Nine

“O’CONNELL?” Brodesser’s voice was pitched soft and low, so as not to wake Hoshi. “No. O’Connell was in that first group of five.”

“The first ones Sadir shot,” Trip said. He shifted position in his seat, but didn’t open his eyes. The burst of energy that had carried him through the day was gone. He was running on fumes now, resting while he could. If he hoped to make it through the next twenty-four hours, he’d need to husband every last bit of his strength.

“That’s right.” Brodesser’s voice came from his left, where the professor sat, technically on watch-though there was little for him to do, with the cloak engaged and the autopilot on.

Behind Trip and to his right, Hoshi slept on, oblivious. Trip listened to her breathing a moment, and then nodded, satisfied. Whatever fumes she’d been running on had dissipated just after they’d emerged from the Belt, and she’d virtually collapsed in her seat, falling right asleep. Her breathing then had been shallow, and somewhat rapid. Trip had hoped it would even out on its own, which it seemed to have done. For the moment, at least. She was sleeping like a baby.

Despite his exhaustion, Trip hadn’t been able to follow suit. For one thing, he was too keyed up. His intuition was right, he knew it-they were going to find Enterprise at Kota. That was one reason. There was also a nagging ache in his right leg-not the calf, where he’d been getting all the cramps, but in the upper thigh. Stiffness, he decided. He’d been unable to get comfortable. He debated taking one of Trant’s painkillers but decided he would save them for when he was really hurting.

“Makin was killed then too,” the professor continued. “Her, Dubrow, Ferrara…”

“So who’s left?” he asked. “If we’re right about all this-if the Daedalus crew is aboard Enterprise-who’s running engineering? Who’s piloting the ship?”

“Piloting? Westerberg. Engineering-there’s Fitzgerald. Al-Bashir. Yee.” Brodesser paused a moment, then ran off a half-dozen more names.

All at once, Trip realized there was one very prominent one missing from his list.

“What about Cooney?”

“Cooney. I don’t know.” He could almost hear the frown in the professor’s voice. “He worked at Kota for a while, then they moved him. An incident with one of the guards.” Brodesser paused. “He was not the most…tractable of workers.”

Trip had no trouble imagining that. This universe’s Cooney, from what the professor had told him already, had a lot in common with the engineer he remembered from his own. A man who marched to his own drummer, and anyone who got in the way had best step aside or get hurt.

If Cooney was on board Enterprise…well, Trip couldn’t help but think that would be a good thing.

He and the professor had been talking over what they planned to do at Kota for the past half hour. Now, Trip tried to picture the base in his mind as Brodesser had described it to him.

Kota had started as a small research facility-the Denari people’s first tentative steps into the galaxy beyond their solar system, two years before Daedalus’s arrival-built on a small, lifeless moon, which circled a gas giant the size of Saturn. When Sadir had captured the Starfleet vessel and her technology, he’d turned the research station into a factory, where he churned out the weapons and ships that enabled him to seize power.

Over the years, Kota had grown even bigger, grown to encompass mining facilities, living quarters, and weapons research labs. Above the base, in geostationary orbit, Sadir had built a mammoth orbital platform, constructed in the shape of a cross, with massive hangars-ship-building facilities, each one big enough to hold a half-dozen Enterprise s-dangling from each arm.

Trip’s gut told him they’d find Enterprise inside one of those hangars, but whether they found it there or in orbit, their strategy was basically the same: bring the cloaked cell-ship alongside a hangar, use the EVA suits Kairn had given them to board through a side airlock. Go right for the engineering deck.

That was where the Daedalus crew was supposed to come in. And yet…

Despite the professor’s reassuring words (“They’ve been prisoners for fifteen years, Trip-they’ll jump at the chance to escape”), Trip frankly was worried about how those people would react. So much time spent cowering in a cell…it tended to beat the fight out of you. What if they refused to help? Even worse, what if they turned him and Brodesser over to the Denari?

Trip was working out a plan B in his head to cover that eventuality when the console beeped.

“Dropping out of warp,” Brodesser said. “Coming up on Kota Base.”

Trip opened his eyes. He’d dimmed ship’s lights to let Hoshi sleep. Now he leaned forward over his console to bring them back up.

Then Brodesser’s console beeped again, several times in succession.

Trip turned to the professor, who was frowning.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I’m not sure I’m reading this right,” Brodesser replied. “Could you-“

A brilliant white light flared in front of them.

The cell-ship shuddered, and dropped like a stone.

Trip’s stomach heaved. He barely managed to stay in his seat. He heard a thump behind him and realized Hoshi hadn’t.

“Commander!” she yelled. “What-?”

Trip hit the cabin lights.

“Some kind of pulse weapon hit directly above us,” Brodesser said, reading his console. “No structural damage. Some disruption of higher-level computer functions-“

“I can see that,” Trip said. “The autopilot’s out.”

“Warp drive as well,” Brodesser said.

Trip switched over to manual control and tried to steady the ship.

“Professor, tell me who’s out there. Who’s shooting at us?”

“No one is shooting at us, Trip. I remind you we’re cloaked. We appear to have wandered into the middle of someone else’s fight. I count two dozen small ships-a few larger ones-all coming under attack from emplacements on the moon’s surface and the orbital platform-“

Light exploded near them again. Again, the cell-ship shook.

“I suggest we wander back out again,” Brodesser finished.

“That’s what I’m tryin’ to do,” Trip said. He was having a hell of a time getting control of the ship, though. They were wobbling like a wounded duck.

They stabilized.

“Is Enterprise out there?” Hoshi asked.

“Not picking it up, no.” The professor frowned. “Hmmm.”

“What is it?” Trip prompted.

Brodesser shook his head. “That blast that almost hit us-it must have been a wildly errant shot. I can trace the energy signature for it back to the orbital platform, but the ships who might have been its target…there are none near us.”

“Bad aim, I guess,” Trip said, as he started to plot a course around the main battle. “See if you can pick up any com chatter out there, Hoshi. Find out what this is about.”

“I can tell you what it’s about,” Brodesser said. “The war. They’re fighting for control of the weapons facilities here.”

“Maybe over Enterprise, too,” Trip added.

Brodesser nodded. “Yes. That would make sense.”

It would also make their task much more difficult, Trip realized. The ship, if it wasn’t involved in active fighting, was going to be heavily guarded.

From the look on Brodesser’s face, he realized the same thing.

“We might need a new plan,” the professor said.

Trip nodded. The cell-ship shuddered under his control again-stopped almost dead, then started forward once more.

“Commander?” Hoshi asked from behind him. “What was that?”

“Not sure.”

“Let me check,” Brodesser said.

Out of the corner of his eye, Trip saw the professor’s hands flying across the Suliban-built console.

“I think I’ve found our problem,” he said a few seconds later. “The cloak.”

“What about the cloak?”

“It’s failing.”

“What?”

Trip brought up a diagnostic screen on his own console, and saw immediately the professor was right. The cloak was damaged; the field projector itself was down to ten percent of nominal output. It must have been hit during that first blast.

“It’s stealing power from other ship’s systems to maintain function,” Brodesser continued. “That’s why the engines are failing-“

The lights flickered.

“-and so on,” the professor finished.

The console beeped.

“Two of the smaller ships have just spotted us, and locked on weapons,” Brodesser said.

“And we’re being hailed,” Hoshi said. “Don’t think they know for certain we’re here, but…”

Trip tried to punch the cloak back in again. The display indicator flickered, then held.

Weapons exploded on either side of them.

Trip’s console beeped.

He looked down and saw that the oxygen content of the ship’s atmosphere was dropping. The cloak was stealing power from life support, too.

“How far off is that orbital platform?”

Brodesser shook his head. “At the rate we’re losing power now, we won’t make it.”

“Commander?” Hoshi asked. “What should we do?”

Trip looked down at the console.

Out the viewscreen at the ships tracking them.

Back at the console.

“I’m thinking,” he said.