Chapter 11: Found

It's inevitable we are unprepared. It's inevitable we will not have the tools we need. It's inevitable you will be forced to solve problems that once took a flick of your wrist and suddenly require mountains to move. This inevitability will kill you. All of you will face the inevitability. Make it your goal to inevitably survive. Make it your goal to learn and teach us to spit in the face of inevitability. –Vice Admiral Howard Kahtibi. Address to the Academy class of 2351.

USS Pioneer

Accidents are inevitable. They strike at the worst times to the best people. Mr. Murphy is rightly loathed for the law bearing his name, but it is a fact: accidents happen.

Eddie's engineers were getting broadsided with Murphy's Law since the beginning of the refit. Usually it amounted to little more than inconvenience. A trip to Fahdlan's sick bay and a few moments cleaning up the resultant mess were a cheap price to pay in light of all that could happen on a project of this scale. Fahdlan would scold them and send them on their way, but so far nothing serious had passed into his compartment since the Flare jump and the Hirogen attack.

So it was a shock when Dr. Mashdi Fahdlan felt the deck jump under his feet, and the lights all went out. Momentarily the lights came back on line.

"Pi?" Fahdlan asked nervously.

"You have a serious injury on the way, doctor," Pi reported calmly.

"Serious?" the doctor wasn't sure if Pi grasped the precise language of triage.

His console lit up with as detailed a physical scan as if he were standing over the patient with a tricorder. If anything, Pi was being understated. The patient was going to die within minutes unless… "Allah, be merciful!" Fahdlan blurted in genuine alarm. The patient was Eddie!

Fahdlan sprang into action. He prepared the instruments to receive the injuries he was seeing and brought in his entire staff. The last of his nurses arrived with Eddie, and the damage was even worse than Fahdlan suspected.

Eddie's jaw dangled from a scrap of tendon on the left side of his head. Where his mouth had been was a crater of blood. Both arms and one leg were pulped to a mass of blood and bone. The ribcage had been caved in and torn away on one side leaving the organs exposed to the air.

"The power conduit just blew up!" one of the engineers who brought him babbled hysterically, "we couldn't get there…"

Fahdlan didn't even look up. "Get them out of here!" he commanded. It made no difference how this happened until later. The Chief Engineer was in tatters. Saving his life would be tricky at best. "NOBODY THAT ISN'T INJURED OR MEDICAL PERSONNEL IS ALLOWED IN SICKBAY!" he shouted. "We have to save this man," he added quietly.

Commander Okuma arrived outside sickbay about the time the door slid shut barring her way. "I'm sorry, Commander," Pi explained. "Dr. Fahdlan has given strict orders."

Samantha was annoyed. "How bad is it?" she asked. Pi replied with the same diagnostic display she had given Fahdlan a few moments before. "Dear God!" She wasn't a doctor, but this sort of injury was breathtaking. "Who is it?"

"Lieutenant Commander Gordon," Pi replied.

At first Sam thought she'd heard incorrectly, "Eddie?" She cast about the corridor and noticed for the first time the frightened faces of almost every engineer on duty staring back at her.

"Fahdlan has to save him!" Lieutenant Blackburn sobbed.

"We need him," Chief Bristol added sounding uncharacteristically gloomy.

"If there's anything we can do to help save him…" Emily babbled.

Sam cut her off. "…What was that explosion, Lieutenant?" she demanded.

"One of the main power trunks exploded right in front of the Commander," Bristol explained.

"How many saw it, and is the ship in danger?" Sam asked.

"Just us," Emily motioned to herself and fifteen other engineers. "There's a hole in the deck, but we bypassed the damaged leads. We had to just to get to Eddie."

"Damn!" Okuma growled. Almost all her engineers on duty were standing around completely traumatized. "You are all to go to 10 forward, and stay there. You're all off duty until I say so."

"But Eddie…" Emily protested.

"Now, Lieutenant," Okuma managed not to shout. "Let the doctor alone. Pi will keep us posted."

"Certainly, Commander," Pi replied.

"But there are no computer nodes in 10 forward yet," Lieutenant Neidem protested. "Pi can't talk in there."

Sam rolled her eyes. "Go install them," she snapped in exasperation.

A nervous laugh rippled through the assembled engineers before half of them broke down in tears. Sam took Emily by the arm and gently led her away from sick bay. The others followed in a daze. Koon was waiting for them in 10 forward. He made a point of stopping each of the engineers and surveying them carefully before embracing them. He'd address each of them individually and say something to the effect that everything was going to be alright. When the last of them sat down, he turned to Sam. "I can stay with them a while, Commander," he said quietly. "You have anything in mind to fix the damage?"

"I was going to bring in second watch early," she explained. "Clean up the mess and start repairs."

"I concur," Koon said with a nod. "I want you back here as soon as you have the full picture of the damage." He motioned to the dazed engineers about the compartment. "You and I need to look after them awhile."

"I told them to install the computer nodes in here so they can get updates on Eddie's condition," she explained.

"Fine idea," Koon announced with a half laugh.

Samantha left. She was a dozen paces down the corridor when she felt a sudden surge of relief. Peyter had not second-guessed her. The niggling doubts she felt about her abilities as a commander always roiled in her heart, poisoning what was otherwise a very productive professional relationship. Usually Eddie was to blame. Like a class favorite, he was beyond her reach to impose discipline. However when Eddie was down, Koon turned, not to his department, but to her to set things right. Maybe she was being too hard on Eddie after all.

HPV Ivin

Lieutenant David Cabrillo had never felt such pain. He wasn't sure how it had gone so badly so quickly. One moment he was flying a shuttle with Dr. Spaulding, he felt and saw the familiar tingle of a transporter beam, and everything changed before he could ask what was happening. He could even see the shuttle exploding as his body dematerialized. As soon as he materialized in the unfamiliar setting his reality was nothing but pain.

The large gray aliens seemed to take it personally for some reason. Or more precisely they seemed especially upset with him. They beat Spaulding as well, but they did so with more of an eye to keep the scientist on the deck. What they put David through was repeated, vicious, and filled with undisguised hatred. They shattered all his ribs, broke all his fingers and toes, and knocked out all his teeth before relenting. David felt blood rising in his lungs. He'd drown soon without some help.

"Oh, you're not going to die, Cabrillo," Chieftain Pak warned. He motioned to a pensive looking Hirogen who surveyed David with a thoughtful eye.

"It'll take weeks to repair the damage to his skeleton," Surgeon Vulo announced. "Still want to make a trophy of him?"

"Just keep him alive," Pak commanded. To emphasize his point, he picked up David by the hair and dragged him to sickbay. By this time David was too senseless to feel the pain and bonelessly allowed himself to be dragged.

He weakly coughed up mouthfuls of blood. Faintly he noticed a smear of blood on the deck following him. Spaulding was allowed to walk behind David. When they reached the sickbay, Vulo brought out a pointed instrument the size of David's hands. He savagely stabbed one into David's side.

"Don't you touch him!" Spaulding shouted and lunged to protect David.

Pak swatted Spaulding aside like tossing a toy across the room. David heard all the scientist's ribs break with a meaty crunch when Pak's fist struck him, and heard a deeper crunch that could only be Spaulding's spine breaking when he hit the far bulkhead. The older man slumped in the corner he'd been tossed. Dazed, paralyzed, but still alive, Spaulding regarded Cabrillo with amazement.

Vulo stabbed another of the devices into David's other side. "That should keep the lungs from filling up with fluid," he announced.

"You should have known better than to taunt predators, Cabrillo," Pak snarled. "Where is Pioneer?"

"Let him heal a while before getting into that," Vulo reasoned. "He's half dead."

"He'll be exactly dead when we're done, Vulo," Pak laughed. "Duplicating our performance won't be hard." Even so, he marched from the compartment, and didn't return for a while.

Vulo propped Spaulding up against the bulkhead, thought better of it, and moved the man to a cot. "Wasteful," he sniffed. He put a few more probes into the scientist, but nothing half so drastic as the devices draining the blood from David's lungs. "Maybe you could tell us where Pioneer is," he mused.

Spaulding began to laugh. "Bring the other one in. I'll tell you."

Even in his pain, David stirred to stop Spaulding. Kree! My lovely Kree! I can't have them anywhere near her! But his throat was filled with blood, his mouth was filled with the stumps of broken teeth, and his body was too tired to do more than groan.

A moment later Pak reappeared. "I understand you have something to tell me," he said to David.

Spaulding began to laugh again. "The boy is too far gone to tell you anything," he said.

Pak turned his attention back to the scientist. "Anxious to betray you kind? First Cabrillo, now you are willing to trade mercy for lives."

It occurred to David this accusation was revealing. What was Pak talking about?

Pak struck Spaulding a hard blow across the face. The scientist smiled. "No need to be rude," he said.

Something in Spaulding's tone alarmed Vulo. "You've driven him mad!" he said. "Kill him! He'll infect us all!"

Too late for that, David thought dully. Admittedly he was judging from human standards, but Pak and his crew were acting strange indeed. Blind hatred like this was not normal. Even the most violent Klingons had a reverence for honor and brotherhood. Pak and his crew, by comparison were lashing out. At what? At David Cabrillo? Why? Heartshock expressed frustration here and there, but this anger was beyond comparison. For that matter, the stories he told of his race repeated a reverence for manners and decorum. While that decorum was a bit different than human society, it wasn't anything like how he was being treated by Pak and his crew.

Pak glared at Vulo before returning his attention to Spaulding. "You want mercy, Spaulding?" he asked sounding reasonable for the first time.

"I'll settle for you head on a spike," Spaulding chuckled.

"You?" Pak sneered. "You'll never walk again."

"I'll be dead before long," Spaulding admitted cheerfully.

He has gone mad! David tried to rise and silence the scientist, but agony and few grinding bones stopped him.

"But I'll have the pleasure of seeing you into Hell first," Spaulding added.

"Don't bore me with bravado, Spaulding," Pak growled. "Where is Pioneer?"

Don't tell them! David wanted to shout.

"I believe you call it Sanctuary," Spaulding confessed.

David groaned. He began to cry. Kree! My lovely Kree! Any defense he could give her was carelessly tossed aside.

"We have your Chieftain Heartshock," Spaulding continued. "He will see your entrails smeared over that lifeless desert."

This affected genuine surprise in Pak. "Heartshock? He lives?"

"Koon spared him. The Captain has turned your mightiest against you."
Pak laughed. "Delusions, doctor. Heartshock is the loudest voice of his race."

"Koon will convert you, or kill you, Chieftain," Spaulding said. "There is no more ruthless a man in Starfleet."

"A challenge!" Pak exulted. "Unlike the craft a few days ago in the nebula. This will be a hunt!"

"You will die, Chieftain," Spaulding said gravely. "Koon will not suffer what you've done to me."

"I know Sanctuary well," Pak lied. "I'll see to it Koon's skull faces yours in my cabinet."

Pak left to issue orders. Vulo fled the compartment fearing Spaulding's madness would infect him.

There was a long silence before David heard Spaulding again. "I've mistreated you, Lieutenant," he declared. "It was vanity on my part. I saw your brilliant work, and I knew you would be a rival in the years to come."

The confession surprised David. He painfully rolled his head to face Spaulding. The scientist was facing David with a mask of madness. His corneas were cracked, and blood filled one of his eyes. His broken nose flowed with a sedate trickle of blood. "Koon will slaughter them, Cabrillo," he hissed with demonic satisfaction. "You and I will hold the Gates open for them for what they've done."

David suddenly felt Vulo's apprehension. Spaulding had gone mad, and he might infect everyone before he died.

He thought of Kree. He was never going to see her again. He wept.

USS Pioneer

It was hours before Tylan heard the news. She'd heard the explosion, heard about a serious casualty, and it never occurred to her Eddie might be in danger. Eddie was the best at what he did. It was beyond her imagination he could make a mistake. So she kept to her work, and never bothered to ask Pi about the injured man in sickbay.

"Hello, Tylan," a familiar voice called from the door to her lab.

She didn't bother to look up. "You sound smug, M'rath," she declared in her best Vulcan dispassion. "Have I missed something?"

"You've been spending a lot of time with Commander Gordon lately," M'rath gloated. "Probably haven't slept with him yet though. Any reason why?"

"Your jealousy has never been attractive," she declared still refusing to look up from her work.

"Never said that while we were together," M'rath sounded genuinely hurt.

Tylan wasn't fooled for an instant. "Not that it's any of your business, but I have spent time with Commander Gordon. I find his company more to my taste than yours. And no, we haven't had sex."

"That so?" M'rath asked. His gloating tone vanished.

Tylan felt triumphant. She looked up at her former lover, partner, fellow traitor… master if she were perfectly honest with herself. "Yes, you arrogant ass, I like Commander Gordon. I have for years. I never cheated on you unless you gave me orders to that effect. I've never had my way with Eddie, but I want to. I love this man, and you can't take him from me."

M'rath blinked in surprise. "It's refreshing to hear our language again," he admitted thoughtfully.

Tylan hadn't noticed she'd been speaking it. "I didn't speak it for your sake," she snapped.

"I wish I had a lover to flaunt in your face, Tylan," M'rath shot back in Romulan.

"I feel sorry for the fool who falls for your pretensions," Tylan said reverting to her dispassionate voice again. "Were I a male, you'd still be satisfied with me."

M'rath rolled his eyes. "I tried, Tylan," he said sounding more exasperated than hurt. "That's not your fault."

Tylan felt her jaw drop open in shock. "Was that an apology?" In all their forty-four years together M'rath had never apologized for anything. Instead he had abused her mentally and verbally. She wasn't sure if what passed for intimacy between them constituted sexual abuse or not. She had no frame of reference other than she imagined something more like the feeling she gained from stealing kisses from Eddie. It was safe to say it was emotional trauma from multiple means of communication.

M'rath's expression turned petulant. "It's the last one you'll have from me."

"It's not accepted!" she hissed.

"Too bad," M'rath said returning to his gloating demeanor. "Besides, Eddie isn't going to be yours anyway."

Tylan laughed. "I'll clue you in on something, M'rath. Eddie can't stand you. He thinks you're trying to stir up trouble with his people all the time. He thinks you're judgmental and condescending. I might hasten to add he's heterosexual to the bone. I should know."

"Prying into his mind, Tylan?" M'rath asked idly.

"You've turned me into a thorough agent," Tylan admitted. "I also couldn't bear another denial in my bed. So yes, I've pried into Eddie's mind a little."

"Finding it easier with your emotions uncaged?" he asked with genuine interest. He didn't have telepathic ability. He made up for it by shrewd observation and deft intellect. Arguably he didn't need telepathy to know everything she could gather about someone.

"As a matter of fact, yes," she admitted. "I can even tell why you're…" she trailed off as she gathered M'rath's thoughts. "…here," she finished with a hollow voice.

A moment before she was confident and proud. She was on her own, she was in love, and her life was building into something wonderful. A moment before she had expected M'rath to simply be here to tear her down again. She thought she had armor against anything he could throw at her because M'rath no longer mattered to her. Instead her world came crashing down.

"No," her voice was that of a child. "No!" she said again trying to deny the truth in M'rath's mind. She bolted for the door, but M'rath stopped her.

"It wasn't anything I did, Tylan," he said smugly. "Your boy just got himself killed rather than be with you."

She pushed past him, and ran in a panic to sickbay. She skidded to a halt before the closed door. "Eddie!" she panted breathlessly.

"I'm afraid the prognosis is in doubt, Lieutenant," Pi informed her. "Dr. Fahdlan has been working with his entire staff for six hours without letup. Commander Gordon is under the best care."

"Eddie," Tylan panted twice more before breaking down into hopeless sobs. She crumpled to the deck and reached out with her mind trying to find him. She found him almost instantly although what she sensed was nothing like the man she knew. Pain, terror, confusion, and despair filled a very small space of what she knew Edmund Gordon's soul occupied. "Darling!" she whispered. "My darling, Eddie, don't die!"

The door to sickbay opened. A nurse in a blood-spattered apron seized Tylan and dragged her inside.

Fahdlan glanced over his shoulder. "Allah be praised!" he said dully. "He's been calling for you these last ten minutes."

Dazed, Tylan could only blurt, "What?" She looked past Fahdlan and saw a naked mound of what she could only describe to herself as ground meat. "Eddie!" she screamed in horror.

The mound stirred. A groan of pure agony came from Eddie's still ruined throat.

"Can you soothe him?" Fahdlan asked. "He keeps breaking through sedation."

Tylan looked into the mind of the man she loved. I'm here, she told him. I'm here, my darling.

Wordless agony filled his mind.

Come to me, she pleaded. Look for me. Look only for me.

Almost instantly she felt the pain holding his mind down break off. The confusion was still there, but she noticed Eddie's mind working better almost at once.

"Keep talking to him," Fahdlan said.

Tylan did. You've had an accident, Eddie, she explained. We're trying to save you.

The confusion in his mind abated. The terror and despair dropped away almost instantly. "Stay," Eddie said clearly. It was all he could bring himself to say. His mind couldn't bring enough concentration to bear in order to say more.

I'm here. I'm here, Eddie, she told him.

"What the hell does 'korri, korri' mean?" one of the nurses asked her. Again she'd begun speaking in Romulan without thinking.

"Focus!" Fahdlan snapped. "Lieutenant, stay right there. I don't know if we can save this man, but you improve our chances."

The ship rocked again. Red Alert sounded. Reflexively Tylan moved to go to her duty station. One of Fahdlan's bloody hands grabbed her arm. "Stay right here," he snapped and plopped her down at his desk. "We're going to save Gordon, and that is your first duty to this ship. Understood?"

Tylan nodded.

Cove 3

He reached the summit before sunrise. It had been a difficult climb. Despite the lack of snow, the cold on this mountain was as chilling as any other. The thin air had him panting, and the climb up the slopes of this monster peak had challenged him like no other. It must have been a magnificent site when the place had water. The view below showed this 9000 meter peak's flanks had marched all the way down to the shore of an ocean shore. He'd found the dried remains of trees, plants, and the bones of animals lower down. He found gashes in the sides of the rocks that could only have been made by glaciers.

"Water made this place precious," he panted surveying the views all around him. "Where did they send it?"

The question had gained a hold in his mind the more he had a chance to see and lament the lost beauty of this dried world. To be certain it had a stark charm as it was, but dust and sand was not life. He found himself admiring the defenders of this world. The decision to plunder the water was the most ruthless act he'd ever imagined. Seeing it up close only confirmed it.To go to all the trouble, only to have those plans slip through their fingers must have been… He couldn't imagine what that must have been like. Heartshock had never planned for salvation. Having hopes like that dashed was beyond his reckoning.

Perched on this peak, he wanted to understand the races that had defended this place. He wanted to grasp what desperation had driven them to abandon it. Surely it had not solely been the Hirogen. The stories he'd been told didn't speak of a collapse. The Hirogen had simply seen the system dry up and a mass exodus. Stragglers had been picked off to much satisfaction, and those were the majority of the stories told of this place. Had his people been so blind to the real drama that had occurred here?

"Drama?" he laughed breathlessly. He'd been reading too many plays recently. He'd rarely used the word except to describe relationships with females.

He paused in his thoughts. It had been a very long time since he'd been with a female. He had a longstanding relationship with a female that he imagined he cared for even now. Would Sharizk understand his heart now? Would she understand he had to hunt for Voyager? Would she understand he had to turn his back on his race to do it? He could always get on the Net and explain himself, but she was firmly in the wrong direction to bring along. It would take months of travel to reach her unless he somehow got Pioneer into a hyperlink station.

He stopped there. He'd never considered it before. The Hirogen Net was primarily a system of sensor and communication nodes scattered around the Great Barrier. That same net also contained a few strategically placed hyperlink stations. They were centers of Hirogen culture and trade, and instant travel between them was possible thanks to technology purchased from Iconian traders that helped establish the Hirogen Net back in antiquity. Back in the days of Hirogen expansion. Back when Hirogen could slake their passions in exploration and conquest rather than the current age of the hunt and decline. He'd never bothered to ask where all the hyperlinks were. Could one be near Voyager? Could one be near the Earth Koon spoke so reverently of? There were thousands he knew of. How many had fallen to disuse? Now that he thought of it Sharizk lived in the shadow of one of these hyperlink stations.

There was a problem though: Pioneer would never reach any of those stations before being mauled by swarms of Hirogen ships. There were precious few species that could peaceably travel to and from Hirogen worlds. Heartshock could count them on the fingers of one hand: Chunn, Pfing, Neirir, and Romulan. Pioneer could not pretend to belong to any of these races. The Chunn and Pfing were currently at war inside the Great Barrier, the Neirir were in headlong flight from the Borg, and the Romulan Empire was currently blockading Hirogen space as it met the Borg threat. In addition, only the Chunn would be allowed access to a hyperlink station. Regardless of Koon's resolve, Heartshock knew there was a vanishing chance he could get Pioneer to a hyperlink station once. More attempts were out of the question. It would be safer to visit Borg Prime since the Borg were notoriously aloof anyway. It might be a better bet to let Voyager get to a hyperlink station and aid their escape from the target system. There might be an abandoned station in Borg space Voyager could use.

The Borg.

The more Heartshock thought about them, the more they became a problem. As a race, Hirogen distained the Borg. The Borg, in turn seemed preoccupied with other things. What were they doing out there? Hirogen knew plenty about expansionist empire building from their past, but the Borg were simplistic by comparison. Why did these passionless brutes care? Was it anything to them that they expanded or contracted? They grew and reproduced, albeit Heartshock was disgusted by the notion of Borg drones copulating. Yet their children were produced to uphold the Hive instead of any real hopes and dreams for them. Why did they need more? Furthermore, why did they aggressively need more? What had offended them? What could have changed the Borg Queen into the threat she was?

No matter.

The Borg were an obstacle that would not budge. The Romulans were holding their border against them, but at a shocking cost in lives and ships. The Neirir had fought and lost their encounter with the Borg, and now they were reduced to desultory fragments scattered through Hirogen space. Their worlds were overrun. Their once thriving culture wiped out. Voyager would stumble across their territory should they survive long enough. Might even be a hyperlink station abandoned back there, but the Neirir had smashed the technology in an effort to keep the Borg contained. Since no Borg cubes or spheres had popped up in any other hyperlink station, Heartshock suspected the Neirir had been wholly successful in doing so. The Borg were not known for hesitating at any opportunity, so a somewhat static border with the Borg could be drawn on a chart. For that reason, Heartshock knew Voyager was firmly on the far side of Borg territory. A narrow corridor of space existed between Borg space and the Great Barrier and that would leave precious few chances to maneuver without stumbling upon cubes, spheres, and drones in their millions.

Then it dawned on him: the Great Barrier. The space beyond the Great Barrier was Borg free. Pioneer could even trim vast quantities of relative time to reach Voyager thanks to the proximity of Sagittarius A. Had he not stumbled upon Pioneer trying to breach the Great Barrier in the first place? True enough, the Chunn and Pfing were fighting frantically on the other side, but they would not care to include Pioneer in their quarrel. The Pfing were easily insulted, but Koon struck Heartshock as more than a little diplomatic in his abilities. The Chunn would most likely escort Pioneer through their space just to be sure this alien ship didn't cause trouble. It would make the journey to Voyager shorter by decades, and keep the focus of Pioneer's journey on the hunt for Voyager rather than crossing the endless empty space between the two ships.

Heartshock felt elated. He had a plan, he had a path, and he knew he could bring Koon around to his line of thought. The hunt of Heartshock's life was at hand! Quite naturally he was eager to begin.

He tapped the com badge he'd been given. "Heartshock to Koon," he called out. "I've decided to join your hunt."

There was a long pause. Long enough for Heartshock to wonder if he'd been abandoned out here. Would Koon have done so? Unlikely. Why go to all the trouble when they could have killed him?

"That's good news," Koon's voice announced suddenly. "I'll arrange transport back to the ship."

Heartshock's Hirogen senses keyed to Koon's voice. The man was upset. "Are you alright, Captain?" he asked.

"There's been an accident," Koon admitted. "My Chief Engineer is in critical condition at the moment."

Heartshock recalled the Commander, but not his name. He also recalled the paternalistic attachment Koon had for the man, and the engineer's acceptance of that role. Even in Hirogen society, the relationship would be touching. From his brief encounters with the engineer, Heartshock understood the man to be an orphan. There was no denying the holes in the man's spirit that suddenly lit up when he was performing for Koon. This could cause a delay, but Heartshock understood Koon would keep going even if the death of this adopted son left him grieving. It would be best for the man to live regardless. "I understand, Captain," Heartshock said. "I'll be waiting here. No rush."

Much to his surprise a shuttle appeared on the horizon. In a few moments it stopped, pirouetted barely a meter from him, and dropped the rear hatch. A crewman inside extended a hand to bring him aboard. "We were nearby," the man explained. "We heard your message and…"

The man, shuttle, and everyone aboard it vanished in an all too familiar flash of purple energy. The steady hum of the shuttle's engines howled into a scream as the thrusters struggled to regain their equilibrium. It was a pointless task. The top half of the shuttle was sheared off leaving a burning, spinning bottom half cartwheeling barely an arm's length from Heartshock. What was left of the nose veered into the sky, then continued its arc directly for where the Hirogen stood.

Heartshock darted down the mountain instantly. The nose of the shuttle missed him by a handbreadth, while the tail pitched over after it trying to roll over the powerful alien. Another purple flash sheared the tail off the shuttle, but the nose continued to roll after Heartshock. He was rapidly running out of space to escape the ruined craft before he had to contend with a precipitous drop that could kill him. He saw a spot of good footing, managed to plant his feet, and spun to meet the reduced mass of the craft. It lurched and burned twice more after him. With one mighty shove, he managed to deflect the shuttle's nose directly away from him. It continued to roll down the mountain leaving Heartshock panting in the thin air. In his mad dash for safety, he'd sacrificed 100 vertical meters from the summit. He judged he'd run at least twice that horizontally.

There was no mistaking it. Even before the transporter beam confirmed who had destroyed the shuttle, he knew what those purple flashes were. The Hirogen were here.

HPS Ivin

It took Pak a moment to confirm what he saw. Chieftain Heartshock was covered in dust and panting like a canine after a long run. "You look a little worse for wear, Heartshock. I wasn't aware they would abuse you so."

Heartshock was quick to regain his equilibrium mentally even if his body was slower to follow. "Pak," he greeted his fellow, if junior, Chieftain. "You almost killed me with those shots."

Pak's eyes glittered with a disturbing glee. "We couldn't allow you in that ship. Recovering you would have been exponentially more difficult. Besides, those two shots were quite remarkable, don't you think? At this distance, my gunner is to be commended."

Hirogen are students of behavior. All the better to hunt you with, to paraphrase a story Heartshock had read aboard Pioneer called Little Red Riding Hood. Yet some of the practical benefits were a keen insight into normal behavior. Pak was not behaving normally. Pak had run mad. Pak also had a disruptor at his side and seemed anxious to use it. "Exquisite shooting," Heartshock agreed carefully trying to avoid any telltale behavior that might send Pak into a rage. What was happening to his people?

Pak smiled. "I have Cabrillo. The one called Spaulding died a few minutes ago."

Heartshock for the first time in his life cursed his memory for names. He knew both names, but had no memory of who they were other than they were part of Pioneer's crew. "I don't know their names that well," he admitted. Sticking to the solid if evasive truth seemed the best way to prolong his chances. Pak was a rival who could stake a claim on his clan should he kill Heartshock in justified combat. That by itself would have made him wary, but Pak's unhinged mind was alarming.

"We found Pioneer in that moon," Pak said cheerfully. "Eight hundred prey scattered about the system for us, but mostly in one little cave burrowed in a lifeless rock."

"You have a plan, Pak?" he asked taking in the two other Hirogen flanking his rival. They looked as uneasy as he felt.

"Dangle Cabrillo in front of them, and make them give up," Pak said. "These are sentimental creatures."

"Yes they are," Heartshock agreed. "It might be presumptuous to think they will give up everyone for the sake of this one though."

"Then we will kill them anyway," Pak snapped. He turned on his heel and marched from the transporter room. Heartshock followed at a respectful distance.

When they reached the bridge, he was shocked by what he saw. A mangled man lay in a heap next to Pak's command chair. David Cabrillo was barely recognizable even if Heartshock had a faint memory of him. The astronomer wasn't it?

"You soil your command deck with that?" Heartshock demanded in disbelief. He suddenly felt the deepest shame for his race. Hirogen honored life. This perversion made his gray skin crawl.

Pak ignored him. "Fire on the cave," he commanded.

On the hologram, a number of shots showered down on Atoll. The gunner was careful to avoid collapsing the cave entrance.

"Hail them," Pak commanded.

A heartbeat later, the hologram changed. "This is Captain Peyter Koon of the starship Pioneer. You've fired upon us without warning and killed members of my crew. Either explain yourself or consider this an act of war."

"I am Chieftain Pak of the hunting vessel Ivin. I doubt I need to concern myself with war, Captain," Pak chuckled. "You're alone out here. Furthermore, I have your Lieutenant Cabrillo here." He motioned at dying pile of flesh that was the young man. "I think you'll listen to what I have to say."

Koon's expression turned hard. "I don't respond to threats well, Pak," Koon said evenly.

"You'll respond how I tell you, or Cabrillo dies," Pak snapped. "Surrender your ship and beam everyone to the surface of the planet."

USS Pioneer

Koon's expression turned blank. He nodded twice to himself before turning to Lieutenant Locke. "Carrie," he said quietly, "kill them."

"What?" Lieutenant Kree gasped from her station.

"Kill them," Koon repeated.

"But Cabrillo," Locke protested.

"You're relieved," Koon said flatly. "Lieutenant Forte take over the weapons station, and kill them."

The ship rocked as another shower of shots rained down on the cave. "I think you're trapped down there, Captain," Pak taunted.

"Shut that off," Koon growled to Lieutenant Shin. Pak vanished.

Forte took over Locke's station. "Weapons ready, sir," he said sounding uneasy.

Koon made an impatient gesture. "Kill them," he repeated. He sounded like a reasonable man exasperated by a simpleton.

Forte obeyed. The phasers poised at the mouth of the cave lanced out and struck the Ivin a blow that knocked her back on her heels.

"I see the new power grid is working as advertised," Koon mused idly. "Keep firing."

"We're being hailed, Captain," Shin almost shouted.

"One more shot should do," Koon said. "Fire."

The Ivin managed to sidestep the shot before swinging out of the phaser's range of fire.

"On screen," Koon commanded.

An irate Pak reappeared. "I'll have your skull for that!" He snarled.

"Let me make this clear, Pak," Koon explained calmly. "YOU are not allowed to decide the fate of my crew. Not now. Not ever. If Lieutenant Cabrillo is to die, that's my decision. You can't have the rest of them."

"Captain?" Kree sounded uncertain.

"Helm, get us out of here," Koon commanded.

"Very well," Pak said and stabbed Cabrillo in the chest.

"DAVID!" Kree screamed.

A familiar figure darted into the image. Heartshock's mighty hands grasped Pak's head and twisted viciously. With a loud snap and a thud, Chieftain Pak died. "Captain, beam this man aboard before he dies," Heartshock commanded before taking the com badge off his tunic and attaching it to Cabrillo's.

For a heartbeat Koon said nothing. "Adam," he said quietly.

Speer dropped the shields protecting Pioneer and beamed Cabrillo off the Ivin.

"He went mad, Captain," Heartshock explained.

"Should I give you a few moments with your people, Heartshock?" Koon asked.

"That would be useful, Captain. I have…" He trailed off. "What is that?"

USS Diocletian

"Very well," Captain Semmes growled. It looked like she couldn't trust the Hirogen to take care of Pioneer after all. "Fire on the Hirogen ship. Fire on Pioneer."

There were only two weapons the Diocletian could fire while cloaked. She could lay mines which would be of little use here, and she could fire Romulan copied plasma torpedoes which were slow. No matter. They were powerful, and she had her targets completely off guard.

The torpedoes shot towards their targets. The Hirogen ship danced nimbly away from the torpedoes, but Pioneer remained locked inside her cave, and the opening caved in.

"Get the Hirogen craft before it gets away," she ordered. "Are there any shuttles in the vicinity?"

"All but six," Bo Lien confirmed. "They're scattered about the system though.

"Get as many as you can. We'll clean up later," she said. "Drop the cloak. Give them everything."

USS Diocletian emerged majestically from nowhere. She hesitated as if she were allowing her audience to admire her before she began showering Atoll with torpedo and phaser fire.

The Ivin danced away from the onslaught. Shuttles rushed in to defend Pioneer, but the Ivin strangely picked them up in tractor beams and dragged them along after her. Before she could jump to warp, one of the quantum torpedoes detonated outside Cove 3's Van Allen belts. The charged gasses erupted into a cascading explosion that rapidly overtook the craft. Pressure waves built and reflected back down on Atoll reducing it to smashed rocks showering down on the planet below.

"Sir, the pressure wave is heading this way," Lieutenant Green announced.

"Take us to warp. We're finished here," she said as she watched Atoll grind itself to flinders.

The mighty ship whip-cracked into warp and left the star system alone to fly apart on its own.

HPS Ivin

The pressure wave from the expanding explosion was very close to the Flare that had caused so much trouble for Pioneer to begin with. Only in this case, the region it inhabited was much smaller and could expand only at the speed of light rather than being accelerated by subspace. Jumping to warp dragging eight shuttles put a strain on the Ivin, but it helped shroud her escape. There was no way the Diocletian could tell if she had been destroyed in the wave without circling around and searching the expanding explosion for debris.

"Take us to the outer halo of the system," Heartshock ordered.

The Hirogen crew obeyed, but Heartshock wasn't sure if they did so simply out of self-preservation, or he had really gained command of this ship. He'd find out shortly.

The heliopause of any star system is a magical place. It's one of the few places where the physics are fully understood, but don't make much sense. Hirogen had been taking advantage of this hinterland to foil detection for millennia. While it was well known they did so, nobody had yet to solve the sensor errors this strange place caused. That is, except other Hirogen. Once the Ivin dropped out of warp, she was undetectable in the reflected solar wind coming from Sanctuary's star, and the Galactic wind bouncing off the heliopause. It allowed Heartshock to take stock of his situation.

"Chieftain?" the helmsman asked nervously. "Do you claim the right of Primary Clan over this vessel?"

"Yes," he replied.

The Chief Tracker stepped forward. "On what grounds?"

"Pak had gone mad," Heartshock explained. "What happened here was an obscenity."

To his relief, they agreed. Indeed they were reassured to have Pak gone. Beating Cabrillo half to death and killing Spaulding had left all of them severely shaken. It was not the Hirogen way to torture. What had driven Pak over into madness they could not say, but they were superstitious enough to link it with his obsession with Pioneer.

"We need to contact Chieftain Gnan and explain what happened," the Chief Tracker announced.

Heartshock shook his head. "Not until we are assured that other ship is gone. Did we get any good images of it?"

The Chief Tracker bent to his workstation.

"What are we going to do with these smaller craft?" the helmsman asked.

"Bring them aboard," Heartshock ordered. "I'll need to greet them personally. These people are not to be harmed. They are our guests."

They looked surprised, but nobody objected. Pak's two guards volunteered to join him in the hangar.

When they arrived, the first thing Heartshock noticed was how little space was left aboard the Ivin. Pioneer was built for shorter species, but she was also built to hold 800 to 1000 crew in comfort. The Ivin was built for a maximum of 60. Her hangar barely fit all the shuttles. To Heartshock's relief a familiar face stepped out of the first shuttle and surveyed the Hirogen skeptically.

"Heartshock?" Lieutenant Commander Willi Hurst asked dubiously.

"Commander," Heartshock greeted the man with a warm embrace. The tiny alien was all but swallowed up in the Hirogen's bulk. "We have work to do. Are there any injured here?"

There were. Fortunately they were not half as bad as Cabrillo had been. Vulo spent an hour treating burns and scrapes, but his more serious treatments remained on the shelf.

"We have to find Pioneer, Commander," Heartshock continued.

"She could have been destroyed," Willie said sounding dazed.

"I'm not so sure," the Chief Tracker said as he entered the hangar. "Her warp core should have exploded by now."

"Then where is she?" Hurst asked.

"Back in the pressure wave somewhere," Heartshock surmised. "We will have to wait a few days before we can go back there."

Willi cast a dubious glance about the Ivin. "Are we safe here, Chieftain?"

"I am committed to your hunt, Commander," Heartshock said. "With or without Pioneer, we are honor bound to find Voyager."

USS Diocletian

"All of them?" Ward asked.

"That's correct, Admiral," Semmes said.

"Excellent, return to station. This sideshow has cost us far too much time," Ward's face vanished from the main viewer.

It all felt like an anticlimax to Angela. All those years trying to trip Pioneer up into destruction, only to solve the issue with a few torpedoes. They might have done that five years ago.

Still, the mission ahead was more to her liking anyway. A return to the Alfa quadrant to face the Dominion was a stand-up fight. She might even get promoted to Rear Admiral should things go well. The trip home would take four months at transwarp. The only thing left was to endure the boredom.

USS Pioneer

It was the gold that saved them.

Commander Okuma and her survey team had chosen Eldorado cave based on a short list: it was of sufficient size and proportions to easily modify into a spacedock (which was rare enough by itself,) it was a convenient distance from the local sun so the work could be done without the more extreme gear needed on the outer planets, it had a convenient amount of gravity to work in, and it was hidden in every way from sensors. They might have replicated a lead shell for the cavern, to block emissions and shield the sweeps of sensors, but the gold did that easily enough. That they had stumbled upon it at all was pure chance. They had been looking for water, and the only trace of it was on Atoll in the form of a light snow near the top of the canyon, and a two meter thick glacier of the stuff at the bottom. So far as anyone could tell, that was the limit of Cove's water supply. And then they found Eldorado cave.

Nobody had made plans to protect Pioneer from an ignition of the static gasses throughout the system. Instead Okuma and her people had done everything they could to insure they would avoid that sort of accident. Nobody had any intention of deliberately setting the system off. So long as they could work in relative safety in Eldorado, Okuma, Koon, and everyone else was content to tread carefully around the system. They had little choice otherwise.

Had they stayed a while longer, someone might have asked an obvious question: why was the only water in the entire solar system on Atoll? Had they dug a little deeper they might have stumbled across the next obvious question: how was it a cave of solid gold conveniently above the only water in the system? They would never know even after those question surfaced much, much later.

What they did find out was just how fortunate they had been in finding Eldorado cave.

When the shockwave hit Atoll, the tiny moon wasn't shattered, it was squeezed. Tremendous heat melted the outer rock through simple radiant energy, and a somewhat lesser, molten heat was generated throughout the core of the rock through friction. Kinetic force slammed into the outer bounds of the cavern milliseconds after the gold began to melt from the friction heat. The cave didn't collapse so much as it snapped shut like a giant set of jaws on Pioneer. Yet once that force met the fibercore hull, the heat reflected off the surface and caused the gold to flow over the surface of the ship rather than pierce it. By the time the real force of the shockwave hit the cave, Pioneer was encased in a ten-meter thick egg of solidifying gold. So when the shockwave hit, it blew the harder rocks into powder while the gold flowed over the fibercore hull.

Inside the hull gave a mighty groan. The pressure it was enduring was tremendous, but thanks to the fluid state of the gold, it was even. There was only one problem point: the hangar doors. Starfleet regulation had made them flat for decades, and Eddie had simply recycled the old ones. The rectangular doors offered focus points for the force from outside to travel to, and gold breached its way into the hangar in a deadly spray. The one bit of luck in what could have been a bloodbath was the entire hangar crew was on the various shuttles about the system. The gold fountained into the hangar, cooled and solidified in the atmosphere. The hangar doors buckled and broke, but by the time they did, the vast energies outside had abated. A huge, golden foot of gold kicked in the hangar doors, flowed inside a meter or two, and solidified.

A crackling sound like hail on a tin roof skittered through the ship as the inner part of the golden egg cooled against the fibercore.

Then there was quiet.

Koon was surprised. "That's all?" he asked rhetorically. There had been no sparks flying, panels dropping out of the bulkheads, or lights dimming. The only serious thing was the main viewer had gone blank.

As if in response to his question, Pioneer groaned. It was quiet at first, but it grew to a near deafening roar in short order. Eddie would have been able to explain it, but he was still being worked on in sickbay. It was Pioneer's new fibercore hull. Just as Spaulding had promised, the fibercore was self-correcting back into its original shape. The hull and the spun structural members under it were distorted and returning the kinetic energy back into the egg.

Koon and his people felt something very unusual happen. It was as if the ship were trying to squeeze out of a tight space. In this case an egg. The new fibercore casing for the warp core began to draw energy off the core and channeled it to the outer hull. This had not been designed or even predicted, but the ancient artisans who had developed the techniques for making metals into proteins could have warned them this would happen. The decks began to heat up as energy flowed to the hull. Not badly, the amount of heat needed per square centimeter to melt the gold was negligible, but the entire ship became sweltering in no time. Pioneer popped and shook, like a woman putting on a tight gown. In a few minutes, the decks cooled, the hull returned to her intended geometry, and all was quiet again. There was one more deafening BANG as the stream of gold that had flowed into the hangar broke off outside the ship.

"Sensors?" Koon asked.

"We're completely blind, sir," Speer admitted. "Just a solid picture of gold out there."

"We need to clear it off. There's no telling what's happening out there,"

"Aye, Captain."

Peyter Koon wished he could turn to Eddie, but that was out of the question. He also wished he could turn to Garret, but he was dead. The next one down the list was Chief Neil Jung, but he was on a shuttle somewhere. After that seniority dispersed to a dozen different engineers, and he needed to speak with them. "Damage report," he demanded.

The list was shockingly small. A few burns. A few items popped out of bulkheads, and the main hangar doors wrecked. No hull breaches, no systems offline, no more serious casualties for Fahdlan. "I'll meet the engineering teams down in the main hangar."

He had the entire staff of engineers waiting for him once he arrived. "I'll make this simple," he announced. "Get us out of this as fast as you can. We're blind and adrift. Fix it. Use all the help you need. Where do we start?"

As of one mind, the assembled engineers turned their heads to the hangar doors. Tons of gold had flowed into the hangar and plugged the hole. "It's as good as any place to start," Emily Blackburn suggested.

Another engineer tried the nearby hangar controls. "We're good here," he announced. Without further fuss, he snapped on the containment fields and used them to push the gold out. "Like scooping ice cream," he admitted. He tried to jettison the whole mess out the compartment, but the gold outside was barely a meter from the hull.

"Let's get to melting this stuff off," Chief Mixaz announced. "Captain, we'll give you word before long to activate the impulse engines."

They were in a hurry. They might have mellowed a bit had they known what the golden egg was protecting them from.

While Pioneer lay cocooned above Cove 3, the planet itself was being tortured. The shockwave had knocked Atoll completely apart, and the leading edge of the debris was burning though the atmosphere. The energy from the shockwave itself met the Van Allen belts and lit up the planet's magnetic field like a magnesium flare. The polar auroras bloomed, reached up from the atmosphere and down to the surface, then raced for the equator. It was as if the entire planet had been turned into sheet lightning. The surface was instantly razed as the crust absorbed a fantastic amount of energy. The mountain Heartshock had stood on bare moments before was melted into a canyon as its mass crashed to the dried seabed below. The sands turned to glass, then to vast fields of rubies and emeralds. Veins of metal liquefied and spewed onto the surface. The part of the planet facing the shockwave heaved up and cracked exposing the mantle below.

And it was here that Cove 3 and her sisters decided to push back at the onslaught. Rather than crack and break apart, the mantle flowed much like the golden egg. The energy liquefied the crust, but the planet consumed the energy of the shockwave. As the wave passed, the Van Allen belts began to draw on the resulting chemical vapor left over from the explosion. This was possible only because the solar wind had been locally, and momentarily neutralized. Water by the ton raced towards the parched and burning planet. For the first time in 5000 years, Cove 3 (or Sanctuary as her people had called her) it rained. It would rain on Cove 3 and her sister planets for the next nine years.

The cities below were first melted, then drowned. The history of the fraternal species that had stood against the Hirogen so long ago, vanished in a day. It was the same on Cove 2, 4, 5, and the moons of Cove 7 and 9. It would take fully two years before the exploding gasses were consumed. The occasional storm would stir for the rest of the star's life. In thirty years though, life would grow again on these worlds.

Had USS Diocletian stayed a while, they might have observed a spectacle on a scale they had never dreamed of. From a distance it was as if the central star grew, and grew as distinct from exploding. But Semmes was eager to leave this chapter of her career behind her. She wouldn't have cared to know she'd done a good thing. She would have been furious to know Pioneer was still alive.

HPS Ivin

Heartshock returned to the command deck. The crew were taking in the spectacle as it unfolded. They were reverently awed and stared like sculptures. He joined them. Hurst joined them as well but he was the chatty sort. "Mein Gott!" he gasped.

The sculptures stirred. They stared at the small alien for a heartbeat before turning their attention to Heartshock for guidance.

"Could they survive that?" Willie asked.

The Chief Tracker had been one of the crew who had tortured Cabrillo. Ulino stared at the little man and wondered if the new Chieftain would require as much for the newcomer. He earnestly hoped not. Killing the creature was fine, but he couldn't stand to violate life in such a way again. "What are we to do with him, Chieftain?" Ulino asked

Heartshock broke his reverie with a mild shake of his head. "I need to address the crew," he announced. "You will all need to agree with this."

Ulino turned on the intercom.

"This is Chieftain Heartshock of the Ar clan," he announced. "I have killed Chieftain Pak, and taken command of this vessel. Is there anyone who challenges this claim?"

There was a heartbeat before the deck thrummed with rhythmic, stomping feet. Then they all clapped and were silent. His command was secure.

"Hirogen," he began stirring what Willie knew to be he storytelling voice. "Our race is dying."

There were grumbles of disagreement and agreement, but no real outbursts.

"We are within the generation that will turn our kind against each other when nothing else is left to hunt."

There was a great gasp of horror. Nobody had thought that far ahead.

"Other races have turned to trade, and exploration to survive. BUT WE ARE HIROGEN!" He thumped his chest, and the crew returned the gesture. "We are hunters!" They thumped their chests in unison this time. "We are predators!" They thumped their chests again. "We revere life, my brothers and sisters. But we have lost our way. We have consumed more than our share out of pride. Our fathers and mothers have been doing this since before the defenders of this system abandoned it."

Puzzled expressions flitted about the room.

"I have the beginning of a new way for us, my brothers and sisters," he confided. He motioned to Willie. "This is a human man. I hunted him bare months ago. His people captured me, and brought me here. Their leader spared me even when I had the blood of his crew on my hands."

The Hirogen blinked in unison. They had never heard of anything so ruthless in their lives.

Heartshock's voice dropped to a conspiratorial mutter. "He spared me for a hunt, my fellow Hirogen."

The crew leaned forward hungrily.

"In the Delta quadrant is a ship. Buried behind frontiers we've never crossed, this ship is making its way home to the Alpha quadrant. Pioneer is looking for this lost ship in the vastness beyond. She is called Voyager. I've sworn myself to finding her."

There was a long silence. "What will our trophy be? Ulino asked.

"We will bring that ship home safe," Heartshock said. "Bring up a star chart of the Delta quadrant." The holographic image shifted instantly. Heartshock pointed at the approximate place Voyager was last known to be, then he pointed to their location. "They are far from us. This will be a hunt for a lifetime not just of a lifetime."

"Why?" Velo asked.

"Can you think of a greater challenge?" Heartshock asked reasonably.

As the complexities of the hunt began to dawn on them, nods began to circle the room.

"The first step of this hunt is to find Pioneer," Heartshock announced. "It should be childsplay."

The feet stomped the deck again before ending in another clap.

Heartshock's clan was in the hunt for Voyager.

Ulino grabbed Willie. "Tell me everything you can about Pioneer," he demanded.

Willie Hurst was not the sort to stand around and question his good fortune. He had the resources of this ship to find Pioneer and he intended to use them. He discussed what he could think of to start with, but he was more worried about the shockwave and where that might have tossed the ship. He started building a mathematical model of probable trajectories only to have Ulino laugh. "How quaint!" the large alien laughed. "Let me handle the hunting, little man. Give me data."

It was Hurst's first exposure to Hirogen sensor packages, and he was floored by what he saw. Heartshock had boasted about his kind's sensor prowess, but Heartshock bragged quite a bit. If anything what he was seeing was evidence of understatement. "Let's look for the gold," Ulino suggested. "That amount of gold would be unusual anywhere." In a few moments they had found a huge spray of gold tumbling in orbit around Cove 3. This was all the more impressive since they found it looking straight through the expanding shockwave.

"It's in there somewhere," Ulino declared.

"You sure are confident," Hurst countered.

"Those quaint little models you were making will agree with me, human," Ulino snapped offended. "You can even run them if you like, but it'll take hours to derive."

Hurst could only agree.

Reaching Cove 3 would require the Ivin to run completely around to the other side of the system, and backtrack from the direction of the sun. "Get us moving!" Heartshock commanded as soon as he heard the news.

The shockwave had dissipated directly in front of the sun. This trifling explosion was a threat to starships, but the star brushed it aside easily. It left a cone behind the star that they could warp into the system and return to Cove 3's orbit. In time that cone of ionized gasses would be consumed, but the reaction would have to travel around the star first. That would take days if not weeks.

It took seven hours to return to Cove 3. It was not a very safe place to be. Atoll was completely smashed, and the other, larger moon had lost a sizable percentage of its crust. A dangerous cloud of dust and boulders was settling around the planet. A steady rain of meteors stitched Cove 3's atmosphere. The planet below was a ball of ash. The gold they were looking for was in seventy large chunks that were deciding whether to orbit or crash into the planet.

"First eliminate the ones that are too small to contain your ship," Ulino mused. Forty of the rocks dropped off the scan. "Next we need one of some density with a single large portion of porosity." Twenty-nine of the rocks dropped from the scan. "And there she is," he declared.

It looked like a smear of gold paint or a bit of bark chipped off a tree. It was also taking a mighty beating as debris pelted the gold from every angle. "Good thing gold is non-reactive," Hurst mused.

"Quite," Heartshock agreed. "Could we burrow a path to it?"

"We'd burn out our deflector trying to do that," Ulino admitted. "We could get the smaller debris to clump together though. A few arachnid warheads would do the trick. We could fuse them for a net dispersal."

"Do it," Heartshock ordered.

"What's an arachnid warhead?" Willie asked, but it was too late. Three were already on the way.

He watched the three torpedoes bloom into purple clouds that flashed white-hot a moment later. Instantly all the little dust and rocks became significantly fewer big ones. He wasn't sure how they had done it, but a relatively clear path existed to the golden rock.

"Get your people in the shuttles and get in closer," Heartshock ordered. "We may need to crack them out of there soon."

USS Kendrick's Cutoff

"Any idea what we need to do to get her out of there?" Chief Ellison asked.

"Start carving them out of the gold would be my first option." He examined the gold for fault lines he might exploit to gently crack it open. "There," he said motioning at a vein of rock imbedded in the gold. "Heat that up quick and see if we can crack the gold apart."

It worked. A huge chunk of gold the size of a city block caved off the larger nugget. They repeated the process twice more before they saw the tip of a nacelle sticking out. "Pioneer, this is Commander Hurst, do you copy?"

There was no reply. They caved off a few more bits of gold until they had the port side of the ship exposed. The com crackled to life. "Willie?" Koon asked. "We've been digging out of this for hours. Be careful around the hangars."

"It's good to see you, Captain," Heartshock called in.

"It's gratifying to see you as well, Chieftain," Koon answered.

"Captain, we have another problem," Heartshock admitted. "There's a debris storm heading this way. Can Pioneer move under her own power?"

There was a pause. "We don't know yet," Koon confessed.

"You have only a few moments to figure that out, Captain," Heartshock explained. "I suggest we try to rotate the gold to face into the storm before trying to carve you out."

"We can do that," Hurst volunteered. He arrayed the shuttles and slowly dragged the rock around. The storm arrived a bare minute after they finished. Under the onslaught the golden egg started to rotate and fall into the planet's atmosphere.

USS Pioneer

It took only a moment to decide what to do. "Engineering, I need impulse engines online," Koon ordered.

"But the exhaust cones are still choked with gold," Forte protested.

"We will have to burn it out then," Koon said. "Engineering?"

"Impulse engines are up, Captain," Chief Mixaz called in.

"Ease into it, Darren," Koon ordered quietly.

Darren would have done so in any case. Impulse engines needed to be run in before they were really put in service. Pioneer's were completely unused. He was more worried about the gold reflecting the heat back up the impulse cones and burning them out instantly. The engines hummed to life, coughed out four tons of gold, and melted everything behind them. The ship was underway for the first time in three months.

"We're flying blind here, Willie," Koon warned.

They had slowed their decent, but they were in the atmosphere anyway.

"I have an idea, Captain," Willie said. "Keep powering up the engines."

"I can feel the tug of gravity on the ship, Commander. This is hardly the time," Koon warned.

"Reentry will melt the rest of the gold off," Willie explained. "Once you're rid of the mass, you can slid out from under it.

"Let's hope the ship can handle the heat," Koon mused. "Darren?"

"I've got it, sir."

Debris continued to pelt the golden egg. With Pioneer pushing it along, the egg started to skip across the atmosphere. With each bounce, more of the gold burned off the hull.

"Sensors are starting to come online," Speer announced.

"Altitude above the surface?" Koon demanded.

"500 kilometers," Darren reported. "Flight sensors online. Navigation is still down."

The egg was melting. Trouble was the hull was protesting fiercely. Eddie and Spaulding had made the fibercore from a base of advanced Inconel. They had debated about using duratanium, but decided against it. Inconel offered better heat resistance, and it was easier to spin into the proteins. It also made the hull immensely tough, but the current heat was starting to break down the temper of the metal. As such the fibercore was trying to purge the heat from itself. Again it drew energy from the core and sent it to the hull in an attempt to equalize the thermal signature. Pioneer suddenly shook like a horse with a burr in the saddle. The golden egg broke off her, and she shot over the surface of Cove 3. The shuttles could barely keep up.

"We're free, Captain," Darren announced.

"Navigation online," Pi added.

"Find a place where we can survey the ship," Koon ordered.

Pioneer skipped one more time across the atmosphere, and raced away.

HPS Ivin

"That's not the ship I recall," Heartshock admitted.

It certainly wasn't. The clamshell saucer section had been replaced with an elongated trigon. Her lines flowed more gracefully than her Nebula-class beginnings. Her squat center section had been replaced with an elegant neck that extended down to a main body that resembled the hull of a clipper ship. The mission mast was gone. Instead there was a small warp nacelle extending forward over the dorsal part of the saucer section. She still had her somewhat stubby main nacelles attached to the tail of the ship, but they were curved like sickles and extended gracefully behind her. The booms attaching them were fixe to the rear rather than balanced midway along their length. The main deflector dish was triangular and jutted like the bow of a ship under the main saucer. In an effort to gain the most internal volume possible, Eddie had designed her lines with extensive hull blending.

As he had explained it months before to Koon, these large design features all served a purpose. The longer shape improved handling and distributed the thrust along a smaller axis (hence the redesign of the saucer section.) The added nacelle was there for better control and acted more like a combination shock absorber and rudder. The elegant neck was there to better house the hurricane core since they no longer needed a vertical 10 decks to house the linear one. The main body was redesigned for better mass distribution. And the sickle-shaped warp nacelles would make handling at high warp even better than before while adding in a degree of efficiency that was only possible with the new 12-phase output.

Her new fibercore hull had a dull luster to it. Instead of the silver-white she was built with, her fibercore hull flowed like the fur of a puma in a striking gray-blue.

If Heartshock looked at it too long he could swear the hull flexed and bulged as if it were prowling along with powerful muscles under the skin. It was undeniably feline.

"Did you redesign this ship on your own, Captain?" Heartshock asked.

"We did," Koon answered. "What do you think of her?"

"I want one," Heartshock answered.

"Can you gather the shuttles, Heartshock?" Koon asked. "We're spooling up the warp drive, and I don't want to leave anyone behind.

Heartshock complied stuffing the hangar of the Ivin full to bursting again before closing the doors and inviting the Starfleet crew up to the command deck.

That done they watched, power up, and drop into warp. Unlike the usual whip-crack of before, she just vanished with a flash of her nacelles.

"Impressive," Heartshock admitted. The other Hirogen murmured agreement. They had never seen a ship transition into warp so smoothly. "Follow her," he commanded.

That took some doing. Pioneer had jumped straight to warp 6. "Didn't intend to do that," Forte admitted. "Still trying to slow her down." He failed to do so. The ship wanted to run and no amount of tinkering would reign her in.

"Heartshock, I have a need of you hunting skills just now," Koon announced.

"What are we looking for?" Heartshock asked.

Koon told him.