After having waited an entire DISfor them to make their move, YaVang felt only relief when the green‑blooded scavengers pounced at long last. The reverberating clangor of external grapples engaging and hull‑penetrating breach pods fixing themselves to the ships exterior demonstrated that the taHqeqhad finally decided it was safe to come aboard. As YaVang stood in the cruisers relatively narrow boom section, roughly equidistant between the bulbous forward command deck and the wide engineering section that lay aft, he could only wonder whether or not his pressure suits stealth functions had obscured his presence from the boarders sufficiently to allow him to surprise them, or if they had detected his stubbornly persistent lifesigns through his suit and decided that he didnt pose enough of a threat to warrant waiting any longer.

Whichever way the RomuluSnganhad done the math, YaVang was determined to teach the enemy a very painful and very sanguinary lesson about the foolishness and lethality of overconfidence.

YaVang heard a muffled explosion that momentarily rang the hull like a bell, followed almost immediately by another. Fallen bits of conduit that lay in the corridor shifted in the induced breeze, which was swiftly stanched by the harsh clang of a fast‑closing emergency bulkhead. Hull‑breaching charges, he realized, fore and aft. He reflected contemptuously upon the exaggerated sense of caution of the boarders, who were clearly unwilling to risk transporter ingress to a vessel whose internal configuration was no doubt still largely unfamiliar to them.

It willremain unfamiliar to them,he thought, raising the long‑barreled disruptor pistol he clutched in his vacuum‑gauntleted right hand. So long as air remains in this suit, and breath in my lungs.

A swiftly moving shadow cast against the ships dim emergency lighting suddenly drew his attention aft. The approaching partys booted footfalls echoed loudly through the otherwise silent vessel, the sounds seeming to originate in the direction of the engineering section, from which the most recent explosion had sounded. His training instantly taking over, YaVang flattened himself against one of the narrow corridors walls and watched as the initial shadow lengthened and resolved itself into multiple shapes, all of them vaguely humanoid. A pressure‑suited figure stepped directly into view, immediately followed by at least two more.

Arm raised, YaVang stepped forward abruptly and fired. The foremost of the approaching raiders doubled over the fireball that suddenly threw him backward into his fellows. The Klingon maintained a merciless fusillade, taking full advantage of the element of surprise.

He heard a footfall behind him and whirled toward it. The sudden heavy impact against his chest threw him supine to the deck an instant before he felt the fierce heat penetrate the charred front of his pressure suit.

RomuluSngan disruptor,he thought as he realized that his own weapon had somehow slipped from his grasp, no doubt because of the ungainly bulkiness of his gloves.

Despite the tumult of running booted feet all around him, YaVang noticed that the hum of his helmets air circulation system had ceased. That meant that his final signal had been transmitted. The dead‑man switch was to engage either when his suits life‑support system failed, or the moment his lifesigns ceased to register upon the suits internal monitors. The trap he had so laboriously set over the past DIShad been sprung at last.

And the motherless carrion‑eaters had done it themselves.

The deck shuddered and rattled as the individual charges, adapted for their current purpose from the SImyoHs armory, began detonating in series throughout the battle cruisers superstructure. Within but a handful of lup,very little of the ship would remain intact, to say nothing of the misbegotten muqaDwho had dared to try to take her.

YaVang bared his teeth in a warriors grin as several RomuluSnganconverged upon him from both directions, their weapons raised and poised to fire once they all had gotten out of one anothers line of fire.

The deck plating sheared away beneath their boots and YaVangs back.

Freefall. Airless space penetrated YaVangs body like countless icy blades. His last breath rasped in his chest like dry leaves, and he methodically emptied his lungs, just as his training demanded.

The Klingon captain awaited death calmly. Today, after all, was indeed a good day to die, for he had prevented a hated enemy from acquiring one of his peoples mightiest battle cruisers intact. And he also may well have booked passage for himself, as well as for his entire crew, aboard the Barge of the Dead, bound for eternal Sto‑Vo‑Kor.

But even as tumbling debris and oblivion took him, he wondered what fate might befall his beloved Empire the next time a treacherous, dishonorable attack such as this one were to occur.

After all, whatever else the contemptible RomuluSnganmight be, they were nothing if not tenacious.

ONE

Thursday, May 22, 2155 Enterprise NX‑01

“A DMIT IT , J ONATHAN . Youre already at least as bored with this mission as I am.

Unable to deny his fellow NX‑class starship captains assertion, Captain Jonathan Archer smoothed his rumpled uniform and leaned back in his chair with a resigned sigh. Porthos, whom Archer had thought was fast asleep behind him at the foot of his bed, released a short but portentous bark, as if voicing agreement with the woman who looked on expectantly from the screen. Archer turned away from the lone desktop terminal in his quarters just long enough to toss a small dog treat to the beagle, who immediately became far too preoccupied with the noisy business of eating to tender any further opinions.

“My feelings really dont matter all that much, Erika, Archer said to the image on the terminal. “And frankly, neither do yours. This was Starfleets call to make, not ours.

From across the nearly six‑parsec‑wide gulf of interstellar space that currently separated Enterprisefrom Columbia,Captain Erika Hernandez punctuated her reply with a withering frown. “All right. Who are you, and what have you done with Jon Archer?

His lips curled in an inadvertent grin. “Im just an explorer, Erika. I dont make policy. And I dont like babysitting Earth Cargo Service freighter convoys any more than you do. But youve got to admit that there havebeen enough attacks on the main civilian shipping lanes over the past few weeks to justify keeping Earths two fastest and best‑armed starships out on continuous patrol, at least for a while.

She shook her head slightly. “Maybe. But not indefinitely. And certainly not if youre interested in treating the underlying disease instead of just the symptoms.

Archer couldnt really disagree with that either. The past six weeks of mostly uneventful patrol duty, spent endlessly covering the same roughly twenty‑light‑year stretches outbound from Earth, followed by a virtually identical inbound course which intermittently brought Enterpriseand Columbiatogether from opposite directions, put him in mind of the ancient Greek myth about a man whose misdeeds had earned him the divine punishment of rolling a huge boulder up a hill, only to have to repeat the process endlessly after reaching the summit and seeing it roll down again. Archer sometimes half‑seriously considered asking Starfleet to send the new NX‑class starship Challenger,still under construction in the skies above San Francisco, to relieve himafter rechristening it Sisyphus,of course.

But he knew better than to think that either he or Captain Hernandez could do much to change the minds of Admirals Gardner, Black, Douglas, Clark, Palmieri, or any of the rest of Starfleet Commands determined brass hats. After all, each of them had shot down essentially the same argument Erika was making today when Archer had first brought the topic before them weeks ago.