CLOSE ENCOUNTER
Doppelgänger Orbit
Stardate 2261.24
- 2021 hours -
The ship was already on Red Alert when the away team materialized in the transporter room. That was to be expected, considering the circumstances. What Kirk did not expect was the sudden lurch against the hull and the sound of power generators straining somewhere as the deflector screens struggled to repel some kind of attacking energy. The inertial dampeners quickly cancelled out the vibration, and the Captain leapt from the transport pad to the hatch, already sprinting on his way to the nearest turbolift.
He got as far as the transporter room door when the room suddenly filled with screams. He made out the voices of Rand and Dallas, plus the transporter chief whose name he could never remember. But there was a third scream in the room, an almost animal-like howl of greater power and intensity than any human could aspire to, and it was coming from the transport chamber.
For whatever Miri had been on the surface of Doppelgänger, the thing that beamed back to the Enterprise was far from human. Standing seven feet tall, a black charred apparition with compound eyes and a pair of spiny mandibles for hands, roaring madly with a mouth large enough to swallow a man whole. Miri's duty uniform and field jacket were stretched to the tearing point around the alien, and the phaser rifle she'd been carrying was lying at its feet. It wasn't moving, it wasn't lunging, it wasn't even cowering as a frightened animal might. It was simply standing there, looking at its own clawed hands, screaming.
Somehow, it was still Miriam Hallab... But transformed into something else. Kirk didn't understand how or why, but with a battle unfolding around him he had exactly zero time to investigate. "You're on, Bones!" he shouted, and without waiting for a reply, sprinted into the corridor towards the nearest turbolift for the bridge. Spock was right behind him as ever, cool as a glacier and solid as a rock; between Miri's transformation and the firefight on the surface, Kirk's entire body was shaking like an old cellular phone.
"Evasive action! All phasers continuous fire," said Lieutenant Sulu, six seconds later as the Captain emerged through the turbolift on the starboard side of the bridge. The ship lurched again as something struck the deflector screens, but Kirk kept his footing just long enough to drop into his command chair as Spock moved towards the science station. "The Gorn vessel has moved back out of phaser range, Sir," Sulu reported along the way, "Multiple torpedoes inbound on our position, impact in twenty seconds! We're moving at full impulse power to try and evade!"
"Tactical plot, Mister Chekov," Kirk ordered. And at a push of the navigator's fingers, a tactical display appeared on the starboard HUD, showing Enterprise's position in near orbit of Doppelgänger; four small blips indicated a spread of fast moving objects that were racing towards the Enterprise in a close formation, almost like fighter planes on an attack run. Beyond the translucent display, Kirk could see the sweep of the stars as the ship was completing a fast evasive turn away from the alien torpedoes, and felt the slight pull in the deck as the thrust of the impulse engines argued with the inertial dampeners. An indicator on the viewscreen gave the range and impact estimates for the torpedoes, at this point counting down the last eight seconds before they would hit the ship.
Four seconds from impact, the four torpedoes broke their formation and split out into a wide pincer formation, attacking from all directions at once. In the last instants before they could impact, Enterprise's phaser banks opened fire all at once, and three of the Gorn torpedoes vanished into tiny puffs of ionized gas. The last weapon slipped past the phaser barrage and dove towards the ship at meteoritic speeds until - tens of kilometers from the ship - it slammed into the outer layers of the Enterprise's deflector screens and detonated in an impressive fireball.
The deflectors absorbed the expanding force of the explosion as well, but through the engines and the plasma coils transferred that momentum into the ship. Enterprise lurched violently backwards, and the lights dimmed slightly as a high pitched whine sounded from the main engines, already racing to full power. Sulu shouted in surprise, "Shields held, but main engines just spiked! We can't take many more of those, Sir!"
Spock added, "Picking up four more torpedoes heading our way. Impact in thirty five seconds."
In their previous encounters the Gorn had used small attack fighters to bolster their offensives and converted those fighters into suicide bombs when the battle didn't go their way. These torpedoes seemed similar, but Kirk sensed he was looking at something new. "Analysis on alien weapons, Spock."
A display appeared on the long monitor above the science console, displaying the Gorn torpedoes silhouettes. Despite what Kirk expected, the alien torpedoes were actually ring-shaped projectiles with a cylindrical core that spun along their axis of motion like drill bits as they flew. They were relatively large, easily five meters across, but the core section wasn't much larger than a standard photon torpedo. "I read them as strategic anti-ship weapons, Captain," Spock said as he completed his analysis, "Relatively long range, possibly equipped with their own small warp cores. Warhead consists of an antimatter-pumped fusion device, comparable yield of approximately one hundred isotons."
"Could we outrun them at warp?"
"Almost certainly," Spock said, "But I cannot estimate their maximum effective range. They may be able to pursue us indefinitely."
Kirk considered and dreaded the implications. They could go to warp and move to a position far from the planet, but the Gorn might still be able to attack them even from that distance and their torpedoes would still continue to harass them from the other side of the solar system. Sooner or later they might wear down their defenses...
The next wave of Gorn torpedoes appeared on the tactical display, twenty seconds from impact and closing at high velocity. Sulu was burning the impulse engines at full overboost to make the intercept that much harder, but there was no getting away from them at sublight now.
"Where's the Gorn ship?" Kirk asked.
Chekov answered on a reflex, "They have moved to a higher orbit, range eight thousand kilometers. Bearing zero three one mark eight."
It wasn't exactly close quarters, then. "Arm photons one through six," Kirk ordered, "Set warheads for proximity blast."
Chekov released safeties from his console, which in turn kicked the order to the tactical officers at the ops station to the left and in front of him. The port HUD transformed itself into the Fire Control graphic, showing load status of the torpedoes and a sensor scope image of the Gorn vessel framed in the targeting scanners. Within a heartbeat the Ensign answered, "Torpedoes armed and ready! Targeting Gorn wessel..."
"Negative! Fix all weapons on the enemy's torpedoes, interception points at four thousand and two thousand kilometers. Wait for my command. Sulu, pitch us down ninety degrees at full impulse power and then cut your engines."
Sulu grunted acknowledgment and swung the bow ninety degrees straight down. Not that Enterprise actually began to travel in that direction - like the torpedoes, it was still hurtling around the planet below at thousands of meters per second - but the sudden move changed the ship's direction by such a huge degree that all five of the Gorn torpedoes had to stop and regroup to reconsider their programmed attack pattern.
And it was at that exact moment that Captain Kirk ordered, "Fire torpedoes!"
The entire bridge heard an audible tone from the weapons console warning the bridge crew of a torpedo launch, and then, all at once, six blue-white fireballs leapt out from under the saucer section and raced off into the distance like angry meteorites. Half a minute later, a ripple of blue-white fireballs danced among the stars, followed by several larger and brighter orange ones among them.
"All enemy torpedoes detonated, Captain," Spock announced, "The Gorn ship has changed course, now moving towards us at one-half impulse power..."
"Arm torpedoes seven through twelve, lock on and fire!"
"Guidance lock," Sulu reported, then "Firing!"
If the Enterprise was a baseball, the distance to the Francium ship would have spanned an olympic stadium; those six torpedoes covered that distance in about thirty seconds, homing on the energy signature of its sublight engines. Though naturally too far away to be seen with the naked eye, a magnified image now filled Enterprise's viewscreen showing the distant vessel maneuvering in space as a second wave of its super-torpedoes launched from slots along the hull, this time moving to intercept their Starfleet counterparts in space. Then a new wonder to behold: one of the torpedoes crackled in space, and in its place, another Francium now appeared. And again with another torpedo across from it, and two more below. In seconds, one Gorn ship with six torpedoes had become seven identical Franciums in a loose formation, moving towards the Enterprise. Kirk immediately saw that he couldn't tell which was the original and which were the duplicates; Spock saw that the torpedoes couldn't either.
Two photond dove at one of the new Franciums and passed right through it without detonating; the new ship flickered like a bad monitor image but suffered no damage at all. Two other torpedoes slipped into the middle of their targets and detonated; the phantom Franciums vanished without leaving so much as a scrap of debris behind. The last three closed in on the Francium at the very center of the new fleet, which suddenly began filling the sky with plasma bolts in a last-ditch effort to defend. Two of the photons were hit and destroyed before they could even detonate, but the sixth and final weapon slipped through and exploded against the Francium's starboard side. The Gorn ship lurched to port, tumbled for a moment out of control before it began to right itself, like a boxer shaking off a blow.
"Direct hit on enemy's starboard side," Spock reported, "Reading large-scale structural displacement, power fluctuations. We may have seriously damaged him."
Kirk didn't let himself feel relief yet. "Is he moving off?"
"Unknown. I am picking up a power buildup in their engineering section. They may be preparing to go to warp."
On the tactical plot, Kirk watched as the power field around the Gorn ship continued to grow in strength, then an indicator that showed that another small object - one of their spinning ring-shaped torpedoes - had been ejected from the ship. The torpedo didn't accelerate immediately, in fact for several seconds it floated lazily in space alongside the Francium as if waiting for a signal from its mother ship. "Sulu, give me visual," Kirk ordered, and a telescope image appeared on the viewscreen showing the Francium and the small torpedo alongside.
It hadn't been apparent on sensors, but in the viewscreen image they could see what looked like flashes of lightning between the torpedo and the Francium's hull, an indicator of enormous power being transferred from the latter. The torpedo was even beginning to spin faster as it absorbed more energy from Francium's power field, glowing fiercely as it gained energy. Then the electrical discharges ceased. The torpedo hung in space for a moment, and then snapped forward like a bullet fired from an invisible gun.
A microsecond later a brilliant explosion filled the viewscreen. Enterprise lurched so violently to backwards that most of the bridge crew was simply slammed to the deck as if they'd been slapped out of their chairs by a tidal wave. Ensign Chekov wound up on his back underneath his console, and Sulu's head bounced off his helm station and left a three-inch gash on his forehead with an audible, "Holy shit!"
Kirk struggled up to his hands and knees, shook the bells out of his ears and shouted over his shoulder, "Spock!"
The science officer was still climbing back to his console at this point, but through the audio pickup in his ear he could interpret the raw sensor data well enough to answer the implicit question, "They've transferred warp power to their weapons! That torpedo hit us at almost warp four!"
"Sulu, adjust your heading to-"
"Incoming fire!" Spock warned, and then a second shot struck the deflectors and slammed the Enterprise into a spin. This time most of the bridge officers were ready for it, but the suddenness of the impact still knocked half the crew out of their seats or slammed them against their consoles or the bulkheads next to them. It was like experiencing a train cash without a seatbelt; the inertial dampeners just couldn't keep up with that kind of sudden impact.
A small alarm sounded from the left side of the bridge, drawing the Captain's attention to one of the HUD displays that now showed a "Shield Status" graphic. It was a simple double-bar graph above a digram of the Enterprise with special emphasis on the warp nacelles, particularly in the deflector elements within them. The icon that represented the starboard nacelle was flashing red, and the twin bar lines that represented it - one for load and the other for output - were oscillating violently, as if someone were working over the sensors with a jackhammer. Kirk knew this pattern, of course, even before Scotty's voice thundered on the intercom, "Engineering to bridge! Warp engines just red-lined! Deflectors are cutting out!"
Four minutes, Kirk thought. They'd been fighting the Gorn for all of four minutes, not including the half a minute or more it had taken them to get to the bridge from the transporter room. For some reason, Kirk remembered Lieutenant Cartwright, another non-believer in No Win situations, his tactical operations instructor on their sophomore training cruise on the Farragut. Cartwright once told him that the average engagement between any two starships lasted between three and five minutes, while anything longer than that was usually a delaying tactic by the defeated party to evacuate its crew. Inexperienced commanders often had difficulty knowing whether or not victory was still achievable and committed themselves to battles they already lost; the smart commanders, Cartwright said, knew that that if they weren't close to achieving victory by the four minute mark, it was because they were loosing.
In this case, Kirk still had a few seconds left. And looking at the situation, he decided to settle for a draw. His deflectors still had a few seconds of life to them, therefore - by definition - so did his warp engines. "Arm remaining torpedoes! Transverse pattern, set for proximity blast!"
"Ready, Sir," Chekov reported.
"Lock on the Francium and fire! Sulu, bring us to absolute heading three oh one mark zero, warp one!"
"Turning, Captain. Warp power coming up... twelve seconds to space warp..." A withering salvo - twelve more photon torpedoes - leapt from the weapons bay and quickly formed themselves into an attack pattern, four groups of tree, spreading out in a wide pattern to converge on the Francium from four different directions. Beyond the rim of the saucer and the receding fireballs, Kirk saw the horizon of the planet below shifting and turning as Sulu maneuvered the ship, vectoring the impulse exhaust to throw the ship through space like a stunt fighter. Something bright and frightening flashed past the viewscreen, and Kirk realized with a flash of panic that the Gorn had fired another one of their warp-speed torpedoes, and that this last weapon had cut right through the deflectors only to miss the Enterprise by a few hundred maters.
After a few moments the ship stabilized its attitude and Sulu keyed up the ship's intercom, "All sections, standby for warp in six... five... four.. three.. two..."
Kirk saw the snap-streak of yet another torpedo zip past the ship, then the stars themselves exploded all around them. At that moment, the conspiracy of field coils and plasma dynamos that were the Warp Drive Engines created a distortion in space into which the Enterprise presently disappeared, like a raft going over the edge of a waterfall. Enterprise leapt forth - freed from the tyranny of Newton and even of Einstein - in an explosion of speed and power that registered on the Gorn monitors only as a massive gravitational disturbance. From there point of view, it was as if the Enterprise had simply disappeared; from Enterprise's point of view, the ship didn't move at all.
It would take a handful of seconds to surge out of Doppelgänger's orbit, less time than that to clear the Gorn's firing range. Once the drive engaged, Kirk silently counted to four, and then ordered, "All stop"
"All stop, Aye Sir," Sulu cut output from the warp engines, and almost at once their velocity dropped to nothing. Just as quickly as it had burst free, Enterprise came crashing back to the universe of mass and inertia, another floating object hurtling lazily and unpowered through space. Their new position was much higher in orbit than their original point, and it took a few moments of thrust from the impulse engines to give the Enterprise enough "real world" momentum to maintain a circular orbit without ultimately plummeting to the world below. "New position on viewer, Sir," Sulu reported, "We are one point four million kilometers from the Gorn vessel."
"Photon torpedoes have impacted, Captain," Spock reported from his sensor scope, "The Gorn vessel no longer register on our..." Spock looked up and slid his chair over to the library computer interface, "Fascinating!"
"We did we destroy their ship?"
"No, Sir. It has moved to a new position on the far side of the planet. A translocation of approximately twelve thousand kilometers."
Kirk raised a brow, "What'd they do, warp through the planet?"
"There is a transient spatial distortion present near Francium's previous position. It is similar to the transwarp vortex we encountered near New Vulcan last year, but of much smaller magnitude and far less stable. I believe this may be the Gorn equivalent of warp drive."
"Good to know..." Kirk nodded, "Compute a course for orbit of the planet's outermost moon. The Gorn won't follow us that far."
Spock looked up from his science console, "How did you come to that conclusion, Captain?"
"Their science officer said something about their command structure being divided into different mission commands. He tried to warn me that their orbit operations commander is a bit trigger happy, and that if we wanted to get anywhere we should talk to their navigation commander."
"I don't understand..."
Kirk turned his chair and rested his elbows on his knees, "In the old days of space exploration, NASA used to have what they called the Ring of Command. A crew of thirty would have six or seven senior astronauts, each with their own speciality. One would command the launch phase, one would command the ship during planet crossings, one would be responsible for the landing, another would lead the expedition on the ground, another would be responsible for the launch and docking, and so on. At each phase of the mission they completely rearranged their entire command structure, so that each person was an expert in one particular field and merely proficient in all the others. It's kind of like we do today with different ship departments, you know?"
"And you believe the Gorn follow a similar Ring-structure for command authority?"
Kirk shrugged, "It may not be, but it's something like it. It was explained to me that they don't have an ultimate commander for the ship, it depends on what the ship's doing at any given time."
"Your theory seems correct, Keptin," Chekov volunteered, "alien wessel has scanned us, but is not pursing."
"Did we damage their engines or are they just hanging back?"
Spock looked at his sensor scope for a moment, "It is uncertain if any of our torpedoes impacted, but I am picking up some unusual power fluctuations from the Francium. Either the power transfer to their torpedoes or the sudden translocation appears to have considerably taxed their engines."
Kirk nodded, "Same boat as us, then. They jumped to warp to escape our attack, same as we did."
"New orbit confirmed, Captain. ETA, one hour eighteen minutes to orbit of the outer moon," Sulu reported as a navigational graphic on the left side HUD showed their new orbit and a spiral course that turned into a ring five hundred kilometers over its surface.
"They won't follow us," Kirk repeated, "Navigation between planets would require a shift change. If their orbital commander wants a fight, he has to wait for me to come back into his jurisdiction. Besides, I think we've demonstrated that we're a pretty even match when it comes to combat."
"In the mean time," Spock said grimly, "We are effectively prevented from any further action on this planet until the Gorn leave the area."
"For the time being, yes. But we haven't run out of options yet." To this end, Kirk turned around and faced the communications station with a self-satisfied smirk, "Sulu, reload all torpedo bays and then have Mister Scott do a full workup on the deflector systems. Uhura, maintain standing yellow alert and assemble a damage report from all sections."
"Aye, Captain... and what about the Grazine, Sir? Should I tell them to abort the rendezvous?"
"Negative. As soon as they drop out of warp, arrange for new rendezvous coordinates in orbit of the-"
"Sickbay to bridge! Urgent!"
Kirk had almost forgotten about Miri. Remembering now filled him with a sense of dread even greater than the prospect of battle with the Gorn. Punching the intercom to sickbay, Kirk said, "Bones. How's the girl?"
"Sedated, Jim. She's in a state of shock. Understandable considering what's happening to her."
Kirk looked at the intercom as if someone had painted a clown face on it. "Yeah... what the hell is happening to her? Transporter malfunction?"
"I uh... Jim, honestly, I think you'd better get down here. Bring Spock too. You're gonna want to see this in person."