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

by Diane Duane

  “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.”

  “Let’s worry about the hat later,” Jim said. “How many of the Grand Fleet personnel are likely to be from this system?”

  “Captain,” Ael said, “not nearly enough, or we might not now be in this position. The Hearthworlds always have the advantage in placement and promotion in Fleet. To get past the barriers set in their way, commanders must be most extraordinary—and all too many of those are winnowed out early.” Now it was she who sounded bitter. “No one at command level in these ships comes from Art
aleirh. No ships with such command would be sent here in the first place, the suspicion being that they would likely revert to their outworld allegiance.”

  Jim found himself suddenly having uncomfortable thoughts about some things Commodore Danilov had said to him about his own relationship with Starfleet—or rather, Fleet’s perception of it—and he pushed them aside.

  “Captain,” Sulu said, “Elieth and Moerrdel are on approach. High and low.”

  “Got anything ready for them, Mr. Sulu?”

  “Full spread and hot conduits, Captain,” Sulu said.

  Kirk nodded. “Save the rock-throwing for a little later. No use in showing them the rest of the cards in our hand until later.”

  “A little slow on the approach,” Sulu said. “Elieth edging ahead a little. Her scanners are hot. She’s looking at the processing facility.”

  Looking for the same shield waveform as on the planet, Jim thought. “Don’t let them pursue that line of inquiry, Mr. Chekov. Fire at will!”

  Enterprise’s phasers lanced out and splashed against Elieth’s shields. Elieth veered away from both Enterprise and the dilithium processing facility, and Chekov sent a couple of photon torpedoes after her for good measure. “Elieth’s shields down five percent,” Spock said, looking down his viewer. “Torpedo hits on her shields. Shield integrity down ten percent. Moerrdel is firing—”

  Jim gripped the arms of the center seat as Moerrdel flashed past, firing en passant. “Our shields down three percent,” Spock said. “Reinforcing. The small ships are giving pursuit.”

  A hail of little vessels, maybe fifty of them in the first wave, burst out from hiding behind various asteroids in the belt and went after both Elieth and Moerrdel, firing small chemical-explosive missiles and low-level energy weapons after the cruisers. Jim thought it was probably galling for relatively heavily armed ships like the two cruisers to be chased at sublight speeds by little vessels that a cruiser would normally disdain to use even as a gig. But which of those is carrying, secretly, whatever it was that took down the first flight of Romulan vessels into this system? Jim thought. Have to give them a chance to get the job done.

  “Bloodwing,” Jim said. “The smaller ships aren’t going to do any good until the cruisers’ shields degenerate a good deal.”

  “I hear you, Captain,” Ael’s voice said. “Let us deal with it, so long as the supercruisers stay out of it. They may not do so for much longer.”

  “Let’s see if we can increase their enthusiasm,” Jim said, casting a glance back at Spock and not waiting for a reaction. “Bloodwing, we’re going to take them for a little ride and soften them up a bit, while letting them think that what we use on them is all we’ve got.”

  “An admirable suggestion, Captain. We will be doing something similar.”

  “Don’t get too far out of range of the processing facility, though. I wouldn’t like them to strike at it while we’re out of range. Mr. Sulu—”

  “Captain?”

  “The roller-coaster scenario, if you please. I want whoever’s directing this engagement to get the idea that even without our aces in the hole, it’s going to take a lot more firepower to handle us than they’re using at present—and that they’re going to have to come in here and do it, not just coast around outside the belt and take potshots at us. Mr. Chekov, gunnery at will.”

  “Aye, sir,” Sulu said.

  “Aye, Captain,” said Chekov.

  Jim settled himself as securely as he could in his seat. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the artificial gravity—like any other wise captain, he had ceased to trust it long ago. But his inner ear would occasionally betray him at odd moments when his body insisted it was sitting still, and the viewscreen, on which he was having to concentrate most intensely, insisted that he and others were doing anything but. Every now and then, in such situations, Jim had to remind his stomach just who was running this show, and being well settled in place was always a help.

  The view in the main screen lurched and spun to starboard as Sulu’s hands began to dance over the helm controls, and he threw Enterprise away from the dilithium processing facility and directly toward the nearest large rock. Elieth had come about and was firing at them again, but Sulu had already evaded the first spread of phaser bolts and was now in the process of evading the second, lurching from side to side but always heading for the same asteroid, a big one that was rapidly getting too big for Jim’s liking in the viewscreen. Sulu hit another control and tactical view came up to overlay the live image, outlining the asteroid, showing the tag number that he and Chekov had assigned it, with wireframe gridwork showing any unusual mass concentrations inside the asteroidal body. There were several, but at the moment this wasn’t an issue. Sulu threw Enterprise around the ragged curve of the asteroid’s limb at an acceleration that was probably nothing her designers had anticipated, to judge by the way the ship’s substructure started to groan. Elieth came after, still firing, but she came more slowly.

  Enterprise dove and twisted away from that asteroid, flashed past a smaller one, and headed for a third, a big, tumbling, potato-shaped chunk of nickel-iron, flickering here and there in Artaleirh’s sun with the violet or red-violet of dilithium ore. Over it Sulu sent the ship, and past it and “down,” at right angles to the ecliptic and the orbit of the asteroid belt; and Elieth came after them, narrowly missing the asteroid as it tumbled.

  “They must think we’re suicidal,” Jim said.

  “There’s a home-field advantage in every engagement,” Sulu said, not looking away from the viewscreen, his hands roving over the helm console like those of a pianist sight-reading a score. “If they’d been here before we were, they could have had it.”

  He selected another of his tagged asteroids, one shaped like a lumpy letter L or V, and headed toward it. This asteroid was tumbling far more unpredictably than the last, its wireframe tactical image showing a number of irregularly distributed concentrations of mass inside it, probably pools of heavy-metal ore or pure lanthanide metals such as were frequently associated with dilithium in the natural state. But the tumble wasn’t unpredictable for Sulu: readouts in the tactical display, three sets of swiftly changing six-digit numbers, were showing exactly what the asteroid would be doing by the time Sulu got close to it. Enterprise was diving straight at the corner of the V, a spot that did not seem from this angle to be moving at all. Behind her, the other side of the split tactical display showed Elieth getting closer behind, and closer still, gaining confidence in her pursuit of this foe who would not stand and fight.

  Sulu grinned and pounced on the helm console. Enterprise shot through the angle of the V, then to port and down, groaning in her bones. Behind her, the asteroid skewed in its tumble, and one of the legs of the V was abruptly coming straight at Elieth. She frantically threw herself sideways, and in so doing came out directly above Enterprise’s present position.

  Chekov’s hands had been hovering over controls on the weapons console. Now it was his turn to pounce. First a full spread of photon torpedoes went out, leaping away from the ship in the tactical view. They struck Elieth in the belly, right where the bird-of-prey shadows would have concealed a heart; and as the ship’s shields flared with their simultaneous impact, Chekov fired all Enterprise’s forward phasers at the spot.

  Elieth’s shields flared brighter, then flickered in a sickly way. Chekov ceased phaser fire instantly. “Her shields are down,” Spock said from his station, straightening up from peering down his viewer.

  Enterprise veered away to port and “upward” through the asteroid belt. In her wake came about twenty of the little ships, which began peppering Elieth’s nacelles with explosive torpedoes.

  “Not a bad start, Mr. Sulu,” Kirk said, sitting back in the center seat again. “Let’s see what Bloodwing’s up to.”

  Sulu pitched the ship forward a hundred eighty degrees to orient the main sensors back toward the dilithium processing facility. In the distance, past the facility, the tactical display showed
the small red light that was Bloodwing as she twisted and dove among asteroids there, some thousands of kilometers away.

  “Mr. Sulu,” Jim said, catching sight of one particularly hair-raising maneuver that Bloodwing executed in and out among the bulbous projections of a particularly large asteroid, with Moerrdel in pursuit but rapidly dropping behind, “you really have been corrupting Antecenturion Khiy, haven’t you?”

  “Didn’t take much corruption, Captain,” Sulu said, rather absently, as he pulled Enterprise around the pocked limb of yet another asteroid, one that for just a second, to Jim’s eye, had about the same shape as the state of Ohio, and then lost it as they dove past. “He has a natural talent. I just encouraged it....”

  “Uhura,” Jim said. “Response from the other ships?”

  “They’re not pleased, Captain,” Uhura said, sounding grim. “Engagement command on Esemar is ordering Elieth to self-destruct. Elieth is responding that—” She broke off, listening. “Their comms have gone down, Captain.”

  “A malfunction secondary to the damage?” Jim said.

  Uhura shook her head. “I don’t think so, Captain. But there’s nothing further from Elieth—” She broke off and glanced over at Kirk, one hand to her ear. “Esemar has ordered the other ships to go silent, Captain.”

  “Getting ready to come in and deal with us themselves,” Jim said. “Good.” I hope! He was still uncomfortable about what kind of weapons those supercruisers might have on board. “Mr. Sulu, when the big ships start firing at us, I want to be elsewhere whenever possible. Make them show us what they’ve got.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Jim’s insides jumped again as Sulu accelerated Enterprise to just under half impulse, weaving and darting among the asteroids that lay in their path. He almost wanted to protest. It would be simpler to take Enterprise up out of the asteroid belt for a short straight run, but more hazardous. They would be giving up both cover and advantage. My stomach is just going to have to like it, Jim thought as Sulu hurled Enterprise at another asteroid.