by Diane Duane
He straightened up and folded his arms, considering. “The difficulty would be a matter of precision: keeping the wormhole open for exactly the right time necessary to conduct the necessary amount of energy into the target, as well as in making sure it can be shut down while conducting such a flow. The wormhole experiments of recent years have all been attempts to connect into much more innocuous alternate universes, where the ‘differential of dynamic’ and the overall balance of energy states has been roughly equal. Such as that of our own universe with the one where our own ‘dark’ counterparts exist.”
“Aye,” Scotty said, looking glum. “Pumping unlimited amounts of energy into our universe. We’re playing with fire.”
“Every engineer plays constantly with the Elements,” Ael said, “or so tr’Keirianh tells me. I see little chance of our doing so safely. Therefore we must needs nerve ourselves to the dangers, it would seem.”
Scotty shook his head. “We could upset the local spatial ecology somethin’ fierce. Control—”
“It is an issue,” Spock said, “but I think not insurmountable. And the solution you are suggesting is an elegant one. Any nova bomb ignition starts out by instituting a collapse sequence. The insertion of the correct amount of energy would abort the sequence, canceling it out both by means of sine flux inversion and carbon-carbon cycle denaturation. I shall apply myself to the necessary mathematics and provide you with findings at the earliest opportunity.”
Mr. Scott still looked dubious. “Scotty,” Jim said, “we’re running out of time. That thing’s getting closer and closer to Earth. No one knows where it is, and if it’s got one of those new cloaks on it—which I’m betting it does—no one’s going to. I’ve sent messages back to Starfleet about it in every way I can think of that’s safe—” He glanced at Spock, who nodded slightly. “But if I’m getting this right, and you think this resonance-wormhole-whatever technique can be used to keep that nova bomb from getting into the sun, or can disrupt its effects when it does get in, then it’s worth doing. And doing right away.”
“Captain,” Scotty said, upset, “remember what happened to 553 Trianguli!”
“Something a whole lot worse is going to happen to Sol, and Sol III, if you don’t give whatever you’re planning a try!” Jim said. “I know this sounds terrible, but the sun collapsing is just slightly preferable to the sun blowing up. At least there’s a chance to save some lives. But, frankly, neither option is acceptable to me. So do whatever you have to do, build whatever you have to build, and do it now!”
Scotty sighed and nodded. “You give me the numbers,” Scotty said to Spock, “and I’ll build what you describe.”
Jim nodded and turned to McCoy. “Bones, this meeting—I think it would be smart if we brought Gurrhim with us. Can he travel?”
McCoy rolled his eyes. “More like, can he be stopped from traveling,” he said. “Ever since he saw Kaveth arrive, he’s been itching to get over there. Apparently they’re some kind of relatives of his. He’s fit enough now. I’d have discharged him already, if it weren’t for the security situation. But I take it, after what happened with tr’Hrienteh, that the lockdown doesn’t pertain anymore?”
Jim thought about that. “Probably not. If necessary, Bones, we can smuggle him down to the transporter room and make sure that our meeting on Kaveth doesn’t happen anywhere public. But let me think about it for a little. I’ll get back to you. Anything else here that needs my attention?”
“No, Captain,” Scotty said. “We’ll call you when we’ve got our prototype built from Mr. Spock’s figures.”
Jim nodded, and he and Ael headed toward the door. “Och!” Scotty said then. “Captain?”
Jim looked over his shoulder.
“I forgot. That other question you messaged me about this morning?” Scotty grinned. “Aye, we can do it. Gurrhim’s wee widget suggested a method. I’ll have more data for you later.”
Jim started to grin; it felt strange, after the pain of the hours before. “All right, Scotty. You may have just won us this war. Get on it.”
Kaveth was another ship in the mold of Tyrava, but bigger. Ael heard with amusement the sound Kirk made when he got his first clear sight of it after the battle. The ship’s designers had gone, not for three outer hulls, but five; they were set far back along the bullet-shaped main body, producing altogether a sleek and deadly look. This probably should have been no surprise, for Kaveth-Clan was famous for the artistic sensibilities of its children, and for their gifts in design, whether in something so prosaic as a box for starchroot bread or as purposefully elegant as designer clothing or weaponry. In the ancient days when the Kavethssu first took flight, the saying was that they might chop you to bits, but they would do it with style. When they were done with you, you would be fit at the very least for an alien “craft butcher’s” front window, or for an art gallery, if nothing further.
When the party coming in from Enterprise and Bloodwing appeared on Kaveth’s main transport pad, Ael made sure she was standing in such a way as to see Kirk’s expression without seeming to have oriented herself so. Sure enough, his face was worth seeing. As he turned slowly around him, looking up and up, and his jaw slowly dropped, Ael became sure that the captain had never beamed into a rain forest before—at least, not one that was inside. Kaveth-Clan had originally lived in the south-tropical continent of ch’Havran before the Empire relocated them half a century ago to distant outworlds like Mirhassa and Ssuvat, in an attempt to isolate what was seen as a dangerous desire to uphold the right of self-expression in the face of power. When the Kavethssu were stripped of their possessions and forcibly exported to those worlds, the Empire never suspected under how many cloaks and tunics were concealed the most delicate and best-loved of the Hearthworlds’ plants. Now the massive boles of tafa trees, gracefully braiding their way upward in metallic-corded green-blue cables an arm thick, and the huge golden downhanging trumpet-flowers of firjill, surrounded the pad half a stai deep on every side.
“Eden,” Jim said softly. “Tell me there are no snakes.”
“What would a snake be?” Ael said, though she knew.
“Here?” Jim said. “Superfluous.”
That whole large space was empty. They stood there, and after a moment Ael saw coming toward them a shape she had not seen for many years, since her younger days in Fleet. Thala tr’Kaveth was one of those astonishing women who simply did not change with age: raven-haired, tall, and slimmer than any woman had any right to be past her twelfth decade and her sixth child. The joke in the old days had been that her immediate family was a clan all to itself; and indeed the Kavethssu had a reputation for being willingly fertile, almost aggressively so. The joke among the Outworlds had always been that, were the Kavethssu Imperial, there would have been no need for armaments with which to conquer an empire; they would simply have overrun it by sheer numbers.
Now the Clan-mistress of Kaveth came toward them and greeted them all with warmth. Ael’s hand she took and held to her cheek in a surprisingly open gesture of affection. “Instructress,” she said—for Ael had been one of Thala’s teachers at the Fleet during Ael’s brief flirtation with the academic life there, many years ago—“I fear I have run away from school a little farther than previously.”
Ael laughed. The others, who knew the story, smiled; Ael turned to Kirk, introducing him to her erstwhile pupil. “Thala was given to me to tutor in piloting, long ago,” she said. “I fear my teaching methods weren’t to her liking. She left Fleet shortly thereafter to become a farmer.”
“It was not your fault,” Thala said, laughing, and led them all off to one side toward a space among the trees in which a huge greenstone conference table was somewhat incongruously set. “Or, well, not entirely. When the government decided to uproot our whole clan and relocate it to some barren planet I’d never heard of, out at the back end of nowhere, it seemed a good time to take my leave of ch’Rihan before I became too much like the people who could do such a thing.”
They all sat
down. Kirk was still looking around him in astonishment—not just at the forest. “Thala,” Jim said, “I’m sorry. The question has been burning me up. How have you people built these ships? We always thought the colony worlds were poor.”
Thala smiled, as at a clever youngster. And Veilt smiled, and Ael smiled, and seeing Jim’s face, she saw that he understood he had finally asked the right question.
“So did the Empire,” Thala said, “since they beggared us. Who would we be to disabuse them of the notion? We were willing to live in peaceful lawfulness under their reign, but we had to speak our minds; that’s our nature. When they decided that speaking one’s mind was treason, at that point we let them send us far away from their notice, as they thought. It left us freer to speak, and to practice the peculiar form of criminality they had forced upon us. The forest, there—” She looked all around her at the green-and-gold trees surrounding them. “They never knew that we managed to bring the best of it away from ch’Havran with us. All they saw were poor people flocking onto the transports; destitute folk, with muddy plants in buckets. Do you know tivish, Captain?”
Jim shook his head, but McCoy looked up. “Jim,” he said, “you remember the scarf wrapped around that bottle I brought Spock? That was tivish. It’s a plant-based fiber, like silk, only much, much more so. The best tivish is so fine, you can have it in your hands and hardly know when you’re feeling it.”
“It is fabulously difficult to correctly process,” Thala said, “and as a result, fabulously expensive. For the better half of the last half century, we have exported tivish to the Hearthworlds, albeit somewhat erroneously labeled. Our customers have always thought it came from south-continent ch’Havran.”
“Elements forbid we should start some piffling quarrel about a matter of labeling,” Gurrhim said, and coughed.
“And all we poor Kavethssu have gone about in rags and tags these many years, like subsistence farmers, growing the wretched groundroot,” Thala said. “While quietly exporting the best possible hydroponically produced counterfeit Havrannssu tivish all about the Empire, and far beyond—and, from the profits, building ships.”
She looked around her with utmost satisfaction. Ael saw Jim bow his head in what she thought was proper amazement at such determination. Then he looked up. “There would have been other sources for your income, of course.”
“Ah, always. But no more illegal than absolutely necessary. Pirates and subversives the Empire might have made of us, but criminals? The Elements would never approve.” Then Thala grinned. “Actually, perhaps we erred ever so slightly on the side of criminality. We did buy some banks.”
Ael saw Jim settle back in his seat with a smile that said he entirely understood. “Every revolution,” he said, “needs a friendly bank.”
“How pleasant it is to do business with a thoughtful ally,” Thala said. “So now you understand the context. We are happy to leave this corrupt Empire if we must. But far more would we prefer to take it back, and someday replant all this under the open sky where it belongs. Augo has gone some way toward that, but not yet far enough. There’s yet much work to do, and little time.”
“But matters are moving in a direction we would desire,” Veilt said. “Through Kavethssu agents working on ch’Rihan and ch’Havran, much fresh intelligence has not come to us, and it is accurate. The agents’ stake is in preserving their home, which they know is about to be involved in the Battle of Eisn. Public unrest is growing.”
The hair rose on the back of Ael’s neck as she suddenly heard her homeworlds, her home star, being for the first time given a name that turned them into a battle, an engagement. A matter of history—and possibly one of tragedy. “…has no idea what to do,” Thala was saying. “The Defense Forces are torn. They little like to be sent against their own people. Some of the most enthusiastic of them have suffered at the hands of those they command. Numerous members of the forces have gone over to the insurgency and have brought much useful Intelligence and technology with them.”
“That would be the best kind of news,” Kirk said. “Thala, Veilt—how many ships?”
The urgency in his voice sounded the way a touched wound might sound if it had suddenly acquired the power of speech.
“That we know of,” Thala said, “forty-nine.”
Jim sat very still. “Forty-nine capital vessels?”
“No,” Veilt said. “Twenty capitals, and twenty-nine lesser vessels of Warbird- or Reha-class.”
“That we know of,” Kirk said quietly.
“It seems very few,” Veilt said, “I know. But by both accident and design, we have made Grand Fleet empty its purse with some speed. Granted, they brought much more force to Augo than we had expected. But they hoped to strike a crushing blow there—and found their error when it was they who turned out to be tied to the anvil, not we.”
Kirk sat there looking at his hands, folded on the table. “All right,” he said. “Let’s consider how these new numbers affect our tactics. I trust you’ve had time to look over the previous version of our battle plan?”
Thala nodded. “I have consulted with Veilt. Our major concern, as you might imagine, is the number of feet on the ground that we can contribute to this effort. Obviously, when we fight in defense of Kaveth, every able member of our population stands to arms. But for a battle outside our walls, even this one, we must necessarily be more sparing. We cannot leave our children’s home defenseless, especially when it can most logically be expected to suffer attack during the time a significant portion of our forces are groundside.” She sat back in her chair, and something in the change of light and shadow across her face suddenly showed Ael how unnerved Thala was by the prospect that lay before them all.
“Of our combined populations,” Veilt said, “we can offer you two hundred and eighty thousand ground troops. This is ten percent over the numbers we originally discussed with you, Captain, when you first floated your master battle plan. But I still fear it may not be enough.”
Kirk looked a little abstracted. Ael recognized the look of a commander rearranging a strategy on the fly. Then his eyes snapped back into the now. “I would have agreed with you previously,” he said. “Since this is the one battle we can’t afford to lose, it’s also one to which I’ve always preferred to bring overwhelming force, along the lines of five-to-one odds. Today’s numbers take us to about three-to-one, since even though they’ve been calling in everything they can, the Hearthworlds still have too little in the way of ground forces, and those ground forces have too little in the way of experience.”
“It’s as I told you, Captain,” Ael said. “Rebellion has routinely been handled by Grand Fleet, not by putting boots on the ground.”
“And the government has thereby created its own tactical vacuum,” Jim said. “They’ve always expected the Federation and the Klingons to be locked in a permanent strategic standoff, too preoccupied with each other to come this far into the Empire. And as our Intelligence now confirms, it’s never seriously occurred to either Grand Fleet or the government that a local insurgency would ever gain enough momentum to become a serious threat. Or else anyone who suggested such a thing was either laughed out of the room, or silenced for talking treason.” His smile went grim. “There’s no question that whatever battle plan they’ve managed to cobble together will start to break down in earnest when their C&C starts trying to handle troops who not only have never taken seriously the possibility that the Hearthworlds might be invaded, but have never trained as if they might be. That’ll be a good start for us. But to make our numbers count as if they were actually a five-to-one advantage, we are going to have to break that command-and-control much more seriously, and much more quickly.”
His expression was acquiring a sly look, like that of a conjuror with a smeerp up his sleeve. Ael sat back and watched the others’ faces as they watched Kirk. Thala, in particular, was favoring the captain with an expression suggesting that she thought she might be dealing with a madman.
“W
hat did you have in mind, Captain?” Gurrhim said. “Forgive me if this has been discussed before, but I have been busy with other matters.”
“Like healing a big hole in your chest,” Kirk said. “Last I saw, that was acceptable as an excuse for missing a staff meeting or two.” That smile got even more sly as it was mirrored by Gurrhim. Ael saw how much these two men had come to like each other, and was glad of it, as it would prove useful.
“Let’s backtrack a little,” said Kirk. “To reduce ch’Rihan—really our main goal, because ch’Havran will quickly follow—we have two primary objectives before us. First, we must take Ra’tleihfi, not just because of its symbolic value as the heart of the Empire. The command structures centered there have never been decentralized, again due to the inability to conceive of a direct attack on these two planets—and also, if I understand Ael correctly, due to the culture of distrust in both the government and the Fleet. Neither has ever been happy about the prospect of allowing your subordinates to get too far out of their sight, where they’ll have leisure to plot.”
“True enough,” Gurrhim said. “Captain, the doctor gave me many things to read while I was lying on my back the first few days aboard, and while I was reading I found that we have a saying in common. ‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.’”
Kirk nodded. “So that concentration of resources and personnel will have to be disrupted or destroyed as quickly as possible. And our second task will be to capture and occupy all major centers of government in the city—meaning, most specifically, the Senate and the other buildings and facilities of the Tricameron, and the facilities associated with the Praetorate. The Praetors, also, must be neutralized—most particularly the Three.”
“It is a very bland word, ‘neutralized,’” Thala said.
Kirk had the grace to look embarrassed. “Yes. Sometimes the jargon creeps up on you when you’re not looking. Thala, I would prefer not to kill those who don’t need killing. But circumstance sometimes overrules our best intentions. To keep the civilian casualties to a minimum, the Praetorate has to be incapacitated and its members confined or eliminated as quickly as possible. They can’t under any circumstances be allowed to escape. The emergence of a government in exile around which a counterinsurgency could crystallize would be disastrous for everybody. The Three, in particular, can’t be allowed to escape—and when you look at the detailed battle plan, which I’ll be revising again shortly, you’ll see that a fair amount of materiel and personnel are devoted to this objective.”
