Ship of the Line - Diane Carey [73]
“Computer,” he said, “take me to the bridge.”
“Power on. Reverse course. He’ll try to slip under us.”
“Lateral power, sir.”
“Coming around, sir.”
“Phasers … fire!”
Silent standby was over. Systems were back on, once again cooking. The bridge was electric with tension. The whine of phasers surging through the starship’s shaken body made a wincing kind of noise. Were they hitting anything?
Kirk was betting they were. Picard was making the same bet. Blanketed phasers like that were much the same as dropping depth charges. The very fabric of space would communicate a jolt, even if the hits were not direct ones.
“Debris on our scanners.” Spock’s voice cut through the phaser backwhine.
“Analysis, quickly.”
“Same type as before, sir … except … one metal-cased object?”
“Helm, hard over! Phasers, fire pointblank!”
A phaser whined, and at almost the same instant there was a ghastly eruption dead ahead, pointblank range. The reaction was so instant, so gut-level that Picard was momentarily surprised. Kirk obviously knew something about sneakiness, or at least he was making good on his collection of data about his enemy’s methods.
The ship lurched hard over, throwing Picard hip-first against the starboard rail. Holodeck or not, that hurt. The whole ship rocked and shuddered, then hung at an angle against her own artificial gravity. Kirk was thrown back from the forward rail onto the helm console, and both helm officers were pitched from their seats. Spock disappeared entirely into a shadow, and two engineers ended up on the command deck.
Picard found himself suddenly trying to push off the rail onto a tilted deck. He felt the tug of pressure as the graviton chambers struggled to compensate against the damage. Nausea boiled up in his stomach—well, it’d been a while since he’d felt that—
“They dropped a concussion device into the debris,” he observed, watching Kirk and his crew try to collect themselves. “How utterly primitive! Obviously effective, though …” He looked at Kirk, who was pulling the navigator to his feet. “I’m surprised you didn’t think of it.”
“I did,” Kirk muttered. “Right after it happened.”
Half the lights were out on the bridge, leaving large areas in shadow. Mr. Spock came slowly to his feet, favoring one knee, and his face was bracketed with pain he probably would’ve denied. “Main junction shutdown, Captain. Compensators coming on line.”
In fact, the whole crew was crawling back to their posts and instantly rushing to put everything back in some order, but that would take a while. Picard could actually smell what was wrong—detect little burnouts here and there, with distinct scents of different grades of lubricant and circuitry. He did an automatic scent-diagnostic in his own mind and suddenly it was no surprise that the bridge was half in darkness.
In deference to his bad knee, Spock sat down and touched his controls.
“Captain to sickbay.”
“McCoy here.”
“Casualties?”
“Twenty-two so far. Mainly radiation burns, mostly from the ship’s outer areas. Could’ve been much, much worse, Captain.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
Click—and most of the bridge lights came back on. Not all of them, and some that came on were red emergency maintenance lights instead of the regular lights of day work. But they certainly helped.
Other systems hummed to life too, evidence of an unseen but hardworking crew below decks.
Glancing around, Picard sympathized with the shaken crew and their young overburdened captain. And he was glad that McCoy had offered that little gift of telling Kirk things could be worse, after needling him that he should turn back and not face the Romulans down.
Sitting there in a leftover panel of shadow, Kirk tensely looked up at the starboard science console. “Report, Mr. Spock?”
Spock turned. “Nuclear device of some kind, sir. Our phasers detonated it fewer than one hundred meters away.”
“Ship damage?”
“Mainly overloads and circuit burnouts.”
Kirk tapped the controls on his chair arm. “Weapons status?”
“We’ve only the forward phaser room, Captain.