Ship of the Line - Diane Carey [16]
“We’re fishtailing,” Bush murmured. Had he really felt that? Were they losing control? Asking too much of the already battered border patroler? Velocity seemed to peak even though there was open space before them for a good twenty seconds. They didn’t get twenty seconds more pitch-speed out of that maneuver. He felt the ship sag as if she were breathing hard.
Open space—
“Too straight, Andy!” Bush gulped then. “Take a nose-dive! Evasive, not a flat course! Don’t make us a target for a straight shot!”
“Oh—right, right.” Welch shook himself out of his hypnotic trance from the planets racing past, and remembered to steer in and out between those planets instead of just past them.
At this speed, chances of being caught in the gravity of one of those bodies was very real, Bush knew, and he worried about that. The planets were all sizes, and Welch could easily forget to give the larger ones more distance.
Disruptor fire streaked past them every few seconds as the Klingon ship chased them, but the enemy couldn’t get a straight shot. Even the glancing blows, though, were rattling Bozeman’s shields, throwing the ship into paroxysmal stumbling. The plunges, dashes, braking, and climbs of this pointless course barely gave the gravitons a chance to adjust, and Bush felt his stomach being pulled in six directions.
“Compensate like crazy, boys,” Captain Bateson uttered, not bothering to be specific.
“Captain,” Bush spoke up, “what if we send a hardshell?”
Bateson looked at him, probably thinking of the ten things wrong with that idea, but didn’t immediately dismiss the suggestion.
“It’d never get out far enough or fast enough,” John Wolfe pointed out. “A comm hardshell’s only sublight speed—”
“Maybe not to help us,” Bush said, “but maybe soon enough to help Starbase—”
The ship slammed downward a good two feet and gave everyone that elevator-drop disorientation. Cymbal-crash ringing blasted from the bulkheads and ventilators. Caustic smoke belched from several positions at several levels around the bridge, and Bush knew the same thing was happening all over the ship.
“Direct hit, sir!” Dennis called over the noise. “Deflector nine’s down, eight and seven are weakened by fifty-five percent each.”
“Not so bad,” Bateson grumbled. “See what you can do to shore them up. We’ll need our aft shields for those jawkickers. Keep talking about that hardshell. Everybody pitch in. Eduardo, take a breath and suck out some of this smoke, will you?”
“Vents on double, sir.”
“They’d see a hard comm marker in a second,” John Wolfe said.
At the comm station, Dayton waved the smoke from his watering eyes. “They’d hear it too.”
Dennis shook a burned hand and winced through the pain. “Is there some way we can launch one without having them see it?”
Letting fly another two phaser shots to the exposed underside of the Klingon’s bridge bulb, Bush tossed in, “We’d need at least sixty seconds to get it out of the solar system.”
“Or a terrific distraction,” Dennis added.
Welch mopped sweat from his face. “Even at impulse, they’re still faster than we are. They just can’t turn as fast.”
“Maybe we could blow up one of the smaller asteroids,” Perry choked out.
“Take ten minutes,” Bush dismissed. “Don’t—” A hard surge upward drove him to one knee on the deck. From there he finished, “—have it.”
From his stable seat, Bateson reached over and pulled Bush to his feet. “Can we rig a wide-range hardshell with thirty-minute broadcast delay?”
“Can do,” Perry answered before Bush could speak up.
Just as well—Bush would’ve been guessing.
“Do it, please.”
“Aye, sir,” Perry said.
The captain paused as the cutter swaggered under another assault, then said, “Gabe, precautions.”
“Right away, sir.”
Good! Bush had been waiting for that. But he was manning the weapons console—a moment of bitter choice racked him before the captain himself stepped in and took over the weapons board.
Without acknowledging that, Bush clawed his way to a