Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu, Book 5: The Empty Chair Read online

  But then Jim had fallen foul of that least predictable of factors: current events. Or more precisely, a lack of them, he thought. He had come to understand why the favorite toast of sailors in wet-navy times had been to “a sudden plague or a bloody war,” since both were seen as the surest route to promotion via the death of your immediate superiors. Real admirals, in Jim’s opinion—and just about everybody else’s, he suspected, though at Starfleet no one said so out loud—commanded fleets. But there were only so many fleets to go around, especially in times of relative peace. And as luck or the lack of it would have it, Jim’s promotion coincided with one of those somewhat quiet times when the usual old troubles are simmering away, but not actually breaking into a boil. With conflict at something of a minimum, there was what—from any other angle—would have been considered a blessed lack of attrition among Starfleet ships and crews. At the same time, none of the older admirals showed any signs of retiring, and no younger ones, newly come into fleet assignments, got any sudden urge for planetside duty. As a result, the command of which James T. Kirk took charge on the day he put on his admiral’s insignia was a large and shiny new desk.

  And there he stayed for entirely too long, in his own opinion—until V’Ger came along and changed everything—at a time when he should have been out in the galaxy doing his first real admiralty work.

  But now, Jim thought, that gets to change. The situation doesn’t look anything like I ever thought it would, but that’s beside the point.

  For Artaleirh, there had been no time to devise anything but very general plans that would suit the available personalities and materiel. But for Augo, something far more complex was going to be necessary, or Ael and her people would be courting disaster. Now Jim would get to act a wartime Fleet Admiral’s part, designing and directing the progress of a significant part of a campaign. Just in an entirely different Fleet than the one that commissioned me, he thought, and smiled a smile that was fairly grim. Even if we win, I’ll be lucky if I don’t get keelhauled. Or the yardarm.

  But that was a problem for the future. At the moment, a great deal rested on his seeing further than most, so Jim was going to have to find the tallest giants he could, and climb on their shoulders in a hurry. He would have to sit down over the next couple of days and whip his initial thoughts on the upcoming campaign into some kind of order, some shape that would stand being closely examined and picked at, not just passed as an exam essay, with a commendation on the clarity of his writing style. And even then, even assuming Jim could design something that would work, the enactment of the plan would be no classroom exercise, nothing that could be played out in the simulator, to victory or destruction, and then walked away from afterward. Real blood, red and green, would be shed, and Jim would need to consider every drop as precious as his own; for the game wasn’t just to win, but to do it with the least possible mortality and destruction. This isn’t just some “give ’em hell” proposition. You’re fighting alongside the antagonist side. This is more like breaking an occupation than anything else.

  He had a long drink of the coffee, and put it down again, making a face: too much sugar. The door slid open, and Spock, McCoy, and Ael came in together.

  “Thought we’d find you here,” McCoy said. He looked at Jim’s empty plate as he went to the food processor hatch. “Second one? Third?”

  “Third,” Jim said.

  “Stop there,” McCoy said. “Commander? What’s your pleasure?”

  Ael threw a glance at Spock. “I suspect you have plomeek soup, or an analogue?”

  “We do,” McCoy said. “Large or small?”

  “Large, if you would.”

  “It is underspiced,” Spock said. “However, I will have one as well, Doctor.”

  “Two it is,” McCoy said. “But, Spock, you’ve never mentioned anything about the seasoning before.”

  “I would not have considered adjustments to the cuisine to be part of your job description, Doctor,” Spock said. “I have occasionally attempted to discuss the matter with Mr. Scott, but the discussion inevitably degenerates into something to do with haggis.”

  Jim grinned. “That happens entirely too often whether you’re discussing food or not,” he said, as they all sat down and McCoy brought the dishes over from the hatch. “Probably it’s wisest not to provoke the response on purpose.” He sipped at his coffee again, threw an amused look at Ael; seeing her had reminded him of something Uhura reported having heard on the local planetary comms networks. “So, Commander,” he said, “how does it feel to be the Savior of Artaleirh?”

  “Please, do not,” Ael said softly, spooning up some soup. She tasted it, and made an approving face. “In your world as in mine, salvation often has unsavory aftereffects on the one seen to have done the saving, for only the powerless need to be saved, and routinely they hate to be reminded of it.”

  Jim smiled, though only a little; she had a point.

  “And being too successful is likely to produce trouble as well,” McCoy said. “I doubt the Praetorate is best pleased with you at the moment.”

  Ael had a little more soup, then nodded. “Both they and Grand Fleet will be in turmoil. Recriminations will be flying, for under no circumstances would they ever have expected our cause to come so far, with such success. The next blow they deal us will be intended to be infallibly mortal, for we’ve done far worse than merely inflict a defeat upon the government and the Fleet. We have made them look ineffective, perhaps even foolish, and there could be no deadlier affront to their egos, or threat to their power.”

  Jim nodded. “That’s what I’ve been thinking too. We might have been the hammer this time out, but next time we’d better be ready to be the anvil.”

  There was quiet for a time as everyone ate. Jim sat back, drinking his coffee, and gazing out into space. The ship was presently orbiting Artaleirh, and through it, the few cities on the nightside could be seen rotating lazily away toward the planet’s limb—demure little spatters of light, with no sign about them of the sudden blue glow that had saved them from destruction.

  “Jim,” said McCoy, as he finished the small Caesar salad he’d chosen for himself, “you already look like you’ve lost a credit and found a cent. You should try to let your successes stay with you a little longer before you declare them worthless and chuck them out.”

  Ael looked up at that, glancing over at Jim to see how he would take this. Jim could only shake his head. “Bones, this was just one victory, and in the scope of the campaign to come, a relatively minor one. While we’ve done well to reduce the Empire’s available forces by as much as we have, they won’t make any of these mistakes again. The next engagement will be massive, involving an investment of really serious force—tens or even hundreds of vessels. To counter that, we’re going to need more than a scattering of cruisers, a Really Big Ship, and a swarm of little ones. We need a conventional fleet—”

  “Well, didn’t Veilt say that they were going to send in another really big ship like Tyrava? That would have to make a difference. That thing went through those cruisers’ screens like a hot knife.”

  “It did, Doctor,” Spock said, “but bear in mind the other purpose of such vessels. They must be preserved to take their people away to new worlds, if the body governing the old worlds cannot be liberalized or overturned. The Free Rihannsu have done much to reveal the presence of even one of these ships to the Imperium. They will not readily reveal the existence of too many more of them. They have been built at too high a cost, and the hopes of whole peoples ride on them. Unless all other hopes vanish, and there is no choice, risking the great ships would be folly.”

  Ael nodded.

  “But even Tyrava and its companion ship,” Jim said, “can make one big difference, without firing a shot. They can deliver ground forces.”

  McCoy looked at him with a slightly perplexed expression. “Just use them as troop carriers, you mean? I don’t get it. If our side has a bunch of ships armed and defended like Tyrava, then once th
e Eisn system’s safe for them, why not just put them all in orbit around ch’Rihan and blow up everything on the planet that doesn’t surrender?”

  Jim shook his head and had to smile gently.

  “Leaving aside the tremendous undesirability of war itself,” Spock said, “barrage from space except in the ‘surgical’ sense is an error of scale—a massive waste of energy. Whatever we have seen on the small scale in the past, attempts to permanently reduce or subdue a planetary population by attacks from space are inevitably doomed to failure.”

  That made McCoy sit back in his chair.

  “Bones,” Jim said, “when you’ve got a patient with a viral infection, do you flood his whole system with an antiseptic?”

  McCoy gave him a look that was both bemused and barbed. “Hardly. Besides making the client sicker than he was, it wouldn’t do a thing to viral entities hiding inside cells. The preferred tactic these days is to teach the patient’s own immune system to get smarter about destroying the infection. Tailor the phagocytes’ antigenic response to the bug in question, equip them with tailored RNA-cutting seek-and-destroy modules, autoclone an ‘exploded population’ of them, and then turn ’em loose to attack the viruses in situ.”

  “Exactly,” Jim said. “You’ve just described the only effective kind of planetary invasion. It has to be appropriate to the medium in which or over which it’s conducted. We can improve space-based technology until all the galaxy’s cows come home, but when all the ruckus in the sky dies down, the surface of a planet can still only be taken, held, and secured by ground troops. Naturally you do need to achieve local-space and atmospheric superiority first. But after that, everything comes down to people holding small arms—or not-so-small arms—as the situation requires.” Jim shook his head, smiling rather grimly. “Believe me, there’ve been a lot of attempts to get around this problem over the last few centuries. Mostly they’ve resulted in the participants having to have a war two or three times instead of once. Leaving aside the question of our limited resources and relatively constricted timeframe, if we have to have a war, I’d rather have it just once and get it over with.”

  He stretched, leaned back in his chair. “But Spock’s point, as usual, is the most important one. The whole idea of this attack is not to destroy the infrastructure of ch’Rihan and ch’Havran, but to destroy the power of the present government to rule.”

  He looked over at Ael, who was still working on her soup. Despite her present position of potential power, she continued to look uncomfortable when he discussed this very basic goal, which somehow, for the moment at least, made Jim more comfortable, rather than less. People who wanted too much to be running things were all too often, in Jim’s opinion, the wrong people for the job. The reluctant ones could often surpass everyone’s wildest hopes.

  “Anyway,” Jim said, “we now have at least a partial answer to the troop-movement problem, in Tyrava.”

  “Yes,” Ael said. She finished her soup, placed the spoon alongside the bowl on its tray, and pushed the tray away, leaning back in her chair and gazing out into the night.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Jim said, “but all the data I’ve been able to find in the Starfleet general-intelligence databases suggests that the Imperium has very few vessels specifically constructed for troop transport.”

  “Not few,” Ael said. “None.”

  Jim’s eyes widened slightly. Spock, finishing his soup, looked up with sudden interest.

  “Over the last few decades,” Ael said, “what vessels might have been used for such purposes have not been replaced as their ‘useful lives’ came to an end. There have been any number of reasons for this: budgetary cutbacks, the desire to invest the funds in other infrastructure projects more useful to the Hearthworlds, various political moves by certain parties in Tricameron and Praetorate to keep money in their own hands and out of others’. And there will always have been a significant number of both military and political analysts to advise the Praetorate and Grand Fleet that, with the danger of Klingon incursion into our spaces always present, what was needed was not large-scale ground-force support, but strike-force support—more and bigger ships, better armed, to interdict any possible incursion before it could get a foothold at the bottom of any world’s atmosphere. At any rate, for at least the last decade, the Imperium has relied almost entirely on small-or medium-scale fleet actions to keep the outer systems in line. And for the most part these have been sufficient to the purpose.”

  “‘For the most part’?” McCoy said.

  “Oh, there have been occasional rebellions among the most distant outworlds,” Ael said, “but one might say that those happened too soon. Some of their causes were similar to the causes being cited now by the worlds that are in uprising, but support from others could not then be counted on, and the Imperium suppressed those earlier rebellions brutally.”

  “Surprising that this rebellion’s doing so well, then,” McCoy said.

  Ael raised her eyebrows. “I think it is at least partly because the last couple of decades have seemed so quiet on the ‘home front,’ and the governments of the period simply did not believe that any new rebellion would take root for the foreseeable future, or perhaps ever. As a result, they have been slow to act. Additionally, I believe the Praetorate erroneously assumed that the outworld colonies’ fear of invasion and subjection by the Klingons would always invariably outmatch any possible anger over the stringency of the Empire’s rule. Their own arrogance may now prove to be the present Praetorate’s downfall, for as you say, Captain, the Empire has deprived itself of the ability to actually handle any such problem where it must be handled: on the ground.”

  Jim nodded. “It’s a weakness we’re going to exploit as quickly as possible. Also, as regards the Klingons, Tyrava will have upset them a great deal also. They plainly expected to find a system half-subdued by the Imperium, ready to fall into their hands as soon as they got rid of the Grand Fleet cruisers. Instead…” He brooded for a moment. “I wish we’d been able to keep that last ship from getting away.”

  “You are thinking,” Ael said, “that a mission from which no ship returns, and no news, is far better than a disastrous one from which news returns of an enemy far stronger than had hitherto been thought.”

  “Yes. Fear of the unknown is a whole lot more useful for our purposes.” Jim let out a breath. “Well, nothing we can do about it now. The Klingons know about Tyrava, and when they hit us next, it’ll be with absolutely everything they’ve got. They’re in the same position as the Praetorate and the Grand Fleet. They have not only a defeat to avenge, but an embarrassment.”

  Ael nodded. “At least, I doubt they intend to put troops into the Eisn system. I think their intention, should they come so far, would be wholesale destruction—to try to cut off the old enemy’s head, with the certainty that the body would fail soon after. We must be aware of them, and seek whatever intelligence we can quickly find to determine their objectives. Meanwhile, we must both unseat the government and still leave ch’Rihan and ch’Havran sufficiently capable of defending themselves that the Klingons, evaluating the situation, will decide that the space around Eisn is still too much trouble for them. The outworlds may yet fall under attack, but that will be a separate problem. Right now what is right before us—Augo first, and then Eisn—will be challenge enough.”

  The door opened. Scotty came in, surveyed the group at the table. “May I join you?”

  “Of course, Scotty,” Jim said. “We were just talking about you.”

  “We were just talking about haggis,” McCoy said, making a most expressive face.

  Scotty gave him an amused look as he went to the food dispenser. “Burns Night’s not for months, Doctor. No need to break out the antacid just yet.”

  McCoy smiled a sardonic smile as Scotty sat down with a large ham sandwich.

  “And meantime,” Jim said, “we have one more problem to consider…and it’s potentially a worse one than anything that’s been happening her
e, or is about to happen in Eisn’s space.” He glanced over at Ael. “Commander, you won’t have had time to hear about this, but the information came to us from a ch’Rihan-based source that we both know.”

  Ael looked up at that. “You mean our young Senator? So Gorget got back safely home out of that stour.”

  “We don’t know that,” Jim said, “though I hope it did. Terise sent us this information before Gorget departed. We were warned by her of ‘an imminent, clandestine attack of a major and devastating nature on Federation space.’”

  Ael nodded slowly. “That is something I was half expecting,” she said. “The Empire’s uncertainties about this upcoming war are great; they are none too sure, I would guess, of their ability to manage two fronts at once. But the technology…Is it something to do with Sunseed, perhaps?”

  “We have only guesswork at the moment,” Spock said, and the flat sound of his voice left no doubt as to how little he disliked guesswork. “But one piece of data has commanded my attention since we parted company with the rest of the Federation task force at RV Trianguli.” He folded his hands, with the fingers steepled, and looked past them. “You will recall my scans of the vessel Pillion, eventually revealing the second cloaked vessel ‘riding’ on the first.”

  “Yes,” Jim said.

  “Then you will possibly recall that there were two such vessels in that engagement that displayed doubled readings. Hheirant was the other.”

  “Hheirant was destroyed!” Scotty said.

  “Yes, Mr. Scott. But I have no evidence that the source of the secondary reading she was carrying was destroyed as well. In fact, I have circumstantial evidence, though no better, to suggest that it was not. I have carefully reviewed my scan records. My last successful scan for the ‘new’ cloaking waveform, just after the battle began, shows the secondary scan still present, but somewhat dislocated from Hheirant herself.”

  “Jettisoned,” Jim said.