“Sir, the Excelsior has steadied herself,” Ester said. “Her thrusters are engaged, and…well, she’s right-side up again.”
“Good,” Captain Seth responded.
“She’s six-thousand feet above the planet surface, and falling.”
“Captain, transporter rooms are reporting that they can’t initiate any transports off the Excelsior,” Thorn said. “Her shields are up.”
Seth had a frustrated and perplexed look.
“They’re probably trying to minimize damage to their ship as they burn through the atmosphere,” the science officer said.
“Or perhaps trying to be cautious of any counter-attack from the Annecta,” Counselor Jenovia added.
“Hail them, Lieutenant Commander,” Seth quickly ordered.
“They’re not responding,” Thorn replied.
“Again.”
Thorn just shook his head. Alan, just answer the damn hail, Seth thought. “Thorn, will you please fire a warning shot across their bow?”
“Gladly,” he replied, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. Any chance for him to fire the new phasers. “It worked,” he said. “They want to talk.”
The image of the Excelsior bridge flickered on the main viewscreen, but what they saw shocked Seth and the entire bridge crew. The Excelsior’s bridge was smoky and dark, and the crew that occupied the bridge was exceptionally scarce. Captain Santiago sat in his chair, leaning forward with his head drooped down and facing the floor. With such a minimal bridge crew, he looked as if he operated the Excelsior entirely on his own. He raised his head slightly, and stared forth with dark and burning eyes. “This your way of knocking on my window?”
“Alan…your ship…”
“You know what I need to do, Darren.”
“Alan, I need you to lower your shields for the moment. We want to transport your injured over here. Our sensors show you have critically wounded officers there. We have sickbay and medical teams ready to take them in.”
“I can’t risk any of those things transporting over here. The last time they boarded my ship they just about blew it up,” he said sharply.
“Somehow I don’t think the shields will stop them. We had an experience here on the Dragonfly when they were able to jump through a force field. And whatever mechanism they are using to transport is different than our transporter beams. Our sensors show that you have a lot of injured crewmen.” And dead crewmen, too, but somehow Seth just couldn’t bring himself to say it.
Santiago grunted. “You don’t know the half of it; we have a lot more than you realize. We’ve lost all of our senior medical personnel,” he said. “Among many others…” Santiago sadly looked around the main bridge as he said it.
“You’ll have to take a chance with this one,” Seth told him. “We’ll try to be as quick as we ca-”
Santiago cut him off.
Seth swallowed. It didn’t take a genius to know that his long-time friend was pissed. Seth could only sympathize over what he had lost in the brutal attack by the Annecta. Whenever Santiago was on the losing side of anything, he had the habit of being exceptionally quiet as he re-grouped his thoughts. What worried Seth now was that Santiago might be putting himself on a complete kamikaze-mission to destroy his enemy. He had seen this before in him. This wasn’t about the protection of the human colony anymore.
As Seth sat back down in the captain’s chair, he remembered that he had noticed something subtle and very disturbing over his last conversation with Santiago, something that he couldn’t shake. It was when Santiago had mentioned what they had lost in the attack, and how he looked over to his first officer’s seat when he said it.
Commander Ariele was missing from the main bridge.
