Star Trek: The Empty Chair (14 page)

Jim began thinking in earnest about Augo.

In a tapestry-hung room on the Klingon homeworld, a man was swearing.

“Where are my ships?” he said.
“Where are my ships?!”

Four other Klingons were in the room with K’hemren, the Chancellor’s chief counselor. Two of them wore the all-black uniforms of Imperial Intelligence, and stood before him in varying attitudes of disdain or annoyance. Another was a servitor, standing in the rear, awaiting orders. The fourth was on his knees, stripped of his armor, his hands bound behind him. His head was down, and though he was not trembling, it was plain that he shortly expected that head to be severed from his shoulders.

“It is as I told you,” he said. His voice had gone dull; he seemed to have passed beyond desperation. “The great ship came—”

“From
where?”
K’hemren roared at him. “You got no weapons or engine telemetry from it, not even a scan of the direction from which it came.”

“Lord,” said the kneeling man, “it was cloaked. The cloak was of a kind we’d never seen before. It leaked no signal, no waveform whatsoever until the ship was fully revealed. And by the time it was—”

“You would have me believe,” said K’hemren, “that they destroyed at least
five
heavy cruisers—the whole rest of your
complement! Yet you alone managed to fight your way out of this situation?”

“Sir,” the kneeling man said. “It was not fair. It was not
fair!
We had them! And we would have had
Enterprise!”
Some hints of outrage began to illumine the deadness of his voice.

K’hemren merely snorted in disbelief. “Greater men than you have tried that and failed. It stretches my imagination intolerably to believe that boot-stickings like you could ever even approach such a feat.” He looked over at the two Imperial Intelligence operatives.

One of them, gazing down at the kneeling man, shrugged. “Local space was full of jamming signals. It was affecting local scan and telemetry unusually badly. Yet something did show through in the initial analysis. However unlikely it seems, his ship got a brief glimpse of something very large—very massive. On the order of two hundred eighty million
tieks.”

“There are no ships of such a size.” K’hemren made a disgusted face and waved the suggestion away. “Though doubtless there are those who would like us to believe there are. This is some kind of propaganda trick, some ploy or illusion, some alteration of the scans so that they seem to reveal the impossible.
Enterprise
has been involved with such trickery before.”

K’hemren stared at the man on his knees for a moment longer, then gestured to the servitor, who started silently toward them.

The second Imperial Intelligence officer looked up. “Lord,” he said quietly, “
where are the other ten ships?
And where are the other five from this task force?”

“The other ten had orders to run under silence, as you know. As for these five…” K’hemren chewed his mustache briefly while looking down at the man who knelt before him;
behind the kneeling man, the servitor drew closer, with something in his hands.

“Suppose there
were
ships of that size?” K’hemren said softly. “It might well suit our enemies to have us disbelieve this report. More: it might well suit them to have us believe that the ship is not a Federation vessel, but Romulan.”

“The Romulans could never afford such a thing!” said the second security officer, with a scornful laugh.

“Indeed,” said K’hemren, “they might like to have us believe that too. Well, I think we need more data. This undertaking has already become more complex than I would like. For the sake of the attack on the Federation that we’re contemplating, we can well afford to throw away a few more ships to discover the truth of this ‘great ship’—who it belongs to, what weaponry it might have. Whether indeed it’s reality, or just some propaganda ploy.”

The servitor now stood directly behind the man who knelt. He lifted one hand, raised his eyes to those of the Chancellor’s counselor. “Truth we must have, and that quickly. No,” K’hemren said to the servitor. “Not right now. You!”

The man who knelt realized that he was being addressed, and looked up for the first time since the start of their meeting, though not with any expression of hope. “Take yourself out of my sight,” said K’hemren. “And stay in whatever wretched bolthole constitutes your quarters here until you’re sent for. I may, if you’re lucky, send you to your death in some more honorable fashion than the skulking, whining exit you made from your most recent battle.”

The kneeling man scrambled to his feet, bowed deeply but hastily, and left with the servitor close behind him. When the chamber door boomed to again, K’hemren looked at the two Intelligence officers. He leaned back a little, stretching his arms along the arms of the chair. “The coward,” one of the two Intelligence men said.

“Even a coward may tell the truth,” said K’hemren. “I give you leave to access all archived sensor data from our fleets for the last half year. Examine all downloaded scan data for any traces or signs of massive vessels such as our frightened friend claims to have seen. Correlate the data, and have it on my desk by tomorrow morning. In particular, look for sudden emergences of signal or losses of signal such as we have heard described. In this case, things not seen, or half seen, may prove as revealing as things seen clearly—assuming that our poor friend here did not lie.”

“And if he did not?” the second Intelligence officer said.

“Then we have a problem,” said K’hemren. “But not so severe a problem as one we did not know about until it was too late.”

“Should this encounter have been genuine, do you anticipate that it will affect the second front of the battle?” said the first Intelligence man.

The man in the seat breathed out. “Oh, most likely not. My first guess would be that the poor cowards got a glimpse of some ship of the Lalairu, or one of the other ragtag traveling species, while they passed through the Artaleirh system. They are no threat if they’re left alone; they do not seek out wars or enter alliances. However, if the vessel as described and armed does indeed exist, and is a Federation one, it might to some extent change the thinking of the High Council. Certainly it would change the Chancellor’s.”

The two Intel officers frowned, looking scandalized. But K’hemren only laughed at them. “Death in glorious battle is one thing,” he said. “But death that throws ships away thoughtlessly, decreasing our ability to project power, that’s another. There are those who say that the Chancellor is the highest expression of the Klingon ethos. But in my experience, he values his power, and the power of the Defense Force, too highly to throw them away for merely ethical considerations.” K’hemren’s smile was supremely ironic. “Now
go—correlate that data. I expect to hear from you first thing tomorrow morning.”

In an office in Paris, another man, too, sat in a chair, looking out the window at his view of the Eiffel Tower.

It was night, and the top of the hour. The Tower was ablaze with a storm of glittering white lights—the old illuminations that had been put up late in the twentieth century for the Tower’s hundredth birthday, and had become so popular with Parisians that they refused to allow them to be taken down at the end of the centennial year. The old electrics had been replaced with pulsestrobes long ago, but the effect was much the same, and now that same white light raced down the tower like liquid lightning, outlining the graceful curves of the structure, dying away again. The lights in the room were dimmed, as usual, so that the man who watched could better enjoy the effect. But the dimness inside, and the brilliance outside, did nothing to help the President lose any sense of the anger of the man who stood behind him, waiting to regain his attention.

“He’s done exactly what some of us thought he might,” said Fleet Admiral Mehkan, the Starfleet Chief of Staff. “He’s gone native.”

“You have no proof of that,” the President said.

“We don’t need proof at this point,” said Mehkan. “He hasn’t been heard from for two days. That whole part of space is full of jamming. Romulan SIGINT and Klingon SIGINT are both up ninety percent. The war is about to break out in earnest. And
Enterprise
is still on the wrong side of the Zone. You heard Danilov’s last conversation with him! You heard what happened.”

“I heard what
seemed
to have happened,” the President said. “As did you. That Danilov got no reply doesn’t necessarily mean that
Enterprise
has gone over to the other side.”

“Sir, with all due respect, you always knew this was going
to happen,” said the Fleet Admiral. “Up to a point, that served our purpose. And now the war between the Klingons and the Romulans is breaking out, as we had hoped, while the Romulans themselves are in the throes of a revolution even as they declare war on us.”

“Dai, you can leave me out of the ‘we’ regarding that particular hope,” the President said. “And I’m not yet certain that hostilities have broken out in exactly the manner that Starfleet, or the Strat-Tac department, would have planned.” He looked at Fleet Admiral Mehkan rather acerbically. “If it had, they would’ve completely annihilated one another by now, and Kirk would have been home. But as I told you, it was never going to be that simple, and as you say, Kirk’s not back. And it would seem that neither of the two other combatant sides is entirely as eager for war as you would’ve credited. As I read it, the Klingons and the Romulans are both still jockeying for position, trying to avoid fighting with each other, while the Romulans hope to be allowed to concentrate on us, and the Klingons are looking to see which way it will best benefit them to strike. Though, as far as I can tell from the intelligence I see, the Klingons are suddenly having some second thoughts not only about us, but about the Romulans.”

Mehkan was silent for a moment.
He’s wondering,
the President thought,
for the hundredth time: Do I have access to intel that doesn’t come from Fleet?
But the President of the Federation stood there looking innocuous, and after a few moments the Fleet Admiral turned away, frowning. The President held his face quite still and said nothing further for some moments. A gift for looking innocuous had gotten him elected in the first place; since then it had turned out to be more useful than he could possibly have believed.

“I’m still afraid we’re going to have to hunt him down and bring him home,” Mehkan said at last.

“Regrettable,” the President said. What he was regretting
most emphatically was the image of
Enterprise
being resolved to her component atoms, which was—he firmly believed—what the Chiefs of Staff had in mind rather than a court-martial. “Shot while trying to escape,” was one of the things the intervention in question had often been called, once upon a time, whether escape had actually been involved or not.

“I need your sanction,” Fleet Admiral Mehkan said.

The President gave the Tower a glance, and then faced the Starfleet Chief of Staff full on. “You do
not,”
he said. “Under the uniform code, you already have the sanction you need for what you contemplate. I can quote you chapter and verse, if I must. What you
want
is the tacit approval of the office of the Commander in Chief.”

Mehkan watched him. The President absorbed his gaze stolidly, not changing expression, not moving a muscle. Finally, the Chief of Staff looked away again.

“In a perfect world…” the President said then, turning to look back at the Tower. “But never mind. The world’s not perfect, is it? What we seek, theoretically, is that there should be peace. And what we get, usually, is war. Isn’t that strange? Sometimes I think that maybe we’re just a little too willing to let our old natures assert themselves over the new one we’re trying to build. That man out there—he said, once, ‘We’re not going to fight today.’ And he was right, to the annoyance of a lot of people in Starfleet. Now he thinks he
has
to fight, and goes about doing it the best way he can—and you’re
still
annoyed at him.” The President shook his head.

“Oh, he’s a thoughtful man in his way,” said Mehkan, “and one who doesn’t obey orders blindly. Once or twice this has served our purpose, I’ll admit that. But when forces on this scale are involved, the lack of discipline ceases to be an advantage. If one portion of a team doesn’t interact predictably with the others, doesn’t react as it should in a crisis, it endangers the others as well.”

Not that I can tell you what orders besides yours he
is
obeying,
the President thought.
Or how much trouble it’s going to make for you when he really gets going.

The dim lighting in the room let the President see, reflected darkly in his window, the face of the Chief of Staff behind him—the man’s already dour Centauri expression now impassive under the shadow of a distasteful task he now felt he had to do, one for which he now realized he was to be given no backing. “You know my preferences,” the President said. “And you know the realities of this situation. Come war or come peace, any scenario that ends in the destruction of the
Enterprise,
any scenario whatever, will cause this administration in particular and the Federation in general a great deal of trouble. That ship has become a symbol for something very basic, something at the root of what we do, which is why, I would guess, some people in Fleet are so uncomfortable with it, and its command.” He allowed himself one small smile. “It’s always troublesome to try to deal with archetype when it rears its head in the middle of what passes for reality. But if we deal with it in the wrong way, the results echo for years. Be very careful what you do. And under all circumstances, break your backs to bring her back safely, because if she doesn’t come back safely, you’re the ones who’re going to have to answer for it first. And not to me. To
them.”

He looked out into the night. A last splash and spatter of light ran up the Eiffel Tower and seemed to leap into the sky along with the pure white laser that burst up and out of the Tower’s peak to mark the end of the evening’s last display. That line of fire burned upward, like an upheld lance, and then slowly faded. By the time it was dark, and the Tower with it, the President glanced up to see that Mehkan was gone.