Ship of the Line - Diane Carey [77]
As quickly as that the fragile truce between Riker and Bateson dissolved, and Riker felt suddenly cold on the inside.
“Sir,” he forged on, “despite the handsome reports of all your department officers that the starship is ready for warp speed, there are ten thousand bugs that haven’t been worked out. War games are inefficient methods for working out those bugs. We haven’t even had her up to maximum warp yet. Even the hull bolts are untried. Doing this so close to the Klingon Neutral Zone at a time when there are hostilities with the Klingons—”
“I’m used to hostilities with the Klingons, remember?”
“Captain, that was ninety years ago!”
“Ninety-three.”
Abruptly defiant, Bateson’s voice flared. Apparently, sensing he was about to be insulted, he was all done being gentle.
“That’s all we ever had, was hostility,” Bateson went on, now that they had everybody’s attention, and that meant everybody including the squishy life-form sitting on the deck with its big black eyes blinking and tentacles around both of La Forge’s legs. “What’s so different?”
Riker deliberately leaned forward, knowing he was stepping over the line of decorum.
“What’s different is that they’ve had ninety years to think about things you’ve missed. They’re different, Captain, don’t you realize that?”
“Klingons are Klingons,” Bateson said. “They can’t have changed that much.”
Standing up now, Bateson met Riker’s challenge head-on. From Riker’s point of view, the captain stood bracketed by the presence on the upper deck of Montgomery Scott on one side and, ironically, Data on the other.
“You people have never fought Klingons,” Bateson declared. “I have.”
“Maybe not,” Riker said, “but we have fought alongside them.”
Unaffected, Bateson blinked at him. How could he be so blasted casual?
“Will, I don’t care if your mother and two of your sisters are Klingons. Your ships are a little faster than ours were and a little tougher, but you’ve never really fought Klingons. You don’t know what they’re like to fight. I do. That’s the first, best rule of any engagement. Know your enemy. You don’t know them. I know them.”
The resonance of the captain’s voice carried with it a confidence that was both damnable and formidable. Riker at the moment could think of nothing to say. There was an irritating sense in what the captain said, and he was the only one who had actual events to back him up. He was the one who had stood off impossible Klingon odds in the past, though far past.
Cocking a hip, Bateson let the words ring, then lowered his chin and held out a flat hand.
“You want a shuttlecraft? You want to get off? You and your friends? There’s the door.”
The offer took Riker so utterly by surprise that it also put the argument into perspective—an argument about which there had not yet been an incident. Bateson, who remembered that, was keeping his temper and now had parried Riker into a corner.
Getting ready to box his way out, Riker settled back on his heels, took a deep breath, held it, and glanced at Troi and Geordi. Intensity of the moment traveled a psychic channel between them, and Troi reacted as if she’d been pinched. Her gaze attempted to express what lips failed to form. She and Geordi were holding their breaths too.
So were Scott and—well, Data would’ve held his if he’d had any.
“That’s uncalled for, sir,” Riker said. “This ship is brand-new and untried. We’re about to tarnish her image before she even has a reputation.”
Not bothered by the fact that he’d just deeply disturbed several of the officers on his bridge, Bateson speared Riker with a glare.
“Oh, well, Hell, commander, wouldn’t want that to happen! Maybe it’s too high a standard for you, but we’d better have people out here in these ships who believe in the ships. I don’t want you here if you don’t want to be here. You’re grown-ups. Make a decision.”
Very clear. He wasn’t a by-the-book kind of man. They either accepted him for their captain or they didn’t, and he apparently thought senior officers ought to be able to pick.
Or maybe he didn’t, and he was just aware of the