Star Trek: The Empty Chair (19 page)

“I’m going to speak to the crew tomorrow evening,” Jim said. “Apparently there’s already some kind of gathering planned down in recreation; I’ll call them together at the end of it. We’re rapidly getting into a situation their service oaths don’t cover, and this short time we’re spending near Artaleirh is the best time to deal with the problem.”

The others around the table nodded.

And there Jim had to stop for the moment, for he was left staring at the question of how much to say, to whom, and when.
Because
your
service oaths are as much at issue.
He got up and went over to the hatch for another cup of coffee.

Sealed orders,
he thought,
are always a poisoned chalice.
If they hadn’t been sealed in the first place, you would at least have witnesses to the fact that you had been instructed to try to pull off something nearly impossible. But when no one had seen the orders but yourself and the President of the United Federation of Planets, it left you in a nasty spot. Yes, he was your Commander in Chief, but the heads of the Services still didn’t care to have him going over their heads, even in the most unusual circumstances. And if they put enough pressure on the President, and he bowed to it, then suddenly you could find yourself with a “plausible deniability” problem, and a President who “did not remember” giving you these orders, and could make a case that they were forgeries. Regrettable, of course, but what technology could devise, other technology could subvert.
And then you find
yourself staring down the big end of that court-martial Dan mentioned.

Jim let out a breath as his coffee arrived. Now he was going to have to act without any further sense of the reaction of upper-ups in Starfleet, but would still have to take those reactions into account, no matter what he did. And judging what they would be, without data, would be difficult. Even without data, though, Jim was increasingly certain that either the Federation or Starfleet—possibly both—were ambivalent about Ael, and the Romulans backing her, actually winning this war. Her certainty, her skill, and perhaps worst of all, her growing popularity, would be difficult for them to manage.
It would be less problematic for her to go down trying very hard,
said a more cynical part of his mind,
leaving a power vacuum that they could manipulate.
And bearing in mind that someone in Starfleet, or someone with access to their messaging, had purposely sent
Bloodwing
into harm’s way once already, it would be foolish to assume that they wouldn’t do so again if they could.

He picked up the coffee and carried it back to the table, sat down.
Still, any kind of war, no matter who wins, is going to mightily destabilize the Romulan Star Empire right now.
Even if the powers at the top of it were merely shaken rather than toppled, Jim thought the Federation ought to see that as a good thing—either the harbinger of change to come in the near future, or eventually.
And you’d think it would be that much for the better if the present regime fell completely out of power, and Ael became part of the new order.
Then there would be someone high up in Romulan politics who would owe the Federation a tremendous favor…and (as the Federation and the Fleet knew very well) someone who would actually pay off on such favors and neither ignore them, nor stab the Federation in the back afterward.

Yet would they see it that way?
And what about me?
Jim thought.
They ought to know I will do what duty requires of me.

But they’re balancing off the question of my loyalties, and from Danilov’s not-very-veiled warning to me, they’re worried about what I’ll do. There are probably some people up in Fleet who are quite happy for me to help Ael to succeed, but are also looking at whatever I do to supply them with an excuse to court-martial me…

“Captain—”

He looked up. The others were watching him.

“The commodore’s orders to you were quite explicit,” Spock said.

Jim was silent for a long moment, and then made up his mind. “They were,” he said. “Unfortunately…”

McCoy got up, went over to the mess door, and locked it.

Jim’s eyebrows went up.

“You’re going to tell us that you’re running under covert orders again,” McCoy said, sitting down. “To which the only possible answer is, so what?”

“Aye,” Scotty said.

Jim looked over at Spock. Spock raised one eyebrow. “The doctor’s methods of deduction often defy any logical analysis,” he said, “but they do occasionally work.”

“‘Occasionally’? Why, you—”

“Bones,” Jim said, rather sadly, “does it show that much?”

“To the crew at large? I doubt it. But this is part of my job. And those two—” He looked at Spock and Scotty. “—they just know you. You should lay off so much caffeine, by the way.”

Jim could do nothing but laugh helplessly. “Well, I suppose this little chat is a good thing, because it saves you having to relieve me of command because you think I’ve gone nuts.”

“I still may do that,” McCoy said, “if the need arises. But it won’t have anything to do with your sealed orders.”

Jim sighed. “I guess I should be grateful. Bones, though a ship’s commander may be exempt from Starfleet’s wrath when the details come out, the crew may still possibly, and rightly, become insubordinate at some of the things I may order them to do. That’s where the legal implications get sticky. Theoretically, if we all come out of this with our skins intact, Fleet will forgive all. But if they decide not to, if someone in a high place has a lapse of memory, it could get very bad for the crew. Those of them, that is, who aren’t already dead of some other trouble we’re about to get into. Augo, or later.”

“And so you’ve paused as long as you could over the choice you now have to make,” McCoy said, “but now you can’t pause any longer.”

Spock looked from McCoy to Jim. “And we are, I surmise, about to ignore your orders from the commodore, and to go on to assist in the overthrow of, if not the whole Rihannsu government, at least the main personalities presently determining its policy.”

Jim looked from Spock to McCoy. “Yes,” he said. “I feel that that’s the best way to fulfill both the letter and the intent of the sealed orders. While I can’t say much—”

“I don’t think you need to,” McCoy said. “Sunseed and the forced-telepathy project were an indicator of some pretty advanced science being done in Romulan space these days. What we’ve just seen at Artaleirh is more of the same, though the source may be slightly different. Don’t think I haven’t heard you babbling about
Tyrava
and its wonderful new warp technology,” he said, glancing at Scotty. “Taking everything together, I strongly suspect that the whole purpose of this exercise—besides the liberalization of the Romulan regime, which of course would be seen as ‘nice’—” McCoy snorted. “—is another smash-and-grab raid of the kind we’re all too familiar with, the kind that got us tangled up with Ael’s niece in the first place. Find new technology,
bring it home. So that even if the present rebellion is quashed, and Ael fails, and even if—worst case—the Federation is forced into a premature peace after this war stalemates, we’ll still have enough technological ‘booty’ at the end of the day to make it all worthwhile. And to see to it that some kind of technological parity is maintained between our two forces, so that the Romulans won’t be tempted to push into the tactical vacuum that would accompany a ceasefire without attestable victory for one side or the other.” He leaned back, stretched a little. “And if the Klingons catch a little punishment during the proceedings, well, so much the better. In any case, the technological advantages to be obtained from our little
razzia
will work just as well against them. We get a maximum result with minimum logistical outlay.”

Spock blinked. “Doctor, you have been reading the classical strategists.”

McCoy shook his head. “No, just the
Analects.
It’s all in K’un-fu-tse.”

“I would have thought it was Sun Tzu,” Jim said.

McCoy shook his head. “Overrated. Man only had one book in him. In the course of which he repeats himself about fifty times. Jim, we’re going Viking, in a very selective way, and we can’t tell anybody. Not even Ael. Isn’t that so?”

That was one aspect of all this which had been rubbing part of Jim’s conscience raw. “That’s most of it.”

“It would be safe, I believe, to conjecture that there are aspects of your orders that you are not permitted to divulge even to us,” Spock said.

Jim said nothing, just looked at him.

McCoy folded his arms. “Jim, we’ve all been in some pretty awful crunches between duty and necessity, over time, but by and large we’ve managed all right so far. Obviously the mission, and the ship, and the people who make both mission and ship work, come first for all of us. That helps.
But in case you were worrying, I think we can count on you not to take us anywhere we won’t be able to support you in going, knowing what we know. And I think you can count on us not to let you down when it gets tight, though we may have to give you a hard time occasionally, if only to keep up appearances.”

“For once, unusual as it may seem,” Spock said, “the doctor speaks for me.” The two of them exchanged a glance that was quite devoid of the usual edge.

Jim breathed out. “Gentlemen, that is all I could possibly ask. And when we finally get out of this mess…”

“I am going to prescribe us all a rest. I know this little place on Vesta,” McCoy said, “where the girls…well,
theoretically
they’re girls…well, all right, if you take into consideration a little monkeying around with the thirteenth chromosomal pair, they’re probably more like—”

Spock was gazing at the ceiling as if profoundly interested by it. “Doctor,” he said, turning his attention to McCoy again, “what recreation would you recommend for someone less enthusiastic about indulging in relationships with the genetically enhanced?”

McCoy gave him a look. “Chess.”

Jim chuckled and got up. “I need to get busy. Bones, when I’m finished with this next piece of work, I’ll come down and see Gurrhim.”

“I told you, there’s no rush. Right now I prefer to let him sleep—which is, incidentally, a condition I recommend to
you.
Otherwise I’ll come and administer you some sleep whether you like it or not.”

“Noted and logged, Bones.”

Jim went out.

The flitter brought Arrhae to tr’Anierh’s great house as it had before, but this time she had no appetite for the food and drink laid out in the little cupboard in the passenger section. Her stomach was tying itself into knots, and even though she kept telling herself it was ridiculous to feel so, that there was no way she could have been betrayed so quickly, she couldn’t believe it.

She sat there with her hands folded in her lap for those fifteen minutes, every one of which seemed to crawl over Arrhae’s skin with excruciating slowness while she excoriated herself for being so foolish as to have used the public posts to send her message.
Well, what else could I have done?
she thought.
Any other kind of transmission would have been immediately traceable to me.
But at the same time Arrhae knew quite well that, in troubled times, the Intel people sampled the posts randomly, looking for just the kind of message she had sent: something without a return address on it, something that tried to pass itself as a message of no importance, trying to lose itself in the mass of normal postings. Now Arrhae saw what she’d done as utter folly. And she had done evil as well in asking poor Mahan to post the message for her. Now
he
would share whatever punishment came down on her. The whole household would. All the servants, and even her old master, would be hauled in and questioned, possibly tortured, for evidence that they had been complicit in her crimes....

The flitter grounded. Arrhae swallowed, trying to get some control over herself.
It’s ridiculous,
she thought then, trying to steady herself.
If your contacts, whoever they are, had been caught already, do you think it’s to the Praetor’s house they’d have brought you?
For the door had opened, and there was the walk up to the broad porticoed frontage, just as before, and no unusual guard-presence to be seen—not even the honor guard that had greeted her the last time.
That could be a bad sign too,
she thought, as the pilot handed her down. Yet at the same time, conditions might have changed. Possibly this visit was meant to be less public, less noticed, than the last one.

She walked up the paved path behind the pilot with her head up, greeted the door-opener of tr’Anierh’s house with a small polite nod, and followed him as he led her once more across the huge Great Hall to the side room where tr’Anierh’s office was. The door-opener touched a control, so that the office door swung open for Arrhae. He bowed her in.

Arrhae crossed the threshold, smiling, ready to greet tr’Anierh—and then froze. He sat behind his desk, and was rising to meet her. But two other chairs were set on either side of his side of the desk; and in them sat Urellh tr’Maehllie and Ahrm’n tr’Kiell, the other Two of the Three.

Arrhae couldn’t help but swallow once in sudden dread. Thinking that tr’Anierh was kindly disposed to her merely because he had treated her kindly was a great danger, and the sudden presence of these others reminded her of that all over again. And now here she was alone and defenseless in a room with the three most powerful men in the Empire. Fleets moved at a whisper from them; an annoyed look from one of these men had caused people to vanish without a trace and never be seen again. Any one of them by himself could potentially be deadly if you spoke the wrong word, and even under normal circumstances, it would take all your concentration to make sure that you did not. To be
caught in the midst of all three of them at once would be like being trapped in a quaking bog. Too many directions in which you could misstep and be lost, too many things that one of them might take well, but one or both the others might take ill.

“Don’t freeze there like a bird under a
thrai’
s eye, young Senator,” said tr’Kiell. “Sit down. We have some questions for you.”