Ship of the Line - Diane Carey [113]
Even through the mask—what a stench! Riker almost threw up, but managed to hold his stomach down as he and Bateson scrambled to tie the Klingons’ wrists behind their backs and then secure their ankles together.
“Aww …” he wheezed through the mask. “Repulsive!”
“Isn’t it?” Bateson secured the last Klingon. “This is what happens when you let engineers do the cooking. Damn it, they’re not armed! No sidearms! Kozara’s smarter than I gave him credit for.”
Riker hoisted one gagging Klingon to his knees. “We can hide them in the janitorial closet.”
“Good. Let’s get the hell out of this—”
“Let’s inhibit the propulsion system first, sir.”
“And shields. If Starfleet got our message, they’ll need a way to take the ship back without destroying her.
“Let’s at least do it fast.”
“Oh, yes, please.”
“You know, my throat is still burning from that stink.”
“My eyes are watering too.”
“How much do you think Kozara knows about the ship?”
Riker’s question was barely above a whisper as he and Bateson worked on the environmental controls. Scott, to whom fighting Klingons was old hat, was stationed in the auxiliary control room, dinking with the environmental mains. Together they were plotting mischief, but Riker was worried. Soon Kozara would discover the members of his crew missing on the holodeck and those the guerrilla squad had hidden away back in that janitorial closet. Kozara probably wouldn’t find his men, but he’d know some of the prisoners were free and creating trouble. He could then track humans on the move with the bioscanners.
With his arm up to the pit in the wall access conduit, Bateson managed a shrug. “I don’t know when he found out about the ship or that I was on it. Obviously some portion of this is a personal vendetta. If he found out about me three years ago, then he’s had three years to track my activities, and he’s known about the starship for about two of those years, right about when I joined the project. And he’s had a spy informing him, but we don’t know for how long. Could be hours, could be years.”
“I hate unknown quanities,” Riker griped. “But you know as well as I do, he could spend ten years learning about starship systems and still never know them all. I know I don’t. That’s why it takes a large crew to run a ship like this. Nobody can know everything.”
“Give or take Scotty. I’m beginning to think he knows everything.”
Nodding in unqualified agreement, Riker added, “When I figure out how he got the pod’s airlock open with just a survival suit, then I’ll know everything too. We know more than Kozara does, and that gives us an edge.”
“Until he captures us. I’m almost finished here. Adjusting localized gravitational trim … now. I wish we could contact Scotty.”
“We don’t dare,” Riker said. “They could pick up on our comm signals and trace us.”
“What did he say? Forty-five degrees?”
“Fifty-five degree pitch.”
“Fifty-five … You better get out into the corridor. Let them see you, but whatever you do, stay on the outside of the centrifugal.”
“Here I go. Wait for my signal.”
The ship’s artificial gravitational system wasn’t the sort of thing Riker had ever figured for a weapon. Like walking on a planet, the gravity was just there. It felt normal. It was adjusted to feel that way, always perpendicular to the deck, so a person would be upright and feel as if he were walking on an even surface.
All that was about to change. Each deck, each stretch of corridor, had its own superconducting stator constantly spinning gravitons, so inertial potential could vary from one area to another and compensate for hard maneuvering. Waveguide conduits connected the network.
In auxiliary control, Scott had broken into the environmental systems and freed up this link of the network. Bateson now had readjusted the gravity pitch on a fifty-foot stretch of one corridor. All he had to do was