Star Trek Enterprise The Expanse

VIP免费

2024-12-19 0 0 480.75KB 123 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

POCKET BOOKS

New York London Toronto Sydney Singapore

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New

York, NY 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors’

imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead

is entirely coincidental.

STAR TREK is a Registered Trademark of Paramount Pictures.

This book is published by Pocket Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., under exclusive license

from Paramount Pictures.

For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN: 0-7434-8485-1

First Pocket Books hardcover edition October 2003

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster

Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 orbusiness@simonandschuster.com .

This book is dedicated to Margaret Clark,

editor extraordinaire and all-round good soul.

Contents

Prologue.4

Chapter 1.6

Chapter 2.8

Chapter 3.12

Chapter 4.16

Chapter 5.21

Chapter 6.26

Chapter 7.32

Chapter 8.37

Chapter 9.42

Chapter 10.47

Chapter 11.52

Chapter 12.57

Chapter 13.64

Chapter 14.70

Chapter 15.75

Chapter 16.82

About the Author87

About the e-Book.88

Prologue

On the day the world she knew was destroyed, Liz Tucker was content.

It started as a good day, a happy day. She’d returned home a week earlier from what she and other

locals referred to as The Big City—which meant any metropolitan area outside the Florida Keys. Miami,

Chicago, Los Angeles—all of them were alike, all crammed with people and homogenized high-tech

corporate office buildings, the unimaginative streets filled with ground-car traffic, the skies with skimmers.

It was Liz’s job—as she saw it, anyway—to make those cities a little less homogenized, to give the

buildings some character, some uniqueness, a design and style that broke with the ubiquitous sleek

high-rises that made every city look the same.Boxes, Liz called them. No matter how slender and sleek

they became, no matter how far they rose into the clouds or how brightly they gleamed—with their solar

silver surfaces, reflecting heat in summer, collecting it in winter—they were still boxes, and people should

not have to live or work or eat or love in boxes.

Businesses and personal clients soon learned to call on Elizabeth Tucker, AIA, only if they wanted

something new, something different. Not a high-rise surrounded by a green grass lawn and moving

sidewalks.

Which was one reason Liz was happy at the moment: she’d received news less than an hour before that

her design, one of several bids, had just been accepted by Wel-Tech, one of the hemisphere’s largest

health firms. It was a major assignment: a trinity of office buildings connected by a landscaped park. Liz

had convinced them to go with strictly indigenous plants and to add a small lake, which would attract

native waterfowl. She would be able, finally, to help Chicago look more likeChicago, instead of every

other city in the world. There would be ducks, swans, geese.

She was happy, too, simply to be home. Before work commenced on the project, she had a few days to

herself to relax.

Which meant that she was currently thirty feet below the Gulf of Mexico’s surface with her scuba gear.

Just the basics: no need for a wetsuit here. The turquoise water was tepid against her skin.Warm as

bathwater, amazed tourists always said.

There was no place in the world like the Keys; she was proud to be a local, a Conch. Fifty years ago, it

had become a total tourist trap: fast food joints, strip shopping malls, wall-to-wall cheesy hotels lining the

fragile, narrow coastline, hiding any view of the gulf. The place had been filled with people who wanted

nothing more than to play golf, rub coconut-scented oil on their bodies, sit in the sun, and get

unrelentingly drunk, people who had no appreciation for the special environment, for the unique wildlife,

both of which had been endangered by pollution and other acts of human idiocy.

All that had changed now. Liz’s house—a historic landmark, a 1950s bungalow a short walk from the

glittering shoreline—was one of several in a quiet neighborhood punctuated by native flora and fauna: fat,

squat royal palms, fan-shaped palmettos, flame-colored hibiscus and birds-of-paradise, graceful white

herons, and the occasional flamingo grazing for bugs on the front lawns.

She’d grown up in that house; her parents had left it to her when it became clear that her brother didn’t

want it. Trip had always wanted to explore space; Liz had always made fun of him for it.What, Earth

not good enough for you? He had taught her how to scuba dive, and when she’d been fascinated by

the beauty of it, the sense of weightlessness, the freedom and excitement of exploring a totally different

world, he’d said,Understand now? Space is like this ...free and open, and full of things no one’s

ever seen before.

And Liz had retorted,Big difference. There are coral reefs here, and fish and a million other things,

to look at, all nice and close together. Space is filled with a whole lot of nothing. A lot of nothing

between all those stars. It’s cold and empty, and you can’t even breathe . ...

He’d gotten her on that point.Can’t breathe underwater, either. Does that mean we never should

have invented oxygen tanks?

And then he started talking about his favorite subject, warp drive, which made the spaces between the

stars seem a whole lot smaller. He talked about the possibility of life on other planets; if home was this

great, what about the millions of other planets that had to be out there? And all the different types of

fascinating aliens ... The Vulcans weren’t the entire universe, you know.

Liz wasn’t interested. She loved the Keys, loved Earth, and wanted to make the places she loved better;

that was that.

Diving always made her think of her big brother; she smiled, lips pressed tightly together to avoid gulping

in stinging, bitter seawater, as she swam beside a huge manta ray, its boneless body undulating gracefully.

She wondered where Trip was at the moment, whether he was exploring a planet as beautiful as the

undersea world he had introduced to her. She’d taken the boat out, and at the moment, was swimming

toward a coral reef, one of her favorite spots, always filled with an intriguing cast of characters.

Liz never got there.

The seafloor beneath her shuddered, sending up pulses of cooler water from deep below; a school of

silver tarpon surged upward past her, caught in the strange rising current. She was caught too, catapulted

to the surface. The tide was so strong, her mask was forced up to her forehead; she lost her mouthpiece.

When she came at last to the surface, she grabbed the side of the boat and gasped for air. It stank of

smoke, of something scorched.

Liz got a good look back at the shore, and gasped again.

The far side of the island was engulfed by a wall of flame—stretching from the horizon up into the sky,

blotting out the sun. The fire-wall was kilometers wide. It gouged deep into the earth, spewing debris in

its wake—everything, every life form, incinerated beyond recognition.

And it wasmoving, with the inexorability of a tornado, towards Liz and the gulf.

Oddly, she felt no fear. What she saw was too incomprehensible, too massive; what she felt was awe.

At the very least, the Key on which she lived—on which her neighbors lived—would be obliterated.

Overhead, the dazzling sky was momentarily darkened by a rush of seabirds fleeing: cranes, pelicans,

gulls. Their cries were drowned out by the roar of the destruction.

Krakatoa,Liz thought.An entire island blown away without warning by a volcano. One day there,

the next, gone. The birds had been first to leave there, too.

But the wall of fire encroached too methodically, at too even a pace, to be a natural phenomenon. This

horror was man-made; or perhaps, Liz considered, designed by a hand other than man’s.

The gulf began to grow warmer than the smoke-filled air. Liz’s impulse was to replace her mask and

breathing gear, and dive down where it was cooler—but a strong current kept her pinned to the surface,

trapped near other unwilling victims: a pair of chattering dolphins, the school of now-thrashing tarpons, a

struggling barracuda.

Get in the boat,her mind finally told her, cutting through her shock.Get in the damned boat and get the

hell out of here.

White-foamed waves crashed against her and the small power-boat as the wall of flame neared. The

current was so strong by this time that trying to find the ladder, clinging to it with her arms, took agonizing

effort. She managed to pull herself up—just enough to try lifting her leg up, stepping into the boat ...

A great wave came along, and capsized it, forcing Liz for an instant beneath the waters surface. She

bobbed up again, coughing, and opened her eyes, stinging from the salt. The boat was designed to right

itself instantly—but another wave caught it, and overturned it again, and a third swept it away from her

reach. By this time, the sea was so rough, she could do nothing but tread water.

Liz began to sweat, despite the fact that she was submerged up to her chin. She had hoped, up to that

point, that the water would protect her—but it was beginning to roil from the heat.

She watched, amazed, as the stream of fire from the sky devoured the shore and any creature hapless

enough to remain there.

Then it found the water’s edge. A deafening hiss followed as steam rose high beyond the clouds, mixing

in with the smoke; as Liz watched, the oceandisappeared, foot by foot, replaced by an ugly, fathomless

crater.

Her skin grew red, scalded, as she watched the fire come closer. Her first thought, the more maudlin

one, was that if she had to die, at least she was dying in the place she loved best.

Her second and last thought was,Bet Trip has seen nothing as wild as this, even out in space ...

Chapter 1

He was a Xindi warrior, of his culture’s highest class, and out of a sense of decorum he had worn his

ceremonial armor on this, his last mission, though he would not need it, and though it could not protect

him from his fate.

He had already attended his own death ceremony, already been honored for the heroic deed he would

perform on behalf of his people, his homeworld, against the Enemy-to-come. Then, he had felt only a

sense of pride. He had been accorded every pleasure, every desire: his kin were left behind with great

prestige and wealth. They would build monuments to his memory.

Now he sat in the Enemy’s home system, at the controls of the destroyer/probe. It was a handsome

craft: two concentric spheres, each as perfect as his world, each rotating within the other. It had two

functions: the first, to send information to his leaders; the second, to destroy.

The warrior passed through the alien solar system without difficulty, and sped toward his target: the

planet where the Enemy-to-come dwelled, unaware as yet of its future crime. The world itself—Earth,an

ugly word, bitter on the tongue—was not as hideous as the warrior had imagined, with its swirls of blue

and green. There was, in fact, an odd beauty to it. For an instant, the warrior permitted himself to

consider the life-forms dwelling there, on the green landforms, in the blue oceans: They were unaware of

the crimes that would be perpetrated by their heirs, and therefore not guilty. The Xindi knew nothing of

their culture: perhaps they were not so different from his own people.

He censored the thought at once: Such reflection was dangerous, and could only hinder his mission.

He slowed his vessel, and dropped down into the lower atmosphere, confident that he would not be

detected, given the primitive science of the natives.

He programmed the targeted area—a peninsula and island in the western hemisphere—into his

weapon’s sites. All went as he had practiced in the hundreds of simulations, yet he could not shake a

feeling of displacement, of anxiety—was it caused by his great distance from his homeworld, or was it

cowardice in the face of his own demise?

The ancient ceremonial armor, thicker and heavier than the sleek battle armor to which he was more

accustomed, made his fingers feel thick, even clumsy, as he pressed the controls; beneath it, his scales

had grown overheated. Since there was nothing he could do to help his body cast off the unwanted heat,

he shrugged off all concerns about himself—they were, at this stage, useless—and watched, with grim

delight, as the weapon performed exactly as designed.

He glanced at a small monitor showing the destroyer/probe from the exterior: The concentric spheres

rotated into position so that the emitters lined up perfectly.

The deck beneath his feet began to hum as the weapon powered up. He watched the bitter-named Earth

on the viewscreen as a blast of pure destruction streamed from his vessel and strafed the island and

peninsula, as well as the body of water where they rested. Even from the stratosphere, the warrior could

see plumes of steam rising from the sea, black smoke streaming up from the land.

Marvelous; just as in the simulations.

The warrior finished his task with a sense of accomplishment, and sent the triumphant information back

to his leaders: the weapon had worked precisely as designed. So this had been the source of his anxiety:

the possibility of failure. Now that it was gone, he feared nothing.

He received back a prerecorded message of congratulations and farewell.

He programmed his vessel to self-destruct without hesitation or reluctance. He did not think of his

children, his mates, his parents, or his fellow warriors. He did not, in fact, permit himself to think at all. He

merely braced himself physically for what was to come, and when atlast the destroyer/probe imploded,

there was no time even to flinch.

He was, like his victims on the surface, killed immediately, his scale-covered flesh seared in a blindingly

bright millisecond. However, an explosive in the vessel’s engine failed to ignite; the exterior of the

destroyer/probe remained intact, and tumbled towards the planet surface—evidence for alien hands to

paw over, alien minds to contemplate.

Even his corpse failed to be incinerated—more evidence, to indicate the involvement of his species.

Had the warrior lived to know this, he would have been deeply disappointed.

Chapter 2

With a warrior’s fierce stoicism, Duras, son of Toral, stood upon the dais before the Klingon High

Council. He did not permit shame that had gnawed at him for months to show; indeed, at times it had

come close to overwhelming him, and he had almost yielded to the temptation to end his life at his own

hands.

Two things had stopped him: the possibility of revenge so long as he lived, and the shame that suicide

without honor would bring to his family. So long as there was any hope of revenge, he would live for that

moment.

After many unsuccessful petitions, and months of Duras grinding his teeth, the Council had at last agreed

to see him. Duras had returned to his home planet to appear before the Council members; it had been a

long journey from the Ty’Gokor defense perimeter, a place for the incompetent, the humiliated, the

disgraced.

Those who worked there—and, unfortunately, manywho didn’t—referred to it asthe latrine of the

Empire, the place where all refuse was funneled.

Duras had never appreciated the metaphor.

Now he stood and listened with respect and forced patience to the words of the chancellor, who stood

in the central position of honor amidst the other members.

“Twice!” the chancellor roared, emphasizing the word by striking the podium with his great fist. Silver

hair spilled past his venerable shoulders; he was broad of build, broad of face, still thick of bone and

muscle. His very presence emanated the power that was rightly granted him. Even Duras, in his prime

and strong, doubted he would emerge the victor in hand-to-hand combat with the ancient warrior.

“Twice he’s been captured,” the chancellor continued, his mighty baritone ringing off the walls of the

great chamber, “and twice he’s escaped! Our magistrate should never have shown him mercy! He

should’ve been executed for his crimes!”

Duras did not need to ask to whom the chancellor referred: the name had burned in his mind and heart

with peculiar venom, ever since he had been sent to Ty’Gokor.Archer.

Archer, the human who had destroyed his honor, his life.

Not so long ago, Duras had been the proud, invincible captain of theBortas, one of the Empire’s finest

vessels. The chancellor had given him a command: retrieve the rebels who had fled the Klingon

protectorate of Raatooras, and bring them to justice.

It had seemed a simple enough task—until Archer and his ship, theEnterprise, had interfered. The

human had “rescued” the starving rebels, whose ship was in disrepair—then had broken Klingon law and

insulted Duras by refusing to turn the rebels over.

Duras responded by firing his weapons. It should have been an easy matter of crippling the Earth

ship—Duras’s battle cruiser was clearly the superior vessel—then seizing the rebels, and finishing the

humans off.

Archer, however, was both treacherous and cowardly. Rather than fight boldly, he sailed his ship into

the nearby planetary ring system, then used explosions to create a plasma that blinded Duras’s sensors

and temporarily crippled his weapons.

Then he fled, taking the rebels with him.

To deepen the outrage, Archer did not even perform the courtesy of destroying Duras and theBortas.

Instead, the Klingon captain was forced to return in failure to his chancellor.

Duras hoped for death; such grace was not permitted him. Instead, he was demoted to second weapons

officer, and sent to the underbelly of space. His kin was shamed, and no longer spoke his name.

They had managed to capture Archer, and bring him before a tribunal on the outpost Narendra III.

Duras had appeared and engaged the empires best prosecutor, Orak. Confident of victory, confident that

his position as captain would be restored, Duras had watched the trial—only to be aghast when an

all-too-lenient sentence was handed down. Archer was sentenced to labor in the dilithium mines on the

ice world, Rura Penthe—but once again, human treachery intervened.

Archer escaped, and Duras was left to remain a lowly weapons officer.

Now, standing on the dais before the High Council, a muscle in Duras’s left jaw spasmed, the only

outward sign of the hatred that consumed him. He lived only to redeem his house; he lived only to kill

Archer.

A Council member spoke, his tone dripping with condescension. “You had a simple mission, Duras:

locate the rebels Archer was harboring and return them to the empire. But you failed. Archer made a fool

of you!”

Duras permitted himself no reply; the words that sprang to his firmly compressed lips would have cost

him his life.

At last, the chancellor uttered the words Duras had long yearned to hear.

“We are offering you a chance to regain your command, and your honor.”

So; the decision had been made in his favor. Duras let go a long breath of pure satisfaction.

“I will not fail!” he swore to the chancellor.

In his mind’s eye, he saw theEnterprise, charred and floating, dead in space.

Aboard theEnterprise, Chief Engineer Charles “Trip” Tucker entered the conference room and

immediately knew something was wrong, very wrong.

Even before he received the summons to the conference room, the ship had slowed to impulse—which

probably meant communications were coming in from Earth. He’d thought nothing of it, had assumed it

meant a new mission, some new chore they’d thought up at HQ. He’d been in engineering running

maintenance on the warp drive, and for some odd reason thinking of Lizzie.

Remembering times from long ago: thirteen-year-old Lizzie. Trip had been almost seventeen then, and he

had caught her kissing a kid two years older than she was, a skinny sophomore who he knew from the

local high school—what was his name? Carlo something. He was a whiz at botany, that kid; he had

actually been in the same class with Trip and the other seniors.

Carlo, all elbows and knees, and Trip had flipped his lid when he found skinny Carlo in a liplock with his

little sister behind the movie theater.

Hey,he’d yelled, as he grabbed the kid by the shoulder and pulled the two lovebirds apart.Why don’t

you go pick on someone your own age?

Lizzie’d been furious.Hey, leave him alone, Trip.

Get out of here!Trip had shouted, ignoring his sister, and Carlo obeyed, taking flight.

He and Lizzie had fought like the dickens then—he wasn’t sure who was madder at whom, but all of his

protective big-brother instincts had come to the fore that day.

Tucker grinned at the memory. Funny, how back then two years had made poor frightened Carlo seem

like a sophisticated man of the world, out to take advantage of his baby sister. Of course, knowing

Lizzie, it was hard to say who was taking advantage of whom. Lizzie had always insisted she was

perfectly capable of taking care of herself. Didn’t Trip trust her?

Trip trusted her, all right; no one had a sounder head on her shoulders than Lizzie. It was the guys he had

the problem with. Being a guy himself, he knew they were up to no good.

Tucker’s reverie had been interrupted then, when a call came, asking him to report to the conference

room immediately.

Trip entered and found the Vulcan Science Officer T’Pol, Lieutenant Malcolm Reed, Doctor Phlox,

Hoshi, and Mayweather, all standing around the table.

Standing, not sitting and talking casually. The expressions—save for T’Pol’s, of course, which was

always blandly passive—were all grim. Something major was up, and it wasn’t good.

“What’s going on?” Trip asked.

“The Captain wants to talk to us,” Reed said somberly. His British accent seemed even more

pronounced than usual—as it often did when he was worried or tense about something, a fact Trip had

learned over the course of their friendship.

“About what?”

The linguist and communications officer, Hoshi Sato, was petite and delicate-boned, her long dark hair

pulled back at the nape of her neck. Her brow was frankly furrowed with concern. Travis wasn’t

surprised; she’d always been a bit of a worry-wart, although after logging some experience aboard

Enterprise, she’d learned to loosen up quite a bit. “He’s speaking to Admiral Forrest ... it’s about the

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

POCKETBOOKSNewYorkLondonTorontoSydneySingapore POCKETBOOKS,adivisionofSimon&Schuster,Inc.1230AvenueoftheAmericas,NewYork,NY10020 Thisbookisaworkoffiction.Names,characters,placesandincidentsareproductsoftheauthors’imaginationorareusedfictitiously.Anyresemblancetoactualeventsorlocalesorpersonsl...

展开>> 收起<<

Star Trek Enterprise The Expanse.pdf

共123页,预览25页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Star Trek Enterprise The Expanse

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: