8: The Natividad
"Damned thing. I don't know how anybody could fight in these."
"It's not half as fancy as what you normally wear on the holodeck. How many epaulettes have you worked your way up to? Three? And how many shoulders do you have?"
They were in the turbolift, and Gerard was struggling to loosen the collar of the Starfleet dress uniform he had worn to the fancy dinner with the Ambassador. Hornblower would have been incredibly irritated not only at their endless, distracting chatter in breach of military discipline, but also how Bush eyed Gerard across the cramped space. There was a little smile in the corner of her mouth as she watched him struggle; she had her head tilted to the side, too. In Bush, these were classic signs of sexual attraction -- it was the stage she called possible target acquisition. The greater her attraction, the broader the smile became, and in any other circumstance, that slowly widening grin would normally have sent Hornblower into a fit of irritation that resulted in him at least fantasizing about ordering her and Gerard to oversee the flushing the portside waste collectors. Personally.
Possibly manually.
Now, though, Hornblower could barely spare a thought for them. He saw Bush and Gerard through a haze; he barely heard their chatter.
He sprang onto the bridge as soon as the lift doors opened. Knyvett was already at the long-range scanners, and a schematic of the system lay on the viewscreen above. A long yellow trail marked an intersect course, and Bush whipped around to look at Hornblower. Hornblower could see her expression out of the corner of his eye, and her mouth hung half-way open.
"That can't be!"
Two concentric circles marked the position of the Natividad. They were tracking the enemy under cloak.
Hornblower allowed himself a moment of satisfaction over how Bush stared at him, mute with admiration -- perhaps he had been paying attention a little in the turbolift.
"It is the Natvidad. You should keep up-to-date on your non-Federation defense reading," he said, then swung into his accustomed place at the command rail on the bridge. He preferred to stand for engagements like this. "Take us to red alert, Mr. Bush. And power to both torpedo and phaser banks, Mr. Gerard, but hold your fire if you want to keep your commission."
"Aye aye, sir," Gerard said. He, too, had stopped for a moment to stare at the viewscreen, but he ran up to his station quickly enough. Red light washed steadily through the ship, and the klaxon settled into its holding pitch. Hornblower ordered himself to wait until he had counted to a hundred before asking how many of the Lydia's crew were at battle stations, but Bush interrupted him at eighty-two.
"Ninety-eight percent -- no, one hundred percent - of the crew at battle stations, sir."
Hornblower hid his pleased surprise; it was a full seventeen seconds off their previous best. He might have congratulated Mr. Bush, as it was the product of her relentless drilling, but it was no more than was necessary at this point -- in the proper order of things, in a fully joined battle, the Natvidad would demolish the Lydia with two full passes.
She had heavier armaments; she had heavier shields. Her Klingon-built tractor beam would irresistibly haul the Lydia into a bloody boarding action by superior numbers if the Lydia should venture too close. Nor could the Lydia remain at a distance; Hornblower had studied the visual data, and he recognized Romulan-built long range torpedo bays when he saw them.
The Natvidad was superior to the Lydia in all respects except for the training of her crew, which Bush had wrung out by drill -- and the Natvidad's commander was no fool, either. The neutrino trail had kept coming for the Lydia through every feasible trick that Hornblower knew, from the Mars half-warp roll to hiding, briefly, in a radio-washed asteroid field.
No, the commander was not fool at all. He had tracked Hornblower through millions of light years, through an entire sector of space littered with anomalies and difficult points where a lesser commander would have stumbled. By calibrating the sensors for neutrino leaks and configuring a data filter for Knyvett to use, Hornblower had only neutralized her cloaking device. He had removed the element of surprise.
He still had not removed her superior offense. Or her superior defense. Or the ferocity of a crew that knew death by gruesome means awaited failure.
The bridge, to Hornblower's ears, was silent. He had stopped hearing the klaxons once they settled waiting pattern; years of service as well as his own tonedeafness had taught him to block it out. It always sounded like meaningless, grating noise. Anything musical sounded like grating noise, and the thick silence continued until --
"The neutrino stream has swung around and is headed, under cloak, at direct intercept," Clay said, voice cracking a little.
"Hold course, Mr. Clay, and hold fire, Mr. Gerard. I want us close."
Hornblower gripped the command railing with both hands. The seconds dragged by; he could look down at them and see that he was gripping the railing so hard that his knuckles had gone pale, but the effort of keeping himself under control was so great that he could not feel it. Bush was a few feet away, breathing harshly, and a little further than that, Gerard alternately cursed and cajoled his torpedo bays. Every tactical officer that Hornblower had ever known did that. It was the characteristic of the breed to think of them as living beings who would respond to verbal persuasion.
In his head, though, Hornblower became his own desperate entreaties: where was it? They could not survive this encounter without it. What could possibly delay one of this magnitude?
Gerard had left off talking to his boys -- amusing that he would think of them as males in need of charming when he had spent so much time trying to charm the Ambassador, but Gerard had always referred to the guns as being male. Bush had made disparaging remarks about it before, but now, the only sound on the dull noise of the red alert klaxon.
Still, it had not yet arrived.
Still, the Natividad bore down on them.
And suddenly, just as Hornblower was convinced that he could not bear it anymore, Clay shouted from the helm. "Charged plasma arm of storm incoming, captain! Mark 6' 7', 1', traveling at 225% of normal plasma storm speed. Unless they take evasive action --"
Clay was almost hysterical with excitement, and then, the plasma arm, traveling at near warp speed, was already upon the Natvidad.
There it was. The phenomenon that Hornblower had been waiting for, on which he had pinned all his hopes of survival, let alone promotion. Conventional Starfleet wisdom that the speed and trajectory of plasma storms could not be calculated with accuracy, but Hornblower was not a conventional captain. He had done some of the calculations himself; he had used every particle of mathematical intuition and experience and knowledge that he possessed so as to be in its path, at this moment, in the position.
It was a feat of spacefaring of the highest order, and now, it bore fruit.
The Natividad's captain had been intent on bringing his ship as close to the Lydia as possible that he had forgotten to keep abreast of long-range sensors, and by the time it had shown on the limited sensors that cloak allowed, an arm of the storm had already taken the Natividad into her grip. She flickered into view; the superplasma had disrupted her cloaking device, and Hornblower watched as thousands and thousands of tons of the deadliest armaments from three major space-faring races spun like a toy in the storm's grasp.
"Helm, bring us around her stern, " Hornblower shouted. He was too excited to pretend calm. "Fire your torpedo banks, Mr. Gerard, bring the phasers to bear as you can."
"With pleasure, sir."
There was only the faintest of recoils as the torpedoes left. Bush and the engineering officer had brought them back almost to full functionality; Hornblower gripped the command rail out of habit, more than need, as the Lydia swung around the Natvidad, slow and leisurely as she raked the Natvidad from back to front, then down the other side, from front to back.
"Damn my eyes," Bush swore. She stared raptly at the sight of the Lydia's phasers raking, at will, the helpless Natividad, which still lay becalmed, systems struggling with the remnants of the plasma arm. The Natividad vented from multiple decks, and torpedos and smashed the structure around her left warp nacelle. "Damn my soul, sir."
There was no time to reflect on the joy of having impressed her, though.
"Plasma arm is swinging back around, sir," Clay shouted.
Bush had the engineering report. "Port impulse is at 68% and dropping. Engineering is attempting a circuit override -- "
But Knyvett had news, too. "The Natividad is back. Powering torpedo banks online, 45%, 75%, 85%. Ten seconds to firing -- "
"Evasive maneuvers failing. Impulse engines are at 15% strength due to ion interference. We will be struck by the storm, sir."
Once Hornblower saw the size of the plasma arm, he knew that it had been no better than even odds that they could escape their own turn with it. The breadth that had engulfed the Nativdad was now going to make a victim of them. Hornblower had gambled that the storm would be there, and he had won that bet, but he had lost when he bet that they would escape it.
"All non-essential power to shields," he said. It was almost unnecessary to order it; the Lydia's crew was well-drilled enough so that Chief had undoubtedly begun re-routing the second that news of the had come in through Engeineering's audio patch on the ridge.
The lights flickered as power was re-routed. The Lydia had wrung all the advantage from the superplasma arm; now, she was to pay the price. The viewscreen showed how she was caught between the plasma storm on her port side and a dozen torpedos, streaming from a recovered Nativdad, on the starboard side.
"Brace for impact," Bush said.
And then, more quietly, almost like a prayer --
"For what we are about to receive, Lord -- " she whispered, and it was upon them.