Ship of the Line - Diane Carey [67]
“Negative.” Kirk moved to the forward side of the helm, faced the two men stationed there, and spoke to the navigator. “You and Mr. Sulu will match course and speed with the object on our sensors move for move. If he has sensors, I want him to think that we’re a reflection … an echo. Under no circumstances are you to cross into the Neutral Zone without my direct orders.”
“Acknowledged, sir,” Sulu said.
“Cancel battlestations, all decks standby alert.”
Picard followed the captain around the helm. “If I recall, this is when the hunt begins, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Kirk said as he settled into his command chair. “The game from now on is dangerous. Every move we make will be a critical one.”
“An act of war, actually,” Picard corrected.
“The act of war has already happened.” Kirk gripped the arms of his command chair and eyed the screen, though there was nothing to see yet but stars. He pointed at the great emptiness which held a lurking enemy. “He made it. That moment’s past.”
The holodeck program completely accepted Picard’s presence, without admitting him in as a “character” in the drama of a situation where he did not belong. He was an observer here. This was an instructional historical program, not a game or toy, not meant at all for recreation.
In fact, the navigator had turned to address the captain, but now the program circumvented that. Picard had asked a question. Now, all the active members of the show would find something to do until Kirk’s part of the program was ready to push on.
Strange. If Kirk “liked” talking to Picard, the computer would just let him keep doing it. Yet somehow the programming would sense when it was time to move to the next step. Ingenious. Nothing short of brilliant. Not the machine—the people who had invented it.
“Are you saying you’re at war?” Picard asked him. “That’s your attitude?”
“Not yet,” Kirk said, raising his brows. “But we’re not at peace either. Commander Hansen and his people wouldn’t want us to pretend nothing happened. And I’m not going to.”
“You’re running a parallel heading with the blip?”
“That’s right.”
“What if they go into the Neutral Zone?”
“I haven’t decided.”
“You mean you may actually consider following them in?”
“I’m already considering it.”
“Really …”
For the first time Kirk turned his head very slightly and eyed Picard with that forceful leer. “You’d do something else?”
“Once they cross back into the Neutral Zone,” Picard said, “in my time we would let diplomats handle such things. They’re headed back into their own territory. Why don’t you let the Federation handle this? Perhaps it’s a rogue. You don’t know whether this action is sanctioned by the Romulan government.”
“Sanctioned or not, they’re responsible.” Kirk pointed at the screen. “No ‘rogue’ developed that plasma weapon on his own. That takes infrastructure.”
“Perhaps it’s not even a Romulan. You’re assuming.”
Kirk seemed unmoved, even nettled by the suggestion. There was only the slightest tensing of his shoulder muscles beneath the gold tunic. “It’s a Romulan ship, near Romulan space, slaughtering Federation outposts in an area where the Romulans once staged a protracted war against us. If you don’t like assumptions, get another job.”
“How do you know what their real intents are?”
Eyeing him fiercely, as if Picard were really annoying him, Kirk leaned toward him and drawled, “Am I supposed to wait for another declaration of intent?”
It was a good point. Picard offered an eyebrow shrug and accepted that. Four outposts violently demolished. Couldn’t be ignored.
As if tiring of that line of talk, Jim Kirk got up and prowled the command area, rarely looking at anything but the screen. The soft sorrow of those moments with Hansen was completely sweated out of him now. He was hardened, or more properly he was hardening, preparing himself for what he thought might be coming.
“The Romulan government has been the silent body,” he said. “They’re the ones who haven’t made their philosophies clear. They’re the ones who haven’t stated their goals outright. If they let a rogue get through,