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for
real,
Mr. Sulu.”
    “Aye aye, sir,” Sulu said. Jim watched that big ship keep on bearing down on them.
It’s as big as
Enterprise, he thought.
A class of Romulan vessel that the Federation knows nothing about. Another reason to make sure we get out of this alive.
“Uhura,” he said, “prepare a squirt for Starfleet Command.”
    “Done already, Captain,” she said. She had been watching the screen as carefully as any of them had. “But I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get it out. Subspace is full of jamming.”
    “What’s the source?”
    “Artaleirh, Captain.”
    Whatthehell?
“Dump it to a microbuoy and prepare to get rid of it that way,” Jim said. “Dump my personal logs to it as well, and all Mr. Spock’s scans and other pertinent data. We’ll need to make sure that the news of what happened here has a chance to get out, even if we don’t.”
    “Handling it, Captain.”
    “
Esemar’
s weapons are going hot, Captain,” Spock said.
    “Mr. Sulu,” Jim said, “a little more discretion, if you please!”
    Sulu whipped the
Enterprise
around the back of a nearby asteroid just as
Esemar
fired her disruptors. The fire blasted the back of the asteroid into magma, tracking toward
Enterprise,
but missing her as she continued around the far side.
Llendan
and
Chape
came streaking around the asteroid to either side, firing as well, but Sulu had already gone diving steeply in z-axis, down through the plane of the asteroid belt. The two corvettes followed,
Esemar
coming after them.
    “Disruptors on
Esemar
are running at approximately one hundred seventy-five percent the power of a standard Romulan Grand Fleet cruiser’s,” Spock said. “Higher even than
Bloodwing’
s, and she has had her gunnery conduits clandestinely augmented.”
    “And in comparison to our own phaser banks, that would be?”
    “About a hundred and forty percent,” Spock said. “The comparison, of course, cannot be exact, due to the differences between Federation phaser technology and—”
    “I get your drift, Mr. Spock,” Jim said. “Mr. Sulu?”
    “Running like hell, Captain,” Sulu said. And so he was. Jim swallowed as the view on the viewscreen began lurching and swooping in ever more creative and unlikely directions. Jim began to think it was true that some people never really learned to think in three dimensions, and that some people,on the other side of the divide, were born to it. He thanked heaven one more time that Sulu appeared to fall into the second category. Jim’s stomach, though, continued to express its own opinions as Sulu found more and more interesting ways to use asteroids for broken-field maneuvers in vacuum.
Esemar
was dropping behind, which would have made Jim happier if its weaponry wasn’t so much on his mind, and if the smaller, nimbler corvettes weren’t beginning to gain on them.
    “Mr. Spock,” Jim said. “An analysis of any weak spots in
Esemar’
s shields would be useful at this point.”
    “Working on that, Captain,” Spock said. “Unfortunately the brute-force implementation makes it all too easy to cover such. Elegance of design was not…”
    He trailed off.
    Esemar
was firing at them, the initial disruptor bolts splashing off
Enterprise’
s screens without too much effect: but as she got closer, Jim knew this would no longer be the case. “Mr. Spock?”
    No answer came back. Spock was peering down his viewer, though hardly lost in thought—Spock was less likely to get lost in his thoughts than anyone Jim knew. “Mr. Sulu,” Jim said, “buy us some time, would you?”
    “I’ll dig down deep, Captain,” Sulu said, “but with something like that chasing us, not to mention its two little friends, my budget’s limited.”
    Now we’re up against it,
Jim thought. But Spock was still gazing down his viewer, one hand working over the controls at his console, and Sulu was hammering away at the helm, corkscrewing among the asteroid field’s flotsam and jetsam,