A/N: I know my version of Ty Lee may come off as OOC to some, but the woman who bared her soul in "The Beach" is just as much Ty as she is the rest of the time. Plus she's been through a lot in the last six months, as the chapter will make clear.
"Again the shadow moveth o'er
The dial-plate of time."
-John Greenleaf Whittier (December 17, 1807 – September 7, 1892)
American poet and abolitionist
Chapter Two
Captain Ty Lee watched the red-gold orb of the sun rising over the horizon as she stood at the top of Prince Sakomo's Tower, the imposing red and gold tower that stood at the heart of the Fire Nation Royal Palace. The young captain watched as the black and red airship slowed down as she made to moor to the tower where she was standing. The passenger airship, a luxury yacht for important persons like the person she was waiting to meet and her escorts, was covered at a watchful distance by the two armored black Naval airships. This was in addition to the four other airships floating behind it in the palace defense perimeter, upgraded from two since last night's attack.
For a moment she let herself forget what had happened last night. Of the burned body of one of her Kyoshi Warriors, her Kyoshi Warriors, who had been with her at the Rock. Of that godawful smell of burnt flesh. Instead she tasted the crisp clean air, free of the usual industrial smells she associated with the capital city, but flavored, as ever, with the salt smell of the sea.
The light in front of her eyelids abruptly darkened, and she opened her eyes to find herself in the looming shadow of the airship, watching as the airship's captain deftly guided her nosecone into the docking mechanism on the tower's golden cap. Once she was bought to a stop, the red canvas covered gangplank extended out of the crew area and touched down on the gray stone platform. Ty smiled warmly at the tall young woman who walked down it to stand on the docking platform.
At five foot ten, First Lieutenant Mychiko Kurorsawa was eighteen, two years her senior. Her normally shoulder-length black hair was tied up in a bun. She, like Ty Lee herself, was wearing the new undress uniform Suki had instituted in the months since the war, (or at least major combat operations), had ended. Her green, double-breasted tunic and red trousers, with a blue line up the inseam, shone brightly in the sun along with the gold-wrapped hilt of the sword buckled around her waist.
The older woman stopped, coming to attention and raising her right fist to her left shoulder sharply in a regulation salute. Ty Lee returned it with equal sharpness.
"Morning, Mychi," she said, using the diminutive form of her executive officer's name. "It's good to see you again."
"Good to see you too, sir," her executive officer shot back gamely. She looked around at the airships in the defense perimeter, and the soldiers lined up in parade-ground formation in the courtyard below. "If I may ask, what's going on?"
"Quite a bit since last night. I'll brief you and Miss Beifong on the way down." She peeked behind her first officer's shoulder, "where is she, anyway?"
Mychi smirked. "Taking it easy getting to the gangplank. You know how she hates air travel."
Ty winced in pained sympathy. Air travel didn't exactly sit well with her either. "How was the trip?"
"It was pretty good," her friend nodded. "Her parents were as respectful and well-behaved as one would expect."
Ty snorted derisively. "I would be if two full squads of Kyoshi Warriors were scattered throughout the house," she said. Kyoshi Warriors who were there to ensure that their prodigal daughter would be allowed to leave.
"I like you guys, I really do," a sharp soprano said from behind Mychi. A short dark-haired girl well into her thirteenth year stepped gingerly down the gangplank, holding on to the handrails more tightly than she probably would have wanted to let total strangers see. "But I still don't get why Zuko insisted on me having Kyoshi Warrior bodyguards the entire time. If my parents had tried to stop me, I would have just fought my way out."
"Yes, because the only daughter of one of the Earth Kingdom's oldest noble families fighting her way out of her family home so she can return to the Fire Nation is totally going to go over well during the summit," Ty pointed out dryly. "The summit, by the way, which you have been specifically not invited too for that exact reason,".
"I can be diplomatic," Toph pouted, immediately triggering quelling glares and annoyed sighs from both older women.
Toph at least had the grace to blush. "Sometimes," Toph muttered darkly. After a moment, she cleared her throat "At any rate, I want to know what's going on, one of your courier ships flashed a message at our liner and the crew's heartrates shot up and haven't seemed to go back down."
"Follow me," the young captain said, turning and heading back to the door. "I'll explain on the way down."
Ty Lee spoke in a rapid clip as they walked inside and crossed the short distance to the elevator, filling them in as it descended towards the first floor.
"Spirits," Mychi whispered when she was done recounting the events of last night, her voice thick with pain and horror. "And the bitch killed Aiko?"
"Wasn't she one of the Warriors who was with you on the Rock?" Toph asked.
"Yes," Ty Lee said, her voice hardening as the elevator opened out into the torchlit inner gallery. "When Azula remanded us there, she replaced Mai's uncle Colonel Chang with one of her Lightning Sword officers, a Colonel Medora. She's a sadistic bitch with a taste for cruelty and none of Azula's former impulse control. Azula then transferred in the Kyoshi Warriors and after a few days I joined them as a training officer. When Medora slaughtered our people, some of the other female prisoners joined us. We wouldn't have had the strength to try to oust her ourselves towards the end if they hadn't." And what did Aiko get for her bravery? She died like a dog without even a chance to defend herself. "Aiko deserved better than the half-burned corpse I saw when I finally got there."
"I'd like to see this weapon, sir," Mychi said harshly from behind her.
"That's our first stop, actually." Ty bought the group to a stop in front of the wide double doors to the archery range. She put her hands on the plain brass door handles and pushed it open.
On the green grass of the range, bathed in the early morning light creeping over the walls, was a wooden table set up near the back wall. Standing behind it was Sokka and what appeared to be a corporal in the Yuyan Archers, gesturing as they discussed the curved black object on the table.
As Ty and her party crossed the courtyard, she caught the corporal's eye and the woman, around Mychiko's age, stood abruptly to attention. Sokka looked at the woman, clearly taken aback by the change in her posture and turned to see what had caused it. His warm brown face immediately broke out in a large smile as soon as she saw who it was.
"Hey guys," he said, with an anxiety written all over his face she was unaccustomed to seeing there. "I wish you'd been able to come back under better circumstances. I don't really know how it feels to lose someone under your command, considering I've never really had one, but for what it's worth, I'm sorry."
"It's okay, Sokka," giving a tired smile. "She died doing her duty. For a Daughter of Kyoshi there is no higher honor," Ty responded aggressively, projecting for all the world the unflappable image of everything the Fire Nation School for Girls taught her a company commander should be. "Suki ordered me to come see you as seen as these two landed, so we could see the weapon before we moved on to our assignment."
"Our assignment?" Toph said as she moved over to stand with Sokka, her arms crossed over her chest.
"Voluntary in your case, but I doubt you're going to turn it down."
"Which is?" Mychi cut in, curious.
"Which is something I'll tell you in a minute," Ty said pointedly, her voice edged with exasperation. "For now, I want to see just how this weapon could do what it did to Aiko and nearly did to Zuko."
"Of course," Sokka said. The attractive, broad-shouldered darker-skinned man turned back to the table, picking up a curved black object and offering it to her. "Well, this is it. Zuko wants me to find out all I can about it."
Ty took it gingerly, surprised at its shape. Why does something like this seem familiar? The rifle is surprisingly heavy at just over two pounds and just over two feet long. It had a long black and gray oval barrel, curved towards a hole at the front that she guessed was where whatever it discharged came out. The stock was designed to rest against the shoulder while firing it. There were two handholds, one towards the front and one towards the back to hold while firing.
All at once she remembered where she'd seen something like this before. Once, while home on leave, she had snuck into this exact archery range, curious despite her better judgement about the explosions everyone kept hearing from it. "We were developing weapons to this at one point, in the broadest possible strokes at least. However, those were longer, thinner, and fired metal slugs."
"Which Zuko told me last night when he asked me to look into this," Sokka with a brisk nod.
"This doesn't however, sir," the Yuyan Archer cut in for the first time with the honeyed cadences of the Southern Islands. "This weapon fires blue bursts of energy, and while the experimental weapons only fired a dozen or so rounds before needing reloading, we're not sure how many shots this one has in it." She extended her hands to take it. "If I may, sir?"
Ty nodded her assent as the Yuyan Archer pressed a tiny lever on the side of the weapon. The young captain nearly dropped the weapon in shock as a panel on the top slid aside and a black scope popped out with a slight mechanical whirr.
"Stare through down at the target on the range, sir," the young corporal responded.
Ty gave the young noncommissioned officer a quizzical look. "You're being theatrically mysterious, Corporal," she said slowly before putting one gray eye towards the scope. Her eyes widened in shock at what she saw.
A green circle with four lines spaced equidistantly around it centered on one of the downrange target dummies, a bale of hay encased in black lacquered armor. In the lower left-hand corner, another circle appeared as if by magic with a grid showing four dots. Her breath caught in her throat as she realized what she was looking at: the positions, relative to hers, of Mychi, Sokka, Toph, and the Yuyan corporal sharing the range with her. She swallowed impulsively. The potential of what I'm looking at…
In the lower right-hand corner was some sort of red and white sliding scale with what may have been numbers: strange symbols like "1" and "9," which she could only assume indicated the range to the target. She didn't like the implications of her not being able to read them. At all. It only confirmed what had been in the back of her mind ever since she received the report to mobilize the rest of her company that terrible previous night.
No one on her world could have made weapons like this. Which meant they had to come from somewhere else. Some other world. "That's the least disturbing thing about this weapon," Sokka said from behind her, holding his hands out for the weapon. "If I may?"
Ty handed it back to Sokka who handed it back to the Yuyan Corporal while she and Mychi made to stand behind the table.
"Thank you, sir," the Yuyan Archer said.
The corporal turned it over and moved a knob on the side with a loud chirping sound before turning it back up and bringing the weapon to her shoulder. She looked into the scope at a target downrange and squeezed the trigger.
The blast that filled her ears was so loud it physically hurt as a long blue light shot out the hole in the front and connected with the target dummy in less time than it would have taken for her to blink had she dared close her eyes.
The dummy, in armor designed to defeat a crossbow bolt, disappeared in a flash of orange that exploded outward from where the beam hit it, burning strands of hay and slagged armor covering the ground in a wide circle around where it had used to be.
For a long moment everyone stared in horror at the smoldering wreckage of Fire Nation military supremacy littering the range. This…whatever it was, had clearly been caused by a higher setting of some sort, for as badly burned as Aiko's torso had been, at least her body had been more or less intact. Ty shook her head, banishing images of the burned bodies and wrecked vehicles something like this could inflict and pulled her right hand from the hilt of her sword where it had strayed almost without thinking.
"Well, we're screwed," Mychi said after a moment, her mouth visibly trembling. "Benders would be the only ones capable of meeting a force armed with these weapons in the field and, unless they can somehow deflect those shots, they'd take horrendous casualties doing it. We have to find out where they're coming from."
Ty nodded in agreement, even as she couldn't see any way to actually do that. If they're coming from another world, not even the Avatar is going to be able to get to them, let alone stop them. As for what we can do…
"As a matter of fact, we have orders relating to just that," Ty said aloud, balling her fists in an effort to keep them from shaking from the horror that still slid down her spine. "The assassin who attempted to murder Zuko was a Lightning Sword, a member of the Fire Nation secret police force. Specifically, a certain Corporal Izani we're both too familiar with." She swallowed the lump that suddenly appeared in her throat as she remembered being forced shamefully to her knees with her hands bound behind her back in front of an equally bound Kyoshi Warrior. Captain Shiga, the woman who's shoes Ty now filled, had to have known in that moment that she was going to die. But even then, there had not been a trace of fear in her brown eyes even as her hair had been pulled back and a knife ran across her throat by the very woman Katara had killed the night before. She made not projecting any fear look easy.
"I owe Katara for ending that miserable life," Ty heard her friend and executive officer mutter behind her, as she was no doubt subconsciously rubbing the spot on her shoulder where Shiga's blood had splashed as the blood pressure in her brain had dropped to zero.
"We all do," Ty growled, her voice hard like flint. "But since it was a Lightning Sword from the Rock, Colonel Suki and Firelord Zuko have ordered us and Miss Beifong to talk to Azula."
"Me? But What can I do?" Toph said, anxiety touching even her voice. The younger girl may have not been able to see the explosion itself with her damaged eyes, but she had certainly been able to hear and feel it in the ground. "I can't tell when Azula's lying. I found that out during the invasion."
"Azula's a lot less stable now than she was then," Ty said, turning back to face her friend. In no small part thanks to Mai and me. "You might be able to detect something. Failing that, your primary job is to keep her from trying to kill us. You up for it?"
Toph closed her eyes and took a deep breath, clearly trying to calm her nerves. "If it will prevent anyone from having to face that in the field. Then yes."
Captain Jonathan Archer stood alone in Spacedock Two's empty viewing gallery, looking at his ship, at the changes that had been wrought to her ever since he had last taken her out to fight the Terra Prime extremists on Mars. She had put in from the damage that she had taken when the extremists attacked her with the hijacked verteron beam normally used to divert comets. Upon putting in for repairs, Starfleet decided to field-test the experimental upgrades that had been in the work ever since the Xindi crisis, incorporating the latest advances from both Starfleet R&D and the scientific and technical data gleaned from the previous four years.
The ship resting in vacuum below him, enclosed partially by the frames of San Francisco Fleet Yard's Spacedock One, now had a secondary hull, fatter to the front under the saucer-shaped primary hull, and thinning towards the back where the warp nacelles were now attached. In that primary hull was a new powerful warp drive capable of reaching warp six, thanks to the new government's desire to make up for decades of treating the newborn Earth like a client state in need of coddling. About fifty kilometers away, in the blackness of space, was the spacedock where Columbia had undergone the same rebuild.
Archer wouldn't have believed any of it was possible not that long ago. In fact, he would have blamed the Vulcan's superior attitude for…well anything. He remembered however, what Ambassador Soval had told him the last thing he and Archer's old friend Admiral Forrest had discussed before he was murdered in the bombing of the Earth embassy on Vulcan last year. Earth had taken a fraction of the time Vulcan did to rebuild their world after their equivalent of the Third World War and within a hundred years had established half-a-dozen major off-world colonies and a dozen smaller ones. Something it had took nearly eight hundred Earth years for Vulcan to achieve. Many in the Vulcan government had feared that, if given unfettered access to their technology, Vulcan would suddenly have found itself a thrall to some sort of aggressive Terran Empire that bestrode the stars like a colossus. It wasn't exactly an unfounded fear; the "client state turns aggressive and overpowers their former overlord" was not exactly an unknown phenomenon in human history.
At least the Vulcans finally think we can be let out of the house without terrorizing the playground.
"She's a beautiful sight, ain't she?" A voice, heavy with the accent of the Deep South, said into the empty room behind them.
A playful smile emerged on Archer's face. "You know, Captain Hernandez's new chief engineer has challenged us to a race," Captain Archer said, turning to face Commander Charles Tucker. The thirty-four-year-old Chief Engineer, with fair skin and blonde hair was, like him, in civilian clothes, in this case a polo and blue jeans. "She thinks that she and Kelby can beat even you."
"I taught Commander Kelby everything he knows," Tucker said, no small amount of pride on his voice. "He'll make a fine chief engineer once he's with a Captain who won't constantly compare him to me at every opportunity," he said with just a hint of edge to his voice.
Archer's face flushed. He hadn't exactly taken Tucker's brief transfer to Columbia in an effort to avoid dealing with his relationship with T'Pol well. It was one of the reasons Archer had lobbied for Kelby to go over to Columbia to take over her Engineering department. He deserved a fresh start, especially after his incident with the Orions.
"I agree he'll be fine," he said. "And I'm sure you'll be able to edge him out just a little. You always do."
Tucker nodded with a self-confident smirk before turning his attention to the window. "It wouldn't have been possible without the Vulcan's giving us the warp six technology."
"True," Archer responded. Though I can't help but wonder…" His voice trailed off, as what he had been thinking about before Trip walked in reasserted itself.
"Remember what?"
"Just something I was thinking about before you walked in, Trip. I can't help but wonder," Archer said with a heavy sigh. "If we're not destined to repeat the Vulcan's mistakes. We've done worse, far worse, on our own world. And we seem to be well on our way, what with Terra Nova and all."
"That's different," Tucker pointed out, "the Novans asked to return to the fold, for lack of a better term, and appearances aside they're as human as we are. Legally and morally we couldn't refuse them."
Archer nodded somewhat reluctantly. Terra Nova had been the earliest human deep space colony, founded in 2078, after deep space observation platforms in the asteroid belt had detected an Earth-sized planet with the signature of liquid water and free oxygen in orbit of Eta Cassiopeiae . The hindsight of nearly a hundred years had suggested it had been foolish to establish a colony that far away when the very same Kepler Two mission had detected an oxygen-bearing world in the Alpha Centauri trinary system, equally uninhabited and equally unclaimed by the other regional powers. Most historians now accepted that the reason Terra Nova had been targeted as the site of humanity's first extrasolar colony was because it was strategically located along the long trade route between Trill and Earth. A valid reason to establish a presence in the area, but not until after they gained the experience necessary closer to home by colonizing their nearest neighbor. Which was also strategically positioned in relation to Vulcan.
All had gone well with the groundbreaking, but when Earth was readying the next colony ship, the locals had rallied around a man named Mark Logan to resist it. Which was, on the face of it, ridiculously shortsighted. The two hundred people of the original colony ship was not enough of a gene pool to establish a long-term society. They only compounded the insanity when the asteroid strike that had felled the original colony finally came, sending everyone under the age of fifteen into the caves while everyone else readied to fight the invasion force they thought was coming. Which had meant that all they had really managed to accomplish was get everyone over the age of fifteen killed. By the time Enterprise had arrived to investigate the colony's fate, the descendants had reverted to a hunter-gatherer subsistence pattern and were living in underground caves. Their bodies had been wracked by long-term health problems relating to inbreeding depression and the contaminated water. After initial hostilities had been settled, they had recommended to the Novans that they relocate to the caves in the southern hemisphere, until the radiation levels in the northern hemisphere finished returning to normal.
Which didn't do anything to solve the inbreeding depression problem. When Captain Erika Hernandez and the Columbia arrived three years later, the Novans, having been convinced by the surviving member of the original colony before she died of old age of the need for change (helped along, no doubt, by the historical and science files in the data they'd left for them) had swallowed their pride and requested the help that they'd needed, even if it meant giving up their independence. The only way to do that was to complete the relocation and start shuttling in new colonists to increase the local gene pool. A process that was well underway.
"Well we are planning a deep range mission to that world in the Expanse we intervened on during the Xindi Mission," Tucker pointed out.
"Just because we intervened in a couple of cases involving members of our own species doesn't change the fact that we shouldn't just throw our weight around whenever we feel like it," Archer muttered, thinking back to the world in question. In their exploration of the Expanse in search of the Xindi weapon, they had encountered a planet of humans who had been kidnapped from Earth and used as slaves by a race known as the Skagarans in building new colonies. The human slaves, mostly from his home country's western states, rallied around a man named Cooper Smith, overthrew their overlords and reduced them to second-class citizens. However, what may have been justifiable at the time as self-defense rapidly turned into the kind of institutionalized racism the ancestors of a good chunk of them were familiar with from the American West of the Nineteenth Century.
The humans in the village they'd landed at had justified it as preventing them from getting their hands back on advanced weapons and overthrowing them in turn, but the infrastructure that had allowed them to produce those weapons had long been destroyed. Also, the Skagarans who had interbred with the humans on the planet had had no more desire to return to those days then the humans who'd overthrown them. It had taken a firefight with the local bigots to get the wheels of change moving but he hoped that that village's example would become the law planetwide. Starfleet was planning an expedition back to that world to check up on the situation there. In addition they would offer to voluntarily relocate them, human and Skagaran alike, back to Earth, or, alternatively, use it as a base to locate any other human populations that may have been abandoned out there by the Skagarans. As well as finding the Skagaran homeworld itslf.
"My point is," Archer said aloud, "that however well-intentioned, these things have a funny way of backfiring when and where you least expect them too."
"Everything we do can have unexpected consequences," Tucker pointed out. "Someone other than the Klingons we pissed off during our previous voyages could come back to bite us in the ass five, ten years down the line. Does that mean we stay home?"
"No," Archer said pleadingly, "and I'm not saying we-,"
He was interrupted when the intercom in the viewing gallery chirped up.
"Dock command to Captain Archer," a female voice said from the intercom.
He walked over and pressed the comm panel. "Go ahead."
"I'm sorry to bother you, sir," the young petty officer in Dock Command said, "but we've received a priority signal from Admiral Gardner. He wants you in Starfleet Command for an emergency meeting immediately.
"On my way," Archer said, "On my authority contact everyone assigned to the Enterprise and either cancel their shore leaves or tell them to be ready to report aboard as soon as possible."
"Yes, sir," the petty officer said.
In addition to the new secondary hull, one of the other problems with the Enterprise that had become abundantly clear was that even when she didn't have a secondary hull it was undermanned, hampering their ability to take damage in any kind of sustained engagement, even with the addition of the MACO detachment. Consequently, the flight crew had been brought up to four hundred and thirty, including the MACOs. Though with the new systems, there were one or two holes that still needed to be filled.
He had a sinking feeling that he was going to have to expedite that search.
An hour later, Captain Archer, freshly changed into his uniform, walked briskly down the brightly lit corridor at Starfleet Command when he caught sight of a woman only a few years his junior. Like him, the woman coming down the adjacent hallway at him was in the new uniform: a deliberate departure from the one-piece jumpsuit he'd worn since he was twenty-one. The new uniform was a solid blue jacket with a name patch on the left side and the four pips of a captain on the right and black trousers, with the division color being represented on the name patch and on the turtleneck, in both their cases a solid gold.
"Erika," he said greeting his friend and opposite number on the Columbia, Captain Erika Hernandez. "He called you in too?"
"Yes," she said quickly as they fell in next to each other. "And right when I was having dinner with the rest of my family in Old Mesilla, too." She gave a disappointed huff. "This was my last chance to be with them before I have to ship back out tomorrow."
"I was in Spacedock, looking at my ship," Archer responded a little sheepishly. "I was a little restless sitting around in Buffalo."
"Don't get me wrong, I love my family, but I personally can't wait to be back in the saddle myself," Hernandez said softly as they moved at a brisk pace down the corridor, "though I have a feeling that I'm not going to like the reasons we're going back a day early."
Archer sighed. "Me neither, Erika. Me neither."
As the two old friends, and occasional lovers, walked down the corridor, the two enlisted security guards flanking Admiral Gardner's office (the enlisted personnel and NCOs retained the original jumpsuit, though the turtleneck was replaced by a division colored one as well, in this case red) stood too attention. He noted that they no longer carried the small arms Starfleet had used previously, instead they had switched over to the same curved black rifles and pistols the MACOs used. It was a change that was long overdue, and it saved the quartermasters from having to stock two different types of rifle. At the same time, it had made abundantly clear that, whatever officers like Erika, (and even she had eventually acceded to the need for a MACO detachment after that first fight with the Klingons) had wanted to think, Starfleet with all its responsibilities, was just as much a branch of the Earth military as the MACOs.
He grimaced internally. He had a bad feeling this briefing they were about to enter was going to make that fact even more abundantly clear as the two of them stepped into Admiral Gardner's office. The spacious room with its blue carpeted floor was illuminated with the red-orange light of the sun setting behind San Francisco Bay as they both stopped, staring at the Admiral and his guest.
The fair-skinned senior officer whose blonde hair had long ago gone white was not the only officer in the room. A shorter, blonde Andorian in the leather uniforms of Andorian Imperial Guard was sitting across the wide oak desk from him in front of the window.
"Shran," Archer said, pleasantly surprised by the presence of his old friend. "This is a surprise. What brings you to Earth?"
"It's not the weather, pinkskin," the Andorian officer groused, "I feel like I've lost a quarter of my body weight and I've only been here a day."
"He's here at the request of his government," Gardner offered. "He's been on their equivalent of extended leave ever since he lost his ship and his superiors thought his assignment here could 'rehabilitate' him."
"'Rehabilitate?'" It had always bugged him that the Andorians had benched Shran after the Drone Crisis, blaming him for the loss of his ship, the Kumari. "Admiral, the Romulans attacked him with a new and unexpected weapon, no reasonable person could be blamed for what happened."
"As the board of inquiry back home agreed," Shran put in.
"Then why are you still on the bench?"
His Andorian friend looked at him quizzically, his antennae focusing on him, telegraphing his confusion by the unfamiliar metaphor.
"Why haven't you been given another ship?"
"They say it's because they don't have a ship to give me at the moment," Shran said, more than a little bitterly. "And," he sighed, "alongside Talas, several of my former officers were also from wealthy, well-connected families. Enough of them think I missed something I shouldn't have prior to the attack on the convoy to keep my superiors from going out of their way to assign me another command. I do, however, still have friends who don't want me 'on the bench' as you put it until I reached retirement age so they 'loaned' me to your Starfleet."
"Congratulations, Captain," Admiral Gardner said pointedly, waving his hand in Shran's direction. "Meet your new operations officer."
Archer, stunned, looked from Shran to Gardner. "Excuse me, sir?"
"You were still looking for one, weren't you?"
"Yes, sir," Archer began, "But-,"
"Then I've saved you another week's worth of searching, Captain," Admiral Gardner said airily. "Say thank you." Gardner's voice was like hardened agate as he glared at him.
Archer, caught in a corner by military protocol, said the only thing he could in response. "Thank you, sir."
"With all due respect, sir," Captain Hernandez said from his left, "this can't be the only reason you called us down here."
"No, it's not, Captain," Gardner said, before hitting a touchpad on his screen. Immediately, the sound of hydraulic motivators whirred to life and a metal sliding door closed over the window, blocking the picturesque scene of the sun setting behind the Golden Gate Bridge. Fluorescent lights in the ceiling and on the walls sprung to life even as a Faraday screen descended and locked into place in front of the now armored window. Archer jumped and turned around as the doors behind him closed and locked with a loud click.
"We are now in SCIF mode," Gardner said, "At this time, I must point out to all of you that this briefing is classified. Do you all understand?"
"Yes, sir," all three of them said in rapid succession.
He picked up a handheld remote and pointed it at the large viewscreen on the far wall, which showing a star map of the sector encompassing Terra Nova.
"Six hours ago, the Trill cargo vessel Ma'kala picked up a subspace distress beacon from an Earth Cargo Service J2-class freighter, the Makati City. They were having trouble with their subspace antenna and by the time they fixed it, all they could do was relay the signal to a Vulcan science vessel near Terra Nova who forwarded it to us. He gave a pained grimace. "The distress signal was coming from an uninhabited red giant star system with no life-bearing planets, which means the odds of their being any survivors is effectively nil. What's interesting though was code used in the distress call. It was Seven-R.
Archer's nostrils flared in shock. Code Seven-R was ECS distress code for "We are being boarded by pirates." It wasn't one they normally got to send, as the pirates usually overwhelmed the ship before any sort of distress beacon could be launched.
"Leaving aside the loss of life," Gardner said somberly. "Makati City was carrying a shipment to the MACO garrison setting up shop on one of Terra Nova's southern islands. Roughly twenty thousand rifles and pistols. And at least three times that in terms of thermobaric grenades. Not to mention manufacturing equipment capable of producing more of them out of local materials."
"Mother of God," Erika muttered from next to her, eyes widened in horror, no doubt thinking of the same images he was. Pirates raiding helpless prewarp civilizations with modern weapons they couldn't possibly defend themselves against without drowning their attackers in blood first.
Gardner leaned forward, a hard look in his eyes. "Your orders are to recover any remains of Makati City's crew, and if possible, track down and recover as many of our weapons as you can before they're used to hurt anyone else. I just hope it's not too late."