War Stories (Book 1) - Keith R.A. DeCandido [10]
Faulwell had not been directly involved in either of Biron’s previous encounters with the U.S.S. da Vinci at either the Cardassian station Empok Nor or at the planet Maeglin. Therefore, Biron was unfamiliar with him. Apparently, he was stationed at this particular starbase during the war, and assigned to interpret and translate Dominion communication codes into something that could be read by the Federation.
That is a valuable skill, Biron thought, and began reading.
Starbase 92
STARDATE 52601.6
Bartholomew Faulwell had been sitting outside Commander DuVall’s office for two hours. He had kept himself occupied by reading one of the books he had loaded onto his padd—it was what he intended to use to read himself to sleep that night, of course, but he could always get his hands on another one. And it was a good read—a historical novel about twenty-first-century space travel by a very talented woman named Almira Van Der Weir. Bart had also read many straight histories about so-called “boomers” in the days before the Federation’s founding, and Van Der Weir was one of the few fiction writers who captured the essence that Bart had found in the histories. Portraying the frontier spirit was easy enough—pretty much every halfway decent novel set in that time period managed that—but few were able to leaven it with the very real hardships they endured. Then again, in our replicator age, hardship’s a tough one to handle—though I suspect the last couple of years have cured us of that little bit of complacency.
Of course, Bart would rather have been doing something productive with his time. Since the start of the war with the Dominion, Bart had been applying his skills as a cryptographer to cracking Dominion and Cardassian codes. With the entry of the Breen into the war, he assumed that his sudden reassignment to Starbase 92 had to do with their codes.
So he’d hopped the first runabout he could get on and reported to the station commander immediately upon his arrival at the large top-shaped station that orbited Calufrax IV.
And then he waited.
Finally, the doors parted and a very short, balding, round human came out. He didn’t so much walk as waddle.
“You must be Faulwell. Come in.” Then he turned and went back into his office, obviously expecting Bart to follow him.
No apologies, no pleasantries, just ordering him in. This is gonna be fun, Bart thought with a sigh as he got up, turned the display of his padd off, and followed the commander into his domain.
Said domain was fairly utilitarian. Usually Starfleet officers tended toward a minimum of décor—enough to show that there was a person occupying the space, but not enough to scream out their personality through interior decorating. It was the enlisted folk like Bart himself who tended to make their working spaces over into their own image.
DuVall, however, took the former to an extreme. There was nothing here that didn’t belong: the standard-issue desk with equally standard-issue viewscreen/computer on it, the two guest chairs, the computer display on the wall, and damn little else. No pictures, no personal effects, no wall hangings, nothing.
“Have a seat,” DuVall said, even as he fell more than sat into his own chair.
“My orders,” Bart said, “were to report here right away, but not why.”
“Of course not,” DuVall said after snorting derisively. “I won’t kid you, Mr. Faulwell. There’s a war on.”
Bart bit back a sarcastic response. It didn’t do to antagonize one’s commanding officer within five minutes of meeting him.
DuVall continued. “You probably don’t know this—and once you leave this room, I expect you to continue not to know this—but the war’s going pretty badly for our side.”
In fact, this was common knowledge, but again, Bart refrained from comment.
“With the Breen’s damned energy-dampener keeping us and the Romulans out of the battle, we have to rely on the Klingons to hold the border. Now, between you, me, and the viewport, there’s nobody I want next to me in a fight more than a pissed-off