David Stern - Star Trek: The Children of Kings

He looked up at Liyan.

Pheromones .

Im sorry, he said, and took a step back from the Orion tallith. I need to speak with my ship.

Pike flipped open the communicator again.

The light on it was flashing red. No signal. What

It is I who must apologize, Captain Pike. I had hoped to avoid this scenario. Tactician. The tallith spoke without turning, to an Orion Pike hadnt noticed before, who stood at her shoulder.

Down! someone shouted in Pikes ear. Bens voice; the captain did as he was told and dove to the floor. A phaser beam cut through the air above him; a second later, one of the ceiling support beams crashed to the floor, raising a cloud of dust, cutting them off from the tallith and her guards and most of the others in the room as well.

Captain!

He turned and saw Ben holding his weapon. Ross stood next to him. A handful of bodies surrounded the two of them. One of those was Smiths. She wasnt moving. No surprise.

Half her head was missing.

We have to move, sir, Tuval said. Now.

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Macbeth: Your children shall be kings.

Banquo: You shall be king.

Pike was the last one in. As he entered the briefing room, the others all stood.

As you were, the captain said, and took a seat at the head of the table. Thank you for coming. Number One?

He nodded toward his second-in-command, seated to his right; she leaned forward.

Weve recovered part of the station log, she said. A small portionabout a minutes worthfrom the day of the attack. The images are heavily compressed; artifacts abound, both auditory and visual. The audio, in fact, disappears entirely less than halfway through the recording. But even so

Hang on. Commander Tuval leaned forward. Part of the station log? Where did that come from?

A fair question, Pike thought, considering that the base itselfStarbase 18, the Federations farthest outpost in this sector of the galaxywas pretty much space junk at this point. A fact Tuval knew better than anyone else in the room. Two days ago, the commander Enterprise s security chiefhad almost died exploring its remains. The skin on the right side of his face was still pink, and he had half-healed burns over most of the right side of his body. His lungs were functioning at sixty percent capacity; according to Dr. Boyce, theyd never reach a hundred percent again. All in all, though, Tuval was lucky.

The other three members of the landing party were dead.

You can thank our science officer, Pike said, nodding toward Spock, who sat to the captains right, at the far end of the table. There were seven of them in the room; Chief Engineer Pitcairn, Commander Tuval, and Communications Specialist Garrison on one side of the table, Number One, Boyce, and Spock on the other. He can explain it to you.

Pike gestured to the Vulcan to go ahead.

Starfleets communications infrastructure in this sector is a patchwork affair, Spock said. You are no doubt aware of this, Commander.

Of course. The trouble weve had getting through to Starfleet Command

This is because some of the subspace amplifiers in this region date back to the early years of exploration; to link these early models with current Starfleet equipment requires the use of multiple communications protocols as well as additional processing modules. It occurred to me that stored within some of those processing modules

You talking about the RECs, Mr. Spock? That from Chief Engineer Pitcairn.

The REC-twos, Chief.

Model twos. Not sure I remember those. Pitcairn frownedor maybe it was a small smile. On the chiefs craggy features, it was hard for Pike to tell the difference.

Three months into his five-year mission with the crew, the captain was still learning their little personality traits. And quirks. And likes and dislikes and how they got along with one another. Which members of which department worked well together and which were like oil and water. In that regard, hed expected to have some problems with Spock. There were a lot of people who still held a grudge against the Vulcans for the way theyd treated humanity in those early, postFirst Contact years. Holding back key technologies, refusing Earthers an equal voice among the quadrants space-faring races. Most of that seemed to be in the past now, but occasionally, a bit of that xenophobia still popped up. Pike had prepared himself to have to deal with some of that among his crew; hed suspected he might have a problem with Pitcairn in that regard. Glenn was old-line Starfleet, senior member of the crew, and the longest-serving non-flag officer in the fleet. But the chief and Spock got along like gangbusters.

Would that the rest of his crew mixed half that well.

The model twos were identical to the original RECs, Spock continued. Except that they were housed in significantly larger storage frames to allow for a wide range of potential expansion requirements.