Ship of the Line Page 5

  “Not so bad,” Bateson grumbled. “See what you can do to shore them up. We’ll need our aft shields for those jawkickers. Keep talking about that hardshell. Everybody pitch in. Eduardo, take a breath and suck out some of this smoke, will you?”

  “Vents on double, sir.”

  “They’d see a hard comm marker in a second,” John Wolfe said.

  At the comm station, Dayton waved the smoke from his watering eyes. “They’d hear it too.”

  Dennis shook a burned hand and winced through the pain. “Is there some way we can launch one without having them see it?”

  Letting fly another two phaser shots to the exposed underside of the Klingon’s bridge bulb, Bush tossed in, “We’d need at least sixty seconds to get it out of the solar system.”

  “Or a terrific distraction,” Dennis added.

  Welch mopped sweat from his face. “Even at impulse, they’re still faster than we are. They just can’t turn as fast.”

  “Maybe we could blow up one of the smaller asteroids,” Perry choked out.

  “Take ten minutes,” Bush dismissed. “Don’t—” A hard surge upward drove him to one knee on the deck. From there he finished, “—have it.”

  From his stable seat, Bateson reached over and pulled Bush to his feet. “Can we rig a wide-range hardshell with thirty-minute broadcast delay?”

  “Can do,” Perry answered before Bush could speak up.

  Just as well—Bush would’ve been guessing.

  “Do it, please.”

  “Aye, sir,” Perry said.

  The captain paused as the cutter swaggered under another assault, then said, “Gabe, precautions.”

  “Right away, sir.”

  Good! Bush had been waiting for that. But he was manning the weapons console—a moment of bitter choice racked him before the captain himself stepped in and took over the weapons board.

  Without acknowledging that, Bush clawed his way to a starboard side comm to the lower decks and hoped Dayton had managed to hold back the Klingons’ comm blanket enough to be able to speak to the crew.

  “Attention, all hands,” Bush rasped through his smoke-raw throat. “Prepare to abandon ship. Now, boys, that’s not a command to abandon ship, but just prepare for it. Off watch, get the lifepods warmed up and running, check fuel and survival stocks. All hands, know which pod you’re assigned to. Stick close to your posts until further notice. Bridge out.” Swinging around to a technical ensign who was hurriedly closing the electrical trunk he’d been patching together, Bush snapped, “Ensign Nolan, take George Hill to a pod.”

  “Aye, sir!” The ensign scrambled along the deck without really getting to his feet and scooped George Hill’s squashy “head” and tentacles into his arms. The eighty-pound decapus obligingly climbed onto the ensign’s shoulder, coiled around his arm, his neck, his elbow, and one thigh, and turned dusty gray to match the utility suit, even getting a white ring around its “head” to match the suit’s collar. Thus encumbered, the ensign stumbled for the turbolift.

  “Gabe!”

  “Sir?”

  “I’ve got it!” Bateson slid out of his chair and prowled the helm. “I’ve got it. Andy, keep dodging. Gabe, listen to this. Mike, John, Eduardo, you too. I want to launch a hardshell probe into a sensor blind of some kind. A recorder marker at its highest sublight, but with a delayed broadcast timer of, say, half an hour. Once it’s a half hour away, it’ll send a distress beacon. We’ll have to send it without Kozara’s knowing, or he’ll chase it down and kill it. It has to be silent for thirty minutes. That means we have to stay alive that long and distract him from scanning the area.”

  “And once it’s gone,” Bush picked up, “even if we’re destroyed, Starfleet’ll be warned and be able to protect Starbase 12.”

  Snapping his fingers, Bateson crowed. “I like the way you think! Pack it with subspace broadcast on a delay. I want it to stay silent for half an hour, then scream its little ass off. Gabe, Andy, you keep us moving and distract Kozara for thirty minutes. That’s all I want, boys. If we live thirty minutes, I’ll die happy.”

  Bush drew a breath, nodded, and mourned, “And I’ll die unmarried.”

  Chapter 5

  “Hardshell launched! God help us he doesn’t see it go.”

  Gabriel Bush crossed his fingers, toes, most of his chest hair, and the tail of every fish he’d ever netted as he watched the tiny dot of the comm probe gloss off into space. Was the sensor blind wide enough? Had the cutter stayed on opposite sides of this big planet long enough, yet not so long that the Klingon could get here too soon? Would the probe be fast enough to get out of the solar system, and yet silent enough to remain undetected?

  Hang on, Ruby, we’ll have that wedding day yet . . .

  “Let’s veer out of the sensor blind and try to look innocent,” Captain Bateson said.

  The sensor blind was small indeed, simply a funnel-shaped piece of space starting small and widening into the far reaches. Into that little wedge they’d launched their hardshell comm probe.

  Now Andy Welch leaned into his controls and the cutter veered off, hoping the feint in another direction would distract the Klingon. Also, Bush was hoping that Kozara’s crew weren’t efficient enough to pay attention to outlying space while they had prey at their fingertips. Bateson had always said Klingons were like that, and now the cutter’s crew was betting on that assessment.

  How far away was another Starfleet ship? The comm hardshell would go like mad for half an hour, then start screaming for help from anyone who could hear it.

  “All we have to do now,” Captain Bateson said, “is distract Kozara for twenty-three more minutes. As long as we’re alive, he can’t move on even if he knows the probe went. After twenty-three minutes, if he kills us he still won’t have time to make it to the starbase before the Enterprise or somebody heads him off. You know how the merchant fleet is in these outskirts—they’ll move in and stand Kozara down themselves if they know to do it. Twenty-three minutes, boys. That’s the deal.”

  “He’s gaining, sir,” Dennis announced.

  Bush fitted together what was happening and decided to leave things as they were. Dennis was keeping tabs on the Klingon, Wolfe was monitoring the science station, Perry was keeping the engineering patched together, Welch steered for all he was worth, down in the lower decks Ham Hamilton and Mitch Trumbull were being Perry’s hands, and Bush himself was firing back at the Klingon.

  Firing. What a wish. Popping, more like. Spitting. Teasing. Against the shields of a full-sized warship, geared entirely for battle and absolutely nothing else, the cutter was only marking time, perhaps obscuring the Klingon’s view now and then with a shot, but not much else. And the cutter was taking hits despite Welch’s efforts to waggle around planets and between asteroids. This large solar system no longer seemed so large—not at these speeds.

  Another spasm pierced the shields and came down through the innards of the ship like a rupturing blister. The crew was hit with waves of energy looking for a place to dissipate. For a handful of seconds Bush was riveted to his seat, frozen, unable to speak or do more than move one hand as the other hand sizzled against the weapons controls. Too far—too far from the starboard quarter weapons array firing button—he saw the red button blinking ready ready ready.

  Just beyond his finger . . . just past his reach, and the jolt of the strike was still holding him down as if he were caught in a thunderbolt.

  Ready ready ready ready ready—

  The cutter veered hard under him. He felt the movement, and another second or two of the terrible seizure still kept him down. Then, abruptly, the ship tipped up on a wing so sharply that the artificial gravity slipped and Bush was thrown to the deck. On aching legs he scrambled up far enough to throw an arm over the weapons console and cram the heel of his hand into the red button.

  The whine of phasers broke again from the aft hull, and judging from Mike Dennis’s whoop of victory, scored a hit on the Klingon.

  Not a de
structive hit, but enough to gain a critical second or two, perhaps to get out of the line of fire again.

  “He’s pretty mad,” the captain grunted, coughing on a stream of smoke from the port side. “He didn’t expect us to be here. We wrecked his shining—”

  The cutter jolted suddenly, and the captain and Bush both stumbled. Welch came an inch out of his seat. “Guidance is slipping!”

  “What?” Bateson bolted toward him and was met at the helm by Bush.

  “Why would it slip?” Bush asked—what a question!

  The helmsman shook his sweaty head. “I don’t know, I don’t know! It’s internal, though, that’s for sure.”

  On the upper deck, Ed Perry rotated like a planet. “That can’t be an accident!”

  Bateson skewered him with a glare. “Can it be damage?”

  “Maybe. But I wouldn’t bet on that.”

  Straightening against the protests of his aching back and legs, Bush looked at the captain meaningfully. “End of the chase. He’ll chew us to scrap.”

  “Look for a hiding place, Andy,” Bateson ordered. “We can’t keep this up. What’s around?”

  Before them, the forward screen shuddered and swung as if it were hanging free, but that was only the movement of the ship around them, and all who remained on their feet were only doing so by hanging on hard to the consoles.

  Andy Welch’s jaw was actually dripping sweat now. “All these planets, three asteroid belts, all too thin, and over there is some kind of . . . cloud. Doesn’t look like anything that would hide us.”

  “Cloud? Let’s see it. Mag it.”

  “Full mag,” Dennis called from beneath a terrible crackle as something burned over his head.

  On the screen, through waves of acrid smoke and dust, a planet’s edge dissolved and was replaced by a hazy globular mass that didn’t look like anything but heat distortion. In fact, they could see another planet right through it. The smoke and dust inside the bridge here were far thicker.

  “Is it energy?” Bateson asked. “Is that a nebula?”

  “I don’t think it’s a nebula,” Dennis responded. “Some kind of energy. I’m getting some funny readings.”

  “How we doing on time?”

  “Nineteen minutes left, sir,” John Wolfe declared.

  With an internal groan, Bush leaned forward a little on Welch’s chair back—nineteen endless minutes.

  His stomach twisted. With guidance malfunctioning . . . what could make that happen? It had been working fine just before this encounter, so what could have gone wrong? Had something been shaken loose by one of the hits?

  No, there was nothing in that system to shake loose. He was grasping at answers for his own comfort, and failing.

  He looked over Welch’s head at Bateson. “Let’s go in.”

  “I think so too,” Bateson said. “Tell me why you do.”

  Shrugging one shoulder, Bush said, “If it disrupts us, maybe it’ll disrupt him too.”

  Bateson gave a quick nod. “Let’s go in. Time for some naviguessing. Gabe, give it a try.”

  “Alter course, one-one-four-zero, Andy.” Bush put his hand on Welch’s shuddering arm and was gratified when the shudder faded some and the helmsman leaned into his recalibrations. “You’ll have to do it manually and eyeball your course.”

  “I . . . know.” Poor Welch.

  “Full impulse,” Bush decided.

  Was that right? Did the captain want to reserve any power? No—that wouldn’t work. Bush glanced at Bateson, but the captain was looking at the screen. Right, full speed. On any straight course, the Klingon ship could come up out of an arch and shoot right down its nose at them. Speed and a tighter arch would be all that could help the cutter now. The speed they had.

  Without guidance working well, the arch was another matter.

  “Hold on, everybody,” the captain said. “Mike, John, help the helm. Ed, crack on all the speed you can. Andy, pilot with the thrusters if you have to. Everybody else just hang on. Hang on.”

  On the side screens, the Klingon ship with its greasy-green hull shone in the light of this system’s star, cast slightly yellowish as it passed out of the haze of the planet just left behind by the Bozeman. The warship dragged a tail of the haze along behind as it veered in an upward arch that couldn’t quite match the tightness of the cutter’s arch. The Klingon kept its disruptors griping angrily now that there was nothing between the two ships. Bush’s teeth were set on edge with every scratch and glance, but the enemy didn’t land a direct hit. Good thing, at this proximity, because one hit—

  Bush gripped the helm chair harder. On the forward screen, those disruptor javelins shot by, leaving a cymbal-ring to jar the cutter’s shields and vibrate through the ship.

  The “cloud” was hardly that at all. It barely registered on the eye, and only the enhancement on the helm screen allowed Bush to really understand they were heading toward more than a mirage. Something was there, all right—if only it held some kind of energy that might choke the Klingon’s weapons for a few more minutes, long enough for the hardshell to get far enough away. As for the Bozeman . . .

  Suicide mission. Bateson had called it right.

  Ruby’s funny face and chipmunk cheeks popped up in Bush’s mind. How teasing and quirkish she’d look in the bridal veil—poor girl, she’d wanted so much to be radiant. He had intended to tell her she was, and that someday they would have children just as radiant as she, cheeks and all.

  Even if the cloud helped, there would only be a few more minutes. He damned himself for not coming up with ideas. He was dependable, but not creative, competent but uninspired. At moments like this, he wanted to go get a Vulcan for his captain.

  “Entering the cloud,” John Wolfe reported, and tapped at his sparking console. “It’s some kind of localized distortion.”

  There was no sensation of entering anything, no bump or swish, no jolt, not even much of a change on the main screen. Perhaps there was nothing here at all, and it was just a mirage or some kind of sensor wash. It wasn’t as if they could open a window and stick a hand out.

  “We’re in,” Wolfe said. “It’s in flux . . . we’re losing power.”

  Welch gulped, “Captain, I’m losing thrust! Speed’s reducing!”

  On the upper deck, Perry shook his head. “Damn it! Pulse flow’s impeded. Must’ve been one of those aft hits. Main systems are losing power.”

  “We’re slowing down,” Welch whimpered.

  The bridge noises and the hum of the ship grew slower and weaker, like batteries running down to their last bit of charge.

  “He’ll be on us in two seconds,” Bateson mourned, and swung around to the port monitors to see the approach of Kozara’s warship.

  But those monitors were empty. Only stars.

  Mike Dennis had been leaning one hip against his mate’s board, but now pushed himself squarely around and bent forward over something on his panel. He didn’t look up. “Captain . . .”

  Bateson turned. “Yes, Mike?”

  Bush looked up there too, but Dennis shook his head, changed his controls, tried something else, and shook his head again. “John, you seeing this?” he asked.

  Wolfe frowned and double-checked what his co-new-guy was looking at.

  During that moment, Bush discovered one of the things about Captain Bateson that perplexed him so much—Bateson didn’t prod or demand answers, even though he had been summoned. He didn’t snap his fingers or climb to the upper deck to hustle the crew there into explanations they weren’t ready to give. He just waited. In the middle of all this, he found a few seconds to just wait and let his crew do their jobs.

  “Can’t be,” Wolfe uttered. “You got eighty-nine percent too?”

  “On almost everything,” Dennis answered.

  “Can’t be.”

  Bursting to ask, Bush clamped his teeth down on his lower lip and clamped his hand on the helm chair. The captain still didn’t press, but only turned fully toward the port deck and co
ntinued to wait.

  Dennis shook his head again, clicked at his board, and shoved aside a piece of conduit support that had flaked down onto his controls,

  “Tell him,” Wolfe said, looking at Dennis as if he couldn’t believe what he was about to confirm.

  Dennis stared at him a moment, then turned to the captain and wiped a hand across his moist cheek. “Sir, the Klingon’s gone.”

  As if he’d been ready for the absurd statement, Bateson said, “No, he’s not. Find him.”

  Ignoring a shooting pain down the side of his right leg, Bush limped to the weapons console. When they found the Klingon, he should be ready to keep up defense, joke that it may be. Maybe a few lucky shots . . . maybe a torpedo . . . maybe an act of desperation . . . Kozara’s ship outgunned the cutter fifteen to one. Maybe an act of God . . .

  At the science monitors, Wolfe turned to the captain with his conclusion. “No readings at all, sir.”

  “Gabe, Mike, Ed, all of you look for Kozara.”

  The bridge fell to a bizarre silence. Only the blips and shivers of damaged systems and the hum of ventilators made any noise at all. All faces bent to their boards, except Welch, who stared into the main screen, trying to steer without computer guidance.

  “No residue,” Dennis reported. “He didn’t explode.”

  “No warp trail either,” Wolfe said. “He didn’t leave—”

  Bush glanced up there. “Is he shut down?”

  “Million-dollar question,” Bateson responded. “To tease us out, maybe . . . nah, he’s not that scared of us to play a game like that. Keep looking.”

  “Captain, I’ve got some kind of malfunction here,” Dennis complained. “The planets are reading way off position from a minute ago.”

  “It’s your instruments,” Perry told him. “Planets don’t move like that.”

  “Maybe, but this distortion we’re in,” Dennis went on, “I think it’s temporal.”

  “Time distortion?”

  “That’s what I’m reading. Could be a malfunction. I’ll check, sir.”

  “Wait—got him!” Dennis yelped suddenly. “Coming up on us fast from high forward—but the readings aren’t the same. These are . . .”