Текст книги "A Stitch in Time "

Автор книги: Andrew Robinson

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

“The situation,” said the captain, doing his best to keep his voice free of anger, “is I’ve lost my lasers, my atomics, and my shield generators. And that’s just a superficial assessment.”

Dane grunted. “Tough luck. We suffered a little damage ourselves.” He began tapping a command into his armrest. “I’ll contact the others and let them know what happened here.”

Matsura’s mouth fell open. That was it? he wondered. No thanks? No recognition that he had put his ship and crew on the line to bail out a reckless fool of a comrade?

If this had been an Earth Command mission, Matsura’s wingmates would have been quick to acknowledge what he had done. But this wasn’t Earth Command, he reminded himself bitterly. It was something completely different.

And Connor Dane was still a Cochrane jockey at heart, taking low‑percentage chances as if his life were the only one at stake.

Matsura was tempted to lash out at the man, to tell him how he felt; but he wouldn’t do that with two complements of bridge officers privy to the conversation. He would arrange a better time.

“You do that,” Matsura said. “And when you’re done, I’d like to speak with you. In private.”

For the first time, it seemed to dawn on the other man that his colleague might not be entirely happy with him. “No problem,” Dane answered casually. “I’ll tell my transporter operator to expect you.”

“Yellowjacketout,” said Matsura–and terminated the link.

A moment later, Dane’s face vanished from the screen, replaced with a view of his Christopher.Matsura studied it for a moment, his resentment building inside him.

Then he got up from his center seat. “You’ve got the conn,” he told Lieutenant Williams and headed for the Yellowjacket’stransporter room.

As far as he knew, thatsystem was still working.

“I’d ask you to pardon the mess,” Dane said, “but I might as well tell you, it’s like this all the time.”

Matsura didn’t say anything in response. He just frowned disapprovingly, looked around Dane’s cluttered anteroom and found an empty seat.

Obviously, Matsura wasn’t pleased with him. And just as obviously, Dane was about to hear why. Removing yesterday’s uniform from his workstation chair, Dane tossed it into a pile in the corner of the room and sat down.

“All right,” he told his fellow captain. “There’s something you want to get off your chest, right? So go ahead.”

Matsura glared at him. “Fine. If you want me to be blunt, I’ll be blunt. What you did out there a minute ago was foolish and irresponsible. Leaving your flank exposed, forcing me to go in and protect it . . . you’re lucky you didn’t get us all killed.”

Dane looked at him. “Is that so?”

“You’re damned right,” Matsura shot back. “No Earth Command captain would ever have taken a chance like that.”

Dane shrugged. “Then maybe they should consider it.”

“Are you out of your mind?” asked Matsura, turning dark with anger. “You’re going to defend that gambit–after it crippled my ship and injured seventeen of my crewmen?”

Dane smiled a thin smile. “Given a million chances, I’d do it a million times . . . hands down, no contest.”

Matsura was speechless.

“Of course,” Dane went on, “I’m not one of the noble black and gold, so none of my skill or experience means a flipping thing. But I’ll tell you what . . . I’ve met a few Romulans in my day too. In fact, I was blasting them out of space long before you ever warmed your butt in a center seat.”

Matsura’s eyes narrowed. “There’s a difference between experience and luck,” he pointed out.

“Men make their own luck,” Dane told him. “I make mine by pushing the envelope–by doing what they least expect. Come to think of it, you might want to think about pushing the envelope a little yourself.”

“Me . . .?” Matsura asked.

“That’s right. Dare to be different. Or do you want to spend the rest of your life living in your flyboy buddies’ shadow?”

Matsura’s jaw clenched. “I don’t live in anyone’s shadow–not Hagedorn’s or Stiles’s or anyone else’s. What I do is carry out my mission within the parameters of good sense.”

Dane grunted. “Right.”

“You think otherwise?”

Dane shrugged. “I think good sense is what people hide behind when they can’t do any better.”

“Says the man who hasn’t got any.”

“Says the man who accomplished his mission,” Dane noted.

Matsura flushed and got to his feet. “Obviously, I’m wasting my time talking to you. You know everything.”

“Funny,” said Dane, keeping his voice nice and even. “I was just about to tell you the same thing.”

Matsura’s mouth twisted.

“And just for the record,” said Dane, “I didn’t expect you to protect my flank. As I said, I’m not much of a team player.”

The other man didn’t respond to that one. He just turned his back on Dane, tapped the door control and left.

The captain shook his head. Matsura had potential–anyone with an eye in his head could see that. But the way things were going, it didn’t look like he was going to realize it.

Not that that’s any of myheadache, Dane told himself, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes.

Matsura was still boiling over Dane’s remarks as he left the Yellowjacket’stransporter room . . . and on an impulse, headed for a part of his vessel he hadn’t had occasion to visit lately.

Men make their own luck,Dane had told him.

But Matsura had done that, hadn’t he? During the war, he had been as effective a weapon as Earth Command could have asked for. He had risen to every challenge thrown his way.

But Dane wasn’t talking about efficiency or determination. He was talking about thinking outside the box. He was talking about a willingness to try something different.

You might want to think about pushing the envelope . . .

And, damn it, Matsura would do just that. He would show Dane that he could take the direction least expected of him–and do more with it than the butterfly catchers themselves.

Neither Shumar, Cobaryn, nor Dane had discovered anything of value with all their meticulous site scanning. But with the help of his research team, Matsura would turn up something. He would find a way to beat the aliens that his colleagues had overlooked.

Or do you want to spend the rest of your life living in your fly‑boy buddies’ shadow?

Matsura swore beneath his breath. Dane was wrong about him–dead wrong–and he was going to make the arrogant sonuvagun see that.

The captain had barely completed the thought when he realized that his destination was looming just ahead of him. Arriving at the appropriate set of doors, he tapped the control pad on the bulkhead and watched the titanium panels slide aside.

Once, this relatively large compartment on Deck Eight had been a supply bay. It had been converted by Starfleet into a research laboratory, equipped with three state‑of‑the‑art computer workstations and a stationary scanner that was three times as sensitive as the portable version.

It was all Clarisse Dumont’s doing. If the fleet was going to conduct research in space, she had argued, it might as well enjoy the finest instruments available.

Matsura hadn’t been especially inclined to make use of them before; he had left that to those members of his crew with a more scientific bent. But he would certainly make use of them now.

“Mr. Siefried,” he said, addressing one of the three crewmen who had beamed down to the colony to collect data.

Siefried, a lanky mineralogist with sharp features and close‑cropped hair, evinced surprise as he swiveled in his seat. After all, it wasn’t every day that Matsura made an appearance there.

“Sir?” said Siefried.

“What have we got?” asked the captain, trying his best to keep his anger at Dane under wraps.

The mineralogist shrugged his bony shoulders. “Not much more than we had before, I’m afraid. At least, nothing that would explain why the aliens attacked the colony.”

Matsura turned to Arquette, a compact man with startling blue eyes. “Anything to add to that?” he asked.

Arquette, an exobiologist, shook his head. “Nothing, sir. Just the same materials we saw before. But I’m still working on it.”

“Perhaps if we had a context,” said Smithson, a buxom physicist who specialized in energy emissions, “some kind of backdrop against which we could interpret the data.”

“That would be helpful, all right,” Matsura agreed. “Then again, if we knew something about these aliens, we probably wouldn’t have needed to do site research in the first place.”

The scan team looked disheartened by his remark. Realizing what he had done, the captain held his hand up in a plea for understanding. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it came out.”

“It’s all right, sir,” said Smithson, in an almost motherly tone of voice. “It’s been a frustrating time for all of us.”

Matsura nodded. “To say the least.”

But he wasn’t going to accept defeat so easily. Not when Dane’s smugness was still so vivid in his memory.

“Do you mind if I take a look?” he asked Smithson.

“Not at all,” said the physicist, getting up from her seat to give the captain access to her monitor.

Depositing himself behind the workstation, Matsura took a look at the screen, on which the Oreias Seven colony was mapped out in bright blue lines on a black field. He hadn’t actually seen the site in person, so he took a moment to study it.

Immediately, a question came to mind.

“Why does the perimeter of the colony follow these curves?” he asked, pointing to a couple of scalloped areas near the top of the plan.

“There are hills there,” said Siefried, who had come over to stand behind him. “Not steep ones, mind you, but steep enough to keep the colonists from erecting their domes.”

Makes sense,the captain thought. Why build on a slope when you can build on a flat?

Then again, why build near hills at all? Matsura presented the question to his mineralogist.

“Actually,” Siefried noted, “it would have been difficult to do otherwise. All the regions suitable for farming have hilly features. The area the colonists picked is the flattest on the planet.”

“I see,” said the captain.

He studied the layout of the colony some more, looking for any other detail that might trigger an insight. Nothing seemed to do that, however. Without anything else to attract Matsura’s eye, it was eventually drawn back to the two scalloped areas.

“What is it, sir?” asked Arquette, who had come to stand behind the captain as well.

Matsura shook his head, trying to figure out what it was about those two half‑circles that intrigued him. “Nothing, really. Or maybe . . .” He heaved a sigh. “I don’t know.”

But it seemed that a visit to the colony was in order. And this time, he was going to go down there personally.

As Bryce Shumar materialized on the Horatio’stransporter pad, he saw Cobaryn standing alongside the ship’s transporter technician. Obviously, the Rigelian had decided to wait there for him.

That came as no surprise to Shumar. What surprised him was that Connor Dane was waiting there too.

“Welcome to the Horatio,sir,” said the transporter operator.

Shumar nodded to the man. “Thanks, Lieutenant.”

“About time you got here,” the Cochrane jockey added. “Hagedorn and Stiles have probably finished all the hors d’oeuvres.”

The remark was unexpected–even more so than Dane’s presence there in the first place. Shumar couldn’t help smiling a little “I didn’t know you were a comedian,” he said.

“Who’s joking?” Dane returned.

“I hate to interrupt,” Cobaryn told them, “but now that Captain Shumar is here, we should get up to Captain Hagedorn’s quarters as quickly as possible. I wish to be present when the decisions are made.”

Shumar agreed. Together, the three of them exited the transporter room and made their way to the nearest turbolift, which carried them to the appropriate deck. From there, it was a short walk to the captain’s door.

They knew that because the ships they commanded were exact replicas of the Horatio,designed to be identical down to the last airflow vent and intercom panel. Anyway, that had been the intent.

As the doors to Hagedorn’s quarters whispered open, Shumar saw that there were at least a few details there that diverged from the standard. More to the point, Hagedorn’s anteroom wasn’t anything like Shumar’s.

It had been furnished economically but impeccably, the walls decorated with a series of small, ancient‑looking iron artifacts, the clunky, standard‑issue Earth Command table and chairs replaced with a simpler and earthier‑looking version in a tawny, unfinished wood.

Interestingly, there weren’t any of the customarypersonal effects to be seen. Not a medal–though Hagedorn must have won lots of them. Not an exotic liquor bottle, a musical instrument, an alien statuette, or an unusual mineral specimen. Not a hat, a globe, or a 3‑D chessboard.

Not even a picture of a loved one.

Shumar found the place a little off‑putting in its spartan outlook, in its minimalism. However, it looked considerably bigger than Shumar’s own anteroom. So much so, in fact, that he didn’t feel cramped sharing the space with his five colleagues.

Then it occurred to Shumar that only fourof his colleagues were present. Matsura was conspicuous by his absence.

“Come on in,” said Hagedorn, his manner cordial if a bit too crisp for Shumar’s taste. “Can I get you anything?”

Shumar noticed that neither Hagedorn nor Stiles had a drink in his hand. “Nothing, thanks. Where’s Captain Matsura?”

Stiles frowned. “He’ll be a few minutes late. He wanted to check out the Oreias Seven colony himself.”

“Didn’t he do that already?” asked Shumar.

“Apparently not,” Hagedorn replied, obviously unperturbed by his colleague’s oversight.

“You forget,” said Stiles, “some of us aren’t scientists.”

Shumar hadn’t forgotten. He just couldn’t believe his fellow captains hadn’t seen a value in examining the colonies firsthand.

“Why don’t we get down to business?” asked Dane. “We can bring Matsura up to speed when he gets here.”

Shumar had never heard Dane take such a purposeful tack before. Was this the same man who had lingered over his tequila while everyone around him was scrambling to fight the Romulans?

It seemed Connor Dane was fullof surprises today.

Stiles glanced at Hagedorn. “I agree. It’s not as if we don’t know where Matsura will come down in this matter.”

Hagedorn must have been reasonably sure of Matsura as well because he went ahead with the meeting. “All right, then,” he said. “We’re all aware of the facts. We’ve scanned all four colonies in this system, including the two the aliens have already attacked, and we haven’t discovered anything to explain their aggressive behavior.”

“Fortunately, we’ve shown we can track them down,” said Stiles, picking up where his comrade left off. “But we can’t match their firepower or their maneuverability unless we come at them with everything we’ve got.”

“Even with the Yellowjacketdamaged,” Hagedorn noted, “we’ve still got five battleworthy ships left. I propose we deploy them as a group in order to find the aliens and defuse the threat.”

“It’s the only viable course of action open to us,” Stiles maintained. “Anything less and we’ll be lucky to fight them to a draw again.”

Silence reigned in the room as they considered the man’s advice. Then Hagedorn said, “What do the rest of you think?”

In other words, thought Shumar, you three butterfly catchers.

Cobaryn was the first to speak up. “I agree with Captain Stiles’s assessment,” he responded.

Shumar was surprised at how easily his friend had been swayed. It must have shown on his face because the Rigelian turned to him with a hint of an apology in his eyes.

“Believe me,” said Cobaryn, “I wish we could have come up with another solution to the problem. However, I do not see one presenting itself, and the colonists are depending on us to protect them.”

It was hard to argue with such logic. Even Shumar had to admit that.

Dane was frowning deeply, looking uncharacteristically thoughtful.

“You seem hesitant,” Stiles observed, an undercurrent of mockery in his voice. “I hope you’re not thinking of hanging back while the rest of us go into battle.”

Obviously, thought Shumar, some bone of contention existed between Stiles and Dane. In fact, now that Shumar had occasion to think about it, he was reminded of an exchange of remarks between the two at the captains’ first briefing back on Earth.

In response to Stiles’s taunt, the Cochrane jockey smiled jauntily. “What?” he asked, his voice as sharp‑edged as the other man’s. “And let you have all the fun?”

Ever the cool head, Hagedorn interceded. “This is a serious situation, gentlemen. There’s no place at this meeting for personali‑ties.”

“You’re right,” said Stiles. “I was out of line.” But neither his expression nor his tone suggested repentance.

Hagedorn turned to Shumar. His demeanor was that of one reasonable man speaking to another.

“And you, Captain?” he asked.

As his colleagues looked on, Shumar mulled over the proposition before him. Part of him was tempted to do what Cobaryn was doing, if only for the sake of the colonists’ continued well‑being.

Then there was the other part of him.

Shumar shook his head. “Unfortunately, I’m going to have to break with the party line. I’ll be beaming down to Oreias Seven in order to continue my investigation.”

“Are you sure you want to do that?” asked Hagedorn.

Shumar nodded. “Quite sure.”

“What about your ship?” Stiles inquired.

Shumar understood the question. Stiles wanted the Peregrineto go with the rest of the fleet to increase their chances of a victory. What’s more, Shumar didn’t blame him.

“My ship will go with you,” he assured Stiles.

“Under whose command?” Stiles pressed.

“That of my first officer, Stephen Mullen. From what I’ve seen of him, he’s more than qualified to command the Peregrine.Infact, considering all the military experience he’s got under his belt, you’ll probably feel more comfortable with himthan you do with me.”

But that didn’t seem to be good enough for Stiles, who shot a glance at Hagedorn. “As it happens,” he argued, “we’ve got an experienced commanding officer without a viable vessel. Why not put Captain Matsura in the center seat of the Peregrine?”

Shumar didn’t like the idea. After all, Mullen had demonstrated an ability to work smoothly with the Peregrine’screw. Besides, he wasn’t going to let Stiles or anyone else decide whom to put in charge of his vessel.

But before he could say anything, the doors to Hagedorn’s anteroom slid aside again and Matsura joined them, his forehead slick with perspiration. “Sorry I’m late,” he said.

“It’s all right,” Stiles assured him. In a matter of moments, he brought his Earth Command comrade up to date. “So, since Captain Shumar has decided to stay here, we’re talking about putting you in command of his ship.”

“Which isn’t going to happen,” Shumar interjected matter‑of‑factly. “Captain Stiles may have missed it, but I’ve already decided who’s going to command the Peregrine.”

Stiles’s look turned disparaging. “With all due respect, Captain–”

Matsura held up his hand, stopping Stiles in mid‑objection. “There’s no need to argue about it,” he said. “As it happens, I’d prefer to stay here with Captain Shumar.”

Stiles looked at Matsura as if he were crazy. “What the devil for?”

Shumar wanted to know the answer to that question himself.