Before you all judge me too harshly for the following story, be honest--haven't some of you ever wondered what might happen in an encounter like this?

Star ???: The Andrasta Maneuvers

In 2266 the United Federation starships Constitution, Constellation, Enterprise, and Essex arrived at the uninhabited Andrasta system to perform a series of training maneuvers. After landing their respective marine detachments on Andrasta II, they gathered in orbit around the planet and prepared for the next stage of operations. It was at that point that they observed a large vessel from a previously uncontacted civilization emerging from hiding on the dark side of Andrasta II’s moon. The following excerpt from Mary Sue Tiu’s Five-Year Mission: What Really Happened Aboard Starship Enterprise describes the discovery by members of the squadron that they were not alone….

Even at this distance we could tell that the new vessel that we saw on our screens was huge. It had a triangular shape quite unlike anything we’d ever seen before. We didn’t want to believe at first that we were seeing what we saw. Kirk spoke for several of us on the bridge when he grasped at straws by wondering aloud whether perhaps the object was some bizarrely-shaped minor moon that had somehow hitherto escaped our notice. An instant later the image refreshed to provide slightly more detail. We could see then that the rapidly-approaching triangle could not possibly be natural. “It is evident, Captain,” said First Officer Spock, “that that is no moon.”

Kirk immediately ordered Ensign Chekhov to call the crew to battle stations—and to inform them that this was not a part of the scheduled maneuvers. I’ve seen published accounts quoting him as saying something along the lines of: “Battle stations! This is not drill!” In fact I and others who were there distinctly recall Ensign Chekhov employing an expletive in place of the word “drill.” Given the startling nature of the situation, nobody blamed him for that minor lapse in professionalism.

As I assumed my own action station, I heard Lt. Sulu announcing the appearance of additional sensor contacts. They were smaller than the original unidentified object, and faster-moving. The interloper was launching something that looked very much like a swarm of tactical strike craft. There were some twenty-four of them in all. As they approached, they divided into four groups to attack all four members of our squadron simultaneously. Six of them came at Enterprise.

Little more than five minutes passed between the initial sighting of the mother ship and the first contact between the enemy and our squadron. The enemy strike craft swarmed us, delivering a startling volume of fire for such small craft. Though our shields successfully absorbed all the energy that they poured into us, sufficient excess electromagnetic pulse got through to short out several circuits and create feedback at some of our stations. Mine was one of them. The sparks that seemed to explode into my face were a good deal less spectacular and damaging than what one tends to see in vid-show depictions of space combat. But I can tell you that for somebody on the receiving end in real life they were quite terrifying enough!

As I tried to bring my disrupted station back online, a tremendous thump struck the ship. I felt my feet leave the deck. For a moment I thought we had lost artificial gravity. Fortunately it was only a blip in the artificial-G field. I nearly lost my footing when my feet slammed back down.

Within the space of less than two minutes we had destroyed three of the attacking strike craft. One of these had slammed right into our lower hull at combat speed. Small wonder we felt the impact all over the ship! The physical impact was sufficient to effect a hull breech in Compartment 18-C. The compartment’s occupants, Specialists Tomlinson and Watkins, were blown out into space. Their remains were never recovered. Several other crew members in adjacent compartments sustained injuries of varying degrees of severity.

Constellation sustained considerably more severe damage. A similar hit by an out-of-control attacking craft tore completely through the rim of Constellation’s primary hull. The ship had sixteen killed and at least as many more seriously injured. The rest of the squadron suffered no casualties or major damage.

Between us we had destroyed eleven of the twenty-four attacking craft. The survivors, their limited munitions presumably expended, retreated to the mother ship. The entire action, from first sighting of the mother ship to the disengagement of the last attacker, had taken barely ten minutes. The mother ship recovered its surviving strike craft and did not take further offensive action.

We were left to repair the damage, care for the wounded, and take stock of our situation. The realization that we had just encountered an unknown and hostile spacefaring civilization was a disturbing one. Our new enemy clearly had sufficiently advanced technology to make them dangerous. The extent of the potential threat became more apparent as we processed the data collected by our instruments during the encounter.

We were startled in particular by the twin ion engine signatures that we had read off of each of the tactical strike craft. Ion propulsion units’ economical use of reaction mass makes them useful for sub-light-speed work. However, the immense energy needed to create even a modest thrust with such a system limits their employment to applications where a long, gradual thrust is adequate. They are not suited for the brief, powerful bursts needed in tactical maneuvering situations. To produce ion units with the kind of performance readings we received, the enemy must have had some phenomenally compact and powerful energy units. We wondered what further nasty surprises they might have in store for us.

As it happened, our marine detachments on the ground were even then in the process of finding this out for themselves.

We learned afterward that our marines had set up within four hundred kilometers of the enemy’s planet-side base. The coincidence was not quite as extraordinary as it might have seemed. Andrasta II has very limited land mass that is even marginally inhabitable. The enemy had evidently used several of the same criteria in choosing where to set up on the ground as we had. So it was that our ground units came to be within feasible striking distance of theirs.

Their assault force took two days, traveling by night under sophisticated anti-detection shielding, to get close to ours. They coordinated their space and ground attacks to occur almost simultaneously in the early morning hours for the troops on the ground. We still don’t know how their space and ground units got into contact with each other without our noticing. The leading theories are that they had either some sort of cloaked shuttle craft, or employed encrypted signals disguised as random natural electromagnetic background noise.

At any rate, the assault took our marines by surprise. They saw them coming using ground-based sensors—the ships in orbit could not, of course, supply them with any useful recce while under attack from space—barely in time to assume a viable defensive stance. Our marines were both outnumbered and outgunned.

The enemy had a particular advantage in terms of fighting vehicles. Our marines had only minimal ground transport, with no proper combat vehicles at all. The enemy had five armored fighting vehicles as powerful as anything in the Federation’s inventory. They also possessed two bizarre, bipedal “walker” all-terrain vehicles. The five AFVs and the bulk of their personnel were deployed against our center. The walkers and smaller infantry assault parties conducted diversionary attacks against our flanks.

Enterprise’s marine detachment was on the left flank of our improvised defensive line. Our heavy weapons sections grenade launchers and heavy Tactical Fire Augmentation System blasters should have had sufficient firepower to destroy the attacking walker in the initial exchange of fire. Unfortunately the section’s personnel were mostly recent replacements for the losses that the detachment had already suffered. Their inexperience, along with what must have been a remarkably adept crew aboard the walker, enabled the walker to take out all of our TAFAS and launchers within a few moments. The attacking walker suffered only a glancing hit that did little damage in return.

It was at this point that Gunnery Sergeant Ron Galloway performed the feat for which he became famous. Finding himself near a TAFAS that had been knocked off of its tripod mount, he hefted the thirty-five-plus-kilo weapon—recall that Andrasta II has a gravity of 1.07 standard G—and opened fire. His second shot struck the enemy walker squarely in the center mass and went all the way through the lightly-armored vehicle. Its momentum carried it forward for two or three steps, like a charging animal struck dead in mid-stride, before it collapsed, practically at Galloway’s feet.

Gunny Galloway’s extraordinary action undoubtedly saved a number of lives. He was very properly decorated afterward. Marines whom I’ve heard discuss what Galloway did are almost unanimous in declaring that he deserved a medal simply for firing a TAFAS blaster from the hip, let alone actually hitting anything with it.

Meanwhile the brunt of the enemy attack fell upon Constellation and Essex’s marine units in the center. Their more seasoned heavy weapons sections had a small number of Grenades, Fuel-Air on hand, and they made these extra-powerful munitions count. Their carefully placed GFAs and TAFAS shots did great damage to the enemy’s armor. The enemy lost three out of five AFVs. The remaining AFVs retreated, along with the surviving infantry. Constitution’s marines on the right flank also made short work of the walker that attacked them.

In all, the enemy lost twenty-three dead and thirty-seven prisoners, almost all of them seriously wounded. Our marine casualties were fifteen dead or fatally injured and thirty-six wounded with varying degrees of severity. These included two dead—Privates Carlisle and Grant—and five wounded from Enterprise.

The four ships’ marine detachments prevailed against an enemy boasting the advantages of surprise, superior heavy weaponry, and at least a two-to-one advantage in infantry numbers. Their infantry had weapons and equipment broadly similar in type and capacity to those of our fully combat-equipped marines. The enemy marines were inferior to ours in one respect. Survivors of the Andrasta II ground battle invariably derided the enemy infantry’s marksmanship.

The dead and prisoners recovered after the battle were virtually identical to Terrans. They even had a similar variety of phenotypes and pigmentations. This similarity in biology was most fortunate, in that it greatly facilitated treatment of the enemy wounded.

Most of the prisoners appeared grateful and relieved at the humane treatment that they received. Several of the more cooperative individuals were shuttled to Constitution and put to work with linguistics experts in the squadron. With the prisoners’ cooperation, and the aid of sophisticated linguistics software, our experts were able to establish a rudimentary level of communication within a few weeks. Communications officers Uhura, McGivers, and I were chosen to represent Enterprise in this effort.

During this period the enemy mother ship remained in orbit around Andrasta II’s moon. We learned later that the ship was not only a carrier vessel. It possessed sufficient firepower and shielding to make a fair match for all four of our squadron’s ships in its own right. But it made no further hostile moves. Evidently its commander did not feel that the initial surprise attack had softened us up sufficiently to hazard the entire vessel.

A few days after the twin battles, we began broadcasting standard first-contact imagery and sound signals. We then persuaded two of our prisoners to broadcast a video statement to the effect that they were alive and had been treated well. After that the mother ship began sending signals in reply. Deciding that the visitors were likely to offer no further hostilities, we dispatched the damaged Constellation to Starbase 5 for repairs.

The mutual exchange of signals greatly facilitated the development of our ability to understand one another. At last we were able to learn what it was that had brought the interlopers to the Andrasta system. They stated that they had been fighting an interstellar war with an alliance of enemies. During combat operations they had attempted to warp, and had fallen into some sort of temporal-spatial anomaly. We were never able to communicate fluently enough to understand what, exactly, they had encountered. Essentially it seems to have been some sort of unstable wormhole phenomenon.

The wormhole had moved them far away from home indeed. As best we (and they) could determine, they were from the Triangulum Galaxy—making them only the third contact with intergalactic visitors in Federation history, and the first from Triangulum. Their displacement had been temporal as well as spatial. Again, as best anybody could tell, they were from approximately nine centuries in our past.

On arriving in our time and space, they had made their way to the nearby uninhabited Andrasta system, and had gotten to work trying to figure out what to do next. In the meantime they set up a temporary base on Andrasta II to obtain needed raw materials. There they discovered the site of an abandoned Vulcan research station. Realizing from this that the system received visits from other spacefarers, they decided to make preparations for armed resistance, should that prove necessary.

When our squadron warped into the outer Andrasta system, about three months after their own arrival, the visitors ordered their ground base to conceal themselves during the several days it took us to regroup and move into ready sensor range in the inner part of the system. The mother ship concealed itself through the simple expedient of staying on the dark side of Andrasta II’s moon. Our squadron officers caught a lot of flak afterward for their failure to take the elementary step of sending sensor probes around the moon the moment we arrived in the vicinity. This was a most embarrassing lapse on their part, even granting that the scheduled military maneuvers had not yet begun when the enemy revealed themselves.

It is tragic that we did not detect the visitors earlier. We might then have initiated peaceful contact efforts. Instead, our sending down marine parties to the surface near the visitors’ own surface base, and our evident preparations for military maneuvers, convinced the mother ship’s commander that we planned hostilities. He made the tragic decision to attempt a first strike. While I, and most officers with whom I have spoken, do not agree with that decision, it is perhaps understandable in a commander experiencing the sort of stress that commander was under.

By the time we established firm communications we had been in orbit around Andrasta II for two months. The visitors had by now determined that there was a chance that in another six to eight months the anomaly would reappear. They informed us that they planned to warp into the anomaly in an effort to return to their own space and time.

We settled down to wait. During our wait the Federation sent major reinforcements to augment our modest cruiser squadron, including transports carrying substantial ground units. We now had a clear advantage in terms of firepower. The visitors, though understandably concerned, recognized the Federation’s desire to keep a watch on them during the remainder of their stay. We tried to allay their concerns by keeping the new units some way back from their mother ship. They remained close enough to prevent their getting far enough out from Andrasta’s sun to warp away unmolested.

Four months after first contact, Enterprise was instructed to proceed to Starbase 5 for its own needed repairs. McGivers was transferred to Constitution to continue liaison duties. Frankly, I envied her for getting away from Enterprise. That was the end of my involvement in the Andrasta affair.

Four months after our departure, the visitors announced to their watchers that they had seen evidence that the wormhole anomaly was about to recur. They were allowed to proceed to the region of space that they indicated. Federation vessels gave them a not-too-close escort to that point. From here the visitors warped away. Neither they nor any vessels that show any affinity with their technology have been encountered since.

We have no way of knowing whether they were successful in their attempt to return home. Indeed, we have no way of knowing for certain whether their story was true in the first place. There have of course been many conspiracy theories that purported to speak of their real aims. Official Federation policy states that they were most likely telling the truth. Certainly the manner in which they suddenly appeared deep inside Federation space, as if from out of nowhere, and left it, never to return in the decades since, suggests that this was the case.

During the months that I worked on liaison duty with the visitors at Andrasta, I spent a good deal of time interacting with one of my opposite numbers, one Lieutenant Akeda Wioza. While I can’t say that we became friends, exactly, we did eventually feel comfortable enough in each other’s presence to exchange some personal information. I learned that she came from a system called Kessel; that her family and most of her friends were still there; that she hoped, assuming she survived her military service, to return to them.

Whether this would ever happen seemed doubtful. The visitors’ techs had calculated that they had better than a 95% chance of surviving a second passage through the anomaly, but little more than an even chance of actually being returned to their own approximate time and place. Even assuming they did, there was a strong chance that they would be a good twenty or thirty light years distant from where they started, and perhaps as much as thirty years or so in their own future. It was therefore likely that, even if they did return “home,” they found a situation quite different from what they had left.

As regrettable as the violent first contact and the resulting casualties were, most of us who were at Andrasta II found ourselves sympathizing with our interlopers. We have no way of knowing, of course, of the rights and wrongs of the war from which the anomaly had snatched them. But every spacefarer can identify with those who find themselves far from home, wondering whether they will ever see it again. We hope that they did somehow make it home, to a time long ago and a galaxy far away.

*applauds*