"Nequencian Hospitality"

[Cptn Elias Moore 0]

Elias stood behind the comm station, staring at the viewscreen. They had escaped the shockwave relatively unharmed. Relatively unharmed... they could have been dead. The weapon on the planet had fired. But it hit something else.

 

Had he seen what he thought he saw? A starship with a green hull, larger than Challenger, a tear-shaped saucer straddled by slightly upcurving nacelles. It wasn't there just minutes ago. Or was it merely invisible? Suddenly, a tactical alarm... and there it was, on sensors, visible on the viewscreen. And then it was there no more, struck by the alien weapon's devastating discharge, annihilated in one sure stroke, gone before he could hail it.

 

Where had he seen that ship before? In the Enterprise archives. It was a Romulan ship.

 

Romulan.

 

Its debris was scattered through the system.

 

What the hell had it been doing in the system? Elias gripped the sides of the terminal. It had been spying on them, of course. Scanning their construction sites. Scanning their ships. Scanning the alien weapon as it emerged from its subterranean chamber.

 

And now its debris was scattered through the system.

 

Eight light years from the mined border of Romulan space.

 

The blip on sensor platform 6 now made sense, as did the sensor sweeps they only barely managed to detect. What assumptions had its crew made about the weapon that brought about their doom?

 

Commodore Moose had taken Challenger out on a mission of peace. He had intended to bring the ship right where it was now, to the Romulan border, and then beyond in the hopes of establishing a dialogue with the secretive race. Challenger was to be the shining beacon around which peaceful relations with a major interstellar power could be guided.

 

Now Challenger was in the debris field of one of that power's warships, the last traces of it smeared on her hull. They had a golden opportunity, their first such opportunity, to speak to the Romulans. Instead, a massive weapon sitting right in the middle of one of Starfleet's future colonies vaporized an untold hundreds of them. Opportunity turned to tragedy in the blink of an eye.

 

"The weapon is powering up again," Lieutenant Westler announced.

 

They could be next--the only fact that mattered at this very moment. Horror at the fate of the Romulan ship had settled in for only seconds before this stark reality called Elias back. He had to make sure they didn't succumb to the same fate...