Dreadnought! Page 8

  “Why?”

  “For warmth and for defense.”

  “Not why those. Why you?”

  “I presume you mean—”

  “Why are you here?”

  He inhaled slowly, hating to explain. “It is illogical for them to assume you to be an accomplice to terrorists.”

  “You … don’t believe I am?”

  “It is not part of your character.”

  “I’m glad somebody thinks so.”

  “May I ask your plans?”

  “Just one. I’m going to get to Brian Silayna on Star Empire and lay on that ticklish right foot until I get some straight answers. There’s something more to this than just a terrorist plot. Brian’s no militarist, I know that for sure. I’ve got to take the initiative, Sarda. Kirk didn’t put me under computer guard for no reason.”

  He looked puzzled suddenly. “I fail to understand what you mean by that.”

  “Oh, come on. Any numb-nut can outthink a computer sentry. He must have known I would, Sarda, he must have. I don’t know why, but he expected me to break out.”

  “Your line of thought has no logical basis, Lieutenant.”

  “That’s right. That’s why it works. Listen … thanks for the parka and the weapon. Will you operate the transporter for me?”

  “It would be to no avail. When you were taken from the bridge under guard, Star Empire dissolved its clones and moved off to the edge of sensor range, well out of the transporter’s reach.”

  “What? Damn … Kirk didn’t fire on them?”

  “He refused to fire on a fellow vessel until motivations are crystallized.”

  Making a dangerous alternative start to form in my mind, I grabbed the parka and headed for the corridor. “Let’s hope he holds that thought.”

  Minutes passed in a flurry of turbolifts and tube accesses as we tunneled our way through the bowels of Enterprise. Soon, under Sarda’s touch, the hangar deck flooded with yellow-white lights and we were opening the panels on the starboard hangars. And there sat the fighters. These weren’t one-man Tycho fighters, but the newer Arco Class attack sleds, designed exclusively for starships when Enterprise was refitted during the fourth year of her exploratory mission. They were two-seaters, low-nosed and fast. Half of the eight-meter length was engine, to power a 360-degree thruster, two forward phasers, and two side-mount photon slings.

  While starships and service vessels got heroic names like Enterprise, Defiant, Constellation and Intrepid, these runabout fighters were christened less flattering tags: Zipper Fly, Stocking Cap, Wooden Shoe, Honey Bun, Rock Slide, and Runamuck. Strangely enough, the chubby work-bees hangared opposite us usually got even less likely names like Dante, Prodigy, and Gray Matter.

  “Those people in the dubbing department at Star Fleet must get bored,” I commented, climbing the wing of Wooden Shoe. The hatch finally opened with some difficulty. The fighters weren’t very well maintained, it seemed, since they hardly ever got used in actual combat. Bureaucrats. Somewhere, somebody was still paying somebody else to put nuts on bolts because somebody else was sentimental about the “skill.”

  “Can you get the hangar bay doors to open?”

  “I shall attempt it.” Sarda found the control panel and patched it through to the bay doors. “Yes, it can be done from here.”

  “Go ahead. I’ll power up the sled.”

  Wooden Shoe’s two seats were fitted for optimum function and freedom of movement, but not much for comfort. I settled into the pilot’s seat at the left and buckled myself in. “If only I can remember how to do this….” There weren’t any choices; I had to remember. Moments later the ship began to hum around me as power surged through its shell. I taxied out to the flight deck and waited for deck to depressurize and the vast, scalloped bay doors to open. My hands were ice cold. I was throwing my commission out the garbage chute and maybe even my life.

  The sled jostled slightly, shaking me out of my thoughts. As I looked around for the problem, I felt a telltale shift of air and the suction sound of repressurizing.

  Without turning, I said, “I can handle it from here on.”

  The seat beside me rotated and when it turned back, Sarda was in it. He said nothing. He must have keyed the deck depressurizing unit to give him a few seconds to climb on board with me and seal in.

  “Sarda, they asked for me.”

  “You,” he said, “and a Vulcan.” His expression was unreadable. He slid a communicator across the panel to me.

  I stared at him. “Absolutely not. Get out.”

  “I am not obliged to follow your orders, Lieutenant. When we clear Enterprise I shall consider you my commanding officer, since inevitably one of us must be in charge. Logically that individual is you.”

  The immediate urgency parted for a warm pause. I surveyed his plastic expression and felt a molten core behind its Vulcan stoicism. His amber eyes met mine not in camaraderie but in defiance.

  “Why, Sarda? Why would you risk everything for me?”

  His hands moved on the controls. Before us the immense docking bay doors made a loud hydraulic chunk and started to open. A thin line of black outer space appeared and got wider. I waited for his answer.

  “Nothing I do is for you,” he said coldly. “I have … other motivations.”

  My voice was solemn as a whisper. “You don’t know what you’re getting into. Stay on Enterprise.”

  Wooden Shoe’s engines whined under his touch. “Out of the question.”

  I took the controls. The engines roared in our ears, begging to be released, to fly. I engaged thrusters and raised the ship off the deck floor to a hover position, ready to—

  The bay doors stopped opening. Orange lights flashed along the panels.

  “The override!” I shrieked. “They’re onto us!”

  “The doors are closing.”

  Damn, damn, damn—“Not on me they’re not. Give me full power. And sit back.”

  Wooden Shoe nearly tore itself and us apart trying to go from dead hover to full throttle. We shot toward the closing doors.

  “Piper—” Sarda gripped his seat arms.

  The fighter roared toward the bay doors, toward what was now only a slit of space not even as wide as we were.

  “I see it.” With a wrenching move that defied our balance gyros as well as Enterprise’s artificial gravity, I turned the fighter on edge. Engines straining, Wooden Shoe skimmed between the lips of the bay’s maw as they snapped shut behind us. Space opened wide and we sailed into its black panorama.

  I sank back into the seat and started breathing again. “Keep us at half throttle. By the time they realize we made it we’ll be out of tractor range and they won’t be able to pull us back.”

  “They will, however, be able to fire on us.”

  Kirk’s face filled my mind.

  Within seconds we were out to optimum phaser range. And by then I had an answer for Sarda.

  “He won’t fire on us.”

  Sarda questioned me with a glare.

  “I know he won’t,” I said.

  “How do you know?”

  “A guess.” Sarcasm rose in my tone. “Is that all right with you?”

  “Intuition is recognized as a command prerogative—”

  “Don’t say I’m in command.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Just don’t say I’m in command! Just don’t. I don’t even want to hear it.”

  Disturbed, he turned back to the navicomp and plotted a course for the new position of Star Empire. Our fighter could outrun a starship at sublight, so Enterprise couldn’t chase us if she wanted to. If he wanted to.

  He won’t.

  “What happened on the bridge after I left?”

  “Star Empire moved off—”

  “I know that. I want to know the rest of it.”

  “Star Empire,” he repeated with extra firmness, “retreated and Captain Kirk contemplated pursuit but decided against it. Uhura advised him we were receiving subspace
hailing from Vice-Admiral Rittenhouse aboard his flagship, Pompeii, which is on its way to this sector. Rittenhouse ordered Kirk to abate any interference with the dreadnought, but only to hold it in this sector until reinforcements arrive. I gathered the Vice-Admiral has called in starships from all over the quadrant. Kirk’s hands are tied.”

  I stared at him until he nearly twitched. “Other starships?”

  “Affirmative. Potempkin, Lincoln, and Hornet specifically.”

  “It’s that critical?”

  “Evidently.”

  “But why? This is crazy. What is it about this that warrants the attention of that many heavy cruisers? Pulling other starships off assignment …?”

  “We are now out of phaser range from Enterprise. My congratulations on your ‘guess.’”

  His approval sent needles down my spine for a crowd of reasons. A fully trained Vulcan wouldn’t have offered congratulations or any kind of laud at all. If I hadn’t known Sarda’s problem, I would’ve felt good at his comment, but I knew he could say such a thing only because of his lack of training and my ignorance, largely because of the harm I had done him, the distance I had put between him and other Fleet Vulcans. I felt cheap accepting the benefits of his pain.

  “Thanks,” I mumbled.

  Wooden Shoe streaked through open space, past the sensor-fouling asteroid belt, toward the thing in the distance that looked more like a toy than an outsized star vessel. More toy than threat.

  “May I ask how you escaped from the computer sentry?” Sarda wondered as Enterprise shrank on our aft scanner.

  I shrugged. “I gave it a hot foot.” A strange ambiguity crossed his face, making me get through my reluctance to explain. “Brian Silayna … a long time ago we had occasion to be … noticing details in my cabin at Fleet Headquarters. He told me how the fire system might be able to override a computer guard because the sentry system wasn’t allowed to trap a life form in a burning room. It’s a glitch in the system design. I just disconnected the alarm so the bridge wouldn’t be alerted.”

  “Engineer Silayna has a talent for system crossover uses.”

  “He … certainly does.” The Star Empire filled my vision, my whole mind. Within it, Brian. Why hadn’t he told me? Why hadn’t he let me know he was involved with insurgents? My heart thumped a thready rhythm of desperation, loneliness, infirmity.

  Sitting beside Sarda intensified my loneliness. Particularly obvious was his refraint from applauding my ingenuity at putting Brian’s hypothesis to use. I didn’t know what I liked less—his approval or his silence.

  “Sarda.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why didn’t the Klingons’ phaser blasts go right through the projection of Star Empire?”

  “Because the projection was not in space at all. It appeared only within the ship’s sensors, adjusting the appearance of the phaser beams.”

  “So anyone out in space would see phaser lances shooting out without effect.”

  “Correct. Enterprise’s sensors ‘saw’ what the image projector told them to see.”

  I shuddered. “That’s … a formidable weapon. No wonder the dreadnought was top secret.”

  Through tight jaws he said, “It was not intended to be a weapon. It was created for defense.” He said it with a strange, unlikely intensity, and coupled the gruffness with an un-Vulcan snap of the navigation perimeter switch. “Like the synergist,” he added with frightening bitterness.

  I swiveled slightly his way and leaned toward him, hoping to bridge the gap. “What’s ‘the synergist’”

  His embarrassment was plain and it quickly pushed him back into his shell. But not soon enough to get him out of answering my question, especially since I refused to turn away, and leaned nearer. He became more and more uncomfortable. Finally he recited, “A synergist is an element which changes into a different element under the proper circumstances.”

  “But you didn’t say ‘a’ synergist. You said ‘the’ synergist. Tell me, Sarda … or would you rather I find out for myself?”

  His glance told me he knew I was just bulldog enough to do that. Seconds ticked. He wrestled with himself, trying to decide if he wanted me to hear it now, in his version, or later in the version of the Starbase’s official library banks. I could hack into that system. He knew I could.

  “I …” He had to clear his voice. “I received a Special Commendation for research contributions recently—”

  “Sarda! That’s incredible! Why wasn’t it announced at Academy? I didn’t hear a thing abo—”

  “Because I insisted it be kept private.”

  “But an honor like that—”

  “Is no honor to me.”

  “But why not? That kind of recognition could carry enough weight to get you back into the Vulcan Science Academy!” Before gushing any further, I picked up the weird jade flush in his cheeks and realized I’d said the wrong thing. Again. Gosh, big surprise. Speaking softly, I asked, “What was the project? This synergist?”

  He actually sighed. “I developed a synergist which turns nitrogen in atmospheric compounds instantly poisonous.”

  I let out a low whistle of appreciation. “That’s quite a …” Weapon. Oh, damn. Another problem. “I see.”

  His resolute silence was agonizing.

  “Did you discover it by accident?” I asked.

  “I was searching for a synergist,” he admitted; “however, I hoped to discover an element which would render toxic substances inert, not turn beneficial compounds lethal.”

  In other words, my lost Vulcan friend, you got a high award for an achievement that can only be regarded as dishonorable and shameful by your home culture. I thought about the strange twists of fate bothering his awkward position between races. He walked a strange tightrope indeed, partially because of … guess who. “A defensive substance, not a terrible weapon,” I murmured. “Sarda, don’t blame yourself for humans’ funny priorities. It’s not your—” My voice caught in my throat. “Defense?—like the image projector? You! You developed the image projector! Didn’t you? Didn’t you? That’s why Commander Sulu made you explain it to the Captain!” His cheeks flushed deeper jade and his eyes turned hard as gemstones.

  I slumped back in my seat, drained. “Yours … so why is Rittenhouse getting the credit for it?”

  Sarda’s lips narrowed into hard, flat lines. He remained silent as a statue.

  I knew. “Because he took credit for it. Right? He took it away from you, didn’t he?”

  When he spoke again his voice was tight with the battle for composure. “I was compensated for it.”

  “Meaning you were paid. Sarda, that smells! What’s a fistful of credits compared to the recognition you’d get for such a fantastic device?”

  “I want no recognition for developing a weapon of that magnitude.”

  “You didn’t intend it to be used as an aggressive tool. And today’s events proved you right. The projection was a perfect decoy. It let Star Empire lure the Klingon sentry ships out and get the drop on them.”

  “It is a dangerous device, too easily perverted. I should never have attempted its invention.”

  “Wrong. You’re totally wrong! A starship could be misused too. Medicine can be misused. Any good thing can be. Don’t torture yourself. Even Vulcans should realize the need for weaponry, Sarda. It’s not your fault you were victimized by a power play of rank. You should get recognition for it.”

  A thick amber glare bored through me. “Was that your logic when you announced my propensities to our superiors at the Academy?”

  I winced, remembering that terrible misjudgement, and gazed back at him in sorry shame and abrupt silence.

  “Please do not repeat your generosity,” he said harshly, and turned away.

  Elegiac distance soon reestablished itself on Sarda’s face, in his movements, and in his eyes. As for his voice—he refrained from talking to me or acknowledging my presence in any avoidable way. I had managed, unintentionally again, to completely humili
ate him.

  There was nothing I could do to heal the damage, but I was getting the idea these uneasy moments weren’t entirely my fault. Sarda shouldn’t feel as he did. There was great value, positive value, in his talent, and he could do tremendous good with it. Of course, he was trying to make it beneficial, but his inventions kept fouling on the natural human propensity for using military superiority to back up human principles.

  Our principles. Of all the races I could’ve been born into, I had to be human.

  “Do Arco Class sleds have destruct sequences?” I asked him.

  “All Federation vessels are required to have—”

  “Then I want to key into it. Code it into our communicators with a fifteen-second detonation delay.”

  For the first time in several minutes his eyes locked on mine. “I see no logical reason to expect a need for such an encoding,” he said in a tone of voice that might have been his version of shock. Clearly he never took me for the kamikaze type. “We shall be boarding a vessel which must be returned to Star Fleet intact; therefore I—”

  “If we can return it intact.”

  “I resist your logic.”

  “Then blast logic. Call it an order, Lieutenant. Call it whatever makes you set that code.” Tension laced my words with undue force, but I didn’t feel bad about it. I didn’t care if he liked my orders or not as long as he followed them. He said I was in command. Then command I would. Since the earliest Phoenician ocean crossing, vessel captains had forgone any concern about being liked by those they commanded. Cold. I had to learn to be cold. Suddenly I envied Sarda’s luck at being Vulcan, even though he felt less than privileged.

  Unable to hold the iron hardness for long, I reacted to his eloquent silence by way of an explanation. “It’s an old human tactic of anticipation. We call it ‘covering your ass.’”

  “It sounds unreliably colloquial.”

  “Maybe. But I’m not going any farther into this mess without stacking my deck. I just want to make sure we can get out as well as get in.”

  “But they insist their mission is peaceful.”

  “I’m not in a mood to believe everything I hear. Even if Brian Silayna is the one talking.”

  “He did seem unusually stressed.” Sarda completed several computations, crossed indices in the sled’s computer, and locked it in. “Destruct code isolated and tied in,” he said, “as ordered.”