Ship of the Line Page 9

  Today there would finally be another choice. Finally, finally, he could leave, and melt into the faceless masses.

  Were they still young enough to build their lives again? Gaylon hardly knew anymore. How much had things changed? Were there nothing but young men in charge now? Or were elders more respected? Who was in power now? Which families? Which sect? Which province now dominated?

  Gaylon looked at Kozara. The commander sat as if he had been sculpted into his seat. Would Kozara’s son be here?

  The boy’s life had been bedeviled by ridicule, Gaylon remembered, so difficult that Kozara had willingly taken the chance to go off into the big nowhere and relieve Zaidan’s plague of nominality. When, seven years ago, Kozara and his unimportant crew had left Klingon space, Zaidan had been plodding along in a construction career, making buildings, bridges, and spaceports like this one. Only two things had saved him from the crushing weight of his father’s failure. One was his natural skill with architecture. The second was his father’s only success—destruction of the Starfleet border ship that had ruined the assault on Starbase 12. At least there had been that single accomplishment. Kozara had retained his rank, and Zaidan had been spared the stain of complete dishonor.

  Now the humiliation had been scrubbed clean and Kozara could have a son again. Gaylon and the other members of the crew could begin again, rebuild their lives, negotiate for wives. If they were not too old, perhaps they could have sons. The stain upon them had been made to fade.

  And they were old . . . all of them. All were grayed and crusty, their skull ridges pronounced and spiny. Their best days were past.

  Moments passed as the ship was secured by the technicians outside, and Gaylon caught the eyes of the other crew around him. Veg, whose wife had left him after the Bateson incident. Zulish, who had been anticipating transfer to service with a favorite former captain and had been rejected. Kuru and Losh, who both had expected to be accepted to the finest warriors’ advanced-training facility on the main continent.

  Ninety years.

  Gaylon knew what they were thinking now. Those might as well be their hands out there, doing the menial work. Warriors and skilled experts in advanced fields like Zaidan’s were not as common as the enemies of the empire believed, for the imperial government could not economically support the training of more than a special few, and the private structure had been deliberately held down, so there were many positions of useful unimportance to be filled—that was understandable. But once trained as a warrior, one would find only agony in taking a manual position.

  Gaylon knew what his crew members here on the bridge were thinking. Was Kozara right? Was the slate clean? Could they come back now?

  Or were those manual jobs outside the ship waiting indeed for them?

  If Zaidan were here, that would be a clue. There might be hope.

  Gaylon held his breath when the bridge-direct access vault opened and they were once again connected with others of the empire. This would be the first time in all these years that they laid eyes upon a Klingon other than themselves.

  The crew had their body armor on today. Many years ago they had ceased to wear it for daily duties. First the senior engineer had put his away, and then gradually the entire crew followed. Kozara had been last, probably because he thought he should be. Out in the Waste, what was armor for? To pick up plants, carcasses, and minerals, and to survey primitive planets, who needed protection? Who needed to look like a warrior?

  Today, they wanted to wear it. They were glad they had it on as the vault port on the side of the bridge clanked and rolled open, revealing a conduit into the Fortress Zgoda Ring.

  And there—there stood a young Klingon! Gaylon’s heart began pounding against the shell of his body. His blood began to course. Hope!

  Kozara’s son was big, even for a Klingon, and had to duck as he stepped under the vault port and entered the bridge. Zaidan had the massive arms of a man who had done considerable lifting and daily physical work. His hands were strong too—from the tips of his fingers to the muscles of his neck, from the boulderlike thighs to his neatly braided hair, he was powerful and developed, though even he was no longer young. He was nearly a century old now, at an age when most Klingons should be just reaching their highest goals. He wore the black-and-red clothing of a construction specialist in the employ of the imperial government, but not the jacket of a supervisor, as Gaylon expected to see by now.

  Kozara moved on once-powerful legs toward Zaidan. The two stood looking at each other, and Gaylon realized that Kozara had once been nearly that tall and brawny, but had lost bulk with the years of low activity, no battles.

  The commander straightened and squared his shoulders within the armor he no longer completely filled.

  “My son,” he greeted.

  Zaidan’s head had been tilted to one side, and he now slowly tilted it to the other side.

  “My pain.”

  A shock—that was Kozara’s voice from years ago!

  But the words . . . the contempt . . .

  Kozara, Gaylon, the entire bridge crew visibly sank. The son shriveled the father with his glare. All became clear in that instant. All became derision.

  Stunned in the truest sense of the word, Kozara stared and stared until his eyes began to water and he had to look down at the deck. With his head bowed there and one hand steadying him with a grip on the command chair, he seemed to have been punched in the heart.

  Pestilent disappointment shot through the crew. Standing nearby, Gaylon closed his hands and took the same kind of grip on the hem of his tunic. There he stood, holding onto his own clothing and hoping to keep control. A gush of breath, a flinch, a tightening of his eyes—unacceptable. Zaidan would see out of the corner of his peripheral vision.

  In that moment a strange and unexpected shift took place—Zaidan, the son, the skilled laborer, the lower, suddenly and quite decisively became superior to imperial trained warriors. On one finger Gaylon could count how many times in Klingon history that had happened.

  Now it was happening here. Gaylon felt as if he were shriveling into the deck.

  Slowly, slowly Kozara’s eyes rose again to meet his angry son’s, but they were crimped and wrinkle-fanned. He parted his lips. No sound came for several moments, through which Zaidan harshly waited without saying anything to his father. Self-control—an effective method of torture.

  “Why do you say this to your father?” Kozara croaked from the depth of his misery.

  “Do you know what happened while you were gone?” the son shot back. “Your one victory was snuffed out, that is what happened. That.”

  Kozara blinked in confusion. His face shifted and twisted. “What is it you speak about? My victory was the destruction of the Bulldog and his crew. He is gone. They are gone. My victory stands.”

  “Your victory has evaporated,” Zaidan charged. “Bateson is back!”

  Back?

  Gaylon heard what Zaidan said, but could make no sense of it. The Federation ship had disappeared in a place where nothing could disappear. Kozara and his crew had searched for them, to make sure there was no trick, and for certain the Bulldog and his Bozeman had disintegrated. The Federation used no cloaking device. That ship could not have disappeared. Even with a cloaking device, there were methods of detection. But there had been no trail, no residue, no distortion. Nothing.

  “Back?” Kozara belched. “We drove him into a planet! He is dead!”

  “He is back.” Zaidan poked his nose forward and glowered. “He did not die. He did not plow into a planet. He went not into a planet, but into a time anomaly! And he emerged three years ago, to be escorted in trumpeting victory to Starbase 12 by none less than that petrified block Jean-Luc Picard and the becursed Enterprise!”

  The shock was almost too much to absorb. Gaylon’s mind rushed with protests, but he dared not say anything. This was not his time to speak, yet he wanted to blurt out arguments, insist that this could not happen, that there was some trick. But this
was Kozara’s moment and Gaylon could not interfere.

  And Kozara had nothing to say. The commander shuddered and sizzled in his place, but said nothing.

  “Not only is Morgan Bateson back,” Zaidan continued, “but Morgan Bateson is famous. At forty-two years old, Morgan Bateson is a hero. His ship which you ‘destroyed’ is polished and tended and fitted to a special dock. Bateson came forward in time with his ship bearing the signs of battle and his crew intact.”

  Zaidan’s voice was controlled, his words prepared, but each sentence burned across the deck. The rehearsed explanation had obviously been cooking for three years, waiting to be spoken. Three years of Zaidan’s shame.

  “Since then,” the son continued, “the empire has been the laughingstock of the galaxy. We have been pilloried by the lowest of the low, the weakest of the weak. Bateson brought his entire crew safely through to a whole new time. Bateson went through time to save his ship from Kozara. The empire has been blistered by ridicule with every celebration for Bateson and his men. A warship, an entire invasion, was turned back by a single border ship and its forty-man crew. In Starfleet, to stumble on a pebble is now called ‘a Kozara maneuver’!”

  Dashed to blindness, Gaylon sank back against the helm console. Good thing it was there. If only he could speak—if only it were his place to say something—

  “Your one little victory against Morgan Bateson saved me from scraping animal dung from imperial streets,” Zaidan snarled. “I was Kozara’s son, humiliated but not stripped of my rightful place. Kozara was still a warrior and I could work. I could command teams of laborers. I could design complexes and show my designs to respectable Klingons. I could do all these things . . . until Morgan Bateson came alive again.”

  Zaidan took one—and only one—step toward his father, and tipped one brawny shoulder in that direction.

  “Since he came back, do you know what life has been for me? Son of the warrior who won not a single encounter? I have borne the wretchedness that should have been yours. My career has spiraled down until I am scarcely able to build a shelter for a dog. No one wants a bridge, an outpost, a box, a sewage station built by Zaidan, son of Kozara. Perhaps they have a job for me in Starfleet!

  Gaylon glanced around the bridge at the terrible faces of Veg, Zulish, and the other bridge officers. He knew that the communication lines were open throughout the ship and the entire crew was hearing this. That was simple docking procedure, so all systems could be coordinated and no one could subvert the process of entering a port or province. Now the whole crew heard all this, and indignity scrubbed their faces.

  “Now, this week,” Zaidan charged, “comes the biggest embarrassment of all. The Federation is about to launch a new starship. It is the sixth Starship Enterprise. And the great Morgan Bateson is master of ceremonies. Morgan Bateson has used his rank privilege to employ his crew in the commission and building of the new starship. That mollusk Picard is to be guest of honor. For two years Starfleet has been building this starship, and when the fifth Enterprise was destroyed four months ago, the decision was made to declare this new ship the next Enterprise. Recall, o warrior, that it was the Enterprise of James Kirk who flew in after the disappearance of Bateson and finally drove you back into the Neutral Zone. Is there no relief for me? Must everything you do haunt me this way? Bateson and the Enterprise through my entire pathetic life? I should rename myself ‘Bateson, son of Enterprise.’ It would be less disgraceful than ‘Zaidan, son of Kozara’!”

  Their lives were over. Gaylon’s eyes were boiling. The faces of the other crew members were dusky with hopelessness. Surely one of them would surge forward and slaughter Kozara where he stood. He even saw Veg’s hand slip back to grip his hungry dagger. Gripping his own tunic’s hem harder, Gaylon vowed not to stop the murder.

  Then Zaidan stepped back a pace, straightened his stance.

  “I am no longer the son of Kozara,” he proclaimed. “I will go away. I will change my name. I will be a pirate or a hired weapon. If I could scrape this degraded face off my skull, I would do it. There is no more Zaidan, son of Kozara. There is only Kozara, who could not make a single victory, who never had a good day to die, and who could not keep a son.”

  The bridge fell to scornful silence. The disgraced young Klingon pressed his mouth shut on those words and seemed to be finished saying the things he had waited three long years to say.

  He turned as sharply as that, and strode toward the exit.

  As Zaidan’s boots clunked on the conduit deck and he dipped his head to keep from bumping it, a pitiful voice sputtered across the deck.

  “I want one chance . . .”

  Zaidan stopped and turned. “What?”

  “One chance,” Kozara begged. “Be my son for one more chance.”

  “What chance?”

  “I will hunt Bateson down and kill him.”

  Waving both hands, Zaidan spat his contempt. “Who cares about that? So he would be dead! So what?”

  Crushing his knuckles across his mouth and rubbing saliva into his beard, Kozara tried so hard to think that the old scar on his skull turned darker. There was every stress in his face short of blood coming from his eyes.

  “I will . . . I will destroy . . . I will . . . his entire crew came through time with him, you said?”

  “Yes!” Zaidan snapped. “So what?”

  “There is a chance!” Kozara bolted, suddenly coming to life. “If his entire crew came through, then I am vindicated!”

  “Why?” his son demanded.

  “Because there is a Klingon operative on his staff.”

  Kozara lowered his voice and made the wild statement as calmly as if he were once again giving the order to dock. His satisfaction ran deep and cold through his crew.

  But Gaylon threw it off. “We had no way of knowing Bateson would be waiting for us that day! How would you have known to put a spy on him?”

  “Bateson and I had clashed before, and Bateson and others,” Kozara said, enjoying the sudden upper hand. “The spy was assigned to the Typhon Expanse. I and others knew that even if Bateson were drawn away, he would be there when we tried to return.”

  “Why did this operative fail to help us that day?”

  “How could I know that?” the old captain barked. “But if that person is still alive, then he has been working on that new starship all this time. Think of it!”

  “You are fantasizing,” Zaidan insisted. “There is no such person.”

  “Doubt me, then. I may not be Kang or Koloth, but I am a commander in the Klingon fleet and there are things I know. If my information is right, there was on that day a Klingon operative on Bateson’s ship. Not a Klingon, but a human doing Klingon business. For that man, only three years have gone by. His loyalties may yet be in place. We shall see when we come up against Bateson and his new ship . . . what advantages he can give us.”

  Kozara circled his command chair with a flicker in his eye such as Gaylon had never thought to see again. Gaylon dared say nothing to this wild new turn of possibilities. Could it be? Was there a wink of hope in the murk?

  “I will kill Bateson,” Kozara promised, “and I will smash the Federation’s new starship at the same time. No . . . not enough. Even more, I will make the entire Federation hate what they have built! For all time, I will vilify the name of Enterprise!”

  Zaidan shifted his considerable weight and tilted his head to one side. “How will you and one miserable old ship destroy the new starship?”

  “I do not mean to destroy it,” his father said. “I mean to possess it.”

  Something about those words made Zaidan pause, Gaylon noticed. The son had spent his life scheming to overcome his father’s shortcomings, and as such he was no stranger to clever schemes. His restraint now showed that. A chance was a chance.

  Or something about the idea—to do such an outlandish thing, to even conceive of it, took some courage, some cleverness. Zaidan apparently saw a glimmer in his father which he had ceased to believ
e existed, perhaps believed had never existed at all. But there it was. Kozara had somehow spoken magical words.

  And Kozara saw the change. His senses were not so stultified that he missed his advantage.

  He swung around, then around again, until he caught the attention of his entire bridge crew.

  “Yes!” he sang out with his ages-ago voice. “Listen, all of you! Gaylon! Zulish! Veg! Kuru! All of you—you will help me! We will stay together and escape failure’s maw with a victory such as none has ever seen! Our enemy has returned! No Klingon will deny us a chance to defeat him! We will get a ship, a good ship! We will give the ship a name that will ring in history! The empire will not stop us from this chance to reclaim our honor! This is the continuation of the battle that was cut short so long ago by a quirk of space! I will go before the High Council and they will give me a ship. Bateson is still young, but I have ninety more years’ experience to use against him. We will snatch our names back from the gullet of shame! Say it now, so my son can hear the loyalty of this crew of the forgotten! Say you will all come with me!”

  A spontaneous cry of willingness rose from the crew, blasting forth like the shot of some great old weapon. In a moment, in an instant their enemy was back and they were warriors again! Their shame could become their monument!

  Like a flash Gaylon remembered the long-subdued one characteristic that had made Kozara worthy of the rank of command—stunning flexibility.

  On the crest of this unexpected turn, Kozara squared his shoulders, raised his chin, lifted both his hands and fanned them, and turned to Zaidan.

  “This I promise, I vow, I swear to my son,” he blazed. “On the blood of our fathers, there will never be another Enterprise!”

  The ship was a thing of exquisite beauty in an exquisite setting. . . . She was a magnificent fighting machine, the mistress of the waves over which she was sailing in solitary grandeur.

  Lieutenant Hornblower

  Chapter 10