Star Trek: The Empty Chair (17 page)

Arrhae breathed, and breathed, and breathed once more until the terror faded, though it did not pass.

If I am going to die today,
Arrhae thought,
I will do it with my composure about me.
And there were other things about her as well that would be useful at the last need. Starfleet had not left her without last defenses, though it seemed like years since she’d even thought about the issue.

Arrhae thought about it now, as she got up to see to her cosmetics and scent before going out to get into the dark craft that would take her into the jaws of the Praetorate.

At a great distance from ch’Rihan, aboard
Enterprise,
James Kirk sat alone in the officers’ mess. In front of him sat the empty plate that had contained his third chicken sandwich. The first two had vanished as quickly as if tribbles had been at them; but the third one had taken a little longer, and the edge was off his hunger now.
There’s nothing like being shot at,
he thought,
to sharpen your appetite. At least, after the shooting stops.

He got up and got himself a second cup of coffee, and put much more milk and sugar in it than usual, and sat down, stirring it.

Admiral,
he thought.

It was a word he had used with varying degrees of respect, or disrespect, over his career, when thinking or speaking of other people. Some admirals were very good. Some of them were, frankly, inept. Too often the admiralty was something into which ineffective captains were kicked so that they could do less harm. And even the best admirals didn’t usually command a ship proper; normally they “rode” ships that carried them around while they directed what was going on outside them. It was a curious kind of command, in which one’s “flag” or personal influence counted for more than the ship in which it rode. For a man as used to a very personal relationship with his vessel as Jim was, the whole
concept seemed peculiarly abstract and thin-blooded, and not particularly desirable.

Yet when that dubious honor had finally descended on Jim, he had accepted it—and the acceptance had been founded in a straightforward awareness that to refuse such an increase in rating could constitute career suicide, even for such a relatively successful commander as he. Jim had of course taken the exams associated with the change in status—one did not ascend into the ranks of the admiralty without proving a grasp of the theoretical aspects of the job as well as a talent in the field that suggested the potential for it. And as he’d expected, at the exam level he’d done quite well.

But then Jim had fallen foul of that least predictable of factors: current events.
Or more precisely, a lack of them,
he thought. He had come to understand why the favorite toast of sailors in wet-navy times had been to “a sudden plague or a bloody war,” since both were seen as the surest route to promotion via the death of your immediate superiors.
Real
admirals, in Jim’s opinion—and just about everybody else’s, he suspected, though at Starfleet no one said so out loud—commanded fleets. But there were only so many fleets to go around, especially in times of relative peace. And as luck or the lack of it would have it, Jim’s promotion coincided with one of those somewhat quiet times when the usual old troubles are simmering away, but not actually breaking into a boil. With conflict at something of a minimum, there was what—from any other angle—would have been considered a blessed lack of attrition among Starfleet ships and crews. At the same time, none of the older admirals showed any signs of retiring, and no younger ones, newly come into fleet assignments, got any sudden urge for planetside duty. As a result, the command of which James T. Kirk took charge on the day he put on his admiral’s insignia was a large and shiny new desk.

And there he stayed for entirely too long, in his own opinion—until V’Ger came along and changed everything—at a time when he should have been out in the galaxy doing his first real admiralty work.

But now,
Jim thought,
that gets to change. The situation doesn’t
look
anything like I ever thought it would, but that’s beside the point.

For Artaleirh, there had been no time to devise anything but very general plans that would suit the available personalities and materiel. But for Augo, something far more complex was going to be necessary, or Ael and her people would be courting disaster. Now Jim would get to act a wartime Fleet Admiral’s part, designing and directing the progress of a significant part of a campaign.
Just in an entirely different Fleet than the one that commissioned me,
he thought, and smiled a smile that was fairly grim.
Even if we win, I’ll be lucky if I don’t get keelhauled. Or the yardarm.

But that was a problem for the future. At the moment, a great deal rested on his seeing further than most, so Jim was going to have to find the tallest giants he could, and climb on their shoulders in a hurry. He would have to sit down over the next couple of days and whip his initial thoughts on the upcoming campaign into some kind of order, some shape that would stand being closely examined and picked at, not just passed as an exam essay, with a commendation on the clarity of his writing style. And even then, even assuming Jim could design something that would work, the enactment of the plan would be no classroom exercise, nothing that could be played out in the simulator, to victory or destruction, and then walked away from afterward. Real blood, red and green, would be shed, and Jim would need to consider every drop as precious as his own; for the game wasn’t just to win, but to do it with the least possible mortality and destruction.
This isn’t just some “give ’em hell” proposition. You’re fighting
alongside
the antagonist side. This is more like breaking an occupation than anything else.

He had a long drink of the coffee, and put it down again, making a face: too much sugar. The door slid open, and Spock, McCoy, and Ael came in together.

“Thought we’d find you here,” McCoy said. He looked at Jim’s empty plate as he went to the food processor hatch. “Second one? Third?”

“Third,” Jim said.

“Stop there,” McCoy said. “Commander? What’s your pleasure?”

Ael threw a glance at Spock. “I suspect you have plomeek soup, or an analogue?”

“We do,” McCoy said. “Large or small?”

“Large, if you would.”

“It is underspiced,” Spock said. “However, I will have one as well, Doctor.”

“Two it is,” McCoy said. “But, Spock, you’ve never mentioned anything about the seasoning before.”

“I would not have considered adjustments to the cuisine to be part of your job description, Doctor,” Spock said. “I have occasionally attempted to discuss the matter with Mr. Scott, but the discussion inevitably degenerates into something to do with haggis.”

Jim grinned. “That happens entirely too often whether you’re discussing food or not,” he said, as they all sat down and McCoy brought the dishes over from the hatch. “Probably it’s wisest not to provoke the response on purpose.” He sipped at his coffee again, threw an amused look at Ael; seeing her had reminded him of something Uhura reported having heard on the local planetary comms networks. “So, Commander,” he said, “how does it feel to be the Savior of Artaleirh?”

“Please, do not,” Ael said softly, spooning up some soup. She tasted it, and made an approving face. “In your world as
in mine, salvation often has unsavory aftereffects on the one seen to have done the saving, for only the powerless need to be saved, and routinely they hate to be reminded of it.”

Jim smiled, though only a little; she had a point.

“And being too successful is likely to produce trouble as well,” McCoy said. “I doubt the Praetorate is best pleased with you at the moment.”

Ael had a little more soup, then nodded. “Both they and Grand Fleet will be in turmoil. Recriminations will be flying, for under no circumstances would they ever have expected our cause to come so far, with such success. The next blow they deal us will be intended to be infallibly mortal, for we’ve done far worse than merely inflict a defeat upon the government and the Fleet. We have made them look ineffective, perhaps even foolish, and there could be no deadlier affront to their egos, or threat to their power.”

Jim nodded. “That’s what I’ve been thinking too. We might have been the hammer this time out, but next time we’d better be ready to be the anvil.”

There was quiet for a time as everyone ate. Jim sat back, drinking his coffee, and gazing out into space. The ship was presently orbiting Artaleirh, and through it, the few cities on the nightside could be seen rotating lazily away toward the planet’s limb—demure little spatters of light, with no sign about them of the sudden blue glow that had saved them from destruction.

“Jim,” said McCoy, as he finished the small Caesar salad he’d chosen for himself, “you already look like you’ve lost a credit and found a cent. You should try to let your successes stay with you a little longer before you declare them worthless and chuck them out.”

Ael looked up at that, glancing over at Jim to see how he would take this. Jim could only shake his head. “Bones, this was just one victory, and in the scope of the campaign to come, a relatively minor one. While we’ve done well to reduce
the Empire’s available forces by as much as we have, they won’t make any of these mistakes again. The next engagement will be massive, involving an investment of really serious force—tens or even hundreds of vessels. To counter that, we’re going to need more than a scattering of cruisers, a Really Big Ship, and a swarm of little ones. We need a conventional fleet—”

“Well, didn’t Veilt say that they were going to send in another really big ship like
Tyrava?
That would have to make a difference. That thing went through those cruisers’ screens like a hot knife.”

“It did, Doctor,” Spock said, “but bear in mind the other purpose of such vessels. They must be preserved to take their people away to new worlds, if the body governing the old worlds cannot be liberalized or overturned. The Free Rihannsu have done much to reveal the presence of even one of these ships to the Imperium. They will not readily reveal the existence of too many more of them. They have been built at too high a cost, and the hopes of whole peoples ride on them. Unless all other hopes vanish, and there is no choice, risking the great ships would be folly.”

Ael nodded.

“But even
Tyrava
and its companion ship,” Jim said, “can make one big difference, without firing a shot. They can deliver ground forces.”

McCoy looked at him with a slightly perplexed expression. “Just use them as troop carriers, you mean? I don’t get it. If our side has a bunch of ships armed and defended like
Tyrava,
then once the Eisn system’s safe for them, why not just put them all in orbit around ch’Rihan and blow up everything on the planet that doesn’t surrender?”

Jim shook his head and had to smile gently.

“Leaving aside the tremendous undesirability of war itself,” Spock said, “barrage from space except in the ‘surgical’ sense is an error of scale—a massive waste of energy.
Whatever we have seen on the small scale in the past, attempts to permanently reduce or subdue a planetary population by attacks from space are inevitably doomed to failure.”

That made McCoy sit back in his chair.

“Bones,” Jim said, “when you’ve got a patient with a viral infection, do you flood his whole system with an antiseptic?”

McCoy gave him a look that was both bemused and barbed. “Hardly. Besides making the client sicker than he was, it wouldn’t do a thing to viral entities hiding inside cells. The preferred tactic these days is to teach the patient’s own immune system to get smarter about destroying the infection. Tailor the phagocytes’ antigenic response to the bug in question, equip them with tailored RNA-cutting seek-and-destroy modules, autoclone an ‘exploded population’ of them, and then turn ’em loose to attack the viruses
in situ.”

“Exactly,” Jim said. “You’ve just described the only effective kind of planetary invasion. It has to be appropriate to the medium in which or over which it’s conducted. We can improve space-based technology until all the galaxy’s cows come home, but when all the ruckus in the sky dies down, the surface of a planet can
still
only be taken, held, and secured by ground troops. Naturally you do need to achieve local-space and atmospheric superiority first. But after that, everything comes down to people holding small arms—or not-so-small arms—as the situation requires.” Jim shook his head, smiling rather grimly. “Believe me, there’ve been a lot of attempts to get around this problem over the last few centuries. Mostly they’ve resulted in the participants having to have a war two or three times instead of once. Leaving aside the question of our limited resources and relatively constricted timeframe, if we have to have a war, I’d rather have it just once and get it over with.”

He stretched, leaned back in his chair. “But Spock’s point,
as usual, is the most important one. The whole idea of this attack is not to destroy the infrastructure of ch’Rihan and ch’Havran, but to destroy the power of the present government to rule.”

He looked over at Ael, who was still working on her soup. Despite her present position of potential power, she continued to look uncomfortable when he discussed this very basic goal, which somehow, for the moment at least, made Jim more comfortable, rather than less. People who wanted too much to be running things were all too often, in Jim’s opinion, the wrong people for the job. The reluctant ones could often surpass everyone’s wildest hopes.

“Anyway,” Jim said, “we now have at least a partial answer to the troop-movement problem, in
Tyrava.”

“Yes,” Ael said. She finished her soup, placed the spoon alongside the bowl on its tray, and pushed the tray away, leaning back in her chair and gazing out into the night.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Jim said, “but all the data I’ve been able to find in the Starfleet general-intelligence databases suggests that the Imperium has very few vessels specifically constructed for troop transport.”