(Following "Relic" ...)
Anij saw the astonishment on the faces of Lee Carter and Garek Loran at what they were seeing. The true nature of the town meeting hall was a well-kept secret. The older Ba'ku all knew about it, of course, but the younger generation, those like Artim, did not.
She spread her arms to take in the surroundings and addressed the two offlanders, "This is our last starship. Hopefully it will suffice?"
Carter recovered enough to mutter, "We had no idea you still possessed this level of technology."
Anij smiled. She pointed to another doorway and said to Garek, "The engines are that way, Commander."
Garek eagerly trotted off to find out what the Ba'ku used for a warp core, leaving Carter and Anij alone on the bridge. Anij turned to Carter and said, "We've maintained this vessel in the eventuality we might need it, but no one among us remembers how to operate it. Would you do the honors, Commander?" Anij pointed to the seat in front of the pilot's console.
Considering that the Son'a ship closing on them was less than five minutes away, and that the Arizona wouldn't be in range for twenty, Carter felt she had little choice. Still, she felt a tingle of excitement as she maneuvered to the proffered seat and took the controls. Surprisingly, they weren't that different from typical Federation helm controls.
"We have little time to lose," said Anij as she seated herself at one of the consoles behind Carter. The stakes were even higher for her than they were for Carter. If the Son'a succeeded in destroying the Ba'ku village like they planned, it wouldn't be Carter who'd lose her home and family.
"Right," said Carter. She held her breath in hopes that she'd figured out the controls correctly, and pressed a combination of buttons. From somewhere deep beneath her, in the bowels of the ancient Ba'ku ship, sleeping fires kindled and awoke the slumbering dragon that was her engine. The walls began vibrating, and as the pitch of the engine rose, began rattling.
Outside, the Ba'ku villagers that had been near their meeting hall made a hasty retreat. After having rested here for centuries disguised as normal building, their last starship was taking flight again. Plaster facades crumbled and fell away, clinging vines and shrubbery were torn from the ground as the massive structure gained altitude. Raining dirt and shredded masonry beneath it, the Ba'ku ship lifted above the rooftops of the surrounding buildings. Once clear, it rotated on its yaw axis, and then shot away skyward.
In the control room, Carter was growing more confident with the alien controls with each passing second. On the right side of the panel, indicators began flashing and beeping. "I have the Son'a ship on sensors," she announced. A few more button pushes and the Ba'ku ship's shields went up, but when Carter read the gauges, her alarm returned anew.
She turned in her seat to face Anij and exclaimed, "These shields are a simple electrostatic bubble! A hand-phaser could penetrate them!"
Anij shrugged and explained, "The technology is a few hundred years out-of-date...."
"Carter scowled and muttered, "Swell," as she turned back to her controls. "Let's see what other surprises this ship has in store for me...." After taking a swift inventory and consulting with Garek down in the engine room, a few other 'surprises' became evident, the most grievous of which was the nature of the ship's weapons.
There was no time to fix things though, for the Son'a ship was upon them. The Ba'ku ship had climbed above the planet's atmosphere just moments before, and now Carter turned it to face the enemy. She had a desperate plan, but she felt it was their only chance.
The Son'a were still heading straight for the Ba'ku village -- apparently they had decided that the ancient Ba'ku vessel rising to meet them posed no threat, and that's exactly what Carter wanted them to think. She moved her ship as close to the path of the onrushing Son'a warship as she dared, and as the massive crescent-shaped craft roared by, she pivotted the relatively small Ba'ku vessel around and put the next phase of her plan into action.
A large hatch in the underbelly of the Ba'ku ship sprang open, and a long, cylindrical object dropped out. A split second later, the tail end ignited and the missile shot forward toward its target.
Even the primitive guidance system aboard the missile could track a target as large as a Son'a warship, so Carter was confident she'd score a hit. The trouble was, even the large thermonuclear explosion the missile's warhead would cause wouldn't be enough to do significant damage.
The time for theories was over however, as the nuclear missile closed the last few dozen yards to its target and vanish in a rapidly expanding sphere of primal energy. Inside the Ba'ku ship, Carter and Anij had to avert their eyes from the main viewer to keep from going blind. The blast expanded to engulf both the Son'a and the Ba'ku ships, but the Ba'ku ship was protected by its primitive electrostatic bubble. The Son'a ship however, vulnerable to this kind of radiation, sparked and sputtered at the center of a charged particle maelstrom. After a few tortuous seconds, it lost all power: the lights in the portholes went out, warp coils darkened, thrusters went silent, and the ship began to gyrate gently, out of control.
Carter's plan had worked! While not enough to destroy the ship, the atomic explosion's electromagnetic pulse had totally disrupted its electronic systems. Nothing would function aboard the ship until her crew could reboot her systems. Hopefully, that would be enough time for the rest of Carter's plan to work out.
She cast a nervous glance at the chronometer on the console before her. It was going to be close. Just in case, she positioned her ship to intercept the Son'a before they could reach the Ba'ku village if they managed to restart their ship ahead of schedule. They had only one more thermonuclear warhead left, and she figured that, plus the exploding warp core of her ship would be just about enough to take out the Son'a before they completed their horrific plan of genocide.
The chronometer beeped. Time was up. Right on schedule, the Son'a ship on the view screen began to re-light. Swiftly, it's spinning stopped, and it came to rest in a position directly facing the Ba'ku vessel.
Carter quickly called down to engineering and told Garek to get ready to blow up the engines, and he replied wryly that he was doing all he could to keep them from blowing up. Despite the grimness of the situation, Carter smiled at Garek's ever-irreverent attitude. She looked over to Anij, who had been silently sitting at her console through all this, and who now nodded in silent approval of Carter's plan. They'd be killed, but her people would survive.
The console in front of Carter beeped. The displays showed that the Son'a ship was powering up it's weapons. Without modern shields, Carter knew they wouldn't survive even the first attack. It was now or never. She took a deep breath, and her hands reached toward the controls that would engage the suicide run against the Son'a vessel.
Just then, a huge silver shape flashed across the main view screen and a triumphant war-whoop blared from the speakers. Carter jerked her hands back. Multiple lances of energy connected the distance between the silver shape and the Son'a vessel, and small explosions sprouted on the Son'a ship wherever the beams touched.
As Carter's brain caught up with what here eyes were seeing, she realized that the silver shape was the Arizona, arrived just in the nick of time to take out the Son'a ship. Her actions with the nuclear missiles had delayed the Son'a just long enough to make that possible. The war-whoop had been Jo's, apparently at the helm of the Arizona.
She continued watching the Arizona on the screen. It latched a tractor beam onto the crippled Son'a vessel and began towing it away.
Carter turned back to her console and set in a course back to the Ba'ku village. The ancient starship would once again rest among the quiet buildings of the town, covered in ivy, awaiting the next time it would be needed. She looked back at Anij and saw that she was smiling. Disaster had been averted, and no lives had been lost.