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

by Diane Duane

  Ael smiled slightly and looked at the screen. “Show me tactical,” she said to Aidoann.

  The screen showed her a two-dimensional representation of the armada. Only the largest ships, and Kaveth and Tyrava, showed as actual shapes; Enterprise and Bloodwing and anything smaller than they showed merely as a spark of light, in the scale that was needed to express all the vessels that were there. Enterprise and Bloodwing were near the forefront, and a great curve of other vessels, such as those captured from Grand Fleet at Artaleirh and renamed, hung back just behind them. The whole array of vessels went to define the rest of a rough half-sphere, and the array was pointed roughly at Eisn in the distance, the tiniest possible golden globe. At such a distance, the planets were not visible. But Ael, knowing from what point she looked down on the solar system, knew exactly where they were. Soon now, she thought. Very soon.

  “Dropping out of warp now, khre’Riov, as per schedule,” Aidoann said.

  Ael merely nodded. Though she had had much to do with the making of this plan, she would now have but little room for the spur-of-the-moment action that so routinely characterized engagements in her world. This game was being played on a different level. In some ways, it was much like Mr. Spock’s chess—but in others, it was less a game than a dance. I step here, you step there, or if you step that way, then I step another; all planned, everything anticipated. The rigor of the structure would have seemed stifling, except that it was better, in this situation at least, to be stifled than dead. Dead folk could not complete the job they had come all this way to do.

  Though their shields were up, Ael leaned on the back of her seat and felt decidedly exposed. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the look that Aidoann was throwing at her. “I know,” Ael said, “I know we’re well outside what they will have assumed is our best scan range. Nonetheless…”

  That was when the fire lanced out from space all around them, and the ships started to appear.

  The initial fire splashed off their shields, due to the attackers’ distance. Ael swallowed and stood up straight. “Khiy,” she said, “fire and evasive at will, according to four-n. Mind our neighbors in the pattern!”

  “Ie, khre’Riov—”

  “They’ve decided not to let us in close,” Kirk said from Enterprise as Bloodwing’s disruptors lanced out. Ael could just hear him grinning. “All right, we can throw away everything from four-a through four-m.”

  “Why?” Ael said. “What would have been your preference?”

  “The closer to the planet, the better,” Jim said. “Any limitation of the enemy’s maneuverability is to be welcomed. But if they want to have it out here, we’re ready for that too. We expect more cloaked incoming, though.”

  “We will be ready,” Ael said.

  Khiy threw the ship into evasive along the lines that had been laid down for it in the master attack plan. In this early part of the engagement, the ships would be moving largely in unison, while their commanders took a little time to grasp the numbers of the enemy and their disposition. “Well,” came Jim’s voice over the comms, “they’re closer than I thought. Maybe we can throw out everything through four-p…”

  “It was only to be expected,” Ael said, “that they might have acquired some data about our scan range. Tr’Hrienteh might not have gotten it from me, but she had access to ship’s computers—it’s information she could have easily picked up just from ship’s comms in the last week or so. Well, we have a few surprises of our own.”

  Things were starting to happen more quickly. Ael saw three Grand Fleet cruisers diving toward her. “Khiy,” she said, “this would be a good time to avoid them.”

  But he was already swerving away, angling upward and outward within the pattern laid out for them, and streaking briefly back toward the great ships. It was the strategy that she and Jim had agreed upon. “If you’re going to be an idiot,” he’d said, “and insist on riding out front, make sure you’re covered. Don’t be shy about letting the big gunnery handle your troubles.” But she’d noticed that Enterprise, too, had been “riding out front,” and she thought she had shown great control in not calling Kirk on it.

  The pursuit dropped away behind them, but kept on firing. “They are none too eager to get near Tyrava,” Ael said, and smiled. “Khiy, bring us round back of them; we will have another crack at those miscreants.”

  “Little time for that, right now, khre’Riov,” Khiy said. The supercruiser was coming up behind them. Ael looked at it, concerned, thinking that its commander might have tractor beams on his or her mind. At the same time, she was tempted to laugh. How unlike this was from her usual fights. How strange, hardly to even notice the name of the ship as you shoot at it. The world is not what it used to be.

  Khiy swung the ship back toward Tyrava. The cruiser was following her with some purpose, heading straight toward the great ship, and Ael grew uncomfortable. There is something unwise about this, she thought. “Khiy! Veer off!”

  “Ael,” a voice came. It was Kirk, micromanaging his battle plan again. “Where’re you going?”

  “I am not sure at the moment,” Ael said, “but I have the feeling that this is the wrong place for me to be.”

  Kirk said a word. It was not one she had ever heard from him previously; the translator refused to render it. “Ael,” Kirk said, “I thought we’ve had this discussion enough times. There’s very little room in this operation for spontaneity.”

  And Khiy abruptly threw the ship to starboard. Not even Bloodwing’s gravitational dampers could cope with the sudden move, and Ael had to grab the seat in front of her to stay upright, and with the other hand brace the Sword to keep it from falling off the seat’s arms. Behind them, where they had been, a ferocious beam of blue-white fire ravened out from the cruiser and hit Tyrava’s shields.

  It pierced them. The beam lanced through, scoring the hull. A puff of air and fire washed out from the contact point.

  “We are not the only ones with new technology!” Ael said. “Or with the wit to use it! Captain?”

  “I saw it,” Kirk said. “Mr. Spock—”

  “Scanning,” Spock said. After a second he said, “They have augmented disruptors, similar to those we saw at Augo, but using a slightly different instrumentation of the hexicyclic waveform—”

  “Fine,” Kirk said, “but can we do anything about it?”

  “I can design a shield retune,” Spock said, “but it will take a few moments. Meantime, I would suggest that this implies six-b, a concerted attack on the great ships—”

  “I’d say you’d be right,” Kirk said. “All ships, six-b and six-b-1. Go, go, go!”

  New sets of vectors leapt onto Ael’s viewscreen, as onto everyone else’s viewscreens or tanks. She doubted, though, that her helmsman needed them; Khiy was already arcing away along a new course. Hard behind them came the pursuers—three cruisers, four corvettes. A significant portion of the attacking force was coming after Bloodwing. “Captain,” Ael said conversationally, as Khiy went into evasive maneuvers again, “I begin to think you might have had a point about the wisdom of running out front.”

  “Don’t make me be right,” Kirk said. “I hate being right.”

  “Since when?” came another voice. It was McCoy; he had apparently decided to ride this particular engagement out in the bridge.

  “This is no time to quibble, Bones,” Kirk said. “Everybody, six-c! Those cruisers—”

  Twenty of the available Free Rihannsu vessels, the biggest ones with the heaviest weapons, doubled back on their own courses and went after the cruisers that were chasing Bloodwing. This, too, was an exigency they had been prepared for. As Khiy’s evasive maneuvers became more energetic, Ael finally yielded to the necessities of the moment, plucked the Sword off the arms of her command seat, and sat down in it, hard, just as the ship shook with incoming disruptor fire. She leaned on the sheathed Sword, staring at the screen. “There, Khiy,” she said. “And there!”

  But there was no point in telling K
hiy what to do anymore. Sulu had, indeed, corrupted him too thoroughly; he had made of an excellent navigator and helmsman a superb one. He would have come to this pitch eventually, Ael told herself. It was simply having someone else to encourage him.

  And Khiy was throwing Bloodwing around as enthusiastically as Sulu ever had done with Enterprise. Ael simply concentrated, for the moment, on not falling out of her chair. “Tactical,” she said to Aidoann, and the screen shifted to that display so that she could see what the other vessels were doing, but there was almost too much going on for her to take in. One thing she noticed with relief—Tyrava’s screen had sealed over again, and two of the ships that had made similar holes and similar damage on the other side of Tyrava’s vast bulk now blew up, one after another, as the gunnery of first Tyrava and then Kaveth hit them.

  “I have the retune,” Spock said over on Enterprise. “It may take some few moments for Tyrava and Kaveth to implement it.”

  That was when the second wave of cruisers decloaked. They came full tilt at the great ships, and shortly after came a third wave, also decloaked and firing. All of them had the same augmented disruptor beams; all of them swarmed around the great ships like biting insects about cattle. Beams sliced out from the two great ships’ projectors in all directions, but here, if anywhere, lay their weakness; they were not as agile as the smaller ships that plagued them. “This is six-d-1,” Kirk said from Enterprise. “Go, go, go!”

  The ten largest Free Rihannsu vessels that had been acquired at Artaleirh and Augo, and ten of the smaller ones, now curved up and out to attack the attacking cruisers. “Mr. Spock,” Kirk said, “what about that retune?”

  “Implementing now, Captain,” Spock said. “The routine has been disseminated to the cruisers. However—” And Ael saw two brief flowers of fire, one after another, as two of the craft captured at Artaleirh were simply vaporized in the unforgiving lines of fire that lanced out from the attacking cruisers. Ael watched, and went hot with rage, and ached to throw Bloodwing at those ships and exact revenge, but the ship was too small. She could not compete with such weaponry, not even with her augmentations.

  One more Free Rihannsu vessel vanished in fire as she watched; and a fourth one took a massive hit on its screens from one of those new, hot, blue-white beams. Ael sucked in her breath. But it did not explode.

  “They have the retune,” she said. “Khiy—”

  “We have it as well, khre’Riov,” he said. “We’re ready.”

  “Good. Then bring us where we can shoot one of those—”

  Khiy flung Bloodwing at one of the cruisers. Her own disruptors raged out. A tattoo of fire ran all of them down the cruiser’s hull. At first it seemed to have no effect, and then one beam pierced a shield that wavered. Seconds later, all the shields on that side of the cruiser failed. Khiy fired again. The cruiser blew.

  Bloodwing shot through the glowing plasma as it self-annihilated, and out the far side—straight into the jaws of another cruiser. But Khiy was on it. Once more the disruptors lanced out, struck shield, struck through it. One of the cruiser’s nacelles cracked away; the cruiser spun off out of control.

  “Retune propagation is complete,” Spock said.

  “Six-g, six-h!” Kirk’s voice said.

  Once again, the Free Rihannsu vessels shifted configuration, making the half-bowl again—a little more compact, this time, to allow for the vessels that had been lost. Six cruisers were lost to their own complement; but easily fifteen of the Grand Fleet vessels had gone down under the guns of Tyrava and Kaveth and the other smaller ships. Though the great ships had suffered some damage from the cruisers, they had proven more than deadly enough in return. Ael sat there with the Sword across her knees, and considered that this was going to be one of those battles—or at least, skirmishes—that was won, not strictly by superior tactics, but by sheer brute firepower. One begins to understand, she thought, why the Federation has always been sniffing about our doorstep in search of technology. When it makes this kind of difference in large engagements…She looked thoughtfully at Enterprise, barely more than a tiny white spark in the display, some hundreds of thousands of kilometers away.

  And now Enterprise had her own problems. There were several cruisers after her now, and she was corkscrewing away. “Khiy,” Ael said, “do you keep your eyes open to see if there’s a chance to do the captain a favor.”

  As she spoke, one of the three cruisers following Enterprise suddenly blew up as Sulu spun the ship a hundred eighty degrees in yaw and fired with forward phasers at something that a moment before had had only much weaker rear phaser banks to deal with. “And that is a trick that Mr. Sulu has taught me,” Khiy said. “Would you like to see me do it, khre’Riov?”

  “Not right this minute!” Ael said. “I should think you would have enough to do with them at the moment.”

  Bloodwing’s disruptors lanced out again, and again; and another ship blew up. “Aidoann,” Ael said, “what does that make our numbers now?”

  “We are down to thirty vessels of cruiser size or larger, khre’Riov, but they are down to twenty. No, make that eighteen.” She was peering down her own scanner, shaking her head. “Things are moving so quickly…”

  We are so used to hunting on our own, Ael thought, hunting in a pack is a new, strange thing to us. Well, if this works correctly, we will not have to do it much more often.

  “Three more vessels uncloaking, khre’Riov,” Aidoann said. And there was an urgency in her voice. “They’re large.”

  “Define large,” Ael said—and then she stopped. It was unnecessary. Whatever size they were, they were large enough to show as visible shapes on a screen that also contained Kaveth and Tyrava.

  “They’re like the supercapital vessels,” Aidoann said, “But ten percent larger! Coming at us now.”

  “Those were not in the plan, Jim,” Ael said, with some alarm, as the shapes began to grow on her viewscreen. “They cannot have any more supercapitals left.”

  “They can if we didn’t know they had them,” Kirk said. “Mr. Sulu, let’s see what they’re made of!”

  “Kirk,” Ael cried, “now who is being unnecessarily spontaneous?!”

  “Whatever you say, Captain,” Sulu said. But he sounded dubious. “But they look a bit big for us.”

  “They are a bit big for you,” came Veilt’s voice from Tyrava. “And there are some odd readings coming from those. I strongly suggest that both of you—”

  And from the attacking supercapitals came something like a globe of fire. It reminded Ael of nothing so much as the matter-dissolution weapon that her people had used years ago. “Khiy!” Ael said.

  “Mr. Sulu!” Kirk said at the same moment.

  “Yes, khre’Riov!” Khiy said, already flinging Bloodwing away. But that furious ball of force was still coming at them, expanding, and—Ael blinked. It could not actually be following them as they turned.

  “I very much dislike that, Captain, whatever it may be!” Ael said.

  “A programmable plasma,” she heard Spock say. “It shares some of the characteristics of the old molecular-disruptor weapon mounted on early birds-of-prey, but it would appear to have been upgraded somewhat.”

  “Too much so for me!” Ael said, watching it match them arc for arc and keep on closing. “Khiy, get ready to go to warp.”

  “Ready, khre’Riov,” he said.

  “Go!”

  Bloodwing leapt away from the other vessels, curving up and away from Eisn. That ball of force followed. “Shield status?” Ael said to Aidoann as the thing got closer.

  “They are at full, khre’Riov, but that thing is radiating such power that it will go right through them.”

  “If Spock is right about that thing’s antecedents,” Ael said, “we may be able to outrun it, as we’ve done with its predecessors. Khiy, make all haste! Tr’Keirianh?”

  “I hear you,” was all her master engineer said. It was going to have to be good enough.

  Bloodwing ran, and the f
orceball ran behind her. Ael gazed at it on the viewscreen, its view now showing space behind them, the engagement continuing in the distance. Was it attenuating? Ael shook her head, watching it come closer.

  “Warp three,” Khiy said. “Warp four.” He looked up at the screen, unbelieving. “Khre’Riov, that can’t be accelerating!”

  “It should not have been able to turn, either!” Ael said. “Just go, Khiy!”

  He threw the ship into another of those turns that made Bloodwing’s bones groan with the stress of it, and still the forceball followed them, growing closer. But it was beginning to thin. “Yes,” Ael said. “Go, just go!”

  “Warp five.”

  It was not easy for a ship of Bloodwing’s class to accelerate so quickly. But she is in a class by herself, Ael thought, gripping the arms of her seat, bracing the Sword. Go, cousin. Think what you bear, and save us one more time!

  Khiy swerved again, and once more the forceball followed them. But it was growing fainter, even as it accelerated one more time. Ael saw it coming faster and faster, and shook her head, hit the all-call button. “Brace, my children, brace, collision imminent! Collision—”

  The thing struck them as tr’Keirianh coaxed one last burst of acceleration out of the warp engines. Everything shook as if some huge fist had struck Bloodwing a great blow; the bridge went dark. Ael took that last long gasp of air that becomes second nature for one who routinely is in situations where the next gasp may be of vacuum. But though things stayed dark for some seconds, the hull did not crack, nor did the engines give out. A moment later the lights flickered back on again.

  Aidoann was on the floor; she let out a little gasp, a little moan, as the lights came on. Ael left the Sword on the center seat and went to her, letting out that breath. She had thought often enough before that she saw her death coming, but this time it had just been a touch too close. She bent over Aidoann, helped her up. “Cousin, come on,” Ael said. “Can you get up?”

  “The count,” Aidoann said faintly, and got to her knees. “Khre’Riov, just help me sit for a moment, I have to get the count of ships.”