The fourth planet filled half the forward viewport.
From this distance, it might almost have been beautiful.
Rust-red continents curved beneath bands of grey cloud. Wide oceans reflected the system’s pale sunlight in broken strips between storms. Mountain chains stood like old scars across the northern hemisphere. Lightning moved through ash-colored weather systems that had not existed twelve hours ago.
Then the sensor overlays returned.
Orbital weapons fire.
Atmospheric detonations.
Debris fields.
Thermal blooms across population centers.
Troop carriers entering the upper atmosphere in burning lines.
And everywhere, beneath the data, the psionic-resonance pressure.
Commander Soren Vale stood behind the cockpit stations of the Linnaeus Two and watched the war below reshape itself in real time.
The runabout was running dark by Starfleet standards: low-power emissions, passive sensors prioritized, active scans narrow and intermittent. Its shields were up but modulated close to the background interference of the battlefield. Its engines were tuned for short bursts rather than sustained speed. Every system aboard was trying to look smaller than it was.
So far, it was working.
Or the war was simply too large to notice them.
Vale was not sure which possibility bothered him more.
At tactical, Ensign Ryn Dast tracked contacts with a stillness that had become familiar since Deck Twelve. Her hands moved quickly. Her voice remained level. Her eyes did not leave the display.
“Imperial-aligned forces have taken control of the high orbital lanes,” she said.
Vale looked at her. “Imperial-aligned?”
“That is what the computer keeps suggesting after cross-referencing the survivor’s fragments. I can change the label.”
“No,” Vale said. “Keep it marked as provisional.”
“Everything is provisional out here.”
“That too.”
Crewman Ilen Paz sat at the combined helm-operations station, managing the runabout’s passive sensor mask and communications filters. He was younger than Vale would have preferred for a mission like this, but he had handled the survivor’s transport under impossible conditions in the graveyard, and his hands had not shaken then.
They were not shaking now.
“Surface communications are almost unreadable,” Paz said. “Too much jamming. Too many overlapping command bands. The translator is catching fragments, but most of it degrades before context forms.”
“Anything useful?”
Paz hesitated. “Mostly orders. Coordinates. Liturgical phrases. Some of the same words we heard in sickbay.”
“Heretics,” Dast said.
“Yes.”
Vale did not answer.
He had read the transcript from the interrogation three times.
Terra.
Exterminatus.
Marked for purgation.
Words that had arrived broken, incomplete, and still managed to change the shape of the entire mission.
On the forward display, a cluster of smaller vessels moved down through the atmosphere toward a continent already stitched with fire.
“More troop landers,” Dast said.
Vale frowned. “They are still reinforcing the surface?”
“Yes.”
“But they are winning orbit.”
“Yes.”
“That does not make sense.”
Dast glanced at him. “It might make sense to them.”
Vale let that sit.
Below, a formation of landing craft punched through cloud cover above a battlefront nearly three thousand kilometers long. The computer outlined troop concentrations in amber and red. Some were human. Some were not. Some could not be classified at all because the sensor returns shifted each time the runabout tried to lock them down.
Near one coastal basin, the ground itself seemed to pulse with corrupted energy.
The runabout’s sensors did not like looking at it.
Neither did Vale.
“Mark that region,” he said.
“Already marked,” Dast replied. “The anomaly’s local resonance is strongest there.”
Paz looked up. “I’m catching an orbital command fragment. Repeating pattern. The translator is having trouble, but one term is stable.”
Vale turned toward him.
Paz put it on the small central display.
The word appeared in Federation Standard beneath a block of undeciphered phonetics.
Containment.
Dast’s jaw tightened.
“They’re not sending troops down to save the planet,” she said.
“No,” Vale said quietly. “They’re keeping something occupied.”
The runabout passed through the shadow of a broken orbital platform. Its shattered hull turned slowly above the planet, trailing frozen atmosphere and dead running lights. Beyond it, the Imperial formation tightened.
Ships moved into position around the world in a widening ring.
Not graceful ships.
Not even efficient ships in any sense Starfleet would have used the word. They were slabs of armor and gun decks, cathedral towers and launch bays, brutal silhouettes dragged through space by engines that burned like industrial suns. Some were small only compared to the largest vessels. Some were wounded, venting atmosphere or plasma, yet held formation anyway.
A ring of iron around a dying world.
“Commander,” Paz said.
“I see it.”
“No, sir. New contact entering high orbit.”
The display shifted.
A large voidship was moving out of the outer debris band, descending toward firing position above the planet’s dayside. Its signature was different from the others. Slower. Heavier. Surrounded by escorting craft and a storm of smaller contacts.
Dast’s eyes narrowed. “That one is not joining the line.”
“No,” Vale said. “It is being given room.”
Paz adjusted the scan. “I’m getting fragmented identification traffic from the escort screen. The translator is not confident.”
“Show me.”
A string of broken text appeared.
—Hand—
Static.
—Saint—
Another break.
—Drusus—
Dast looked at it. “The computer is tagging the firing vessel as Hand of Saint Drusus. Provisional translation.”
Vale studied the ship as it turned with ponderous authority until its prow faced the planet.
“Then let’s hope Saint Drusus is feeling merciful.”
No one answered.
Paz swallowed. “Launch-bay activity. Not troop carriers. Bigger.”
“How big?”
“Large enough that the runabout keeps trying to classify them as small craft.”
Dast put the magnified image on screen.
The objects emerging from the Hand of Saint Drusus were torpedoes only in the broadest possible sense. Each was larger than a shuttle, armored, blunt-nosed, surrounded by stabilizing fins and field projectors. They moved slowly at first, as if too massive to believe in acceleration.
Then their engines ignited.
The runabout’s threat board lit up.
“Those are not tactical warheads,” Dast said.
Vale moved closer. “Yield estimate?”
“Unclear. Their internal fields are shielded. But the gravitational distortion around the payloads is enormous.”
Paz looked pale. “The translator just caught another word from the firing vessel.”
The word appeared.
Cyclonic.
Then another fragment.
Sentence confirmed.
Then static.
Vale stared at the torpedoes.
The injured survivor’s ruined voice seemed to echo in the cockpit.
Exterminatus.
“Trajectory?” Vale asked.
Dast answered immediately. “Planetary impact. Multiple population centers. One oceanic basin. One tectonic fault system.”
Paz turned from ops. “Commander, we should warn the task force.”
“Warn them,” Dast said, “but they cannot help us with this salvo. It will hit before anyone can get here.”
Vale looked at the planet.
At the torpedoes.
At the thousands of troop markers still descending into the atmosphere.
The Imperial ships had not paused their landings.
They were still feeding soldiers into the war below.
Meat into a grinder.
The thought came unbidden and Vale hated how accurate it felt.
“They’re still sending their own people down,” Paz said softly.
Dast did not look away from tactical. “Maybe they do not expect them to come back.”
The cockpit went quiet.
Vale sat slowly in the command chair.
Starfleet captains and commanders were trained to think in scales. A life. A crew. A ship. A colony. A planet. An alliance. The balance of one against many. The terrible arithmetic of command.
But there was no arithmetic for this.
Not really.
“We cannot save the planet,” Dast said.
Vale kept his eyes on the targeting display.
“Then we save the next city.”
Dast looked at him.
“Commander?”
“Then the next minute,” Vale said. “Then whatever comes after that.”
He reached for the tactical overlay and transferred firing control to his command station.
“Load quantum torpedoes. Narrow-yield configuration. Proximity detonation only. Target the warheads during their arming cycle.”
Dast was already moving. “Aye.”
Paz turned. “Commander, if we fire, every ship in orbit will know we are here.”
“They may already know.”
Paz looked back to his console. “Yes, Commander.”
Dast studied the torpedo tracks. “We have a window. Their field projectors flare every twelve seconds. If we hit during the flare, we may trigger guidance failure or premature detonation.”
“May?”
“This is not familiar technology.”
“Good enough. Plot solutions.”
Dast’s hands flew over the console.
“Six torpedoes in first salvo. We can engage four with quantum torpedoes. Two with phasers if we close range.”
“Do it.”
“Commander—”
“I know.”
Dast held his gaze for half a second, then nodded.
“Firing.”
The Linnaeus Two dropped its mask.
For one instant, it became very visible.
Then four quantum torpedoes streaked away from the runabout, bright blue-white against the red-brown planet below. They split into separate attack paths, each guided by the runabout’s computer through debris, jamming, and weapons fire that had not yet realized it should care.
The first struck during the target’s field flare.
The cyclonic torpedo vanished inside a contained detonation that folded light inward before expanding into a silent sphere of burning debris.
The second tumbled, lost guidance, and spun into an already-dead orbital platform, tearing it apart in a flash of secondary explosions.
The third broke into three large fragments, each still descending.
Dast swore under her breath and fired phasers.
Two fragments burned.
The third continued.
The fourth quantum torpedo struck cleanly. Another cyclonic warhead died above the clouds.
“Two remain,” Dast said.
“Phasers.”
“Closing.”
The runabout dove.
The planet grew larger, clouds rising like a wall. The inertial dampeners compensated, then complained. Vale gripped the edge of the chair as Dast lined up the first remaining torpedo.
“Firing.”
Twin phaser beams cut across the void and struck the torpedo’s aft field assembly. Its engines flared white. The warhead veered, skimmed the upper atmosphere, and burned apart over an empty ocean in a chain of expanding shock rings.
“One left,” Paz said.
Vale watched the final torpedo fall.
It had already entered the upper atmosphere.
“Can we catch it?”
Dast’s voice was flat. “No.”
The torpedo vanished into cloud.
For two seconds, nothing happened.
Then the planet answered.
The impact did not destroy the planet.
That was worse.
It taught them what the next impacts would do.
The flash washed the cockpit in white.
The sensors overloaded, recovered, overloaded again. A circular shockfront spread across the surface below, vaporizing cloud cover in a perfect expanding wound. The crust around the impact site glowed red, then white. A column of superheated atmosphere climbed toward space like the beginning of a new volcano large enough to have its own weather.
Paz made a sound Vale had never heard from him before.
Dast said nothing.
The psionic-resonance meter spiked so hard the display crashed and rebooted.
For an instant, every light aboard the runabout dimmed.
Vale felt pressure behind his eyes.
Not a voice.
Not words.
A reaction.
Pain, fear, rage, death, all blooming through the field like an atmosphere catching fire.
Then the dampeners reasserted themselves.
The cockpit returned.
“Report,” Vale said.
It took Dast half a second to answer.
“Impact zone… approximately nine hundred kilometers across for immediate thermal and seismic effects. Wider atmospheric consequences still modeling.”
Paz whispered, “One torpedo.”
Vale stared at the wound in the planet.
“That was one torpedo,” he said.
Dast’s console screamed.
“Multiple targeting locks. Orbital defense contacts are shifting toward us.”
“How many?”
“Too many to matter. Five fast movers launching from the inner formation.”
The display magnified the contacts.
They were aircraft or spacecraft or something between the two, each larger than the runabout and shaped like armored knives with engine blocks strapped to their backs. Their hulls were decorated with gold and black markings. Their prows glowed with weapon charge.
“Fighters?” Paz said.
Dast stared at the size readout. “Their fighters are larger than our runabout.”
Vale watched the contacts close across the tactical plot.
“Of course they are.”
The first volley crossed their path thirty seconds later.
Red beams and hard-round impacts stitched space behind the runabout. Paz suddenly looked as if he wished Okafor were at the helm.
“Evasive,” Vale said. “Use the debris.”
Paz turned the runabout hard toward the broken orbital platform.
“Into that?”
“Through it.”
“Aye, Commander.”
The Linnaeus Two plunged into the debris field.
Metal plates spun past the viewport. Broken beams. Dead weapon housings. Frozen bodies the computer automatically blurred before anyone asked it to. Behind them, the five interceptors followed with the confidence of craft designed for battlefields where caution was a theological failure.
Dast fired aft phasers.
The lead interceptor rolled under the beams with surprising agility.
“They are not as clumsy as their capital ships,” she said.
“Noted.”
A second interceptor fired.
The runabout shook as projectiles struck the rear shields.
“Shields at eighty-two percent,” Dast said. “Aft grid took the impact.”
Paz threaded them between two tumbling slabs of armor.
One interceptor tried to follow too closely.
Dast saw the angle.
“Tractor pulse?”
“Authorized.”
The runabout’s aft tractor emitter snapped on for less than a second, not to capture but to shove. The tumbling slab changed vector by four degrees.
The pursuing interceptor clipped it with one wing.
Its shields flared. It spun out, venting atmosphere or coolant, then disappeared behind the debris.
“Disabled?” Vale asked.
“Probably.”
“Probably?”
“It is no longer shooting at us.”
“Good enough.”
The remaining four spread out.
“They’re learning,” Paz said.
“They’re pilots,” Vale said. “Not machines.”
“That makes me feel worse.”
“It should.”
Dast’s console flashed again.
“Second cyclonic salvo preparing to launch.”
Vale looked back to the planet.
The Hand of Saint Drusus had turned slightly, bringing more launch tubes to bear. Around it, larger escorts were adjusting their firing patterns, clearing a corridor through their own orbital traffic. The first lost salvo had surprised them. The second would not.
“How long?”
“Three minutes to launch,” Dast said.
“And our interceptors?”
“Still very committed to our destruction.”
Vale leaned over the display.
“Paz, put us between the Hand of Saint Drusus and the planet.”
Paz turned slowly.
“Through the fighters?”
“Yes.”
“Through the capital ship’s point-defense envelope?”
“Yes.”
“Toward the planet-killing torpedoes?”
“Yes.”
Paz faced forward again. “Yes, Commander.”
“It is worse,” Dast said. “We are also low on quantum torpedoes.”
“How many?”
“Two.”
Vale nodded. “Then we use them well.”
The runabout burst out of the debris field.
Immediately, three interceptors regained firing solutions.
The cockpit shook.
“Shields seventy-one percent,” Dast said. “Sixty-eight.”
Vale brought up a map of the Hand of Saint Drusus’s ventral launch assembly. The structure was massive, armored, and heavily defended. But during launch preparation, energy flowed through exposed field projectors along the outer rails.
Every weapon had a moment when it became vulnerable.
Starfleet engineers built fail-safes to minimize those moments.
These people built shrines around them.
“Target the launch rails,” Vale said.
Dast looked at the model.
“That is not disabling a torpedo.”
“No. It is delaying the next salvo.”
“That ship is several kilometers long.”
“I am not asking you to destroy it.”
“That is reassuring.”
“I am asking you to annoy it.”
Dast’s mouth twitched despite everything.
“That I can do.”
The runabout accelerated toward the voidship.
Point-defense fire erupted around them.
Space filled with red beams, kinetic streams, flak bursts, and luminous shells that detonated in expanding nets of charged particles. The runabout’s computer plotted a thousand possible deaths and chose the least immediate.
Paz flew like someone solving a puzzle at terminal velocity.
The first interceptor overshot them.
The second stayed on their tail.
Dast fired a photon torpedo backward. It detonated in proximity, not against the craft but against a cloud of debris between them. The expanding fragments forced the interceptor aside.
“Disabled?” Vale asked.
“No. Angry.”
“Still good.”
The Hand of Saint Drusus filled the entire forward view.
Armor plates the size of city blocks. Gun ports like tunnel mouths. Statues carved into the hull. Banners or sensor vanes or devotional markings hanging rigid in vacuum. The runabout skimmed over the surface of the giant vessel, so close that its shields sparked against stray radiation crawling across the armor.
Paz’s voice went very quiet.
“We are inside their minimum firing geometry.”
“Then stay there.”
“Trying.”
Dast locked onto the first launch rail.
“Quantum torpedo armed. Narrow yield.”
“Fire.”
The torpedo struck the rail assembly at the exact moment its field projector flared.
The result was not large by the standards of the ship they were attacking.
By runabout standards, it was a sunrise.
A section of the voidship’s ventral launch bay blew outward in a chain of detonations. Secondary explosions rippled along three adjacent tubes. One cyclonic torpedo still inside its cradle ruptured badly enough that the ship’s own emergency fields slammed down around it.
The Hand of Saint Drusus began to turn away from the planet.
“They’re pulling back,” Paz said.
“Temporarily,” Dast said. “I doubt they’re surrendering.”
“Second rail,” Vale said.
Dast already had it.
“Last quantum torpedo.”
“Make it count.”
She fired.
The second torpedo did not reach the rail.
An interceptor dropped into its path at the last instant, either by accident or suicidal calculation. The detonation tore through the fighter’s forward shields and sent it spinning into the voidship’s armor. It broke apart against the hull in a burst of flame and metal.
Dast stared at the tactical display.
“I did not intend—”
“I know,” Vale said.
The runabout shook violently.
“Shields fifty-four percent,” Paz said. “Point-defense has adjusted. They can hit us at this range now.”
“Then we leave.”
Dast’s console chimed again.
“Commander. New orders traffic from the Hand of Saint Drusus. Heavy encryption, but the translator caught fragments.”
“Put them up.”
The fragments appeared one by one.
Obstruction.
Unknown vessel.
Anomaly.
Purgation force.
Then a tactical overlay shifted.
Fifteen large contacts detached from the orbital ring and began turning away from the planet.
Not toward Linnaeus Two.
Toward the anomaly.
Paz looked at the display.
“Oh no.”
Dast ran the projection twice, then a third time.
“At their current acceleration and likely transition pattern, they reach the anomaly in approximately nine hours.”
Vale looked at the depleted weapons panel.
Quantum torpedoes: zero.
Photon torpedoes: low.
Forward shields: damaged.
Aft shields: unstable.
Impulse injectors: heat-stressed.
“We bought their attention,” Dast said.
Vale watched the fifteen vessels form a column.
“Yes.”
“That may not be an improvement.”
“No,” Vale said. “But it is information.”
The Hand of Saint Drusus behind them fired again.
Not cyclonic torpedoes.
Everything else.
Paz threw the runabout down and starboard. The first barrage passed above them. The second caught the port shields and spun them hard enough that the planet rolled across the viewport.
“Shields forty-one percent,” Dast said. “Port grid failing.”
“Course for the anomaly.”
Paz looked at him.
“We’re leaving?”
“We cannot stop the next salvo alone,” Vale said. “And if those fifteen ships reach the task force before they are ready, there may not be anyone left to close the breach.”
Dast looked back at the planet.
Another set of launch signatures bloomed from a different ship in the orbital ring.
“Commander…”
Vale saw them.
More torpedoes.
Too many.
Too far.
The runabout had no quantum torpedoes left. Not enough photons. Not enough shields. Not enough ship.
For a moment, Vale hated the size of space.
Then he heard his own voice, steadier than he felt.
“We saved the next minute,” he said.
Dast looked at him.
“And whatever comes after that?”
“We deliver it to Captain Haddad.”
Paz set course.
The Linnaeus Two turned away from the burning planet.
The remaining interceptors pursued.
For twenty-seven minutes, the runabout ran.
It skimmed the edge of the planet’s gravity well, used a shattered moonlet for cover, dropped two decoy beacons into the exhaust of a burning transport, and flew through the debris wake of a cruiser whose engines were failing in blue-white pulses.
Dast disabled one interceptor with phaser fire to its engine array.
Paz lost another inside a dense debris cloud.
The last two stayed with them until the runabout made a micro-jump through a region of gravitational interference that Starfleet safety protocols would have described as inadvisable if the computer had not been too busy objecting.
When normal space steadied around them, the interceptors were gone.
So were three more points of shield integrity.
Paz exhaled.
“I never want to do that again.”
“You will put it in the report,” Vale said.
“I will put several things in the report.”
Dast did not relax. Her eyes remained on long-range sensors.
“Commander,” she said. “Receiving telemetry from the anomaly region.”
Vale turned.
The tactical display updated.
The Endeavour.
The Huygens.
The Carl von Linné.
A fourth Starfleet signature.
Vale stared.
“That can’t be right.”
Paz checked the identification. Then checked again.
“Federation transponder confirmed.”
The name appeared on the screen.
USS Enterprise-G.
For the first time in hours, no one spoke.
Then Dast said, very quietly, “That changes the board.”
The runabout dropped out near the task force minutes later.
The first thing Vale saw was the Linné.
Damaged.
Alive.
Her saucer bore blackened scars along the forward shield grid. One nacelle was flickering under emergency repair fields. Several hull plates glowed dull red where phaser or plasma or something worse had struck too close for comfort.
The Enterprise-G held position off her flank.
Sleek. Defiant. Smaller than the legends sometimes made the name feel, but unmistakable in the way only an Enterprise could be. Her shields were up. Her weapons were hot. Her presence changed the shape of the battlefield simply by existing.
The Endeavour and Huygens remained locked into the analysis formation around the anomaly, their sensor beams and subspace pulses weaving through the wound in layered patterns.
The work had not stopped.
Good, Vale thought.
Good.
“Open a command channel to Captain Haddad on the Endeavour,” he said.
The screen flickered.
Captain Haddad appeared from the Endeavour’s mission operations center.
For one moment, Vale saw the relief in her face before command sealed it away.
“Commander,” she said. “You are late.”
Vale looked at the tactical display, where fifteen enormous contacts had begun their long movement toward the anomaly.
“Yes, Captain,” he said. “And so are they.”
He transmitted the data packet.
The mission operations center behind Haddad went very still as the threat projection appeared.
Dast spoke from tactical, voice hoarse but clear.
“Fifteen large vessels inbound. They have broken from the orbital formation and are on course for the anomaly.”
Paz added, “Cyclonic torpedoes confirmed. One impact observed. Additional launches probable.”
Haddad’s expression changed.
Not fear.
Not surprise.
Something colder.
Understanding.
Vale leaned closer to the pickup.
“Captain, the planet is being exterminated. We intercepted most of the first salvo and delayed the next, but we forced them to divert ships toward the anomaly. We cannot stop this from orbit with one runabout.”
A second face appeared in an adjacent window on the channel.
Captain Seven of Nine.
She looked at Vale, then at the data, then back again.
“We are out of time,” she said.
Behind her, someone off-screen called out a status report Vale could not hear.
Haddad did not look away from him.
“No,” she said. “But you brought us some.”
Vale looked down at the depleted weapons readout, the damaged shield grid, and the long list of repairs the runabout would need if any of them survived long enough to care.
“At their current speed,” Dast said, “the redirected formation reaches the anomaly in nine hours.”
Vale looked at the depleted torpedo count.
“Then nine hours is what we bought.”
The anomaly turned slowly behind the Starfleet formation, dark and impossible and hungry.
Around it, on four ships now, every scientist, engineer, and command officer left standing bent themselves toward one question.
How to close a wound before an empire arrived to tear it open forever.
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Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. I do not own any of the recognizable worlds, characters, or trademarks featured in this story; they belong exclusively to their respective owners. I make no money from this work.