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Authors: Diane Duane

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Star Trek: The Empty Chair (6 page)

BOOK: Star Trek: The Empty Chair
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Ael sat silent and watched the curves of the starships’ courses become more acute as they neared the planet.


Khre’Riov,
can we not stop it? Let us stop it!” Aidoann whispered. “If we move quickly enough, we could seed the star—or have tr’Mahan give the order.”

Ael shook her head. “I will not,” she said, her voice terribly steady, far more so than her heart. “You heard Courhig. You heard our kinswoman down there. The Artaleirhin have made their preparations. They know how this battle must unfold, for their freedom’s sake. Their choice is made. Now we must honor their intention, or condemn them to the loss of their own honor, forever.”

“But Ael—!”

She would not answer.

On the
Enterprise’
s bridge, the whole bridge crew was watching the same view in slightly different colors, and a stillness had settled over them too as they heard what the translator was making of the Grand Fleet’s announcement to the planet Artaleirh. “Captain,” Sulu said, “those orbits will have the capital ships in disruptor or phaser bombardment range within three minutes.”

Sulu was trying to keep his tone of voice neutral, but the edge showed in it regardless. Jim shook his head, knowing
just how he felt, wishing he could indulge the desire to go and help, but this was one of those moments during which tactics ruled, no matter how it hurt you personally. “I have no interest in going over there, Mr. Sulu,” Jim said, doing his best to keep the edge out of his own voice, though he suspected the minutes to follow might give him nightmares for decades. “I’m not going to throw away what advantage we have by allowing them to draw us out. They fight us here, or not at all.”

“Yes, Captain,” Sulu said, his voice flat this time. Jim had heard that subdued tone from his bridge crew before—the disappointment, the dread. But he was not going to allow that to affect him either.

“Thirty seconds to bombardment range,” Chekov said softly.

Jim had used his own phasers on planets’ surfaces occasionally. It was very difficult to be delicate about it, and when the ship firing was bent on
not
being delicate, the destruction could be terrible. With time and persistence, even large cities could be rendered not merely uninhabited, but uninhabitable. And then there was the matter of the phasers’ effects on the local ecology, on terrain and atmosphere: derangement of the local weather, destruction of water tables and even activation of earthquake faults if any were in the vicinity. But generally the hundreds of thousands of burned and blackened corpses, and the dust of the uncountable vaporized, were no longer in a condition to be able to be concerned about the environmental consequences. The thought left Jim’s mouth drier, if possible, than it was already.

The alternative to disruptor or phaser barrage, of course, was no better in that regard—possibly worse. Yet there would be many more survivors of seeding this star than a full-scale planetary bombardment would leave. Jim rubbed his forehead, hit the comm button on his chair. “Scotty.”

“Aye, sir.”

“If we
had
to break away for the star—”

“We can’t do it, Captain,”
Scotty said.
“Not without warp, and I haven’t got that for you. Another two hours. If anyone’s going to do it, it’s got to be
Bloodwing,
or one of the other lads out there.”

Jim was watching the little tagged light in the display that was
Bloodwing.
She was not moving in the slightest; she stood to her position. “Uhura,” he said, “get me Ael.”

Uhura touched her console, nodded at him.

“I hear you,
Enterprise,” Ael said.

“We can’t just let them sit there and take what’s coming,” Jim said.

“We can and
will,” Ael said,
“as they have insisted is their right to do. I like this no better than you do, Captain, but we have had this out with Courhig, and neither he nor those people on Artaleirh will thank us for changing tactics now.”

Jim sat up and pushed his back against the back of his chair. Finally he nodded. “I just want you to know…” he said, and trailed off.

“I too detest this,”
Ael said,
“should you be in any doubt.”

Spock was looking down his viewer. “The Imperial vessels are moving into low orbit over the planet. Analysis suggests the initiation of a series of attack runs.”

“I grieve for their folly, Mr. Spock,”
Ael said.
“But for nothing else.”

Jim sat there, feeling the sweat trickle down his back inside his uniform.
Those people down there have to know what’s going to happen now,
he thought.
They’re braver than any human population I know would be, under the circumstances.
The problem was that such bravery, in humans, was often closely coupled with fanaticism, and had in the past been associated with many terrible deeds. It was hard, now,
to view such stoicism as strictly sane.
But these people aren’t human, just humanoid, and it does no one any service to project our ethos onto them.

Now
Elieth
and
Moerrdel,
two of the cruisers, streaked in past LPO levels, and lower still, deep into the upper levels of the Artaleirhin atmosphere, and began to fire. Jim would have closed his eyes, except that doing so was the coward’s part.
The least I can do is watch their sacrifice.

The first target was a large city down there on the side of the planet most visible to scan, a city by a big bay. Jim looked at it and thought, rather sickened, of how very much it resembled San Francisco. As the disruptors struck down from
Elieth,
he thought,
It’s my job to prevent this kind of thing, to protect civilians from being killed in this kind of fight. And I can’t do anything.

A haze of smoky blue fire rose up from where the disruptors were striking. Jim could have wept—

—until he realized that the disruptors were having no effect on what was
underneath
that blue fire. He stared at the screen as the disruptor fire briefly stopped, and the blue glow shrugged itself up and away from the city into a bump, a wobbling half bubble, an immaterial dome.

Jim straightened in the center seat, then looked around at Spock. At his station, Spock was gazing down his scanner intently. “Force field,” he said. “Unusual waveform, hexicyclic. Quite robust.”

The blue dome covered what had to be hundreds of square miles. A renewed hail of disruptor fire fell upon it from
Elieth,
and then from
Moerrdel
behind it, and a spread of dissociator torpedoes came down as well. Jim found himself holding his breath again, waiting for the blinding light and the kicked-up dust and smoke to disappear.

“The fields are holding,” Spock said, still gazing down his viewer. “The Imperial vessels are scanning the planet, probably looking for the power sources of the fields. But I suspect
that search will be futile. The power sources are too well shielded—I cannot detect them either.”

To Jim’s practiced ear, Spock’s voice betrayed a hint of what sounded like amusement. The obscuring dust and smoke was already clearing away from the second bombardment, and once again the blue-glowing force fields pushed themselves back up into shape.
Moerrdel
and
Elieth
arced away from the city they had been attacking, heading toward another city in the planet’s northern hemisphere, this one sitting on the banks of a great river.

“Keep them in view,” Jim said. Sulu nodded, touched his control panel. The tactical view shrank while the scan view pulled back to show the two Imperial ships as they made for the upper atmosphere, tracing great-circle routes toward that second city. It lay near the terminator, drifting into dark. Minute after minute it lay there, with no light about it but the faint hazy greenish glitter of what might have been city streetlights, far below.
Elieth
and
Moerrdel
dove, disruptor fire stitching down through the shadow of oncoming night—

—and the blue domes sprang up, at the last possible moment, almost as if in mockery. All around the cities, smoke and fire leapt up, the local atmosphere going almost opaque with dust. The Imperial vessels swung about, fired again, and again.

Nothing. The dust passed away in a blast of local wind provoked by the sudden heat pumped into the area’s air; the fields outside the domes were pitted and crevassed by the disruptor barrage, even molten in places. But the cities stood.

“Most interesting,” Spock said, as calmly as if he were passing comment on the progress of some experiment in a test tube. “The hexicyclic wave is a variant on one of several emitted by the device that tr’AAnikh brought us along with the wounded Senator.” He straightened. “There is some truly fascinating technology coming out of the Rihannsu colony worlds, Captain.”

Kirk filed that statement away for further consideration as he watched the Grand Fleet ships head across the planet again, past the terminator and into Artaleirh’s night side, apparently to see if there was some city on that world that they
could
successfully attack. Jim shook his head at such dogged commission of outrage. “Mr. Sulu, keep an eye on them,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll waste much more of their time there. I want to know when they come out of close orbit again. Where are the big ships?”

Sulu increased the size of the tactical display. “
Gauntlet
and
Esemar
have been hanging back, Captain. They were expecting us to come out after them, I’d guess.
Arest
and
Berouinn
have been moving slowly toward the asteroid belt, scanning, but not getting too far from the capital ships.”

Jim’s smile was bitter. “Wondering what other little surprises we might have in store. Well, they won’t hang back for much longer. Uhura, what do their comms sound like—and the comms from the ships attacking the planet?”

She looked over her shoulder and gave Jim an amused look. “Nothing you’d benefit by hearing, Captain,” she said, sounding dry. “If my grandmamma was here, she’d be telling me to go find a bar of soap to wash these people’s mouths out with.”

Jim wondered briefly how long it had been since soap came in bars, and hit the comm button on the arm of his seat.
“Bloodwing!”

“We hear,”
Ael’s voice said.

“I wish you’d warned me about what was going to happen on the planet, Commander!”

“The people on Artaleirh were themselves none too sure it was going to happen, Captain,”
Ael said.
“The technology had not yet been quite so vigorously tested. It would not have made any difference to how we had to behave for Grand Fleet’s benefit.”

It would have made some difference to my state of mind,
Jim thought, but wasn’t going to say. He was all too aware that, though Ael might trust him, he had another level of trust to achieve with the Romulans in this system and elsewhere, no matter how welcome they said he and his ship were.

“But now the Fleet knows that the planet is of no use as a target,”
Ael said.
“Now they must engage us. Indeed, they cannot return home
without
having engaged us, at peril of their lives. All we require now is patience, of which we have plenty, and they have little.”

And luck,
Jim wanted to say, but once again he restrained himself.

“Captain,” Sulu said, “the Grand Fleet ships are rearranging battle order. The two that were attacking the planet have come ’round the far side now.”

“Joining up with the supercruisers?” Jim said.

Sulu shook his head. “Coming our way, to feel us out, I’d say. The corvettes are hanging close to the supercruisers. It’s another split of forces.”

“Thank the Elements!”
Ael said from
Bloodwing. “Can it be they’re not even aware what they’re doing?”

“In normal circumstances, I’d wonder what they’re teaching people in the Strat/Tac classes at Grand Fleet,” Jim said. “Maybe they’re nervous about what happened to the ships they sent in and haven’t heard from again. I guess I might be, in their place. But meantime, whichever Element makes people throw away good sense or good battle order when they’re angry, let’s definitely thank
that
one. Mr. Sulu, this is what you were waiting for.”

“Aye, Captain,” Sulu said; and in his voice Jim heard something he had heard only very rarely before—an edge of anger, and of relish in the anger, that would have been out of place anywhere but here. Sulu was a kind man, normally, but he had seen things today that, from the sound of it, had at least for the moment wrung some of the kindness out of him. “Khiy?”

“Tr’Mahan signals that the smallships are ready to take the field,”
Khiy’s voice came from
Bloodwing. “Are you?”

“Going now,” Sulu said. “Turn them loose.”

In the background, from Uhura’s station, Jim could hear a faint chatter of messages, all speaking one or another dialect of Rihannsu—the traffic between the little Artaleirhin ships as they moved into position. “Uhura,” he said, “is all that in the clear?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Is that wise?”

She looked over her shoulder and smiled very slightly. “Captain,” she said, “have you ever been to Glasgow?”

“Uh, once.” It had been one of those long-weekend holidays; Scotty had taken him. To Jim’s embarrassment, he could remember very little of the weekend.

“Did you understand the locals?”

“Now that you mention it…” That was one of the things Jim
had
been able to remember about the weekend: that Glaswegians, after a few pints, sounded unnervingly like Klingons. He had found it difficult to believe that he and they were all speaking the same language, and their tendency to greet every sentient being in the street with the phrase “Hey,
Jimmy!”
had already given him a crick in the neck by the end of the weekend’s first night.

Uhura grinned. “Captain, children at school in the Rihannsu outworlds all learn the ‘made speech,’ the original recension of Rihannsu, as a
lingua franca,
but their local and planetary dialects vary from it hugely, not just in idiom but in etymology. Not to mention vowel shifts and other complications unique to a constructed language turned out ‘into the wild,’ where the ‘wild’ is light-years wide rather than just thousands or tens of thousands of miles. If any of the Grand Fleet people
not
from this system can make out more than one syllable in ten of what these people are saying, you buy me a hat and I’ll eat it.”

BOOK: Star Trek: The Empty Chair
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