Hour of the Wolf
Teaser

Disclaimer

I do not own either Star Trek or Battlestar They were created by Gene Roddenberry and Glen A. Larson and are owned by CBS and Universal respectively.

Admiral Hanson looked out from the bridge of the Kyushu as the Saratoga was hit. 'Report!' he shouted to his Operations officer.

'Five ships destroyed, four disabled.' The Vulcan announced, a trace of fear in her normally tightly controlled voice. Not that the Admiral could blame her, they'd only engaged the Cube thirty minutes earlier and already nearly half the fleet were already gone. Then the Melbourne's saucer section was shot at with a Borg cutting beam and was torn in half.

Hanson watched as several hundred people, officers and family were killed. After a terrible moment life boats and shuttles began to launch, broadcasting their automated emergency signals. There wasn't nearly enough space on the handful of ships for a full ship's compliment. If something didn't drastically change the whole fleet, every ship and crewman he'd been able to pull together in the quadrant, would be gone.

'We can't win this one Admiral, we must regroup.' His First Officer announced, echoing his own concerns.

'Where? Earth?' Hanson asked. 'We pulled every ship we could to make a stand here. We have to at least do enough damage to slow them down!' The Borg cube fired a salvo of energy pulses at the Kyushu.

'Shields down.' T'Lau called out from Ops. 'Engineering reports the emitters were fused, some sort of phased polaron pulse overloaded the relays.'

'Just like the others. We have to pull back.' Hanson's first officer snapped.

'No! That's exactly what they want. To give them more space, to split us up and take our ships out one at a time.' The Borg's opening salvo of the same strange energy weapon had devastated the shields of most of the fleet, Hanson had made the mistake of ordering them to pull back and repair. That gave the immense Cube the chance it needed to outmanoeuvre his fleet. He wasn't going to fall for it again.

'Sir, without shields we have no defences, those tractor beams will rip us apart.' That was the nightmare they were faced with and Hanson knew it all too well.

'No choice, we have to stop the Borg here. If we fall the Sol system doesn't stand a chance.' Only a day or so earlier one of his closest friends and one of the best captain's of the fleet Jean-Luc Picard had been captured by the Borg. From the reports of the Enterprise, his ship, Picard had been changed by the enemy. Converted, somehow, into one of them, all his tactical and fleet knowledge twisted against everything both him and Hanson stood for.

Hanson had to out think his enemy, his old friend. If he was honest he wasn't sure if he had it in him. Staring through the view screen at the monolithic spacecraft he realised he only had one play left. A desperate gamble that it would work and buy enough time for what was left of his fleet to either escape or finish the fight.

The Admiral tapped into the ships intercom on his arm rest, realising he was about to give what was going to be his last order. 'All hands to the escape pods, abandon ship.' Flicking the control from internal to external he haled the fleet. 'This is Hanson, all ships break off. Prepare for warp core breach. I say again, pull back. My ships core is about to breach.'

For a moment his crew looked at him. Breaching a ship's warp core was a desperate move. To try to destroy the Cube with the Matter-Antimatter explosion was literally suicide, but it would take out the Cube. Even if the Borg caught the Kyushu with a tractor beam enough of their ship would be in the blast radius to disable it.

Hanson's first officer nodded soberly, saluted crisply just before agreeing. 'You heard the order, everyone to the escape pods.' but he didn't move.

'Mike…'

'With respect sir there should always be at least two officers on the bridge at all times.'

Hanson let himself smile. 'I was quoting the regulations to my superiors before you graduated the academy Mike. Alright, anyone who wants to stay, stay and be damned.'

No one moved.

'I don't think I could ask for a finer crew, or better friends. Thank you all.' Hanson told them. 'Set course for the Cube and prepare to launch the escape pods.'

'Admiral!' T'Lau shouted. 'We have sensor contact, incoming now!'

'The Enterprise?' Hanson asked, hoping the Federation flagship had repaired its damage and joined them.

The Vulcan hadn't looked away from her console, 'Sorry Admiral. The displacement profile is too big'

'Another Cube?' his executive officer gasped, voicing Hanson's own fears.

'No, the energy signature doesn't look anything like I've seen before. Bringing it onscreen.' The view screen rippled and Hanson almost swallowed his tongue. It was huge, dull grey and totally alien. He'd never seen anything like it, the main hull was an immense wedge with a wide flat point at the front, it narrowed off slightly in the middle before widening to the raised engines at the back. You could easily fit the entire Kyushu in that engine section, with room to spare. Either side of the narrow section was what looked like a pair of oversized turned down warp nacelles. The titanic craft seemed to glide past the fleet effortlessly, changing pitch and yaw to almost dance between ships wreckage. A ship that size had no right to manoeuvre like that.

For a moment Hanson thought it was showing off but as the newcomer got between the Cube and the swarm of escape pods he recognised the tactic. It was protecting them. The Borg saw what it was doing about the same time he did and began to fire on the unknown with more phased polaron pulses. The green energy spattered harmlessly on the dull grey ship. The shots, designed to disrupt complicated energy shields, were absorbed by it's hull, shrugged off and ignored.

Then the strange ship returned fire from multiple points, its own energy weapons bypassing the Borg's adaptive shields and causing damage where Federation phasers couldn't. 'T'Lau?' Hanson asked

She knew the question. 'High energy plasma weapons Admiral. Primitive compared to our own, but the shear output is impressive.' She was right, even from here Hanson could see the weapons causing small fires on the Cube's superstructure. The Borg responded with a tractor beam. The sparkling green energy field captured a small portion of the attacking ship. The massive engines flared and the beam struggled to fight against the intense power of those thrusters. A second and a third tractor beam lanced out, trying to get a better grip, but they did very little to stop the oncoming vessel as it orientated it's nose straight at it's target.

The giant ship was in position to fire it's main weapon and did so spectacularly. An orange beam of destruction unlike anything Hanson had seen before came from the ships prow and hit the Cube. 'My god.' the Admiral whispered breathlessly. The single blast had obliterated nearly a quarter of the Borg ship, taking out the whole lower port section and then some. Great gouts of atmosphere emptied into the vacuum of space from the gruesome wound, sending debris and scores of drones tumbling into the airless void.

A second blast came from that mighty weapon, punishing the already stricken Cube. This one seemed to be even more devastating, igniting secondary explosions that seemed to ripple under the Cube's superstructure as countless conduits and other systems detonated. 'T'Lau, report on the Cube's status.' Hanson ordered, fairly sure he already knew the answer.

The Operations officer was, if anything, greener than usual. 'Reading minimum power reserves from the Cube. Dwindling life signs. No subspace transmissions. They're dead in Space Admiral.'

'Our best analysis suggested a ship like that could operate with almost eighty percent critical damage. Check again.'

'I have sir. Reading ninety-two percent critical damage.' It was all Hanson could do to gape at her. The Cube truly was dead in space, like any number of Federation ships that had been destroyed. The amount of destructive power that had just been demonstrated was terrifying. Swallowing his fear the admiral turned to T'Lau. 'Hail that ship Commander. Let's meet the people that just saved our backsides.'

End teaser

Authors note

Okay I don't want ANYONE complaining about the Galactica being over powered here. I've done the math and Starfleet just doesn't have the firepower to match a Battlestar. Do you want to hear it? Good.

According to the Star Trek Wiki a Galaxy Class ship (the most powerful in the Federation at the time of Wolf 359) has eleven type eight phaser banks at any given time. A classic Battlestar has 32 heavy "turbo laser" turrets, each paired with a lighter anti-fighter turret above. That gives it nearly a 6 to 1 advantage over the Galaxy class on the number of support weapons alone.

While the Galaxy has an arsenal of torpedoes at their disposal the Galactica has a number of large Solonite missiles, each capable of destroying Cylon Basestar in a single hit and there is the front mega-lasers. Those things that devastated the Cube. Those are the Battlestar's main weapons and as well as being made to destroy heavy command ships with a single salvo they have another trick, they can be used to project a protective screen over the entire hemisphere of a decent sized planet. Photon torpedoes might be all well and good, but they aren't a match for weapons capable of cracking planets

Now the Trek fan will pull out the quote about lasers not being powerful enough to penetrate the shields, or the modified torpedo in voyager that wouldd destroy a planetoid. I'll go along with both statements, one problem though. Phasers are effective because they are particle beam weapons. It is said in the Galactica Pilot movie that their fighters are armed with "plasma torpedoes" when they fire their standard weapons. Colonial "laser" technology is not just a upgraded laser pointer, but instead plasma based energy weapons. In the Best of Both Worlds episodes it is mentioned that starfleet is working on a Plasma based Phaser.

Now you could argue that continuity wise that shouldn't count because it's never mentioned again. Neither is the ineffectuality of lasers, or that magic Torpedo. Sorry, but anyway you cut this the Galactica overpowers Star Trek.

Enough about that, if people like this idea I might come back and see where the story goes. If not then I'll slink back to my other stories with my tail between my legs.

Thomas