The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [82]
Phuong’s finger hovered over the controls for a moment, as if he were having second thoughts. Then he pushed the button.
Trip felt the familiar slight tug of warp acceleration, visually exacerbated by the brief streaking elongation of the stars and debris visible through the forward window. He felt a cold trickle of sweat running down his neck and wondered for an instant if his sweat had changed color the way his blood had.
In a fraction of a second, the Branson had traversed some four million kilometers. Both men were thrown forward as the ship abruptly returned to low impulse, their restraining straps taut until the inertial dampers caught up with the abrupt velocity change.
“Shit!” Trip exclaimed, wiping sweat from his brow. “We’re still in one piece.” They also appeared to have dropped out of warp only a few hundred kilometers from the densest region of the debris field.
Suddenly, the ship rocked violently, and an alarm klaxon filled the cockpit with a shrill wail.
“There’s another one of the Romulan ships!” Phuong shouted excitedly as he frantically tapped his controls. The viewscreen beneath the forward window responded by revealing the presence of a second birdlike vessel, this one apparently larger and better armed than the first.
“Get into the debris field, now!” Phuong said.
Trip ignored his instincts and pushed the lever to the left, sending the Branson directly into the most debriscluttered portion of the space ahead that he could find. Almost immediately, a proximity alarm began sounding, adding to the general din in the cockpit. With the help of the sensors and the viewer, he attempted to dodge a large chunk of rock, but evidently not quite quickly enough. He saw a boulder-sized meteoroid flash across the top of the viewscreen before it vanished, and the Branson’s hull transmitted the reverberating sound of the glancing impact into the cockpit, which seemed almost to ring like a bell for several seconds afterward.
“Between that hit and the Romulan blast, the hull plating is down to forty percent,” Phuong said, concern evident in his voice.
“I don’t suppose it would do any good to try talking with them, would it?” Trip asked, twisting the controls to avoid the debris field’s profusion of tumbling chunks of rock, metal, and ice. “We do look like them now, and these translator gadgets in our ears will let us speak their language.”
“We’re too suspicious all alone out here. If they didn’t kill us outright, they’d question us for weeks, and then kill us,” Phuong said. “No, we have to get integrated into their social structure before we start trying to bargain with Romulan military officers, and we need to reach our friendly contacts inside the Empire to do that. Which means our top priority right now is to avoid these two ships.”
One of the viewscreens showed a brilliant explosion behind them, as a large portion of a small asteroid suddenly became superheated vapor, evidently because of Romulan weapons fire.
“They’re shooting into the field!” Trip said. He wondered again, for perhaps the six-hundredth time in the past minute or so, exactly what had made him decide to take on this assignment.
“Then we’ve got to go in deeper,” Phuong said. The Branson rattled and shook. “And try not to get ourselves killed in the process.”
Commander Nveih i’Ihhliae t’Jaihen roared in anger and stabbed his kaleh into the neck of the controller. Centurion S’Eliahn clutched his neck, crying out in terror and pain as his emerald blood pulsed out in jets. He crumpled leadenly to the deck.
“Get over here and find them,” Nveih yelled to Tanekh, the female decurion who presently cowered at the communications station.
He stepped over the dying S’Eliahn and moved back to his command chair. He’d always found the young officer incompetent, but his attractiveness had made up for it. But last khaidoa, when the centurion had refused Nveih’s overtures to engage in carnal pursuits with him and Nveih’s wife, S’Eliahn’s fate had been sealed. All the Romulan commander had needed was any small excuse to rid himself of