.
"I am still having difficulty in getting a precise scan, most likely due to the dense materials composing the space vessel's hull," the android explained. "However, sensors indicate a power rate of ten to the fifteenth power measured in gigawatts. It seems the ship apparently utilizes some form of a highly sophisticated quantum or slipstream ion drive which as a result, when in effect, would propel the vessel to an excess of tens of millions of times faster than the speed of light at maximum velocity."
"They could cross the galaxy in a matter of days, depending on the right conditions," Riker stated, eyeing the approaching ship with newfound admiration and a hint of some disbelief. Such advanced technology was beyond anything in the Federation's database.
"That is indeed the case, sir," Data confirmed, calling up new information on his display screen. "Sensors are also picking up the presence of dozens of protrusions across the surface of the hull which, if the computer's readouts are to be believed, are defensive batteries capable of generating energy-based weapon discharges in the gigaton range."
Picard did a double take. "Did you say gigatons?"
"Yes sir," Data responded promptly.
"Unbelievable," Deanna stated softly.
"She's a warship," Picard breathed.
"Raise shields," Riker ordered, turning to the helm officer.
"No, Number One, we cannot," Picard said, moving closer to the viewscreen, his eyes never leaving the image of the steadily enlarging ship. "They are clearly much more advanced than we are and we can only hope that they are benevolent. No, we must not provoke them. Raising the shields could be construed as a hostile act. We will watch them and see what they will do."
Picard hoped he was making the right choice. Of course, it was highly unlikely they could survive against them for long even if their intentions were less than honorable. Such power was virtually unheard of in the Alpha Quadrant. Not even the Borg were as powerful as this single starship. He was going to be interacting with a species that came from a future the Federation couldn't even begin to conceive. What else was there to be done? At best, this was a ship that was heavily armed only as a precaution against aggressive races. At worst...
Riker echoed what was in Picard's thoughts. "And what happens if they do become hostile with us, sir?"
The vessel loomed larger and larger on the screen, until it looked like they were going to have a head-on collision; then, before it could tear through the Enterprise and rip her to shreds, the ship slowed down, decelerating until it had achieved simultaneous orbit with the Enterprise, holding position one kilometer off the starboard bow.
"Then God help us," Picard murmured.
________________________________________
The massive monstrosity that was the other vessel hung motionless in space, suspended in the interstellar void only by its powerful ion drives and the physical laws that apply in a weightless environment. Its unimpressive white hull gleamed dully with the reflected light of the system's primary. Within its hypermatter reactor core churned the compressed fusion of enough power to sustain an entire civilization, providing the ship with an immeasurable supply of energy and the very useful function to remain self-reliant for an extended period of time. Alone, this virtual city of a starship fielded enough armament to subjugate an entire world in a very short period of time. This was no lightly armed scout ship on a mission of peaceful exploration; it was a destroyer, nothing else, and no efforts were spared to conceal its true design.
Atop this mountain of hardened alloy and armor plating stood the bridge, the ship's command nexus, nestled in between two spherical shield regulators. Inside the bridge, sealed off to the harshness of the vacuum by super-reflective transparent metal, Captain Jerec Tano of the Star Destroyer Razer stared out the viewport at the other ship. He was a short man, only 5'7", but he carried himself with an officious grace that denoted very high rank or privilege. He possessed unremarkable black hair and sported a simple, nondescript gray tunic over gray trousers with a matching gray cap to finish the look. Men of similar attire and status worked diligently in the bridge's crew pits and work stations behind him, giving the whole room the feel of controlled order combined with the ever-present atmosphere of military discipline.
Captain Tano was not a young man, now approaching his sixty-seventh standard year, yet this wasn't what he had been expecting to find when he had been ordered to change course and venture into this virtually deserted system. In his twenty-three years of serving in the Imperial Navy, he had never witnessed any other starship like this one, although it reminded him strongly of those damnable star cruisers that the Mon Calamari brought into battle against the Empire's formidable battleships. While scarcely larger than a Corellian CR90 corvette, the opposing ship was long, smooth, and sleek, with an angular saucer section and swept-back nacelles that definitely bore a striking resemblance to the Y-wings the Rebel scum used in their raids on Imperial facilities, which was enough to give the Captain pause and lead him to wonder whether or not this was a Rebel ship he and his crew had happened upon.
"What have you found, Captain?"
Captain Tano froze immediately upon hearing the voice, the same one that had been responsible for his change in course heading. The voice was deep and conveyed a synthetic bass rumble laced with dark overtones, as though a man were speaking from behind a mechanical apparatus, and, indeed, that was precisely from whence it came. With a palpable feeling of dread, the Captain turned to face Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith. The cybernetic being towered menacingly over him, bulbous, fish-eyed goggles glaring ominously into him with razor sharp attentiveness. The familiar cadence of his mechanical breathing accompanied the Sith Lord's every word, and was arguably one of the most feared sounds in the galaxy. At this moment, staring directly into the Sith Lord's hollow mask and feeling as though he were staring into an empty void, the Captain could not disagree.
He snapped up smartly and slid his heads behind his back with expert precision. "My lord, we've come out of hyperspace at the coordinates you have given us. Unexpectedly, we have come across a ship the likes of which we have never encountered before, though it does bear more than a passing similarity to Rebel ship designs."
The huge, black form of the Sith Lord strode past the Captain and approached the viewport, presumably to gaze at the starship himself, and Captain Tano felt himself barely restrain a sigh of relief, the only outward indication of the state of his emotions the slight relaxing of tension around his clasped hands.
"I must know more about that ship," the Dark Lord muttered softly, indecipherably, almost as though he were speaking to someone standing outside of the range of his perception. He turned his head back towards the Captain and spoke more boldly, as if he was just coming out of a trance. "Have your men compiled a detailed sensor analysis, Captain Tano?"
"I am about to receive a report, lord," Captain Tano responded crisply.
As if in response to this statement, a junior lieutenant walked up beside his commanding officer and handed him a datapad. The Razer's Captain took the pad and briefly inspected its contents, studying the information collected by his ship's powerful sensor array and committing that information to memory. After he had finished with this minor task, he moved down the bridge and offered the datapad to Lord Vader. The Dark Lord of the Sith accepted the pad without a word and examined it, Captain Tano wordlessly falling back into a military stance.
"You're sure of your findings?" Vader demanded after a moment of perusing the pad.
Tano turned to the junior officer, who nodded once, and returned his gaze to Vader. "We are, my lord."
Lord Vader was silent for a long moment, and Captain Tano stiffened, feeling the faint ghost of tension work itself around his throat, and he brutally suppressed a nervous gulp. What was so important about this single ship that could have the famed Dark Lord of the Sith so quiet and introspective? From what he'd read through on the datapad, this ship was nothing special. In fact — while it was more streamlined and efficient in a couple key areas, such as subspace harmonics — it was actually quite inferior in so many more such as weapons, sublight and superluminal propulsion, and power generation. He and his crew could easily destroy this inferior space vehicle with a broadside barrage from their antifighter batteries, to say nothing of the enormous ship-to-ship turbolasers which the Razer wielded, which were so powerful in and of themselves that it was within their capacity to reduce the surface of an entire habitable planet to molten slag in less time than a standard day without reinforcements.
He was about to tentatively venture a question when the Dark Lord turned, facing the viewport once again, and his orders flowed smoothly from the vocabulator, strong and without hesitation. "Captain, prepare boarding parties. I want you to use the ion cannon to disable that ship, and once she is dead in the water, I expect you to send over boarding craft to capture the enemy vessel intact."
"Intact, my lord?" the Captain offered meekly, surprised by this sudden turn of events and why Vader would insist on sending boarding teams when it was all the more simpler to just destroy them. He would never dream of questioning a Sith's motives, he was much too loyal an officer for that, but boarding an alien ship which they had no intel on was tactically unsound.
"You have your orders," Vader reiterated firmly. "I sense something about that ship. Something I have not felt before..." Suddenly, Vader straightened up, and with a very precise movement he turned and stalked off the bridge. "I must investigate it." And with that, the Sith Lord was gone.
"What do we do, Captain?" his junior lieutenant asked.
"We will do as he has instructed us, Lieutenant," Captain Tano replied curtly. "Follow his orders. Order the weapons crews to stand by. Prepare to fire a full spread of the forward ion cannon. Leave no part of that ship untouched. Lord Vader wants it captured."
And as the crew moved off to comply with his command, the Captain stepped up to the viewport for the third time, staring at the mysterious ship that had somehow managed to catch the Dark Lord's attention. A brief flash of pity overtook him for the inhabitants of that ship, as their fate had been sealed and they were now at the mercy of the notorious Darth Vader, but it was quickly dispelled, and hard resolve swelled up inside him.
"And I intend to give it to him."
________________________________________
"Have they responded to any of our messages?" Picard asked his second officer.
For the past several minutes, the Enterprise, on Picard's orders, had been transmitting standard subspace greetings and tentative inquiries in all known languages — a vain hope, the Captain knew, for any initial first contact between the opposite ships would inevitably be hampered by a communications barrier that, by the time of the 24th century, had become so little of an issue due to cultural exchange and interstellar commerce among the various powers and sundry groups of the Alpha Quadrant as to be nonexistent, but the bald-headed Frenchman had persisted nevertheless, believing it better to try and open with the formal procedure given the armaments the other ship had at its disposal rather than provoke them, not that the Federation flagship had a dispute with the advanced race that had built this curiously overpowered spacecraft at any rate.
"Negative, sir," Data reported, working his fingers over the terminal, and then his neck twitched as his eyes scanned with lightning speed to take in the new data now compiled on his display screen. "Correction, sir! Sensors are detecting a large energy buildup in what I believe to be the starship's forward weapon array. Magnitude, ten to the twelfth power. Discharge is imminent!"
In a flash, Picard was on his feet, his mind reacting to this blatantly aggressive and completely unexpected hostility with a combination of shocked horror, the snap-quick readiness born of trained precision and combat experience, and obscured deep within his subconscious in the places he had only barely begun to fathom a profound sadness at the sure knowledge of their momentary demise, trying to piece together what on Earth it was that they had done or might have said that so greatly offended the apparently irritable species guiding the alien vessel, what written text had caused them to lash out, the misspoken word that had led them to bring doom to a people they hadn't even met...
"Shields up!" he belted out desperately, even while knowing in his heart that it would offer no shelter against the superior craft and yet feeling that he had to protect his crew regardless, even if such defense for the lives of those under his command were insurmountable, "and hail them! We simply cannot allow this to —"
But it proved to be too late, for on the screen the white-armored vessel shot off a wave of strong energy which impacted against the forward shields of the Enterprise, as suddenly their systems were overwhelmed by the sheer power of the blast. Coruscating electrical tendrils danced about from the viewscreen which leapt from computer terminals to inlaid wall panels with reckless abandon — consoles blew out, sparks exploded all across the bridge, and ejected conduit wires shredded the poor souls of those ensigns and other bridge personnel unfortunate enough to be close to them into so much raw and bloody meat, as the main viewer went completely black and smoke and the metallic tang of ozone and fried circuits filled the cramped space.
Coughing into his shirt sleeve, feeling as if he had just had the wind knocked out of him and surprised to still be alive, the Captain moved about the bridge, trying to make some sense out of the chaos his ship had so rapidly descended toward. "Mr. Data! Report! What the hell is going on?!"
"I am getting no readings, sir!" Data called back, and a note of fear now crept into his synthetic voice, one made possible by the emotion chip he had implanted in his positronic brain only a few short years ago.
Off to the side, Commander Riker was checking on Deanna to make sure that she had sustained no serious injuries in the attack which had disabled the bridge, and found that aside from a minor bruise stained with crimson blood, she was relatively unharmed.
"I'm all right..." she insisted, waving off his ministrations.
"Captain, we have complete failure of the main computer!" Lieutenant Knightly barked from tactical. "We've lost power to everything!"
Data reported back from Ops.
"We are dead in the water, sir," he informed his superiors.
Reflexively, Riker tapped on his combadge. "Geordi, can you hear me? Geordi, respond!"
But now that the tension of the moment had cooled, now that most of the acrid fumes and the blackened stench of superheated electronics had for the most part cleared the chamber, Picard laid a hand upon Riker's arm, trying to restore order to the situation, for with an enemy vessel only kilometers astern, they couldn't succumb to irrationality; the fate of his crew, his beloved ship, and perhaps even the entire Federation, depended upon their actions here, how they handled this crisis, and what they learned from their encounter, and it was Picard's duty to see this through to the end no matter what the outcome was.
"One step at a time, Number One," he told him. "We mustn't panic. Mr. Data, conjecture. What on Earth happened to us?"
"If I were to speculate, I would say that the enemy ship hit us with some form of ionized particle ray," the chalk-skinned being theorized. "The effect when coming into contact with a ship's central computer network would be the complete destabilization of those systems."
Suddenly, Deanna Troi leaned forward in her seat, long hair spilling out over her shoulders as her eyes went wide, pupils dilating from an inexplicable emotion, shock and perhaps fear as well, as if she had just unearthed some hidden and thoroughly unforeseen revelation among the background hum of the universe which would have devastating consequences on the world around her, important news that her superior officers had to know about immediately.
"Captain! Commander!" she stated. "I sense a wave of incoming thoughts and sensations... and they feel so bleak and cold. So utterly lifeless. It's like... whoever these thoughts belong to were bred for death and destruction."
"An imminent arrival?" Picard ventured, his brow furrowed as he struggled to process his thought patterns more fluidly, to construct and ascertain possible motives for this seemingly erratic behavior, all the while fighting the unexplained dread that had somehow risen up behind his breastbone. "So they blow out our power systems, then dispatch their own away teams? But why would they...?"
And total, abject understanding dawned so suddenly that horrified realization swept through him, erasing everything else in its wake and leaving behind only mind-churning numbness and a paradoxical sense of concerned apathy, as though he were disconnected from the events unfolding around him, and in an instant the Captain had moved to the ship's intercom system which had thankfully remained separate from the main computer and thus could transmit his fresh orders to the complement of the Enterprise, the words spilled from his mouth in a gasped and strangled outcry of grim but desperate determination.
"All hands, this is the Captain! Prepare to repel boarders!"
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Lieutenant Pogrin raced through the corridors, heavy boots thudding upon the steel deck plates and passing short-circuited wall interfaces on his hasty beat through the hallways until he and his small company of yellow-shirted security officers had made it to Section 21-A Charlie near one of the secondary docking bays. A pig-nosed man with a shaven head, rumpled skin of a leathery complexion, and luxurious mane of swept-down beard, as well as two jewels of beetle-black obsidian shining in his eye sockets, Lieutenant Pogrin was a Tellarite, and at moment sweat was trickling down the sides of his temples as he and the men and women as well as all the other nonhumans in his security detachment assumed a defensive position arrayed out around the sealed door leading into the bay, so that he and his subordinates could form a chokehold beyond which any intruder hoping to gain access into the dimly-lighted hallway would have to pass by them, making it a simple matter to stun and possibly kill as many of the enemy as they could get within the targeting sights of their phaser rifles.
Pogrin resisted the urge to wipe his forehead as dulled clanging sounds and banging scrapes echoed all around them, as though the ship itself were creaking and groaning like some ancient seafaring vessel made of iron under the stress of water pressure, and he glanced downward with a satisfied nod to find that the safeties had been detached on his weapon. A long-time crew member of Captain Picard's ship, Pogrin had served as an ensign aboard the USS Enterprise-D and then later a full lieutenant aboard the E. Despite serving aboard the flagship for going on close now to sixteen years, having withstood and lived to tell the tale of numerous encounters with the godlike Q, hostile indigenous races, and even the Borg, Pogrin couldn't help but feel nervous every time he was expected to go into possible battle, even though it should have been second nature to him by this time. The adrenaline rush, the pounding of blood in your ears, the thunder of your heart, racing, the fear that in the ensuing conflict you and everyone around you would not live to see the sun rise and set on another day... while he had been through so many firefights that had claimed the lives of his friends, survived through situations that quite frankly had seemed impossible to endure, the condition these events had on his physicality affected him, distracted him, made it hard to concentrate upon when at any moment the enemy would come storming in either to kill, capture, or in the worst case, assimilate him.
Still, Pogrin had full confidence in his comrades to do their job, and he made a slashing-forward gesture with his arm as the clanging bumps of groaning metal reached a crescendo, the signal for get ready to fire. His men leveled their weapons at the bay door, and more than a few double-checked to make sure that their rifles would function well when trouble came knocking at their door. The thudding booms intensified, so loud that Pogrin could barely hear his own thoughts, silence for a few seconds, as the air itself seemed to fold inward, like a child withholding their breath in anticipation, and then...
With a blast of charred durasteel and exploding conduits, the wall three meters off the left and down the hall to their current position blew outward with extreme concussive force, hurling those standing too close to the blast to the deck plate, while others were lifted off their feet and tossed down the hallway like limp rags, even as Pogrin felt his heart sink with shocked dread — They're bypassing the bay completely! he realized from strangled horror — but before he could gain his bearings, white forms spilled out into the corridor, decked out in plastoid armor and raining down a hail of blasterfire on the hapless security officers. In such a confined space, the area rapidly crumpled from the might of their assault, with blaster bolts piercing through wall panels, cutting vital computer components into lethal shards of flying shrapnel, and blowing out ceiling light fixtures to the point that it felt as though the tiny, poorly-lit hall had heated to several degrees higher than it normally was within seconds of their entrance into the vessel.
And the blasters found their marks with unerring precision.
Pogrin reeled, his mind a chaotic mess, overwhelmed by the raw intensity the enemy had brought to the fore, but quickly making its way to the forefront of his being to replace the blind panic that had so nearly threatened to undo him years of Starfleet training recessed in the dark corners of his soul finally kicked in and he unleashed his payload of deadly phaser fire upon the white-suited bodies now clogging the hallway, as more of the scattered security team, now recovering their resolve, emptied their weapons alongside him. With a thrill of terror in his heart, Pogrin observed as though in a haze that the phaser beams didn't appear to be penetrating the body armor worn by the invaders, even as his own officers were mowed down by the opposing force, red hyphens of lancing energy smashing into cloth and flesh as the mass to whom it had belonged was torn apart, either by the collapsing corridor or the plasma being pumped into the miniscule area.
"The stun setting isn't working!" Lieutenant Pogrin shouted wildly above the rising din. "Set to maximum! Kill them, kill them!"
The Starfleet security personnel moved further down the embattled space, stepping past the burnt and in often cases still-smoking corpses of their former colleagues, torn to tatters, limbs jerking where they lie dead or dying on the floor, reduced to animal cries and pathetic, gasping exhalations and Pogrin felt as far removed from the evolved and enlightened Federation as he could possibly be, as if the veneer of civilization that divided thinkers from beasts had been stripped away with their entry into this new and foreign galaxy on the edge of the universe, allowing a brief glimpse to the barbaric past of the Alpha Quadrant's sentients as those base instincts that had been rendered useless by thousands of years of building upward returned clawing and screaming to the front of his psyche, the urge to flee, run away and hide, survive, kill or be killed...
The intensified phaser beams struck at the stormtroopers, and Pogrin made a horrible discovery that only with very prolonged phaser fire did the concentrated beams finally perforate layer upon layer of protective shelling to fell one of their adversaries, and as the situation switched from terrifying to full-blown desperate, with their team running harried and frantically down the hallway to try and put more distance between them and the mysterious boarders, just when Pogrin felt that things could not possibly get any worse...
Hsss.
With a snap-hiss of energy, a bar of bright crimson light materialized in the gloomy hallway, as if the figure attached to it had transported in out of nowhere, and, before the Tellarite Lieutenant could really grasp or ponder the true depth of what was really going on, the shadow now threw itself into the fray, slicing through security officers left and right, as if they were hot butter, and before Pogrin could register it he found the phaser being yanked away from his hands, as if directed by some otherworldly entity, like the darkness surrounding them given form, a primitive specter born of the feral streak within all sentient beings, or perhaps some living nightmare that had haunted civilization for untold eons come to life to exact its revenge upon the living, and Pogrin lost it completely.
"Retreat! Retreat!" Pogrin screamed, his voice quite unlike his own.
Suddenly, as the whirling fan of red energy crisscrossed and hatched the hallway like some dark angel of vengeance, two of his men were sent spinning to the side, crashing into the sides of the corridor with a loud and painful-sounding wet smack, as a sudden constriction latched onto Pogrin's throat, as though his neck had been caught in the grip of a hydraulic vice, and his hands flew to his larynx, attempting madly to restore the ability to breathe to his suffocated airways.
As the remnant of the security detachment under Pogrin's command succumbed to blasterfire or the red energy blade, more than a few dropped their own weapons, spun around on their heel and fled the scene, yammering in gibberish that ranged from frenzied screams to incoherent sobbing to inarticulate begging for their own lives as the shadow ruthlessly ended it for them in one fell swoop, however, through the pitiful wheezing gasps as his life was choked from him, Lieutenant Pogrin observed a select handful of brave souls, resolute in their steadfast courage and stubborn defiance to keep resisting until the very end, continued pumping phaser fire into the heart of their enemy, so that despite the dizzy fog clouding his vision and the tingling sensation spreading across his extremities, the dedicated Starfleet officer couldn't help but feel a sense of proud kinship with the sentients he had led into their last, final engagement in the farthest corners of his dying mind.
And then once they had been felled, the shadow turned to stare at Pogrin as he got his first clear glimpse at the dark colossus and in the second that passed between them, with his back arching and his limbs flailing about, when all that filled his ears was the creaking of his own slowly cracking bones, the blood in his veins turned to ice, and for the first time since Pogrin had witnessed the Borg's assault and the utter annihilation they wrought, he realized that they truly weren't the most horrifying force within all the finely-spun infinite cosmos of creation.
This being, whatever dark power swayed its hand and guided its actions, was — and, as if ushering him into the same hellish nether-world from whence this phantom had sprung, a loud snap that was the sound of his own breaking neck heralded the finality of his corporeal existence as the darkness descended on him forever...
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The situation was not encouraging back on the bridge. From the centralized command nexus that connected the Captain's position to the vast passageways which linked the engineering chambers, control sections, and tactical hubs to one another like blood vessels through the interior of his ship, reports now filtered in like the tendrils of icy fingers slowly spidering their way around his heart with every new status update as from all account the heavy boarder contingent had spread like an infection to nearly every deck across the Enterprise.
"They've taken Section 17-C Tango!"
"Squad five has fallen back to secondary position gamma!"
"Explosive charges have gone off on deck twelve, section nine!"
"Captain, we can't hold them off! Our losses are too great!"
"Security reports that handheld phaser beams are having very little effect on enemy boarders — it's like they're shooting blanks, sir!"
Picard settled into his command chair, bald scalp gleaming with the glistening sheen of pearly-oval sweatdrops while the room itself stank of the suffocating staleness that was their cramped oxygen supply, the wispy smoked-ash quality of charred computer circuits, and the damp musk which was a byproduct elevated human stress hormones.
"Suggestions?" Picard offered to the assembled crew members.
"Call back our men, and we could vent the affected sections out into space," Will Riker said crisply. "It might slow them down a little."
"Make it so," the Enterprise's commanding officer barked, and as the bridge crew rushed off to carry out his orders, he still felt compelled to add, "however, as you said that's just a temporary solution, Number One."
But before the second-in-command could reply, Deanna breathed sharply, a startled gasp of rattled inhalation and her pupils went doe-eyed wide while beads of sweat gathered on her brow, hands flying up to her temples as she shook her head to and fro — as if she had seen something awful, picked up a high-pitched whine gradually building up at the back of her consciousness in the dark places beyond the realm of basic comprehension, a frightening revelation that to lesser mortals would have driven into the tender embrace of all-too-easy madness.
"No, no..." she whimpered as a severe case of trembling seized her upon its grip and refused to let her be for within seconds she was now shaking like a delicate leaf being blown in the wind. "No, Captain..."
The two ranking officers glanced in her direction, feeling suddenly concerned for her.
"Deanna?" Riker inquired, with a tentative step towards her, clearly worried that she might be in need of medical assistance.
"No, no... no, please, no!" she cried out, as if she were in physical pain. "Not that, not that, please! It's too terrible!"
"Counselor, are you all right?" Picard urged as he reached out to place a warm hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off a second later.
"C-Captain, there is, a... a dark presence on its way here!" she reported, still clinging to her sense of duty even as the high-pitched whine morphed and remolded itself into the shape and energy texture of a warped lifeform filled to bursting with hot burning fury and cold, methodical precision with the psychological imprint and all of the companionable warmth as that of a cadaver, icy and dead, far past what her limited senses were able to perceive, and Troi jerked, fingers prying into her skull so that a trickle of red liquid seeped between her hands, and she screamed. "It's so horrible! It's… it's coming to destroy us all! Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop!"
And she thrashed, a desperate, primal paroxysm of most base fear.
"Deanna... Deanna!" Commander Riker said, taking her by her shoulders and shaking her. "DEANNA! Calm down! Deanna!"
But it appeared to be no use for whatever it was that had latched onto