Star Trek: The Empty Chair (41 page)

“It was not your fault,” Thala said, laughing, and led them all off to one side toward a space among the trees in which a huge greenstone conference table was somewhat incongruously set. “Or, well, not entirely. When the government decided to uproot our whole clan and relocate it to some barren planet I’d never heard of, out at the back end of nowhere, it seemed a good time to take my leave of ch’Rihan before I became too much like the people who could do such a thing.”

They all sat down. Kirk was still looking around him in astonishment—not just at the forest. “Thala,” Jim said, “I’m sorry. The question has been burning me up.
How have you people built these ships?
We always thought the colony worlds were poor.”

Thala smiled, as at a clever youngster. And Veilt smiled, and Ael smiled, and seeing Jim’s face, she saw that he understood he had finally asked the right question.

“So did the Empire,” Thala said, “since they beggared us. Who would we be to disabuse them of the notion? We were willing to live in peaceful lawfulness under their reign, but we had to speak our minds; that’s our nature. When they decided that speaking one’s mind was treason, at that point we let them send us far away from their notice, as they thought. It left us freer to speak, and to practice the peculiar form of criminality they had forced upon us. The forest, there—” She looked all around her at the green-and-gold trees surrounding them. “They never knew that we managed to bring the
best of it away from ch’Havran with us. All they saw were poor people flocking onto the transports; destitute folk, with muddy plants in buckets. Do you know
tivish,
Captain?”

Jim shook his head, but McCoy looked up. “Jim,” he said, “you remember the scarf wrapped around that bottle I brought Spock? That was
tivish.
It’s a plant-based fiber, like silk, only much, much more so. The best
tivish
is so fine, you can have it in your hands and hardly know when you’re feeling it.”

“It is fabulously difficult to correctly process,” Thala said, “and as a result, fabulously expensive. For the better half of the last half century, we have exported
tivish
to the Hearthworlds, albeit somewhat erroneously labeled. Our customers have always thought it came from south-continent ch’Havran.”

“Elements forbid we should start some piffling quarrel about a matter of labeling,” Gurrhim said, and coughed.

“And all we poor Kavethssu have gone about in rags and tags these many years, like subsistence farmers, growing the wretched groundroot,” Thala said. “While quietly exporting the best possible hydroponically produced counterfeit Havrannssu
tivish
all about the Empire, and far beyond—and, from the profits, building ships.”

She looked around her with utmost satisfaction. Ael saw Jim bow his head in what she thought was proper amazement at such determination. Then he looked up. “There would have been other sources for your income, of course.”

“Ah, always. But no more illegal than absolutely necessary. Pirates and subversives the Empire might have made of us, but criminals? The Elements would never approve.” Then Thala grinned. “Actually, perhaps we erred ever so slightly on the side of criminality. We
did
buy some banks.”

Ael saw Jim settle back in his seat with a smile that said he entirely understood. “Every revolution,” he said, “needs a friendly bank.”

“How pleasant it is to do business with a thoughtful ally,” Thala said. “So now you understand the context. We are happy to leave this corrupt Empire if we must. But far more would we prefer to take it back, and someday replant all this under the open sky where it belongs. Augo has gone some way toward that, but not yet far enough. There’s yet much work to do, and little time.”

“But matters are moving in a direction we would desire,” Veilt said. “Through Kavethssu agents working on ch’Rihan and ch’Havran, much fresh intelligence has not come to us, and it is accurate. The agents’ stake is in preserving their home, which they know is about to be involved in the Battle of Eisn. Public unrest is growing.”

The hair rose on the back of Ael’s neck as she suddenly heard her homeworlds, her home star, being for the first time given a name that turned them into a battle, an engagement. A matter of history—and possibly one of tragedy. “…has no idea what to do,” Thala was saying. “The Defense Forces are torn. They little like to be sent against their own people. Some of the most enthusiastic of them have suffered at the hands of those they command. Numerous members of the forces have gone over to the insurgency and have brought much useful Intelligence and technology with them.”

“That would be the best kind of news,” Kirk said. “Thala, Veilt—
how many ships?”

The urgency in his voice sounded the way a touched wound might sound if it had suddenly acquired the power of speech.

“That we know of,” Thala said, “forty-nine.”

Jim sat very still. “Forty-nine
capital
vessels?”

“No,” Veilt said. “Twenty capitals, and twenty-nine lesser vessels of
Warbird-
or
Reha-
class.”

“That we know of,” Kirk said quietly.

“It seems very few,” Veilt said, “I know. But by both accident and design, we have made Grand Fleet empty its purse
with some speed. Granted, they brought much more force to Augo than we had expected. But they hoped to strike a crushing blow there—and found their error when it was they who turned out to be tied to the anvil, not we.”

Kirk sat there looking at his hands, folded on the table. “All right,” he said. “Let’s consider how these new numbers affect our tactics. I trust you’ve had time to look over the previous version of our battle plan?”

Thala nodded. “I have consulted with Veilt. Our major concern, as you might imagine, is the number of feet on the ground that we can contribute to this effort. Obviously, when we fight in defense of
Kaveth,
every able member of our population stands to arms. But for a battle outside our walls, even this one, we must necessarily be more sparing. We cannot leave our children’s home defenseless, especially when it can most logically be expected to suffer attack during the time a significant portion of our forces are groundside.” She sat back in her chair, and something in the change of light and shadow across her face suddenly showed Ael how unnerved Thala was by the prospect that lay before them all.

“Of our combined populations,” Veilt said, “we can offer you two hundred and eighty thousand ground troops. This is ten percent over the numbers we originally discussed with you, Captain, when you first floated your master battle plan. But I still fear it may not be enough.”

Kirk looked a little abstracted. Ael recognized the look of a commander rearranging a strategy on the fly. Then his eyes snapped back into the now. “I would have agreed with you previously,” he said. “Since this is the one battle we can’t afford to lose, it’s also one to which I’ve always preferred to bring overwhelming force, along the lines of five-to-one odds. Today’s numbers take us to about three-to-one, since even though they’ve been calling in everything they can, the Hearthworlds still have too little in the way of ground forces,
and those ground forces have too little in the way of experience.”

“It’s as I told you, Captain,” Ael said. “Rebellion has routinely been handled by Grand Fleet, not by putting boots on the ground.”

“And the government has thereby created its own tactical vacuum,” Jim said. “They’ve always expected the Federation and the Klingons to be locked in a permanent strategic standoff, too preoccupied with each other to come this far into the Empire. And as our Intelligence now confirms, it’s never seriously occurred to either Grand Fleet or the government that a local insurgency would ever gain enough momentum to become a serious threat. Or else anyone who suggested such a thing was either laughed out of the room, or silenced for talking treason.” His smile went grim. “There’s no question that whatever battle plan they’ve managed to cobble together will start to break down in earnest when their C&C starts trying to handle troops who not only have never taken seriously the possibility that the Hearthworlds might be invaded, but have never
trained
as if they might be. That’ll be a good start for us. But to make our numbers count as if they were actually a five-to-one advantage, we are going to have to break that command-and-control
much
more seriously, and much more quickly.”

His expression was acquiring a sly look, like that of a conjuror with a
smeerp
up his sleeve. Ael sat back and watched the others’ faces as they watched Kirk. Thala, in particular, was favoring the captain with an expression suggesting that she thought she might be dealing with a madman.

“What did you have in mind, Captain?” Gurrhim said. “Forgive me if this has been discussed before, but I have been busy with other matters.”

“Like healing a big hole in your chest,” Kirk said. “Last I saw, that was acceptable as an excuse for missing a staff
meeting or two.” That smile got even more sly as it was mirrored by Gurrhim. Ael saw how much these two men had come to like each other, and was glad of it, as it would prove useful.

“Let’s backtrack a little,” said Kirk. “To reduce ch’Rihan—really our main goal, because ch’Havran will quickly follow—we have two primary objectives before us. First, we must take Ra’tleihfi, not just because of its symbolic value as the heart of the Empire. The command structures centered there have never been decentralized, again due to the inability to conceive of a direct attack on these two planets—and also, if I understand Ael correctly, due to the culture of distrust in both the government and the Fleet. Neither has ever been happy about the prospect of allowing your subordinates to get too far out of their sight, where they’ll have leisure to plot.”

“True enough,” Gurrhim said. “Captain, the doctor gave me many things to read while I was lying on my back the first few days aboard, and while I was reading I found that we have a saying in common. ‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.’”

Kirk nodded. “So that concentration of resources and personnel will have to be disrupted or destroyed as quickly as possible. And our second task will be to capture and occupy all major centers of government in the city—meaning, most specifically, the Senate and the other buildings and facilities of the Tricameron, and the facilities associated with the Praetorate. The Praetors, also, must be neutralized—most particularly the Three.”

“It is a very bland word, ‘neutralized,’” Thala said.

Kirk had the grace to look embarrassed. “Yes. Sometimes the jargon creeps up on you when you’re not looking. Thala, I would prefer not to kill those who don’t need killing. But circumstance sometimes overrules our best intentions. To keep the civilian casualties to a minimum, the Praetorate has
to be incapacitated and its members confined or eliminated as quickly as possible. They can’t under any circumstances be allowed to escape. The emergence of a government in exile around which a counterinsurgency could crystallize would be disastrous for everybody. The Three, in particular, can’t be allowed to escape—and when you look at the detailed battle plan, which I’ll be revising again shortly, you’ll see that a fair amount of materiel and personnel are devoted to this objective.”

“The strategy as a whole, and the intention of taking the Three out of the equation, is well-intentioned,” Veilt said, glancing down at the table, under the surface of which the many pages and interlocking structures of the battle plan were glowing. “But, as usual, physical reality intrudes. With all the best will in the world, when a culture has transporter technology, it can be very hard to prevent escapes.”

Kirk’s smile now became positively unsettling. “Well,” he said, “we’re just going to have to render transporter traffic impossible.”

The others all stared at him, and so did Ael. “Captain, what in the worlds are you talking about?”

Jim looked a little sour, though amused. “Transporters break every chance they get anyway. You’d think it wouldn’t take all that much to make them useless on
purpose.
Fortunately, Mr. Scott has been working on a protocol that will, for a limited area anyway, make transporter usage impossible. It’s based on a union of one aspect of the new hexicyclic technology that you passed to us, sir,” he said to Gurrhim, “and on some of the research that Scotty and K’s’t’lk have been doing on rendering the Sunseed technology unusable. I won’t bother you with the technical details at the moment, but with the kind of mobile power that
Tyrava
and
Kaveth
make available to us, it will be possible to interdict transporter usage for fairly extended periods within a limited volume of space—specifically, over and around Ra’tleihfi.
Anywhere that beaming will still work will be too far away to be of any use against our operations on and in the city.”

“But surely an effect like that would have to act against both sides,” Thala said.

“You’re right,” Kirk said. “Here, though, we play to our strengths, and use
Tyrava
and
Kaveth
in their modes as hypertroop carriers. By the time our opponents figure out what’s been done to them, our ground forces will already have been put in place by the large-class people-mover shuttles you’re already carrying as part of your recolonization materiel. When everyone’s in position, we then close down transporter use for the duration of the push into the city. If the government troops are going to fight with us, they’re going to have to do it on our terms, not theirs. Timing is going to matter a lot, but assuming that we manage that correctly, they won’t be able to stop us from taking the city.”

Ael shook her head. “But this changes everything. If the attack on the city is now going to be terrain-oriented, rather than assuming large-scale troop emplacements via transporter…” She gave Kirk an annoyed look. “A pity you had not mentioned this possibility to me earlier! There would have been more time to develop this set of strategies.”

“Since I didn’t know myself that it was going to become possible until yesterday about this time, when Scotty told me,” Kirk said, “I would ask you to hold me blameless, just this once.”