Episode 10: Duty, Honor & Sacrifice

Episode description:

Romulan forces threaten advancement towards Earth. Starfleet must find a way to stop them without the new NX fleet in service.








Outline:

After the destruction of the colony on Dellura, Starfleet is forced to play a rather limited hand. The construction on the 3 new NX ships is at a hurried pace, but still they are not ready yet. They are about two weeks away from launch.

Archer orders Trip to stay at the shipyard and do whatever is possible to get those ships going. Trip is not too happy as he wants to be part of the battle. Surprisingly T’Pol is somewhat happy since she thinks Trip will be safer there than in an uphill battle with the Romulans. Starfleet is paranoid of Romulans ships reaching Earth to destroy the ship yards.

The Romulans are building up an offensive force in the Xanive system and Starfleet decides to have the Enterprise lead a force that consists of some very old ships. Starfleet has done their best to retrofit the ships with some updated weapons and tech like transporters, but many of them still have some older nuclear armaments as well.

The Stiles 'C' plot will involve Captain Stiles. He is Cmdr Stiles (the Columbia's first officer) older brother and is Captain of one of those old ships. He is mad because Starfleet has made some pleas to the Vulcans for help and they said no, now his old ship and others are forced to fight a very uphill battle.

En route the crews of the older ships are very nervous and try to hold up as well as they can. Many of the fleet's crew were actually taken straight out of the academy as Starfleet did not have enough experienced officers to fill all the older ships that they were retrofitting. Archer gives an uplifting fleet wide speech (and reads a Zen Xi Tou poem to them) and challenges the crews of those ships to come up with inventive ways to defeat the enemy.

The ships engage in a big battle and a lot of Romulan ships are taken by surprise by some of the unconventional tactics of the Starfleet ships. The Enterprise takes a bit of damage and the warp drive is knocked out.

What's left of the fleet starts to cheer as it seems the Romulan ships are destroyed, and then four more Romulan ships come out of warp to wipe out the almost decimated Earth fleet. Virtually defenceless, Archer has run out of options. The four Romulan ships are closing in, and what's worse there are 2 more ships coming out of warp on the long range scanner heading towards the fleet as well........(yes, insert big cliffhanger here)