Eight Hours and Two Days

[Cmdr Ba'alyo 0]

It was a lot to finish in eight hours.

 

The Orion pirates they were seeking had been resourceful enough to ambush the Efrosian freighter and its dilithium cargo. They had enough firepower to take on the Nelson-class destroyer USS Taurus, which had first responded to the distress call.

 

What they didn't have was enough strength or stupidity to confront an Excelsior-class ship of the line. When Challenger had emerged from warp, the Orions hadn't simply tried to escape. They would have learned quickly that the transwarp experiment – although they'd failed to produce a stable drive – had taught the Federation field techniques that made the Excelsior-class among the fastest ships in the Quadrant.

 

No, the Orion carrier had been smart. They had used their fighters to harass the Taurus, splitting Challenger's attention. They had put the freighter between themselves and the Federation starship, screening themselves from its phasers. They had used tractor beams on the cargo pods, ripping them from the freighter and spilling life that Challenger would either stay to save or abandon to asphyxiate.

 

The Orion ship had gotten away.

 

Challenger had lingered long enough to make repairs and stabilize both damaged ships, then made a hasty pursuit. They'd found a tenuous trail, followed it, and found the first of the lifepods warning them not to come any closer. If they didn't break off, they'd find a string of corpses inside more lifepods, like breadcrumbs.

 

Captain Seiben had taken the prudent choice and stopped.

 

Conferring, the bridge crew had made a new suggestion. They would return to the wounded freighter, repair it, redress it as a different ship, and see if they could lure the Orions into a second attack.

 

Now, eight hours later, it was done.

 

Challenger had hidden itself in the sensor scattering effects of a nearby protostar. The disguised freighter had been towed nearby, already set to send out a distress call with a fake transponder signal. M'Guire was over there, with Reed and a contingent of Marines, waiting to see if the Orions would take the bait.

 

The question was, would they?

[Cmdr Ba'alyo 0]

They had taken the bait.

 

After a two-day wait, with the re-dressed freighter squawking its distress signal like a wounded bird, the Orion ship had made a tentative approach. They had used some kind of EMP device as a vanguard, crippling the freighter's unprotected systems and leaving it ripe for boarding.

 

Small fighter craft had surrounded the blinded transport. Only then had the Orion carrier ship advanced.

 

Challenger, obscured by the molecular cloud of a forming protostar, had observed with its passive long-range sensors. Before the Orion's could get close enough to attempt boarding, the Excelsior-class starship had pounced from its hiding place, surprising the pirates.

 

There were no strategic surprises this time, just a sudden stop before retreating. In their haste to back away, the Orions hadn't even waited to retrieve their fighter craft. They'd backed away without so much as a show of defiance, trying to escape at warp.

 

But there was little chance of that.

 

Knowing it carried some of the fastest warp engines in the Quadrant, Challenger had taken time to pick up the Marines and bridge crew that had been bravely ready to protect their lure. Within moments, the ship and its reunited crew had leapt to pursuit speed.

 

It must have been clear to the Orions they were about to be overtaken, since they moved into an evasive spiral, then angled toward a binary pair of white and brown dwarves -- remnants of a burned-out system. The captain had opted to confront the pirates then, before they could try and hide among any asteroids or debris in there.

 

"Lock onto their engines," Seiben had ordered, "and fire one of our wake-homing torpedoes."

 

Gripping the railing, Ba'alyo watched the sparkling red sphere shoot out, hurtling toward the fleeing ship.

 

The Orion pirates were about to feel the reach of Federation justice.