Ship of the Line - Diane Carey [11]
“Salvos …”
The captain’s murmur swelled on the bridge. No one else spoke.
Jettison incendiaries. Bush got a shiver as his internal barometer dropped. Not often used, so brutal were those weapons, so entirely savage that they tended to spark revenge and rage even brighter than the thing they were set upon to burn. Many stellar wars and the occasional interstellar one or two had been ignited by a single use of such things, and few people ever spoke of them. Everyone wanted to forget those sticky, sizzling destructives. Not surgical at all. Not nice. Not fair play.
“Packed and inbound,” the captain uttered. He was speaking to himself, fingering his beard, thinking. Then he shifted in his seat and tilted his head. “Go, Gabe.”
Bush flinched to life and the words were out before he thought them. “Helm, block their flight path.”
“Aye, sir,” Andy Welch responded. He’d been ready. Course plotted. Now the ship instantly powered up around them, its inner hum bolstering them as if the deck were rising under their feet.
At the mates’ board, Mike Dennis’s face drained to the color of an old eggshell.
Bush was pretty sure his own feet were the same color. Luckily, his face had been trained long ago.
All but that one twitch at the side of his nose. Blast it.
“Steady, men.” The captain leaned ever so slightly forward and placed one hand on a knee. Before them, the thick-hulled Klingon ship seemed to drift downward toward the middle of the screen, but in fact the Bozeman was moving up. The Klingon ship, however, was doing its own enlarging process—drawing closer, so close that no one could claim an error in navigation brought them here.
“Sir,” Wolfe spoke up, “I’ve got the I.D. code off their hull.”
“How’d you do that?” Bush asked. “They’re not close enough for visual confirmation.”
“New interpretation methods,” Wolfe explained. “They’re training us to pick up on segments of numerals and symbols. Like archeology, building a whole creature from an ankle bone and a tooth. I figure out what to look for, then the computer finds the pattern.”
“Okay, who is it?”
“Ship’s name is SuSoy Duj … or mutoy muj.”
“Mighty damn!” As if fired from a blunderbuss, Morgan Bateson stood up from the captain’s chair and flexed his jaw at the oncoming ship. His eyes flared with something like brutal joy. He circled his own chair, but never took his eyes off the other ship. “SoSoy tuj!”
Mike Dennis asked, “Who is it, sir?”
“An old bloodblister. He’s always dogging the Neutral Zone without really coming over the line. We’ve had to rescue a couple dozen border ships from him. Get out the handcuffs, boys. It’s the universal constant … Kozara.”
“I don’t know, sir,” Bush interrupted. “In that? He doesn’t have one of those. He flies a bird-of-prey.”
“Not today.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because SoSoy tuj is his mother’s name. Mmm … interesting … she must’ve died. I get it now—the gathering of their fleet way over there is a red herring. Starfleet’s been set up. The Klingons are creating a distraction. Giving Kozara his chance to slip by.”
“Slip by and what?” Bush asked.
“Isn’t it obvious? The prize of the Typhon Expanse.”
Bush tried to think. This sector had no particular prizes. Just outposts and storage links and—
“Don’t you get it?” The captain slid him a sidelong glare, then nodded at the Klingon. “Why would a Klingon warship, a Klingon captain who’s had no particular glory to claim in his whole career, want to sneak over an unguarded border, in a sector about as far from Federation central as possible, but definitely populated and growing?”
Ed Perry shifted his considerable bulk, trying to apply engineer logic to the problem. “You don’t think …”
“Yes, I do,” Bateson said with a nod. “They’re here to obliterate Starbase 12.”
After the horror of the statement thudded to the deck at everyone’s feet, Mike Dennis was the only one to speak. “Captain, how do you know that?”
Bateson