Captain's Table 02_ Dujonian's Hoard - Michael Jan Friedman [49]
As it turned out, it wasn’t so different from the Klingon version, which I had come to know in my dealings with the Empire. Nor did the similarity come as a surprise to me.
As you may know, the Klingons and the Romulans were allies for a while, in the middle of the twenty-third century. During this period, they pooled their expertise in a great many areas of military technology, ship design being only one of them.
“It’s quite simple, really,” Thadoc told me.
I nodded. “Of course, I won’t feel comfortable until I’ve performed some maneuvers myself.”
He shrugged. “There’s no time like the present. Perform some maneuvers now, if you like.”
I took Thadoc up on his offer. Without diverging substantially from our course, I put the warbird through one rigor after another, testing the precision of her steering system and the responsiveness of her engines.
I was pleased with the results. While the Romulan helm looked like its Klingon counterpart, there was no comparison between the two systems in terms of performance. The Romulans had clearly outdistanced their former allies over the last hundred years.
“She turns on a dime,” I said.
Thadoc looked at me quizzically.
“An old expression,” I explained. “It means she handles well.”
He grunted softly. “That, she does.”
His eyes lost their focus for a moment. It seemed to me Thadoc was lost in some long-ago memory.
“You served on a warbird,” I noted, guessing that that was what he was thinking about.
“I did,” he confirmed. “For six years.”
“As helmsman?” I asked.
“Eventually,” Thadoc told me.
“But you left.”
He nodded. “I did indeed.”
“Didn’t you like it anymore?” I asked.
Thadoc looked at me. “I was good at what I did, make no mistake. Still, I was not held in wide esteem. Perhaps it was the Bolian blood in me, I don’t know. A few years ago, shortly after the Klingon Civil War, our warbird ran into a Federation vessel in unaligned space.”
I thought for a moment. “The Potemkin?”
He seemed impressed with my knowledge of the incident. “Yes. In any case, we lost the encounter. My commander needed a scapegoat so he wouldn’t have to take the blame himself.”
I understood. “And he made you that scapegoat.”
“I was accused of incompetence,” said Thadoc, “and a failure to heed my commander’s orders. All I could do was exercise my right of statement and deny the charges. In the end, it did me no good whatsoever.”
“You were sentenced to death?” I asked.
He shook his hairless, blue head. “My commander knew I had done nothing wrong, and he was not entirely without conscience. He saw to it I was sent to a penal colony instead.”
“Charitable of him,” I commented.
“En route there,” said Thadoc, “our transport vessel ran into a subspace anomaly. There was considerable damage to the ship hull breaches and the like. Casualties ran heavy. As luck would have it, most of the survivors were prisoners like myself.”
He stopped himself. After a moment, he frowned.
“No,” he decided. “They were prisoners but not like myself. The others were violent, desperate men, guilty of the crimes for which they were to be punished. I alone was innocent.”
I asked him what happened then. Thadoc told me, dredging up memory after vivid memory.
“The prisoners took over the ship, but it was useless to them. The engines had been damaged irreparably by the anomaly. We couldn’t go anywhere. Worse, we discovered a buildup of energies in the artificial singularity that powered the warp drive. You’re the captain of a starship; I don’t need to tell you what kind of threat that represented.”
“You were in danger of being destroyed,” I said.
“Precisely,” he confirmed. “Fortunately, the buildup was a slow one. We sent out a distress call and hoped for the best. Days went by, with no response. We wondered if our communication equipment had been damaged as well, in some way we couldn’t detect.”
“Entirely possible,” I remarked.
“Time passed painfully,” said Thadoc, “with no improvement