The Axanar vessel was not, strictly, a warship, but as was the case for many vessels of its sort the difference was academic. Long trips through the void, with help never coming, meant that every vessel needed to be able to defend itself, and the more valuable the cargo the more they resembled a battleship.
The vessel it had preyed on carried ores, making tight margins shipping silver, platinum, and gold mined in the rocky systems around Axanar to distant trading posts, where it would eventually be resold to the mineral-poor Klingons in exchange for mercenaries, weapons, and the odd crystals which formed on their moons. It had been armed with nothing more than a few small lasers, just enough to make any raid economically non-viable.
This ship bristled with weapons; Andorans antimatter missile pods, Vulcan laser arrays, a gimbaled energy turret at its nose which had been built by the mysterious Xindi. Energy shields shimmered over an almost insectoid armoured hull, a complex arrangement of angular, blade-like protrusions housing advanced sensors and deflectors. It could fight a Vulcan patrol frigate to a standstill.
This was not an ore hauler. It was built to carry lithium.
It was closing.
---
Enterprise was fast for a human ship, and it had unmatched endurance, but watching the tiny sensor dot grow closer, Archer was quickly realising they were not the fastest thing in the stars.
"How long?"
"At their present speed, they will overtake us in just a little over nine hours," T'Pol read out dispassionately. "However, this may not be their top speed. It is possible they are conserving fuel until they are closer."
Archer swore, turning his chair to the weapons station.
"Mr. Reed, what can you do in nine hours?" he asked.
"I don't know, sir," he responded simply. "Faster than light weapon calibration is complex, and ideally we'd test it. But… I could maybe get us some more accurate weapons, and ready some warheads."
"Go, and any resource you need, you'll get," Archer ordered, then tapped his communicator. "Trip, can we sustain this speed for nine hours and enter combat afterward?"
There was a long pause which Archer knew was his chief engineer thinking.
"I don't like it, captain," she replied. Which meant they could.
"You don't have to," he concluded, then snapped the line shut. "Alright, bring in the reserve shift. We're going to need to be well-rested. Subcommander, Vulcans need less sleep, right?"
"Yes, sir," she responded simply. "Daily rest is healthy, but not necessary."
"Then you have the bridge. Wake us if they accelerate," he said, standing up.
"Shouldn't…" Hoshi began, then trailed off as she suddenly became conscious of everyone turning to look at her. "Shouldn't we call for help?"
"Nobody'll make it out here in time," Travis replied grimly. "Nobody on Earth will even see it happen for four years. Is there any chance we can talk them down?"
"Frankly, after what I saw on that tape, if they want to talk, I don't want to listen," Archer responded. "Send a message torpedo out to Earth anyway… just in case the worst happens."
T'Pol moved to the captain's chair as the crew moved and the reserve shift came on, mostly-unfamiliar faces taking their place on the bridge. She watched the tiny dot on the screen inch closer, the timer winding down, supervised the sensor sweeps getting a clearer and clearer picture of the vessel coming for them.
Six agonising hours passed with nothing. Then the arm of the captain's chair beeped.
"Go."
"... Subcommander?" Trip's voice came through. She sounded exhausted.
"Captain Archer is getting what rest he can. What is it?"
"I think I should talk to the Captain, it's about the torpedo…"
"I will relay any information along, Commander." T'Pol said sternly. There was a muffled sound on the line, then Malcom's voice came through instead.
"Subcommander, we may have solved the targeting issues for warp-capable torpedoes, but you aren't going to like it," he said. "These things weren't designed to work with any of our systems, they're supposed to be controlled by an FTL targeting computer fly-by-wire."
"I understand Enterprise doesn't have one of those," T'Pol pointed out.
"That's the problem in a nutshell, we're trying to make it all happen with onboard computers. We should have had another month to work on it," he continued. "It just doesn't process fast enough and we haven't got time for proper optimization, so… Commander Tucker has… rewritten the targeting solution. She-"
"Look, it's like this," Trip cut in. "This thing has to make decisions when every microsecond is ten thousand kilometres of deviation, we're trying to make it do too much. So… this does exactly one thing, it keeps the biggest subspace blip it can see in the middle of its trajectory projection. No IFF, no collision avoidance, no PD evasion, no abort function, nothin' that'll slow it down-"
"Will it work?" T'Pol asked impatiently.
"Yeah, but it's basically a 20th century heatseeker. Rough accuracy… I'd say one in three, and that's not accounting for detonation timing, which is…" She paused. "Yeah."
"Are they ready now?"
"I can push the update and we get the tubes loaded in… Malcolm?"
"Ten minutes," the weapon's officer replied.
"Then do so," T'Pol said, clicking to another channel. "Captain Archer?"
---
The NX-01 dropped out of warp and turned, its thrusters firing as it spun end-over-end. The warp coils had no time to cool before, quite suddenly, they flashed against and the ship blurred off in the other direction. In the dark of interstellar space, it would have looked to an observer like nothing but a brief dance of ghostly lights interplaying between a streak of lightning.
The hours-long chase ended abruptly as the NX-01 screamed past its pursuer, three torpedoes leaping from the twin forward tubes and the third in the rear pod. Despite their technology, the crew of the Axanar vessel were still scrambling to meet the sudden change, the missile pods craning over to track their invisible target and spitting out a quartet of warp missiles of its own, which streaked ineffectually by their target from the immense parallax.
The first of NX-01's missiles never even found its target on the scanners, streaking out into the eternal black. The next dove in on its target and before developing a worsening spin trying to keep the target centred, pulling itself into a thousand pieces in a microsecond. The last closed with the Axanar ship and blinked back into relativistic space right on top of its target.
The internal rangefinder, its screen filled with alien vessel, misfired. The bomb didn't detonate. The missile streaked past, turning and accelerating back into warp, briefly losing track of its target before reacquiring it, tearing away in the opposite direction.
The missile roared back to Warp 8.
---
"... is that a hit?"
Malcolm checked his console, frowning.
"Negative, no detonation," he replied. "Missile's… oh."
"Mr. Reed, why is it getting closer?" Archer asked.
"It… appears to have acquired us, sir," he said.
"Well, abort, and ready the next salvo." Archer replied.
"We had to cut the abort sequence, sir." Malcolm said. "T-the odds of this happening-"
"Enough," Archer said simply. "One minute, stop a rogue missile." He shifted in his chair slightly, as though he were watching a sporting event he had no real stake in rather than watching a nuclear missile plunging toward his ship.
"Can we hit it with another?" T'Pol asked.
"No," Malcolm replied simply.
"Okay, plan b then," Archer cut in, watching the timer tick down. "Mister Mayweather, drop us out of warp just before impact, understood?"
"A-aye aye, sir," he said. "I got this."
"Good. They're going to be all over us the moment we do, so ready another three torpedoes and warm up the lasers," Archer concluded, watching the tiny dot close. The slightest bit of nervousness crept over his face. "Polarize hull plating, brace for impact."
In the time it took for the screen to reset to reflect their new circumstance, the tiny dot had passed completely out of view, and it had been replaced with a much larger one. The switch to external cameras showed nothing but a menacing, geometric block of darkness blotting out the stars.
"Mister Reed?"
"Firing!"
Two torpedoes streaked out on impulse engines and shattered against the glowing envelope which danced into view against of the dark shape, wavering and fading.
"No good, they have an energy shield," Malcolm said. "I don't think we dented it."
"We're being scanned," T'Pol said simply. "... correction. I am being scanned."
"What?" Archer asked.
"They have focused an organic scanning array on my position on the bridge," T'Pol said simply. "Disconcerting."
"Well, that means they're distracted. Prepare another two torpedoes to detonate just outside their screens, then target… Subcommander?"
"The missile pod will have integrated antimatter containment," she said. "Andorian vessels usually armour them."
"With the lasers, Mister Reed."
"Um…"
"Aye sir, missiles ready, lasers on target."
"Sir-"
"Prepare to fire!"
"W-we're being hailed!" Hoshi said. "They… have a message, text only. I'm translating."
"Hold," Archer said. All eyes turned to Hoshi as she scanned through, cross-referencing screens. "Ensign?"
"It's… an apology. To… our Vulcan captain," she said. "They want to speak with you, they've given us a video channel and translation matrix for… for Vulcan."
T'Pol turned to Archer, who hadn't moved. A horrible revelation passed over her, and she found herself hoping, against the odds, that logic would win out over pride.
"... you have the chair, Captain," Archer said, standing up and stretching. "Malcom, if you think they aren't buying this, nuke the hell out of them."
---
NX-01 flew silently through the darkness of interstellar space, travelling at over a hundred times the speed of light. Inside, Hoshi Sato sat up and stared out the window, the quadruple panes of transparent aluminium that was all between her and the void.
The Axanar ship was gone now; its crew had denied everything, of course. T'Pol had detailed scans made of the exterior while they talked and they would forward the information to Vulcan customs, but a vessel like that could likely change its drive signature and configuration enough to cast doubt on their identity. Not enough doubt if they'd killed a Vulcan officer, as they stood no chance of intercepting NX-01's messenger torpedo, but if it was kept an internal affair, nobody would look twice.
There would be no justice. Hoshi felt sick.
She took one of her sedatives, laying back against the thin pillow and listening to the rumble of the engine as Enterprise continued on its way.
Two years at the outside, she thought. Two years and she skipped the line. It'd be worth it.
