Ship of the Line

by Diane Carey

  “Sir, we’re not clean slates to each other anymore,” Riker plowed on, now desperate to make his point. “They know how many ships we have, we know what they’ve got—it’s not those days anymore. There’s communication between the empire and the Federation. Believe me, they know we’re not weak. It gives you and me the option of retreating. We don’t have to fight to the death just to make a point!”

  “Hey!” Gabe Bush dropped to the command arena from the upper deck and drilled a finger at Riker’s face. “Show some respect, you phony prig!”

  “Gabe!” Bateson stood up, grasped his loyal lush by both arms and pulled him back. “Down, Rover. This is no time for pluck and spunk. It’s his job to point these things out.”

  “Not with that cocky attitude! He doesn’t get to talk to my captain that way. Some first officer!”

  “Back, back . . . that’s it. Upper deck. That’s right. Man your post.”

  Bateson steered Bush up toward the science station and let a few seconds go by. Then he turned back and casually took his seat again.

  “He’s right about one thing. It’s an attitude thing, Will. The Klingons were at pseudo-peace with you your whole life. This is my time again. Don’t you notice a difference in tactics? Kozara took the past ninety years learning to be sneaky, just as I suspected. To get familiar with Starfleet tech and tactics—”

  Defying Bush’s warning and still in the grip of anger, Riker closed in on the command arena, pressed a hand to the captain’s chair enough to pivot it so Bateson had to look at him, and stormed. “This time he’s after the wrong man. The Morgan Bateson he knew is gone. You’re not paying attention. You’ve forgotten how to be vigilant. You’re just playing with a new toy. Withdraw the ship before you get us smashed.”

  A hand of smoke drifted by from the smoldering hardware trunk, but they both ignored it. Riker saw the captain’s eyes redden with the acrid smoke and felt his own eyes begin to burn and itch, but still he didn’t blink.

  Neither did Bateson. “Is this finally your mutiny, Mr. Riker?”

  Caught by the captain’s sudden charisma, Riker backed off a pace and took his hand off the command chair. “I already said I wouldn’t do that.”

  “At least you’re a man of your word. Bridge to engineering.”

  “Engineering, Scott here.”

  “Scotty, how are you doing down there?”

  “We’ve got you some phaser power back now, sir, but it won’t hold for long. Shields are holding at forty-two percent. They’ll take glancing blows, if your helm can handle it.”

  “Then I’m going back in.”

  “Understood.”

  “Andy, one-third impulse, attack maneuver. Data, fire as your phasers bear.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  The starship peeled back into the core of the Typhon glory and swirled around the Klingon ship, which was taking some suspiciously lazy maneuvers out there.

  “What’s he doing?” Riker demanded. “He’s not even dodging.”

  “Fire, Data!” Bateson ordered.

  “Firing, sir.”

  Even reduced phasers were a frightening and formidable weapon against the blackness and the puff of nebula where Kozara had been hiding. The phasers sliced across the Klingon ship’s lateral shielding and miraculously broke through. Burns saturated the greenish hull and blistered the ship from stern to midships.

  “Got him!” Bateson shouted, thrusting a fist into the air. “We found a weak spot! Keep hitting him right there!”

  Without response, Data continued firing, surgically cutting Kozara’s ship down to the bone, at least in that one quarter. Riker didn’t know the configuration of that ship’s guts, but hoped there was something critical in that section.

  Just as the starship rode out on her one victory, Kozara opened fire again with full disruptors.

  The starship was caught on the underside of her main section, and the deck heaved up under Riker’s feet. Half the crew was thrown upward, only to come crashing down again as the gravitational systems fought to compromise and the ship screamed her way back to her heading. She didn’t know she’d been hit, so she was trying to keep on the same course, which actually made the hit even harder.

  “Guidance is compromised, Captain,” Bush called from tactical. “He’s going after our impulse maneuvering capability!”

  “We’re shallowing into the nebula!” Welch blurted. “I can’t stop it!”

  “Starboard thrusters, full power,” Bateson ordered. “Mr. Riker, you do it.”

  Aggravated beyond reason, Riker spun to the nearest propulsion access and fired up the thrusters manually.

  The ship began to slow its faltering toward the nebula, and gradually angled back onto a plane with the Klingon ship. “Stabilized,” he reported.

  He turned, and Bateson was glaring at him as if Riker’s prediction of disaster had caused it.

  “Did he hit us again?”

  “It’s not destruction, sir!” La Forge argued, “It’s not damage. It’s coded shutdown, and we don’t know the codes to put the systems back on line. We have to completely reboot the system, and that means total shutdown and restart simultaneously from Main Engineering, Impulse Engineering, and—”

  “All stop! Hold position!”

  “Captain, Mr. Riker’s right!” La Forge continued. “It’s got to be preplanned! He’s got somebody on this ship, shutting things down!”

  Bateson’s head lolled as he closed his eyes tightly and moaned, “Goddamn it . . .”

  “Cap,” Wizz Dayton interrupted, “he’s hailing.”

  “Put the son of a bitch on.”

  “Dog.”

  “Butterfly.”

  “We stand against each other again.”

  “In two new ships.”

  “And yours is falling apart.”

  “Is it? Have any parts hit you? Because I wouldn’t want to scratch that royal coach. I’ll send some men right over with a couple of shammies.”

  “And we will eat them.”

  “The men or the shammies?”

  “Both.”

  “What have you done with the Nora Nicholas?”

  “Was that little boat yours? Such a tragedy. But they got in my way.”

  “Are you saying you destroyed those people?”

  “Why would I say? I have the upper hand. I am old now, Bateson. My years have been spent in shame because of you, but that is nothing now. None of this is for me. I am lost. The fates will sooner or later get me again, but today I will prevail. I will turn the fates around this one time, trick them once, and then I will disappear and never give fate a chance to get me again. And my son, who spat upon my name, will no longer live in my shadow. After today there will be no more of this idiotic ‘peace.’ Today, there is a new empire.”

  “And you’re its herald?” Bateson taunted. “I wouldn’t pick you to carry any flags. You’re too easy to beat.”

  “Forget that, Bateson. I can no longer be shamed. I am doomed to dishonor. I accept that. My honor is nothing. I know now that not everyone gets honor. I have nothing to lose. My name is smashed. Only the name of Zaidan can be saved.”

  Kozara stopped talking then, leaving the starship crew to stare at the screen, at the hovering Klingon fighter, and realize the complexity of their enemy’s motivations. Scary . . .

  Riker looked at Bateson, but didn’t speak. The channel was still open. They would hear him if he said anything.

  But Bateson didn’t look back at him. The captain instead was gazing at the ship out there. After several very long moments, he parted his lips.

  “I’m sorry about your son, Kozara. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Your Klingon system of honor has destroyed him, not me or Starfleet. He shouldn’t be saddled with your failures. That’s not why I stood you down that day. But for my part in it, I am sorry it had to last so long for you. No one should—”

  “Keep your pity. The time is past for that. I have changed in many ways. And so have you, in so much less tim
e. And I thank you for one thing—you are so predictable now. In gratitude, I give you my gift for the sake of old times.”

  “Morgan, he’s beaming something over!” Gabe Bush quickly said, staring into the science scopes.

  Jumping up out of his chair, Bateson demanded, “Will the shields hold?”

  “Not at this percentage, sir,” Data told him.

  Bush gripped his controls. “It’s coming through!”

  “Is it a boarding party? Guards, your sidearms.”

  “Ready, sir!”

  The three Security men came forward from their posts at the turbolift doors and stood with weapons at the ready in three positions on the upper deck. From here, they had clear shots at anyone on the bridge.

  “Not a boarding party,” Bush gasped. “Not enough mass . . . I don’t know what—”

  The whine of transporters cut him off. For critical seconds all they could do was stand and wait, and Riker instinctively backed up onto the upper deck and put his shoulder blades against one of the vertical pylons. If their readings were wrong and it was a boarding party, he wanted kicking room.

  The squeal of the transport invaded the bridge and made the crew wince in anticipation. No one knew what to do, but everyone was poised to fight.

  As Data stood up from his post and turned, a ringlike device materialized on the deck beside him, so unidentifiable that nobody did anything but stare at it for an important second.

  Then it glowed white-hot and made an electrical snap.

  Data’s mouth fell open and his eyes flared. His entire body went rigid, and almost as quickly collapsed to the deck in a heap.

  “Positronic neutralizer!” Riker choked. “They took him out!”

  Before anyone could say anything else, the whining of transport beams piled in on them again, this time by the half-dozen. All around the deck, five or six beams glowed. In each place, each beam deposited a dull gray cylinder.

  When the beams faded, Riker kicked the nearest cylinder away—a silly move, because nothing could help them now.

  As the bridge flashed with sudden pounding impact, the last thing Riker heard was his own warning shout, just before the sound of his own body dropping to the deck.

  “Grenades!”

  Part Three: A Harbor of Doubtful Neutrality

  Last night at wheel watch I put a star in my port foreshroud and steered by it, and for a little help put what looked like a star cluster off the fores’l leach and steered also by that. Turned out not to be a cluster at all, but a comet. So I had a comet to steer her by.

  D. Carey, personal log

  0130 hours, May 2, 1997,

  Revenue Cutter Californian

  Parts of this book were written on board, during that voyage.

  Chapter 19

  Year 2266, Stardate 1672.1

  Briefing Room—U.S.S. Enterprise

  (Holographic Simulation)

  “Captain Kirk?”

  The briefing room was solemn as a church. Dust-blue walls and the cool efficiency of an undecorated table didn’t help the mood any. Black chairs, brown table, simple triscreen computer display in the middle.

  Picard moved around the table to a place across from where Captain James Kirk sat with his shoulders slumped and his hands limp upon the tabletop. His olive-green tunic was more casual than the topaz one, a little less formal perhaps.

  This didn’t look like the same man at all. There was no fire in these eyes. Not a muscle twitched. The charioteer was gone from inside him, all the energy sapped. He sat as if harnessed there, staring at the table before him. For a moment, it seemed almost as if the holoprogram had frozen.

  Then, Kirk sighed.

  “Captain?” Picard attempted again. “Are you all right?”

  Kirk didn’t look up. He uttered only a weak, “No.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Transporter accident. I’ve been split in two.”

  Perplexed, Picard tilted a little to one side and checked. “You look all right . . .”

  With an annoyed flicker in his dull eyes, Kirk glanced at him. “You’re looking at half a man.”

  The irritation instantly faded, and Kirk’s eyes fell again. There he sat, an echo of the man Picard would have recognized, the captain who was mellow but intense, sedate until riled, an allegory to the ship he commanded. Today, something was very wrong.

  “I don’t understand,” Picard said. “What made you this way?”

  Rather than respond directly, James Kirk tapped the controls of a desktop panel.

  “Captain’s log,” he began, “stardate 1672.1. Specimen-gathering mission on planet Alfa 177. Unknown to any of us during this time, a duplicate of me, some strange alter ego, had been created by the computer malfunction. The duplicate isn’t really a duplicate as such . . . he’s . . . half of me. Half of my personality. We only discovered the accident when Scott beamed a local animal on board, and a few moments later the transporter activated itself, and a second animal beamed aboard. Except it wasn’t a duplicate—it was an opposite. Shortly thereafter, Yeoman Rand and Geological Technician Fisher were assaulted . . . apparently by me. Crew members report that the counterpart is temperamental, but clever. Apparently, I have a dark twin aboard. We think his base instincts are in control. He’s loose on my ship. And he knows the ship as well as I do. Even worse . . . I seem to be losing the will to fight him.”

  He paused, apparently also losing the will to continue his log entry. After a moment, he simply clicked the mechanism off and sat still again.

  “I’ve got men trapped on the surface below,” Kirk said. “The temperature’s dropping. We can’t use the transporter until we find out how to make it stop splitting anyone who uses it. It’s a frozen waste down there . . . I feel so distracted . . . I keep forgetting things. My strength of will is slipping . . . The crew is losing faith in me. My command . . .”

  “Can’t you use a shuttlecraft to bring those men up?”

  “The ionosphere’s crystalized. Can’t get through.”

  “You could blast your way through with phasers.”

  “And risk atmospheric shock waves on my men? We have to fix the transporter . . . somehow . . .”

  The briefing room door parted without a signal and Mr. Spock strode in, clearly grim with the day’s events. It seemed unbelievable, but in this time of technological wonders and strange uncharted science, such things were possible.

  Spock paused, gazed at his captain briefly, then, much as Picard has asked, he wondered, “Are you all right, Captain?”

  “Check on the men, Spock,” Kirk said immediately. “Never mind me.”

  Not contented by that, Spock went to the end of the table, to a computer terminal, and punched the comm. “Mr. Sulu, report your status.”

  “Sulu here . . . all hands accounted for. The blankets you beamed down were shredded by the transporter process.”

  Kirk tapped the comm nearest him. “Scotty’s working on the transporter. How’s it going down there, Mr. Sulu?”

  “It’s already twenty degrees below zero . . . can’t exactly call it balmy . . .”

  Kirk tapped off the comm and looked at Spock. “Isn’t there any way we can help them?”

  Spock bowed his head; almost in shame. He was deeply pained by the strain in Sulu’s voice and the fact that there seemed to be no answers. “Thermo-heaters were transported down, they . . . duplicated. They won’t operate.”

  The comm blessedly interrupted the terrible litany of failure. “Mr. Spock?”

  “Spock here.”

  “Transporter technician Wilson found injured near the captain’s cabin. Says the imposter called him by name, took his hand phaser.”

  “Acknowledged. Continue the search.”

  Haunted now by the fact that his distorted counterpart was armed, Kirk began, “We’ve got to find him before he . . . but how?”

  Spock drew his brows together, but with a glimmer of hope. “Apparently this double, however different in temperament,
has your knowledge of the ship. Its crew. Its devices. This being the case, perhaps we can outguess him by determining his next move. Knowing how the ship is laid out, where would you go to evade a mass search?”

  “The lower levels. The engineering deck.”

  “I’ll get hand phasers for us,” Spock said. “I’ll meet you in the main section in ten minutes with a search team.”

  “No team,” Kirk said. “Just you and me.”

  “Captain—”

  “Please, Spock . . . no arguments.”

  Sympathy crimped Spock’s features. Troublement and emotion crackled just below the blanketing surface.

  “Very well, sir,” he said, almost as dejected as Kirk. He swung off the table and quickly left the briefing room.

  Picard moved to the place where Spock had been and watched James Kirk. This Kirk, this belevolent, drained man, had no fire in his eyes, no pulse of multiactive thought. He was instead passive to dullness, but clearly battling with himself. He had lost a piece of himself, a critical piece—the piece that made him want to command.

  Had Picard lost that too? Had he lost more than a ship? A piece of himself?

  If so, he suddenly wanted to find it.

  “Strange,” he murmured. “We always imagine that if we could take away all the agression and base needs, the dark gut reactions of human beings, we would have a superior man. You don’t look very superior right now, Captain Kirk.”

  “I don’t feel superior,” Kirk said. “Besides, benevolence is easy—just make everyone an android with the brute programmed out. Would you put your android in charge of the ship on a long-term basis?”

  He looked at Picard—a startling instant, until Picard remembered that the computer had his record and logs just as it had James Kirk’s.

  “Data? . . . No, not long term,” he admitted. “Not yet. He has the intelligence, but he doesn’t have the instinct. He can follow a line of logic, like Vulcans—”

  “But Vulcans haven’t prevailed as the strong shield of the galaxy, as you might imagine they would. The synthesis of the two parts of us has allowed humans to be the prevailing wind of the galaxy.” Kirk listened to his own words, then sighed. “And I’ve lost it.”