Ship of the Line Page 4

They had expected a clear path. The Klingon main fleet had notified them that all known Starfleet ships were accounted for.

  “Mistakes!” Kozara roared. “Always a mistake stands between me and glory! How can this happen? A simple passage becomes an incident! There was supposed to be no ship here at all! Now I have to kill him!”

  “What is he doing here?” Gaylon asked. “Why is he here instead of with his fleet?”

  “He must have damage. One ship, one ship . . .” Pacing like an animal, Kozara thrashed back and forth before his command center, then went behind it and thrashed across the deck again. “We blank his communication, but only if we stay here . . . if we go on, he sends a message and we are compromised. How long to reach Starbase 12 . . .?”

  “Three full hours at warp factor five,” Gaylon reminded, though Kozara knew very well the distance and time.

  “. . . and only moments to communicate with Starfleet . . .”

  Kozara muttered and spat his words, some clear, others garbled, and Gaylon was careful not to interrupt his commander’s efforts to think clearly through the obvious anger boiling beneath. Blocked! By one small ship! The mission of the decade, and one border patroler had stumbled into their way.

  Truly Kozara’s fortunes were shortfallen. Gaylon glanced around at the bridge crew and saw roaring disappointment in their faces. If Kozara never saw glory, they never would either.

  Gaylon held out a hand to calm them, and hoped Kozara didn’t see.

  “He must be damaged,” Kozara said, glaring at the border patrol ship. Instantly dropping his rage for something more functional, Kozara reached past the tactical officer and clicked the sensor board for himself, scanning the bulldog’s ship. “Otherwise, why would he stay here when his fleet goes somewhere else?”

  The science officer shook his head. “But I read full power to all his systems, Commander.”

  “A lie,” Kozara said. “He would never linger here with such a threat in the next sector. His main drive must be crippled.”

  “Sir,” the tactical officer began, “he is moving to block our way.”

  “Is he using full impulse power?”

  “Yes, but his plasma flow is . . . reserved.”

  “Can we destroy him? Are our systems functioning?”

  “We are charging them now, Commander. Everything was inhibited for silent running, as you ordered. We did not expect a fight yet—”

  “I will get you the time to rig out of silence. Hurry.”

  All watched as the smaller ship swung slowly around to face them and climbed toward the SoSoy tuj’s flight path. Rusker nearly laughed, but some inner warning checked him.

  Because Kozara was not laughing.

  “Keep the communications blanket on,” the commander said, “but give me short-range subspace. I wish to speak to the dog.”

  “Morgan Bateson the dog. We stand again before each other.”

  “Kozara the butterfly . . . yes, we do. Sorry about your mother.”

  “It was her time to die.”

  “You’re wearing different clothing.”

  “Much larger clothing. I see that your little lights are flashing at me in the night.”

  Bateson’s eyes glittered and he nodded, even though there was no visual connection. “Well, we all have to do what we do best, Kozara.”

  Audio was barely working. The words crackled and snapped between the ships, just enough to hear each other. The Klingons were letting them talk, but just so far.

  “What are you doing here, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “We have catastrophic failure in our environmental control and an explosion in our lower deck flushed much of our plasma. We need assistance from a full starbase facility and request your merciful cooperation.”

  Bateson laughed out loud. “What a bag of bilge!”

  “You insult me.”

  “I don’t know who you talked into giving you that ship, but it must’ve been a scene to behold. You don’t really think I’m going to let you get anywhere near Starbase 12 with that bulldozer, do you?”

  As the captain spoke, Gabe Bush wedged his arms tight to his body and gripped his elbows and tried to keep them from shuddering. What a sorry display! He wasn’t as afraid as he was certain he must appear, yet the appearance bothered him more than his own mortality.

  “We have no unconventional weapons aboard,” Kozara’s voice crackled. “Only the usual disruptors, and I shall shut those down.”

  “Really?” Bateson said. “Kinda takes the starch out of an assault, doesn’t it?”

  There was silence, given a few snaps and fizzes, for many seconds. Then the comm cracked so loudly that half the bridge crew flinched.

  “Dog.”

  “Butterfly,” Bateson responded instantly, and glanced at Bush. “Enough shillyshallying.”

  Bush returned the glance, but had no idea what he was communicating to his commander. Support, probably. What else could there be? Doubts and fears were already spoken for.

  “It’s my intention to impound your ship,” Bateson announced.

  This lofty and ludicrous statement caused Bush to chuckle suddenly, and some of his nervousness broke down as he waited for Kozara’s reaction.

  A dull rippling sound sniggered across the impeded comm link, and surely they were hearing the amusement of the Klingon crew.

  Then Kozara spoke again. “You . . . in that . . . will detain me . . . in this?”

  “What choice do I have?” Bateson said. “It’s not like I’m towing a dungeon.”

  “Am I looking at a single cruiser a quarter the power of this warship?”

  “No,” Bateson said. “You are looking at a Starfleet Border Service Soyuz-class cutter, with the full authority of the Federation Division of Law Enforcement and the nerve to use it. Unless you turn around right now and head back through the Neutral Zone, I’ll have to hold you, your ship, and your crew in preventive custody. If you turn around, I’ll log the incident as a navigational error. That’s the deal.”

  While waiting again for the response, Bush slipped forward a step and tapped Andy Welch on the shoulder. When the helmsman looked at him, Bush whispered, “Plot evasive.”

  Had he whispered too loudly?

  Welch nodded and worked at his board, fumbled, rubbed the blood back into his fingers, then worked again. On the starboard side, Perry tiptoed—as much as a man of his girth could go on his toes—behind the captain and Bush, back to the main engineering console on the port side. Just to be ready.

  John Wolfe came to life suddenly. “Sir, I’m reading a firing solution!”

  Bateson snapped his fingers. “Evasive maneuvers, right now!”

  The deck dropped out from under them. Perry grabbed for balance, Dayton hunched his shoulders, and Welch leaned into the controls. Captain Bateson drew a breath and held it. Engines surged—and Gabe Bush sensed a slight buckling of the maneuver that should’ve been smooth. The Bozeman was struggling, but finding the power someplace. Unlike the men, the ship didn’t get nervous and would just swim like the reef shark she was.

  “No deal.”

  As the deck vibrated under their boots, Kozara’s voice gave its final snap over the inhibited comm, and the system went dead silent. Frustrated, Wizz Dayton rammed the palm of his hand into his console, then turned a scared-puppy look at Bush.

  No distress call. There was nothing to be done for that.

  “Work on intraship,” Bush snapped. “Keep it clear.”

  That would at least give Dayton something to do, and they did need to be able to speak—

  A sudden queasiness seized Bush by the stomach and shoved him to one side. He slammed into the bridge rail, then caught himself and cranked around to see smoke boiling down from the port-side upper monitor trunks.

  “Taking disruptor fire!” Eduardo Perry shouted. “Glancing hit, shield four! System’s stressed but holding.”

  It was the weakened side, where the ceiling had imploded before.

  At Bush
’s left, Bateson was gripping the command chair with both hands as the ship whined and tilted up on a nacelle to veer around a planet. “Lock it down. All right, boys, it’s time to dodge, spin, parry, and thrust. Brace yourselves and, Welch, make for the inside of the solar system, a good spanking pace!”

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  “Why should they follow us?” Lieutenant Dennis asked. “They’ve got to be reading the damage. All they have to do is keep going to Starbase 12. They must know we can’t stop them by—”

  “They don’t dare move on without killing us,” Bush supplied. “If they leave, the comm blanket lifts and we contact Starfleet, and their mission is compromised.”

  Wolfe didn’t look up from his board. “How do we avoid getting killed, then?”

  “Oh, we don’t,” Bateson admitted. “He’s going to kill us. But call me irresponsible—there are fifty thousand people whose lives are in our hands. Not to mention the crowing the Klingon Empire can do if Kozara succeeds. They have the edge on the next twenty-five years if we let him by. So keep dodging, Andy, till I think of something.”

  Looking troubled, Mike Dennis kept one hand on the mates’ console, but turned to the captain. “Sir, there’s got to be some way to negotiate with them or break the noise blackout. I didn’t come on board to get killed right away.”

  Bateson leaned on his chair and scratched his head as if nothing at all were happening, then stretched out that patronizing grin. “Really? What did you come on board for, Mike?”

  The captain’s musical voice worked on all who heard it. If anyone else thought to protest this action, the inclination dissolved.

  Bush thought of his fiancée at that moment as he watched this.

  Dennis stared at the captain for a few seconds, but neither flinched nor blushed. “I guess that’s what I came on board for, sir,” he said amiably. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just go right back over here.”

  The captain straightened up as the ship’s course rounded its curve and the compensators worked better. “John, quick, let’s see a schematic of this solar system.”

  Wolfe complied without a word, and above his science station three monitors flickered to life, but one of them immediately failed. The remaining two managed to show multidimensional representations of the lovely large solar system and its twenty planets, and their positions at this time of year. Several, six . . . seven, Bush could see, were clustered on the same side of the sun, within a few degrees of each other on the orbital plane.

  “There!” Bateson crossed to the rail. “That can work for us. Andy, I want you to look at that. Memorize it right now. As long as we keep Kozara from leaving the pie wedge right down the middle of those bodies, he’ll be planetlocked. He won’t be able to maneuver more than eighteen or twenty degrees either way with that waterlogged hog. Lead him right down the middle there, then veer on the Z-minus under that blue planet on the left.”

  Welch nodded and croaked, “Aye, sir,” just as another disruptor javelin made the whole ship choke and grate, laying a percussive thrum onto the bridge. John Wolfe pitched forward out of his seat. Bush also had to hang on, but Bateson kneed his command chair without really sitting and managed to hold position and keep his eyes on all the monitors. Deafened by a jangle from the starboard side and blinded by a flush of gouty smoke, Bush found himself momentarily confused. When he righted himself, he realized he was looking at a different monitor than when he went down. Where was the other one?

  And his head was spinning—had he knocked it on something?

  “Keep the pot boiling, boys,” Bateson called over the ship’s gulping of power. “They’re coming after us!”

  Chapter 4

  The forward screen kept a forward view, virtually a big window, giving Helmsman Welch a good look at where he was steering. So all they saw in front were planets swinging around nauseously. It was a port-side monitor, over the engineering station, that gave them the harrowing view from behind.

  The massive Klingon ship dipped its forward bridge bulb and came charging at them shooting streaks of energy that blistered the Bozeman and caused the cutter to stumble even without a direct hit. Shields were made of energy too and reacted to the proximity of the disruptor beams as if the Klingons’ shots creased the very space they were flying through.

  Gabe Bush felt every sizzle on his arm hairs as the cutter turned hot inside. Environmental control was breaking down with the strain of trying to outpace such a powerful pursuer. Systems stretched their limits, infighting until something shut down and something else got the surge of power, creating their own turbulence inside the Bozeman’s hull.

  In a turn that almost pulled the crew’s heads off, the cutter dodged under an asteroid belt and angled around a small dustball with a rocky core. The Klingon ship fell far behind, too heavylegged to effect so tight a turn. An instant’s victory, but there was no getting away from them without warp speed.

  Over the whine of straining impulse engines, Bateson called, “We’re getting gnawed. I’ll take suggestions, boys, while that ponderosity comes around! Klingons aren’t very imaginative. Any ideas for making use of that? After all, we’re the ‘best of the best,’ right?”

  “Might try a subspace burst in a sensor blind, sir!” Perry shouted.

  “What blind?” Bush asked. “We can’t stop long enough to establish—”

  Dennis cut him off. “We could go around the largest planet, then maybe change course to stay there long enough to use the planet as a block.”

  Bateson paused. “How long is long enough?”

  Suddenly on the hot seat, Dennis had to check his calculations before he spoke again; and before he could answer, the cutter was heaved on her nose by another disruptor hit somewhere on the saucer section.

  “Whoa, good shot!” Bateson looked at Bush and shook his head. “Don’t just stew, Gabe. Say ‘Holy Jerusalem’ and shoot back. You know you want to.”

  “Thank you!” Bush dived for the weapons control podium. His shout filled him with a hunger to return fire, and a shell came up and over his sense of humanity, one trait which did not serve well in a situation like this. Some things had to be jettisoned, and giving a damn about the enemy’s life was the first.

  Of course, that wasn’t so hard lately. Quickly he got off two bursts of phasers before Welch recovered control and plunged the ship downward on their flight plane.

  The ship squawked as the metal in her hull strained and her lesser systems suffocated. Flush-mounted hull plates grated like teeth as the whole ship stretched on one side and compressed on the other, and the braces all made groaning sounds.

  “Sir,” Dayton called over the noise, “we need nineteen seconds to broadcast a subspace message!”

  “Too long,” Bateson called back. “Keep the suggestions coming.”

  “Bridge, engineering! Joiner bulkheads in the storage areas are buckling, compromising the DP’s.”

  Clinging like a really big barnacle to the port side, Perry punched the nearest comm link. “Take a club to those joiners, Ham. Don’t let the plates break.”

  “My kinda answer. Mitch, where’s the sledgehammer! Ham out.”

  A blowtorch streaked across their main screen, so close that the bright light blinded the bridge crew for a moment. Andy Welch shielded his eyes and somehow kept piloting.

  “They’re on top of us!” Dennis shouted. “Nine-three degrees by seven-one. Make it seven-three. Closing—”

  The captain responded, “Veer off, starboard!”

  Skneereeech—

  Howling, the cutter scrolled off to the right, leaving the bulb keel of the Klingon to slug around stumpily after them, and open space to spew out between.

  Something about that open area of space . . . the Klingon ship grew momentarily smaller as it briefly fell behind and Bozeman was given the chance to hell-drive for the middle of the solar system’s wedge of planets.

  “We’re fishtailing,” Bush murmured. Had he really felt that? Were they losing control? Aski
ng too much of the already battered border patroler? Velocity seemed to peak even though there was open space before them for a good twenty seconds. They didn’t get twenty seconds more pitch-speed out of that maneuver. He felt the ship sag as if she were breathing hard.

  Open space—

  “Too straight, Andy!” Bush gulped then. “Take a nose-dive! Evasive, not a flat course! Don’t make us a target for a straight shot!”

  “Oh—right, right.” Welch shook himself out of his hypnotic trance from the planets racing past, and remembered to steer in and out between those planets instead of just past them.

  At this speed, chances of being caught in the gravity of one of those bodies was very real, Bush knew, and he worried about that. The planets were all sizes, and Welch could easily forget to give the larger ones more distance.

  Disruptor fire streaked past them every few seconds as the Klingon ship chased them, but the enemy couldn’t get a straight shot. Even the glancing blows, though, were rattling Bozeman’s shields, throwing the ship into paroxysmal stumbling. The plunges, dashes, braking, and climbs of this pointless course barely gave the gravitons a chance to adjust, and Bush felt his stomach being pulled in six directions.

  “Compensate like crazy, boys,” Captain Bateson uttered, not bothering to be specific.

  “Captain,” Bush spoke up, “what if we send a hardshell?”

  Bateson looked at him, probably thinking of the ten things wrong with that idea, but didn’t immediately dismiss the suggestion.

  “It’d never get out far enough or fast enough,” John Wolfe pointed out. “A comm hardshell’s only sublight speed—”

  “Maybe not to help us,” Bush said, “but maybe soon enough to help Starbase—”

  The ship slammed downward a good two feet and gave everyone that elevator-drop disorientation. Cymbal-crash ringing blasted from the bulkheads and ventilators. Caustic smoke belched from several positions at several levels around the bridge, and Bush knew the same thing was happening all over the ship.

  “Direct hit, sir!” Dennis called over the noise. “Deflector nine’s down, eight and seven are weakened by fifty-five percent each.”