Ship of the Line Read online

  “Captain,” he began, “at least take Data with you.”

  Picard put his hands on the back of the nearest chair. “Mr. Data is physically far stronger than any Cardassian or human and he’s quite obviously an android. He’d present the wrong kind of intimidation. However, I do intend to take some intimidation along with me. I’ve already contacted Captain Sisko at Deep Space 9. I’m going to stop off there and borrow Commander Worf.”

  “You’re trying to appear ‘neutral,’ ” Crusher challenged, “and you’re taking a Klingon into Cardassian space?”

  “I want a neutral ship,” Picard explained. “But this is not a neutral mission. I want it made perfectly clear that I don’t care how the Klingons and Cardassians feel about each other at the moment. They can’t tell Starfleet who to have in it.”

  “As long as you’re borrowing,” Riker asked, “why don’t you ‘borrow’ the Defiant too?”

  “No. No armed ships. No Starfleet presentations. I’m taking a privately owned vessel. I want no mistakes made about my intentions. The Cardassians will know exactly how to behave if they see a warship coming at them. If I bring a neutral vessel with a hired captain, someone other than myself, they’ll hesitate. And they’ll be paying attention to me instead of a phaser bank.”

  As he spoke, the captain went to a closet and removed an already packed and strapped suitcase and a Starfleet duffel bag. Obviously he was vacating these quarters and not intending to return.

  Riker found himself disturbed by the luggage, and he stared at it for a long time, even missing the captain’s first few words when Picard turned to them again.

  “Now, listen to me,” Picard said. “Morgan Bateson is a man with different priorities than you and I have ever known. No matter how much we may disapprove, he believes in himself more than in the structure of Starfleet. Captains of his time had to. You can learn something from a man like that. The Klingons have been quiet for nearly eighty years, but they’ve been a smoldering volcano. Now the top is blowing off. They’ve always been resource-poor, angry at having been contained by the Federation, and now they’ve found reasons to be our enemies again. Whether we like it or not, Morgan Bateson’s attitude about Klingons is back in fashion. He is the captain of the Enterprise now. I expect you to treat him accordingly. Mr. Riker, Counselor, you both report to Captain Bateson at eleven hundred. Doctor, get your things and report to Captain Reynolds aboard the merchant explorer Half Moon. Take whatever you may need for a rescue mission. We leave in an hour.”

  There was a storm brewing, without a doubt, and moreover a storm which had so long been foretold would be all the more violent when it did come.

  Ship of the Line

  Chapter 13

  Cardassia Prime

  “Madred Village”

  “Steve! Over here!”

  “Dan—there you are. I couldn’t find you.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Nah, fell into a crater. Took me a while to get out. Are the others protected?”

  “Under cover. Atherton’s got his crew over in the gym, and David and Jack got everybody else in here before the bombardment. They’re down in the basement. Y’know, m’friend, I think they’re really trying to kill us today.”

  “Same as yesterday. Why don’t you turn on that bartender charm of yours and talk them out of it.”

  “They’re trying harder today. You really made them quite mad when you blew up their amphibious unit.”

  “Couldn’t let them work the beach.”

  “Sure couldn’t. Do you think the Cardies are enjoying this?”

  “Hell, no, I think they’re dead serious. I don’t think they’re having any more fun than—”

  “Hey! Look! Somebody’s beaming in!”

  “Where?”

  “Right in the middle of the compound! Right dead center of the bombardment! Those bastards!”

  “Dan—stay here! Don’t go out there. Can you see who it is? Is it anybody we know?”

  “I can’t see very well . . . it’s a man . . . human . . . it’s Mark! Steve, it’s your brother! It’s Mark!”

  At the sound of his brother’s name, Lieutenant Steve McClellan dropped his commanding manner and plunged past Dan Leith, right out of the protective doorway of the building they were hiding in. The last thing he saw was a flash of Dan’s dusty blond hair and shocked face, too shocked even to shout a restraint.

  McClellan was twenty-six and had been doing the work of a fifty-year-old senior officer for months now, but suddenly he felt like a little boy again. Now he forgot all his training and plunged past Dan’s clutching hands and right out into the open, ignoring the plumes of explosive hitting the ground every few yards, every few seconds. Over the whine of salvos he shouted, “Mark! Mark! Mark!”

  In the middle of the shattered spaceport mall, his brother looked completely confused. As the transport process finished and the sparkles faded away, Mark McClellan was left vulnerable and disoriented.

  Damn, he looks exhausted—

  Salvos deployed from the distant hills drove into the pavement every few seconds, each preceded by a telltale whine. The whines were twisting together into one vibrating sound as the salvos came more and more quickly. Each hit blew up a cone of ejecta, sharp and lethal shrapnel, too fast to be dodged. Realizing that he must appear like some kind of wraith bursting through the gouts of smoke, Steve McClellan dodged toward his stunned brother.

  Mark looked like the wreck of their ship, exhausted and caved in, cheeks hollow, eyes weary and dazed, his wheat-brown hair dull and dirty. He was a ghost of the young officer he’d been when their ship had been wrecked, twelve . . . was it thirteen months now? Thirteen months, two weeks . . . what day was it? The eighth?

  The eighth of May. Mark’s birthday. Mark McClellan was barely twenty-four as Steve reached out for him through the sulfurous snarl of the nearest salvo. Relief and regret crashed through Steve’s chest at the same time. His brother was alive, able to see this birthday, but he was also here.

  “Steve?” Mark squinted in disbelief. Then, driven down by the impact of another salvo, he stumbled to one knee. A hundred yards away a water reservoir crashed to the dirt, spilling the rancid liquid inside. As the contaminated water spread, Mark turned and stared at it.

  Accustomed to running on the shuddering ground, Steve McClellan wrenched his brother to his feet and pulled him into a run, wondering if he himself looked as haggard as Mark did. Everybody always said they could’ve been twins. The McClellans had been quite a set on the Durant’s bridge, one lieutenant, one helmsman, both Starfleet, nice and snappy, looking so much alike—if Mark had made lieutenant before they got caught, nobody’d be able to tell them apart.

  But that hadn’t happened. Something else had.

  “In here, Steve!”

  That was Dan calling! But from a different location than the office doorway—Steve looked toward the sound, didn’t see anything, but angled his brother in that direction anyway. All around the running pair, the ground opened up every few feet under the deafening salvos. The bombardment had just started. They couldn’t count on its ending anytime soon.

  Steve pulled his brother into the flimsy protection of a billboard just in time to get a slap of debris across both their backs. Through a wince, Steve shouted, “Call out again! I lost you!”

  “Here! This way! Straight on! Come on, come on!”

  “Is that Dan?” Mark choked.

  “Get up! Run.”

  Gritty with chunks of cracked sidewalk and broken glass, the pavement damned their every stride. With their boots skidding, the brothers scratched around a corner. Steve reached to his side and kept Mark on his feet. They plunged toward Dan Leith’s call.

  There was Dan, looking like an illustration for one of those adventure South Sea holonovels that women liked. Even after all these months of stress and physical taxation, he still looked good, still blond, somehow still tanned. Just one of those lucky guys who were put together like some kind of stat
ue.

  A flash of movement caught his eye. Dan—waving frantically to them from inside a partially caved-in garage. How in hell had he gotten in there from the office building that shielded the rest of their crew?

  But it was a good move. The angle of the bombardment had changed. Dan had anticipated that, and found better cover.

  Steve tilted toward the garage, pushing Mark in front of him. Overhead a salvo screamed in from the hills, torturing their eardrums. Ten feet from the garage, Steve shoved Mark in one fierce final dive forward as the salvo blew a hole in the street behind them.

  The McClellans sprawled into the shadows together, and both fell headlong into the dimness, propelled the last few feet by the salvo’s hit outside the door. The impact blew down what was left of the front ceiling. Razor-edged steel panels, window glass, and shafts of reinforcement bar speared the entranceway and would’ve happily sliced the men in half if they’d been standing there.

  Instinctively shielding his brother from the blast and the hungry shrapnel, Steve twisted at the last moment. The move was a clumsy one. It did his brother no good, but Steve plowed full tilt into a steel tool chest with his right shoulder low. His head cleared the top of the chest, but his shoulder and hip collided with the thick metal crate. Pain bolted through his neck, his shoulder, and the right half of his body. A gray cloud swam before his eyes. Stunned and suddenly lightheaded, he rolled against the tool chest in a haze, then slipped to his side on the oily floor. Felt himself rolling. Had to keep his senses . . . had to stay conscious . . .

  Was his shoulder dislocated? If something happened to him—

  Pain was . . . stay conscious . . .

  “Steve!”

  Mark’s voice. And somebody was pulling him over.

  “Steve, you all right?”

  Shuddering through the daze that gripped him, Steve blinked into the gray cloud and saw dust . . . found the outline of Mark against the dimness. Two pairs of hands pulled him to an awkward sitting position.

  That was Mark right in front of him . . . right here, for real. Steve pulled his brother into a crushing embrace and rasped, “Thought you were dead!”

  Only half the words cracked out past the knots in his throat.

  “Thought you were too,” Mark responded against his ear. “Aw, Steve . . . what’s going on? Is this a Federation post or not? Who’s bombing us?”

  The embrace almost made Steve pass out from pain and relief. His brother had him around the bad shoulder and the gray cloud was pounding at the insides of his skull. Not that he much cared.

  “The Cardassians, who else?” A cloud of dust took form beside them out of the crumbling rubble. It was Dan. That tightened British-empire accent put a stylish mockery on his words. “You men are making me cry. I’ll get tears all over my tidy uniform.”

  Mark McClellan looked around as Dan crouched next to him. “Leith . . . you could be run through a curtain press and you still wouldn’t be tidy.”

  Dan Leith cracked his photogenic smile through the layer of soot on his cheeks. “This from one of the recruiting-poster brothers. Come here, young man. Are you real?”

  In spite of Dan’s wry complaint, there were joyous tears in his eyes as he coiled both arms around Mark McClellan and hugged him shamelessly. The three Starfleet officers, trained by the academy, officers of the fleet escort U.S.S. Durant, hardened by thirteen months’ captivity and torture, paused here in this smoldering metal-sided structure, clinging to each other like lost kids, and pretended for a moment that they were safe.

  Just for a moment. These moments were all they had to sustain them, brief flashes of hope when they found each other again, or survived a trauma they shouldn’t have. Rubbing his arm, Steve McClellan winced through the sharp bolts of pain and the unexpected emotions as his brother and their friend absorbed the fact that they were together again, all still alive.

  Dan Leith pulled Mark back and put his hands on both of Mark’s shoulders, the way a parent does to a child who’s just fallen down. “Are you hurt? Did the plasterfaced bastards hurt you any?”

  “They hurt me a lot,” Mark admitted. “It’s what they do. Where are we? I thought they’d dropped me in a Federation spaceport. Then the ground blew up around me. Is it a spaceport?”

  “It’s a fake spaceport,” Dan explained. “The Cardies built it. They’re making us live here and defend it.”

  “Fake? But there’s what’s left of a runabout right here in this garage!”

  “It’s got no engine, Mark. It’s fake.”

  “No engine . . .”

  “It’s a shell. Trust me, eh? I’m an engineer. If it could fly, I’d fly it. Steve? You all right, Steve?”

  Slowly coming out of his pain-inflicted fog and the shock of reunion with the brother he thought certainly was dead, Steve McClellan shifted his battered body. He leaned heavily on the bottom step of a stairway that led upward from where they crouched. Upward to nothing but a collapsed attic.

  He rubbed his face and let his eyes clear on the blessed vision of his brother crouched only inches away.

  “You all right?” Mark asked. Leaning away from a crawl of hot smoke from outside, he pulled Steve to a better position.

  With only an unconvincing nod, Steve fixed his eyes on his brother, afraid he might pass out and this would be another dream. Pressing a hand to the center of pain in the hollow of his shoulder, he bottled up his anger at the lost months, the lost crewmates.

  “They’re using us to train their spies and soldiers, Mark,” he sputtered. “They built a whole Federation spaceport to see what works and what doesn’t, so they can figure out how Federation people live and fight.”

  Dan Leith kneaded Steve’s injured arm and shoulder to keep the muscles from stiffening up. “What scares me is that this means enough to them that they do this.”

  “This whole complex is a prison of some kind?” Mark glanced around, then looked at the weapon attached into Steve’s belt. “But you’ve got a phaser!”

  “They gave us phasers and some other weapons,” Dan explained. His South African accent somehow made his explanation sound efficient. “They want to be able to fight us for real. But we’re on a moon. Everybody comes and leaves by transporter, as did you. Even the Cardie teams who come to fight us. No vessel ever lands here, thus there’s nothing to hijack. We can’t leave.”

  Mark peered out a crack in the crumpled sheeting that had once been the solid side of the garage. “But there’s a merchantfleet recruiting office right over there! I can see houses . . . an apartment complex . . . a fueling station . . . stores, industrial supply, bicycle repair—”

  “There’s everything,” Dan cut off. “There’s even a dog-clipping shop. The plumbing works, thank God, so we can remain civilized, and the lights, sometimes. It’s a textbook example of a functioning Madred Village.”

  Mark bolted around. “Madred? You mean, that dirty arrogant spawn of a reptile had something to do with this place?”

  “These villages are his specialty,” Steve said through a cough. “This place is a tapestry of little details he got from people like us who he tortured over the years. There are rumors that he’s got Madred Villages for Romulans and Klingons too. The Cardassians are preparing to go to war with everybody.”

  “Who’s shelling us, then?”

  “A Cardie assault team up in those hills,” Dan said. “Been here about . . . isn’t it six weeks now, Steve?”

  Grasping his brother’s arm, Steve crushed down a wave of nausea and asked, “Where’ve they had you all these months?”

  Mark patted his brother’s hand to reassure him. “A work camp. Sometimes in a cell, if the weather was bad. Once in a while they’d pull one of us out and treat us to the zapper.”

  “Damn them all . . .” Steve felt his face crumple at the idea. They all knew about the insidious subcutaneous torture devices that could make the pain in his shoulder and hip right now seem like a brush with a feather duster. He’d promised his parents that he’
d take care of Mark. Now this.

  Forcing himself to think about something else, he asked, “How many other prisoners did you see?”

  “Most of our crew disappeared eventually, like you did,” Mark said. “Ensigns Seneca, Webb, Yeoman Kelly, Ensign Rankin . . . Lieutenant Barth, Lieutenant Garland, Annie Cole . . . about nineteen of us were together in the same cell block, but never in the same cells. When they had us in a work camp, we weren’t allowed to talk much, but at least we could see each other. There were others there too. A couple of Maquis, some merchant spacefarers and their captain, and even a couple of Romulans. Then they started disappearing.”

  “We know.” Dan comforted Mark. “Some of them ended up here. We’ll have to compare notes and see who’s still alive. The merchant captain’s name is Brent Atherton, I’ll bet?”

  “Right, Atherton! You mean he’s here?”

  “Yes, along with some of his crew still alive,” Dan said. “A dandy resourceful one, kept us going many times.”

  “Sure has,” Steve agreed. “Out of our crew, we’ve still got Jack Seneca, David Rankin, Sarah Stockdale, Wattanakul—a handful of others who showed up, one every couple of weeks. Not everybody has survived, though, Mark. Cole and Webb, Kelly . . . Barth, Garland—”

  “They’re dead?” Mark murmured.

  “We’ve killed Cardies too,” Jack established. “They’ve killed some of ours, but we’ve done in a fair few of them as well. It’s not a game. Sometimes we’re the defenders. Sometimes we have to be the aggressors. Every few weeks, a new scenario, some new thing they want to learn from us.”

  “All this,” Mark gulped, “so they can figure out how humans think?”

  “How we think,” Steve said, “how we fight, what makes us flinch, what doesn’t, how much we’ll protect each other, do we protect friends more than strangers—” Dry heat from the shelling outside baked the moisture out of his body as he spoke. He felt strangely cold. “But . . . at least . . . at least we get the illusion of fighting for our lives.”

  Dan put a hand on Steve’s knee—a gesture of solace for that tone of voice. “Now and then the Cardies throw somebody fresh into the pot to see if anything changes.”