Ship of the Line - Diane Carey [14]
A sudden queasiness seized Bush by the stomach and shoved him to one side. He slammed into the bridge rail, then caught himself and cranked around to see smoke boiling down from the portside upper monitor trunks.
“Taking disruptor fire!” Eduardo Perry shouted. “Glancing hit, shield four! System’s stressed but holding.”
It was the weakened side, where the ceiling had imploded before.
At Bush’s left, Bateson was gripping the command chair with both hands as the ship whined and tilted up on a nacelle to veer around a planet. “Lock it down. All right, boys, it’s time to dodge, spin, parry, and thrust. Brace yourselves and, Welch, make for the inside of the solar system, a good spanking pace!”
“Aye aye, sir!”
“Why should they follow us?” Lieutenant Dennis asked. “They’ve got to be reading the damage. All they have to do is keep going to Starbase 12. They must know we can’t stop them by—”
“They don’t dare move on without killing us,” Bush supplied. “If they leave, the comm blanket lifts and we contact Starfleet, and their mission is compromised.”
Wolfe didn’t look up from his board. “How do we avoid getting killed, then?”
“Oh, we don’t,” Bateson admitted. “He’s going to kill us. But call me irresponsible—there are fifty thousand people whose lives are in our hands. Not to mention the crowing the Klingon Empire can do if Kozara succeeds. They have the edge on the next twenty-five years if we let him by. So keep dodging, Andy, till I think of something.”
Looking troubled, Mike Dennis kept one hand on the mates’ console, but turned to the captain. “Sir, there’s got to be some way to negotiate with them or break the noise blackout. I didn’t come on board to get killed right away.”
Bateson leaned on his chair and scratched his head as if nothing at all were happening, then stretched out that patronizing grin. “Really? What did you come on board for, Mike?”
The captain’s musical voice worked on all who heard it. If anyone else thought to protest this action, the inclination dissolved.
Bush thought of his fiancée at that moment as he watched this.
Dennis stared at the captain for a few seconds, but neither flinched nor blushed. “I guess that’s what I came on board for, sir,” he said amiably. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just go right back over here.”
The captain straightened up as the ship’s course rounded its curve and the compensators worked better. “John, quick, let’s see a schematic of this solar system.”
Wolfe complied without a word, and above his science station three monitors flickered to life, but one of them immediately failed. The remaining two managed to show multidimensional representations of the lovely large solar system and its twenty planets, and their positions at this time of year. Several, six … seven, Bush could see, were clustered on the same side of the sun, within a few degrees of each other on the orbital plane.
“There!” Bateson crossed to the rail. “That can work for us. Andy, I want you to look at that. Memorize it right now. As long as we keep Kozara from leaving the pie wedge right down the middle of those bodies, he’ll be planetlocked. He won’t be able to maneuver more than eighteen or twenty degrees either way with that waterlogged hog. Lead him right down the middle there, then veer on the Z-minus under that blue planet on the left.”
Welch nodded and croaked, “Aye, sir,” just as another disruptor javelin made the whole ship choke and grate, laying a percussive thrum onto the bridge. John Wolfe pitched forward out of his seat. Bush also had to hang on, but Bateson kneed his command chair without really sitting and managed to hold position and keep his eyes on all the monitors. Deafened by a jangle from the starboard side and blinded by a flush of gouty smoke, Bush found himself momentarily confused. When he righted himself, he realized he was looking at a different monitor than when he went down. Where was the other one?
And his head was spinning—had he knocked it on something?
“Keep the pot boiling, boys,” Bateson called over the ship’s gulping