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

  “Possibly,” said Spock. “The data is difficult to read. As you know, the energy discharges of a battle situation can adversely affect scan, and local space was full of phaser discharge and stripped-ion artifact at that point. In any event, the object, let us say vessel, producing that waveform cannot be accounted for as destroyed in the engagement. I would estimate fairly high odds that it escaped under cloak. I would also speculate that that is exactly what it was intended to do.”

  “They were holding those vessels in reserve right under our noses,” Scotty said. “One to use to attack Bloodwing. The other—”

  “It is impossible to say exactly what its purpose is,” said Spock. “But I am nearly certain that it left that area under cloak, having been missed in the confusion.”

  “Probably exactly as someone intended,” Jim said. He sat there, brooding darkly for a few moments. “Let’s assume it was carrying some new kind of weapon. But God only knows what kind. They got it as close as they could to Federation space, under cover, and then…Would that vessel be manned, do you think, Spock?”

  Spock frowned. “Logic would seem to suggest so. Indeed, if that vessel carries the prototype of a new weapon sufficiently powerful to endanger Earth despite all the planet’s mobile and static defenses, I cannot believe the Romulans would be so reckless as to send it off into enemy space on a critical mission without either escort or supervision, especially if the technology is new.”

  Jim sighed. “Well, as we’ve agreed, this is information we must get back to Starfleet. But if you’re right, and even the new codes have already been compromised…”

  Then Jim paused. Codes or no codes, someone inside Starfleet Command had purposely sent Ael to a place where she would be ambushed. Someone inside Starfleet Command, too, had sent them out these new communications ciphers. Once again the hair stood up on the back of Jim’s neck at the thought that, somewhere, very high up in the command structure to which he was subject, and unsuspected, treason was quietly festering.

  “We have to find some other way to get this news home,” Jim said. “And there’s no time to waste with message buoys this time. The message has to move at least as fast as subspace radio. But it has to be something that can’t be read by anyone else but Starfleet.” Though how do we make sure that information won’t be somehow denatured when it gets there? Made safe, or unavailable, by the same person or persons who’s been secretly working against us.

  Scotty looked uncomfortable. “You’re not asking much.”

  “Miracles, as usual, Scotty. Nothing more.”

  Scotty sighed. “I’d go out for a quiet stroll on the lake to think, but there’s none handy. Still, I’ll do what I can. I’ll have a chat with K’s’t’lk as well; she may be able to suggest something novel.”

  “‘May’ be able to?” McCoy muttered, and shook his head.

  Jim nodded. “Good enough.” He turned back to his first officer. “Spock, was there anything else in Lieutenant Haleakala-LoBrutto’s data that might give you even a guess as to what the nature of this weapon might be?”

  “There was only the suggestion that it would be able to devastate Earth’s whole solar system if it reached its target,” Spock said. “I can think of various ways to produce such a result, given near-infinite power. But as for imagining a device so capable, which can also be attached to a ship like Hheirant, and successfully cloaked…” He shook his head. “At best, all we can be sure of is that even at high warp, Sol’s system is distant enough from RV Trianguli that it would take a vessel at least ten days to reach it. But if we are to warn Starfleet to any effect, much less to be able to suggest a defense against whatever this weapon may be, we need much more data.”

  They all sat quiet for a few moments. “Well,” Jim said at last, “we have at least a couple of ‘halcyon days’ to sit quiet here and rummage around in our hats for some rabbits. Let’s make the best of them. Scotty, how are your repairs coming along?”

  “At good speed, Captain. We’ve got another eighteen hours or so of spares replacements and recalibrations to do, then we’re fit to run at full speed again.”

  “Good. Spock?”

  “Gentlemen—”

  They all looked over at Ael.

  “The soup was excellent,” she said, “and so is your company, but the last forty hours have been unusually wearing, and I have briefings aplenty waiting me aboard Bloodwing. I should get back there and take them, before I do you all the discourtesy of dozing off at table. May we meet tomorrow?”

  They rose as she did. “Whenever you like, Commander,” Jim said. “Call when you’re ready.”

  She bowed to them all, with a weary flash of smile for Jim, and left. McCoy looked after her. As the door closed, and they sat down again, he said to Jim, “That’s an admission you wouldn’t usually have heard from her.”

  “What? That she’s tired?” Jim said. “Why wouldn’t she be? Adrenaline can only take you so far. It’s within the few hours after you finish an engagement that the reaction sets in really hard. I’m tired too. And we’re all going to feel more or less that way before we’re done. You can’t be any better. How many hours did you and M’Benga spend in surgery?”

  “Believe it or not, barely one and a half,” McCoy said. “But it does feel like months, afterward.” He stretched, rubbed the back of his neck. “There are a few steps I can take for all of us: help manage the lactose buildup in the muscles, some other things. Myself, I favor meditation. But the best treatment for the fatigue is to see that it was all for some good purpose. That man down there is alive, when he wasn’t meant to be.”

  “That’s another thing. When can I see him?”

  “I’d let him alone for a while more, Jim. Though when he’s thinking about the subject—Gurrhim’s urgent enough about wanting to see you—his strength’s not up to long conversations right now. He tends to drop off in midsentence. While he’s still that tired, I prefer to let him keep on sleeping and healing, and not provide him with stimuli that’re likely to impair his ability to rest.”

  “No problem. It can wait a little while more.”

  “There were other matters I wished to discuss with you, Captain,” Spock said, “but I was not entirely willing to do so with the Commander here. To begin with, we will shortly be hearing from Starfleet, and I suspect the communications will be rather…” He trailed off.

  “Tense?” McCoy said. “Why in the world would that be?”

  “Bones,” Jim said. “A little too much irony in your diet lately? Spock, the issue’s been on my mind. I have a few messages I need to get off before we leave this area of space where communication has been so, shall we say, difficult. After that we will run ‘silent’ until we reach Augo. And after that…”

  “They can court-martial us in absentia,” Scotty said, and his tone of voice was almost cheerful.

  “I’d like to prevent that if I could, Mr. Scott,” Jim said, “but it’s nice to see you taking it so well.”

  “You are expecting,” Spock said, “that matters at Augo will so transpire as to leave Starfleet willing to—”

  “Keep on giving us rope,” McCoy said.

  “Our legal status is complex,” Jim said. And that’s putting it mildly! He regretted once more not having had some time to sit down with Sam Cogley, while they were all at RV Trianguli, for the purpose of discussing with him some completely hypothetical situations that were becoming less hypothetical by the moment. Well, it’ll have to wait.

  “I’m going to speak to the crew tomorrow evening,” Jim said. “Apparently there’s already some kind of gathering planned down in recreation; I’ll call them together at the end of it. We’re rapidly getting into a situation their service oaths don’t cover, and this short time we’re spending near Artaleirh is the best time to deal with the problem.”

  The others around the table nodded.

  And there Jim had to stop for the moment, for he was left staring at the question of how much to say, to whom, and when. Because
your service oaths are as much at issue. He got up and went over to the hatch for another cup of coffee.

  Sealed orders, he thought, are always a poisoned chalice. If they hadn’t been sealed in the first place, you would at least have witnesses to the fact that you had been instructed to try to pull off something nearly impossible. But when no one had seen the orders but yourself and the President of the United Federation of Planets, it left you in a nasty spot. Yes, he was your Commander in Chief, but the heads of the Services still didn’t care to have him going over their heads, even in the most unusual circumstances. And if they put enough pressure on the President, and he bowed to it, then suddenly you could find yourself with a “plausible deniability” problem, and a President who “did not remember” giving you these orders, and could make a case that they were forgeries. Regrettable, of course, but what technology could devise, other technology could subvert. And then you find yourself staring down the big end of that court-martial Dan mentioned.

  Jim let out a breath as his coffee arrived. Now he was going to have to act without any further sense of the reaction of upper-ups in Starfleet, but would still have to take those reactions into account, no matter what he did. And judging what they would be, without data, would be difficult. Even without data, though, Jim was increasingly certain that either the Federation or Starfleet—possibly both—were ambivalent about Ael, and the Romulans backing her, actually winning this war. Her certainty, her skill, and perhaps worst of all, her growing popularity, would be difficult for them to manage. It would be less problematic for her to go down trying very hard, said a more cynical part of his mind, leaving a power vacuum that they could manipulate. And bearing in mind that someone in Starfleet, or someone with access to their messaging, had purposely sent Bloodwing into harm’s way once already, it would be foolish to assume that they wouldn’t do so again if they could.

  He picked up the coffee and carried it back to the table, sat down. Still, any kind of war, no matter who wins, is going to mightily destabilize the Romulan Star Empire right now. Even if the powers at the top of it were merely shaken rather than toppled, Jim thought the Federation ought to see that as a good thing—either the harbinger of change to come in the near future, or eventually. And you’d think it would be that much for the better if the present regime fell completely out of power, and Ael became part of the new order. Then there would be someone high up in Romulan politics who would owe the Federation a tremendous favor…and (as the Federation and the Fleet knew very well) someone who would actually pay off on such favors and neither ignore them, nor stab the Federation in the back afterward.

  Yet would they see it that way? And what about me? Jim thought. They ought to know I will do what duty requires of me.

  But they’re balancing off the question of my loyalties, and from Danilov’s not-very-veiled warning to me, they’re worried about what I’ll do. There are probably some people up in Fleet who are quite happy for me to help Ael to succeed, but are also looking at whatever I do to supply them with an excuse to court-martial me…

  “Captain—”

  He looked up. The others were watching him.

  “The commodore’s orders to you were quite explicit,” Spock said.

  Jim was silent for a long moment, and then made up his mind. “They were,” he said. “Unfortunately…”

  McCoy got up, went over to the mess door, and locked it.

  Jim’s eyebrows went up.

  “You’re going to tell us that you’re running under covert orders again,” McCoy said, sitting down. “To which the only possible answer is, so what?”

  “Aye,” Scotty said.

  Jim looked over at Spock. Spock raised one eyebrow. “The doctor’s methods of deduction often defy any logical analysis,” he said, “but they do occasionally work.”

  “‘Occasionally’? Why, you—”

  “Bones,” Jim said, rather sadly, “does it show that much?”

  “To the crew at large? I doubt it. But this is part of my job. And those two—” He looked at Spock and Scotty. “—they just know you. You should lay off so much caffeine, by the way.”

  Jim could do nothing but laugh helplessly. “Well, I suppose this little chat is a good thing, because it saves you having to relieve me of command because you think I’ve gone nuts.”

  “I still may do that,” McCoy said, “if the need arises. But it won’t have anything to do with your sealed orders.”

  Jim sighed. “I guess I should be grateful. Bones, though a ship’s commander may be exempt from Starfleet’s wrath when the details come out, the crew may still possibly, and rightly, become insubordinate at some of the things I may order them to do. That’s where the legal implications get sticky. Theoretically, if we all come out of this with our skins intact, Fleet will forgive all. But if they decide not to, if someone in a high place has a lapse of memory, it could get very bad for the crew. Those of them, that is, who aren’t already dead of some other trouble we’re about to get into. Augo, or later.”

  “And so you’ve paused as long as you could over the choice you now have to make,” McCoy said, “but now you can’t pause any longer.”

  Spock looked from McCoy to Jim. “And we are, I surmise, about to ignore your orders from the commodore, and to go on to assist in the overthrow of, if not the whole Rihannsu government, at least the main personalities presently determining its policy.”

  Jim looked from Spock to McCoy. “Yes,” he said. “I feel that that’s the best way to fulfill both the letter and the intent of the sealed orders. While I can’t say much—”

  “I don’t think you need to,” McCoy said. “Sunseed and the forced-telepathy project were an indicator of some pretty advanced science being done in Romulan space these days. What we’ve just seen at Artaleirh is more of the same, though the source may be slightly different. Don’t think I haven’t heard you babbling about Tyrava and its wonderful new warp technology,” he said, glancing at Scotty. “Taking everything together, I strongly suspect that the whole purpose of this exercise—besides the liberalization of the Romulan regime, which of course would be seen as ‘nice’—” McCoy snorted. “—is another smash-and-grab raid of the kind we’re all too familiar with, the kind that got us tangled up with Ael’s niece in the first place. Find new technology, bring it home. So that even if the present rebellion is quashed, and Ael fails, and even if—worst case—the Federation is forced into a premature peace after this war stalemates, we’ll still have enough technological ‘booty’ at the end of the day to make it all worthwhile. And to see to it that some kind of technological parity is maintained between our two forces, so that the Romulans won’t be tempted to push into the tactical vacuum that would accompany a ceasefire without attestable victory for one side or the other.” He leaned back, stretched a little. “And if the Klingons catch a little punishment during the proceedings, well, so much the better. In any case, the technological advantages to be obtained from our little razzia will work just as well against them. We get a maximum result with minimum logistical outlay.”

  Spock blinked. “Doctor, you have been reading the classical strategists.”

  McCoy shook his head. “No, just the Analects. It’s all in K’un-fu-tse.”

  “I would have thought it was Sun Tzu,” Jim said.

  McCoy shook his head. “Overrated. Man only had one book in him. In the course of which he repeats himself about fifty times. Jim, we’re going Viking, in a very selective way, and we can’t tell anybody. Not even Ael. Isn’t that so?”

  That was one aspect of all this which had been rubbing part of Jim’s conscience raw. “That’s most of it.”

  “It would be safe, I believe, to conjecture that there are aspects of your orders that you are not permitted to divulge even to us,” Spock said.

  Jim said nothing, just looked at him.

  McCoy folded his arms. “Jim, we’ve all been in some pretty awful crunches between duty and necessity, over time, but by and large we’ve managed a
ll right so far. Obviously the mission, and the ship, and the people who make both mission and ship work, come first for all of us. That helps. But in case you were worrying, I think we can count on you not to take us anywhere we won’t be able to support you in going, knowing what we know. And I think you can count on us not to let you down when it gets tight, though we may have to give you a hard time occasionally, if only to keep up appearances.”

  “For once, unusual as it may seem,” Spock said, “the doctor speaks for me.” The two of them exchanged a glance that was quite devoid of the usual edge.

  Jim breathed out. “Gentlemen, that is all I could possibly ask. And when we finally get out of this mess…”

  “I am going to prescribe us all a rest. I know this little place on Vesta,” McCoy said, “where the girls…well, theoretically they’re girls…well, all right, if you take into consideration a little monkeying around with the thirteenth chromosomal pair, they’re probably more like—”

  Spock was gazing at the ceiling as if profoundly interested by it. “Doctor,” he said, turning his attention to McCoy again, “what recreation would you recommend for someone less enthusiastic about indulging in relationships with the genetically enhanced?”

  McCoy gave him a look. “Chess.”

  Jim chuckled and got up. “I need to get busy. Bones, when I’m finished with this next piece of work, I’ll come down and see Gurrhim.”

  “I told you, there’s no rush. Right now I prefer to let him sleep—which is, incidentally, a condition I recommend to you. Otherwise I’ll come and administer you some sleep whether you like it or not.”

  “Noted and logged, Bones.”

  Jim went out.

  NINE

  The flitter brought Arrhae to tr’Anierh’s great house as it had before, but this time she had no appetite for the food and drink laid out in the little cupboard in the passenger section. Her stomach was tying itself into knots, and even though she kept telling herself it was ridiculous to feel so, that there was no way she could have been betrayed so quickly, she couldn’t believe it.