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

by Diane Duane

  Arrhae could not get out of her mind the images of burning buildings, the police craft and military police flitters firing disruptors at fleeing figures on the ground, the shouting, running people, fists shaken at the sky. She could feel outrage building in her, the reaction of other Rihannsu who would see this. How could all those people be spies and traitors? they would be thinking. Something’s gone wrong here, something’s the matter with the government.

  Arrhae shook her head. She knew well enough from her own studies that the best time for external forces to become involved in a revolution was when a government was already having internal problems. People in the Fleet will be seeing at least some of these images of civil unrest, Arrhae thought. Censorship in the military services is often more relaxed than it is for the general public, if only because the military have access to more ways to break it if they start to become interested in doing so. And gossip travels fast. One reason the noble Praetor dislikes it so.

  The newsreader had gone on to some less loaded topic, something about preparations for the departure of the in-system portion of Grand Fleet for the Outmarches, the Neutral Zone, in preparation for hostilities. So now it begins, Arrhae thought. And as for spying on my fellow Senators—well, it seems I must do it, for the time being, to maintain my position with tr’Anierh. But she would also be keeping her eyes open for anything that would make a difference to those who had originally sent her here. How she would get that news out, if she found any, she had no idea. Her one-shot contact was gone forever. No matter. If I must, I will improvise something. In the meantime…

  She sat and tried to shake the images of the smoke rising up, while also thinking of one much worse: night falling over a planet far away, a night that, unless a miracle happened, would be followed by no morning.

  Light-years away, in his quarters, late in his local night, James Kirk sat gazing at a blank spot on the wall with his feet up on his desk, invoking the Gods of War.

  They had names like Clausewitz and Imessa and Xenophon and Kalav and Churchill and Kósciuszko and Patton, and they were all full of good advice. But his problem was figuring out which parts of their advice to take. They often contradicted one another on details, due to their coming from separate time periods and in some cases separate planets. The padd in front of him was covered with notes about some of the things they agreed on, but there were too few of these for the peace of mind of a man who found himself doing his “admiral’s work” under such peculiar circumstances.

  After all, an admiral normally had a fleet he could depend on—well, theoretically, anyway, Jim thought—commanded by beings with whom he had previously served. But this campaign wasn’t going to be anywhere near that simple. Jim was presently devising a battle plan that was going to be executed by people he’d fought against in the past (and often beaten, which didn’t strike him as a recipe for incipient cooperation), people who didn’t trust him, people who, even under the best circumstances, were going to want to get rid of him just as soon as possible. Some of those people might even like to see parts of his planning fail, regardless of whether they themselves took some damage from the failure. One of the War Gods had said that no battle plan, however well-laid, survives contact with the enemy. In this case, though, Jim thought, I’m going to be lucky if it survives contact with my own side. So his goal was to construct a plan that could not be damaged even by his cocombatants’ direct hostility, let alone the always unavoidable potential for sudden idiocy in a crisis.

  Jim sat and looked at his padd. There, in neat order, were what he considered the Top Four Helpful Hints of the War Gods—at least, in the present circumstances—what Jim judged the most basic tactical necessities.

  First, and most important: destroy the enemy’s ability to attack.

  Second, as a way to bring the first goal about, destroy the enemy’s command and control structures to whatever extent possible.

  Third, put the enemy into “shock.” Shock produces or facilitates unconsidered or uncoordinated actions on the enemy’s part. Such actions are usually to your advantage and almost always to the enemy’s detriment.

  Fourth, destroy the enemy’s communications, his ability to predict what’s going to happen, his ability to see.

  That implied four (a): destroy whatever he has by way of an early warning system.

  Considering that particular principle of war, Jim frowned at the blank spot on the wall, turning over possibilities in his mind. The pathway of the Free Rihannsu fleet in toward Augo was not as problematic as its later course toward ch’Rihan and ch’Havran would be. Subspace jamming, and physical interdiction of the space between Artaleirh and Augo, would do the job well enough for the first leg. The process, according to Veilt tr’Tyrava, had already begun, with the dispatch of some of the ships captured by the Artaleirhin to patrol and secure the invading fleet’s projected course.

  But Jim had other concerns. He had been thinking hard about the Romulan monitoring satellites on their side of the Neutral Zone, which lay not too far from the course that would lead from Augo to Eisn. He was also thinking about the Federation monitoring satellites, on the other side of the Zone but not so far away, which would be under threat as soon as war broke out.

  Assuming that they haven’t already been compromised. There was a thought that had been troubling Jim for some time. Those satellites were a long way from Earth, and the Romulans were very technologically creative. Jim suspected that it was at least a fifty-fifty chance that they had been tapped, and that everything they saw was possibly already being piped straight through to Grand Fleet and the Romulan High Command. But there was no way to destroy that early warning system.

  Or is there?

  The wall suddenly seemed less blank than it had, as Jim’s line of reasoning made a big jump into laterality. He could suddenly start to see a way to go, mapping itself out step by step and branch by branch, a growing tree of potential decisions. But that first branch was a doozy.

  The Zone monitoring satellites, on both sides, have to be destroyed.

  The unmanned ones, anyway. But those were by far the most numerous. There were thirty of them between the Federation and the Empire, scattered in a best-solution configuration over a geodesic “surface” spanning some fifteen light-years. It wouldn’t be necessary to destroy them all, just the ones that would be closest to the areas through which the Free Rihannsu fleet would be moving. And if possible it should look coincidental. It would even be useful—and Jim grinned rather ferally—if it looked like Grand Fleet itself had done it.

  Certainly the Romulans would think of the loss of the satellites, in general, as a good thing. They’d gone out of their way to demand their removal, during the talks. An accident? Or a strategy? Hard to tell. But when the Romulans would hear about the destruction of Federation satellites, the last thing that would occur to them was that the Federation was behind it. The concept would be just too outrageous, as they considered the Federation to be impossibly conservative and afraid to do anything risky. They might, of course, think the Klingons did it. That’d give them something to chew on too. The implications needed more thorough consideration: but making the fog of war a little denser, in this situation, might be smart.

  And of course Starfleet would go pale at the very thought of us destroying our own satellites, even if it does serve their best interests. Jim folded his arms and considered the logistics of destroying, say, ten or fifteen monitoring satellites. Without going near them, since we’re going to be busy elsewhere. And we somehow need to make sure that the Federation has adequate feed of tactical and strategic data from inside Romulan space when Starfleet is ready to move.

  He’d talk to Mr. Scott about it. One more impossible thing to do before breakfast was the kind of thing that Scotty thrived on. Jim turned back to the general principles, once more considering that blank wall. Deny the enemy’s supply of attacking forces from outside the Hearthworlds. That would be the next big problem to handle, and Enterprise and the ships traveling
with her would be in no position to do anything about it, nor indeed would it be an appropriate tasking for them. Smaller and more lightly armed vessels could do the interdiction. The Romulans would quickly run low on vessels to spare for convoying. Very soon after the beginning of any civil hostilities, they would be forced to expose their supply and troop movements, and Ael had told him what he really wanted to know, that big troop movements were going to be a problem for them. That would make it much easier for little rebel vessels to harry the ships that would be moving people and supplies. With almost all the participants carrying cloaking devices of one kind or another, he thought, this turns into real twentieth-century stuff, “submarine” warfare—surface, fire, vanish again.

  He considered whether there might be some paradigms from that earlier time that would do the attackers good. Something to consult with Spock about, he thought, and Sulu.

  Jim sighed. That would start getting into the shallower waters of attack design, detail that could be added after he sat down with Ael and Veilt on Tyrava, and with the other Free Rihannsu commanders now gathering in the system, Courhig and his ilk. But now Jim thought he saw the way to present them with a strategy that would reflect both what they thought was most likely to happen next, and what was most likely to go wrong.

  Now all he had to do was keep his self-confidence in place. Desperately important as this work was, Jim thought he could do that. After all, how many other admirals’ campaigns had he taken apart, first at the Academy and then later, for his own pleasure—and time and time again said, softly, or sometimes loudly, “I could do better than that!” Well, now was his chance to prove it. And how far wrong could you go when you had Sun Tzu and Clausewitz and Linebarger and Damins and hr’Teeilih behind you, all concurring on the most important things?

  Pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination.

  And don’t be distracted.

  Jim nodded to the War Gods, pulled the padd over, and got to work.

  When he next glanced at the chrono, it was hours and hours later, but strangely, he felt less tired than he had when he’d started. The bare screen of the padd was now showing the “topmost” of a series of pages—mostly text, but with many diagrams of the Augo and Eisn star systems as well as some others. Now embedded in the text were numerous images and maps of ch’Rihan and ch’Havran, large-scale and small-scale, all heavily annotated with “warfighter choreography” symbols indicating the mooted positioning of all forces from brigade level up, with first-draft conditional movement parameters all laid in.

  Jim sighed and got up, as he had been doing at frequent intervals, to stretch and have some water. He looked down at the padd. This is all I can do for the moment, he thought. Spock needs to look at this, and then we’ll meet with the Free Rihannsu side for input and feedback in the next day or so. The delay’s useful; if I’ve forgotten something important, it’ll give me time to realize what it is, assuming Spock hasn’t already caught it.

  He sighed. Though the plan for dealing with the battle itself was making more sense, the business of Enterprise actually being at Augo was the sorest point for Jim at the moment. That was the point at which it would become plain that he was flouting Commodore Danilov’s orders, and he would be in no position to reveal why. The only question remaining, Jim thought, is this: when we finally make contact with Federation forces, after Augo, will they attempt to destroy Enterprise on sight, assuming that I’ve turned?

  And what will the crew think?

  Strangely, that mattered more, and Jim had kept coming back to it as he worked. It wasn’t as if he didn’t value Danilov’s good opinion. But he was not responsible for Danilov. He was responsible for his crew. Tomorrow night, Jim thought, we’ll find out. And after that, however many of them are left following me, we’ll get out there and start doing business. The President’s business.

  Jim bent over and touched his toes once or twice to stretch his back, and then did a couple of squats and stretches. The man is taking the long view of the Federation’s relationship with the Romulans, he thought, that Fleet, for whatever reasons, is not. After all this is over, even if we win, I have a feeling the Federation and Starfleet are going to find themselves in the middle of a constitutional crisis concerning the President’s powers as C-in-C. After that, things may change; sealed-order missions like this may become illegal. But right now the chain-of-command issue is clear enough to me.

  And he truly felt that the President had the right of it on this issue. The Romulan Star Empire could not be allowed to collapse as a result of the civil war to come. The balance of power between the Klingons and the Federation would be too seriously deranged, and all hell would break loose. So, Jim thought. “Into the valley of death,” but for a good cause.

  Jim wandered back over to the padd, touched its controls, and scrolled through the pages again. It all looked so neat and tidy here. Little bright lines and symbols, arrows and boxes, and all the pages of description. These ten thousand people here, those five thousand there…It’s all just fiction now, he thought. Bloodless and neat. But it won’t stay that way. It’ll start becoming real very soon now. Too soon.

  He paused at that one page in the middle. Except for this, he thought. Everything turns on this, and no matter what the Rihannsu say, it’s got to happen. Better do now what I’ve been putting off. It won’t wait any longer.

  Jim sat down again, made sure the document was properly archived, and cleared the padd, then brought up the private commlink address he had been told to use only once. At first he was about to send the message by voice, but then he reached for a stylus and wrote:

  You said I had one favor coming. I’m calling it in.

  Here is what I need…

  TEN

  Late the next morning, after sending his message and getting some sleep (though probably not nearly as much as McCoy would have wanted him to), Jim went down to the mess again, found it empty this time, and had some breakfast, then headed up to the bridge.

  Spock was in the center seat, looking with a speculative expression at a front-screen view of Tyrava. As Jim came in, he rose and handed him a padd. “Captain, the post-battle assessments are in from all departments now. We sustained very minimal structural damage; repairs are already being made. Mr. Scott tells me that ETA for the completion of repairs is about six hours from now.”

  “Very good, Mr. Spock,” Jim said, looking down the list on the padd and handing it back to him. “Anything else that needs my attention?”

  “Nothing here, Captain. Though I believe that Mr. Scott wishes to see you as well, to discuss something he and K’s’t’lk have been working on.”

  “Fine,” Jim said. “I’ll go down there after I hit sickbay and find out if McCoy will let me see his star patient. He’s being as protective of the Praetor as a hen with one chick.” He looked out at Tyrava and shook his head. “I really should see if I can wangle Scotty an invitation over there, though. Any thoughts on the warp technology as yet?”

  “Some conjectures,” Spock said, “based on some early remote readings. But my preference is for firsthand observations, as you know, and Mr. Scott’s is probably for blueprints, or the original engineering drawings. I fear right now we have time to procure neither, even if the commanders of Tyrava would let us have them.”

  “Yes,” Jim said. “Even after Artaleirh, it’s going to take them a little while to trust us. But they’d better hurry up. If they’re still not sure of us by the time we get to ch’Rihan…”

  Spock nodded. “There is always that possibility. And if other aspects of our mission are to be successful as well, that would seem to be a necessity.”

  “Yes,” Jim said.

  He headed for the turbolift, glancing over at the comms station, where Uhura was running a diagnostic. “Commander Uhura,” he said, “have we heard anything from Bloodwing this morning?”

  “Not as yet, Captain,” Uhura said. “I’ll hail them if you like.”

  “No need,” Jim said. �
��They’re probably just as busy with after-battle cleanup as we’ve been. If they haven’t checked in by a few hours from now, call them and ask Ael if she has time to meet me before the crew get-together tonight.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jim nodded and got into the lift. “Sickbay,” he said, and it whooshed off. Now that he had his suggestions for the battle of Augo down in “hard” form, all the other concerns of the last couple of days had come pressing in on him—especially Arrhae’s warning about whatever was closing in on the solar system to threaten the Earth. I’d give a lot for more data, Jim thought. But I have a feeling that Scotty’s and Spock’s conjectures are on the money. The Romulans have Sunseed, they know it works, they know that under certain circumstances it can be made deadly at a planetary level. I could spend hours trying to figure out what else they might have up their sleeves, but why bother? If I were them, I’d use what I had.

  Unless of course they expect us to think that way.

  Jim sighed. There was no point in trying so hard to anticipate your enemy’s complex and twisty strategies that you tied your own brain into knots and distracted yourself from the obvious, leaving your enemy with leisure to come up behind you and do something straightforward like bash you over the head with a club.

  The lift stopped, and Jim got out and went down the corridor to sickbay. As its doors opened he was greeted by the sound of someone laughing and then suddenly stopping with a kind of wheeze of pain, and then laughing and stopping again. “You should cut that out, Praetor,” he heard McCoy saying, though there was something strange about his voice. Then Jim realized that he was hearing the doctor through his implanted universal translator chip, and that McCoy was speaking Rihannsu. “The sutures are robust, but you’ll pop them if you keep it up.”