Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Empty Chair Page 4

  “That’s where we need it,” Jim said. “One last check on weapons systems, Scotty.”

  “Just finished now, sir. All systems are fully charged and all tubes loaded, ready to go hot.”

  “Captain,” Spock said. “We are getting a tactical-systems feed from Sithesh. The incoming ships are going to lower warp speeds, preparatory to dropping out.”

  “Distance?”

  “I am having some slight difficulty converting distances with the desirable precision from the Artaleirhin data feed,” Spock said. “Closest estimate would be two point six three light-hours, closing fast.”

  Jim nodded. Even just a few billion kilometers’ worth of warning was of value. “Feed Mr. Sulu the coordinate data. How are they tracking cloaked ships even that precisely at this distance?”

  “I would very much like to know,” Spock said.

  And so would the Federation, Jim thought. But for the time being he put the question of his sealed orders aside. The point now was to both survive to be in a position to use them, and to get Enterprise into a position where using them would be easy. “Bloodwing.”

  There was a pause. Then Ael’s voice said, “Ready, Captain. They are close.”

  “We’re ready for them. Good luck, Commander.”

  “And the Elements with you as well—” She broke off. Jim raised his eyebrows. She sounded tenser than usual; revealing in itself, in an officer usually so self-contained and self-assured. Jim sat back and waited the last, hardest few seconds.

  “The incoming fleet is beginning to drop out of warp, “Spock said, as calmly as if reporting the weather. “Gauntlet and Esemar have come out first.”

  “The heavy guns,” Jim said, “ready to break up an ambush. Let’s see the tactical, Mr. Spock.”

  Spock transferred the tactical view to the front viewscreen. Jim saw what he thought he would, the two big ships plunging into the system almost at right angles to the ecliptic, as Courhig had predicted. Already Jim’s heart was pounding with the thought that the Romulans had made one of the three great errors of this kind of warfare, that of dividing your forces before you have adequately assessed the danger—though there were some naval tacticians who claimed that any division of a fleet into subsections was already an error, whether the threat had been correctly assessed or not. By that standard, this incoming fleet was already in trouble, though whether they knew it or not was at issue, not to mention how the forces waiting here would exploit the error. If the Grand Fleet ships rejoined to work again as a more closely aligned group, that would be a problem. But a mistake they made once, they might make again.

  “The Grand Fleet vessels are all now in system,” Spock said, as the two tagged shapes of light that represented Gauntlet and Esemar slowed further, and one after another, the other points of light popped in behind them, in a loose globular formation. “We are being scanned.”

  “No response,” Jim said. “We shouldn’t be able to see them; let’s let them suppose we can’t.” He stared hard at the tactical. “Let me know if they make any changes in acceleration or vector suggesting that individual vessels or a subgroup may be about to break away.”

  “No indications of that as yet, Captain. They are shifting formation somewhat, however. Heading directly for Artaleirh; none appear to be diverting toward us.”

  “Keep an eye on them, Spock. Especially for any sign that some of them might be about to try to seed that star.” It was the smaller vessels in the group that made Jim most suspicious in this regard; the corvettes would almost certainly have more than one function here, since they would be only of secondary use in a fight among starships of any size. Not that we won’t seed that star ourselves if we don’t have a choice, Jim thought, and was once again left very uncomfortable by the concept. How must this moment feel for the people on the planet, knowing that either the enemy or their own side might suddenly make their homeworld uninhabitable?

  “We have two of our cruisers out in abeyance at the moment to interfere with them should they start such a run, Captain,” tr’Mahan’s voice said.

  Jim let out a brief breath of relief that he hoped no one heard. Dammit, we ought to be able to handle it ourselves, he was thinking. Damn crystal anyway! “Good man,” he said to tr’Mahan. “We need to stay still for the moment. We’ll protect your fallback position here. If they make a move, they’re all yours.”

  “I understand your reasoning, Captain. We are ready now. Here they come.”

  Jim’s hands clenched on the arms of the center seat.

  THREE

  ONBLOODWING, Ael stood behind her command chair, watching what lay there glittering in the dark blue light of the tactical display. Nine ships were arrowing down from the night at Artaleirh, and the thought of what that world might be about to suffer filled her with pain. But if they did not suffer it, much worse pain would yet befall all the people on that world, and many others. If only this works …

  “Course change as they go into lower sublight speeds now,” Aidoann said. “All their weapons are going hot, khre’Riov. They are initiating big hyperbolic least-expenditure curves, with Artaleirh as their common locus.”

  They are giving us a chance to regret our intentions, Ael thought. I hope we can return the favor. “They plainly think this engagement will be over quickly,” she said to Aidoann. “So it may, but not as they intend.” Ael glanced down at the seat of her chair, considering that she might prefer to sit this one out. It was likely to get lively. But that would mean moving what lay there now.

  I will not. She glanced up at the screen. “Aidoann, hail the flagship. See that they have visual. I do not care if they return it.”

  Aidoann bent over her console, spoke to it softly. The screen at the front of the bridge remained dark, but the slight hiss of carrier was audible. “Esemar is listening, khre’Riov,” Aidoann said under her breath.

  Ael nodded. “Imperial vessels, stand away from Artaleirh and take yourselves out of the system immediately, on pain of destruction. Your intentions here are known, and will be prevented.”

  There was a long silence before an answer came back. “Traitress,” a voice said, “you and yours will now pay the price of your perfidy. Speak to the Elements now; you’ll have no other chance. Then come out from where you hide and find your death. Else we will take its price from those you have deluded.”

  She grinned. “By the Sword and its Element, I tell you I know it will not happen so. Take yourselves away from here and live, or stay, and leave your Houses sonless, motherless, orphaned!”

  There was no reply, not that she expected one. “Now,” she said softly to Aidoann and Khiy and the others on the bridge, “they must make the first move, and so damn themselves.”

  “And if their move works, khre’Riov?” Aidoann’s voice was a little more testy than usual; the tension was working on her as well.

  “We will at least send some of them ahead of us to make plain to the Elements the need for proper revenge,” Ael said. She watched the curves outlining themselves on tactical: there was no change in them.

  “They’re going for the planet,” Aidoann said.

  “We have always thought they would at first,” Ael said. “It is a feint. They seek to draw the straw before the dzeill, as it were, but that will not help them. For the moment, the dzeill lies still.”

  The curves continued to draw in toward the planet, closer every second. The bridge filled up with the warnings that the Grand Fleet vessels were broadcasting on every available wavelength to the planet below them, blanketing the place. “This is the Grand Fleet of the Rihannsu Star Empire. All cities and settlements of the Rihannsu Imperial subject world Artaleirh are herewith placed under martial law. All manufacturing facilities will henceforth be managed and operated under direct control of Imperial officers. All civil vessels are to ground immediately and prepare to be boarded and either disarmed or inactivated. Gatherings of more than three people in any public place are now forbidden. Hostages …reparations … a new military government …”

  The recitation went on and on, a litany of such trammels to liberty as no free culture could possibly bear. Yet the Artaleirhin were expected to bear it. Their lives, which they had been allowed to run in various small ways as long as they fed goods and monies back to the homeworlds and obeyed the whims of their rulers, were now, if not forfeit, to be lived in cages, virtual or real, under the threat of the scourge or the blaster. “Immediate acceptance of these terms is required. You may choose spokesmen to replace your political leaders, who will give themselves up to the authority of the Fleet to endure the rigors of Imperial justice. Your new spokesmen have one planet’s hour to signal acceptance. This is the Grand Fleet of the Rihannsu Star Empire—”

  Ael looked around the bridge at her crew. They were staring at one another, and at the speakers from which the sound came, with expressions of bitter distaste. “This is what we could have become, my children,” Ael said, “had we remained too thoughtlessly true to our old loyalty. I will wear the scorn of such as these with pride, as an ornament far surpassing any mere battle honor.”

  Aidoann looked over at Ael, then, and flipped a switch at her comm console. A voice spoke, a Rihanha’s voice, not amplified across multibands like the flat, self-assured voice speaking from the sky, but single, simplex and passionate. “—needs not one hour for an answer,” she was saying, “no, not one breath! This is the Free Rihannsu world of Artaleirh. We are the tool of no empire anymore, and the toy of no Senate. We are our own world under our own sky, and we now take that sky back to ourselves, in arms with those who know what freedom is worth, and who will help us be slaves no more. Live or die, we have nothing more to say to you, tools in the hands of tyrants!”

  The announcement from the Grand Fleet ships persis
ted only a few moments longer, then simply broke off, in mid-playback, as if whoever had been playing the recording simply could not believe the response. Behind Ael, Aidoann listened to the silence that followed, and let go a soft hiss of anguish. “Khre’Riov,” she said, “if this doesn’t work, all those cities, all those many people—”

  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.