WAR DRAGONS by JAMES T. HIRK & HIRAKU SULU

Author:JAMES T. HIRK & HIRAKU SULU
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: POCKET BOOKS
Published: 1998-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

KIRK

SHE WAS A BIG, awkward, front-heavy girl, with a fragile rear end and inertial dampeners that were shot all to hell. As willing as her captain might be, I knew if we just slapped a tractor beam on her and started to pull, we’d stress her structural frame badly enough to compromise seals and welds all across her secondary hull. Looking at the damage wrought on her shuttle bays after the FL-70s’ exit, I was frankly afraid we’d snap her in half. So I sent over my chief engineer and the best team of tube-crawlers he had, and we waited nearly three hours for the combined Enterprise-Excelsior tech force to wake up the red-lined impulse engines enough to break the huge ship’s inertia.

The Enterprise took over as soon as the Excelsior was drifting free. Even so, we accelerated her along as smooth a vector as we could manage, and I kept wishing Hikaru Sulu was the one piloting the Enterprise as we did it. They say it’s hard sometimes for young officers to “grow up” out from under their charismatic commanders. I’m here to tell you that it’s also hard to be the commander who lets them go, especially when you know that kind of talent doesn’t come along every day. Even without Sulu at the helm, we managed to safely tow Excelsior a good ten parsecs into Federation space; it took another ten to ease her to a full stop and send word back to Starfleet that she’d be sitting here for a while.

The Excelsior’s crew breathed a collective sigh of relief when we finally released her. I wasn’t celebrating just yet. McCoy once told me I’d be a captain until the day I died—if not longer—because something inside of me just wouldn’t let it go. I suspect that something is the niggling certainties, the agitating instincts that tell you where to go and what to do, even when you have no clear idea what you’re reacting to. Good commanders learn to trust those silent impulses; I’d given myself over to them years ago. Apprehension with no direct target had started burning in my belly about halfway through our oh-so-careful tow, and by now it had almost eaten me through. There was something about this mission already not going as planned, something still an unreachable distance away, something I wouldn’t know about until it was too late. I didn’t say anything to Sulu. He had his own problems, his own ship to worry about, his own peace to make with whatever urges and instincts his captaincy woke in him. It was bad enough that my instincts already insisted we wouldn’t be bringing his first officer back; I didn’t need to complicate his mission with worries about the safety of my ship and crew as well.

Still, we left Sulu and his shuttle crew still gearing up for their trip to the Anjiri homeworld. “No time to waste,” I’d insisted. In reality, if I’d had to hover around doing nothing even one moment longer, I was going to explode.

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