Star Trek: The Empty Chair (22 page)

And he truly felt that the President had the right of it on this issue. The Romulan Star Empire could not be allowed to collapse as a result of the civil war to come. The balance of power between the Klingons and the Federation would be too seriously deranged, and all hell would break loose.
So,
Jim thought.
“Into the valley of death,” but for a good cause.

Jim wandered back over to the padd, touched its controls, and scrolled through the pages again. It all looked so neat and tidy here. Little bright lines and symbols, arrows and boxes, and all the pages of description. These ten thousand people here, those five thousand there…
It’s all just fiction now,
he thought.
Bloodless and neat. But it won’t stay that way. It’ll start becoming real very soon now. Too soon.

He paused at that one page in the middle.
Except for this,
he thought.
Everything turns on this, and no matter what the Rihannsu say, it’s got to happen. Better do now what I’ve been putting off. It won’t wait any longer.

Jim sat down again, made sure the document was properly
archived, and cleared the padd, then brought up the private commlink address he had been told to use only once. At first he was about to send the message by voice, but then he reached for a stylus and wrote:

You said I had one favor coming. I’m calling it in.

Here is what I need…

Late the next morning, after sending his message and getting some sleep (though probably not nearly as much as McCoy would have wanted him to), Jim went down to the mess again, found it empty this time, and had some breakfast, then headed up to the bridge.

Spock was in the center seat, looking with a speculative expression at a front-screen view of
Tyrava.
As Jim came in, he rose and handed him a padd. “Captain, the post-battle assessments are in from all departments now. We sustained very minimal structural damage; repairs are already being made. Mr. Scott tells me that ETA for the completion of repairs is about six hours from now.”

“Very good, Mr. Spock,” Jim said, looking down the list on the padd and handing it back to him. “Anything else that needs my attention?”

“Nothing here, Captain. Though I believe that Mr. Scott wishes to see you as well, to discuss something he and K’s’t’lk have been working on.”

“Fine,” Jim said. “I’ll go down there after I hit sickbay and find out if McCoy will let me see his star patient. He’s being as protective of the Praetor as a hen with one chick.” He looked out at
Tyrava
and shook his head. “I really should see if I can wangle Scotty an invitation over there, though. Any thoughts on the warp technology as yet?”

“Some conjectures,” Spock said, “based on some early
remote readings. But my preference is for firsthand observations, as you know, and Mr. Scott’s is probably for blueprints, or the original engineering drawings. I fear right now we have time to procure neither, even if the commanders of
Tyrava
would let us have them.”

“Yes,” Jim said. “Even after Artaleirh, it’s going to take them a little while to trust us. But they’d better hurry up. If they’re still not sure of us by the time we get to ch’Rihan…”

Spock nodded. “There is always that possibility. And if other aspects of our mission are to be successful as well, that would seem to be a necessity.”

“Yes,” Jim said.

He headed for the turbolift, glancing over at the comms station, where Uhura was running a diagnostic. “Commander Uhura,” he said, “have we heard anything from
Bloodwing
this morning?”

“Not as yet, Captain,” Uhura said. “I’ll hail them if you like.”

“No need,” Jim said. “They’re probably just as busy with after-battle cleanup as we’ve been. If they haven’t checked in by a few hours from now, call them and ask Ael if she has time to meet me before the crew get-together tonight.”

“Yes, sir.”

Jim nodded and got into the lift. “Sickbay,” he said, and it whooshed off. Now that he had his suggestions for the battle of Augo down in “hard” form, all the other concerns of the last couple of days had come pressing in on him—especially Arrhae’s warning about whatever was closing in on the solar system to threaten the Earth.
I’d give a lot for more data,
Jim thought.
But I have a feeling that Scotty’s and Spock’s conjectures are on the money. The Romulans have Sunseed, they know it works, they know that under certain circumstances it can be made deadly at a planetary level. I could spend hours trying to figure out what else they might have up their
sleeves, but why bother? If I were them, I’d use what I had.

Unless of course they
expect
us to think that way.

Jim sighed. There was no point in trying so hard to anticipate your enemy’s complex and twisty strategies that you tied your own brain into knots and distracted yourself from the obvious, leaving your enemy with leisure to come up behind you and do something straightforward like bash you over the head with a club.

The lift stopped, and Jim got out and went down the corridor to sickbay. As its doors opened he was greeted by the sound of someone laughing and then suddenly stopping with a kind of wheeze of pain, and then laughing and stopping again. “You should cut that out, Praetor,” he heard McCoy saying, though there was something strange about his voice. Then Jim realized that he was hearing the doctor through his implanted universal translator chip, and that McCoy was speaking Rihannsu. “The sutures are robust, but you’ll pop them if you keep it up.”

“If you will tell me such jokes, in such an accent,” came the reply, “the fault is yours, not mine!”

“Now what’s wrong with my accent?” McCoy said, as Jim came into the diagnostic bay. The doctor was looking up at the readouts, and on a mobile bed below them lay Gurrhim tr’Siedhri, propped up about halfway and clutching his abdomen. For a man who had so nearly expired only the day before, he looked in surprisingly good shape. He was still rather pale for a Romulan who had been more on the swarthy side normally, but his eye was bright as he saw Jim come in, and if Gurrhim wasn’t moving easily, he was at least moving.

“Praetor,” Jim said. “How are you feeling today?”

Gurrhim gave him a wry look. “I am Praetor of nowhere and nothing now, Captain, so you had best omit the title. But otherwise, I feel far better than I did when they shot me. I may now say that being shot is greatly overrated, and an experience
I could safely have forgone.” He shifted a little on the bed, and winced. “But then, for the moment, so was death, for which I owe the doctor here a debt.”

Jim leaned on the bed opposite and looked up at the readings. He was no expert, but they looked fairly steady. “All part of our basic service package,” McCoy was saying idly, as he studied the readings himself. “But you won’t be needing my attentions for that much longer, Gurrhim. I want to patch in a second layer of autoplast venal grafts tomorrow, but I can do that while you’re conscious, and you can watch and critique my style.”

Gurrhim shook his head in wry wonder. “You do a thing as routine with which our people seem to have great difficulty. I wish we could establish some kind of medical exchange program.”

“I wouldn’t mind that at all,” McCoy said, “assuming our respective governments can get the details sorted out. But that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

“You may be right,” Gurrhim said, looking over at Kirk. “Captain, I must thank you first for giving me refuge. You would not have been blamed to have refused delivery on so abruptly delivered a package.”

“Well,” Jim said, “that kind of behavior wouldn’t normally be our way. And anyway, the package came with unusual, shall we say, wrappings.”

Gurrhim got a sly look. “That surprises me most, that the little trinket I gave to another has now come into your hands. You will keep it safe, I hope.”

“My chief engineer has it now,” Jim said, “and from what he’s said to me about it so far, I think it couldn’t be in better hands. When everything calms down again, we’ll return it to you. I take it that the doctor has filled you in on the circumstances under which you arrived.”

“I am glad he did,” Gurrhim said, “for I remember little of it. One moment I was reading in my quarters. After that—”
He raised his hands to shrug, and then winced again. “—very little.”

“Standard partial global amnesia,” McCoy said. “Disruptor shock has a hydrostatic-shock element as well. The abrupt increase in intracranial pressure alone knocks most people out as soon as the beam-field hits. And you can’t remember after the fact what you weren’t conscious enough to have a memory of in the first place. I’d say it’s a recollection you wouldn’t much miss.”

“There are flickers of other memory, just disjointed scenes, from later on,” Gurrhim said. “I hurt most abominably. I fear I used bad language, and that to the young men who saved me.”

“One of them, by Rihannsu reckoning, is now where he understands what you were going through even better than you do,” McCoy said, “and the other’s long since forgiven you.” He looked over at Jim. “Young tr’AAnikh’s asleep now. He was worrying himself into a decline, so I took it on myself to slip him a mickey.”

Gurrhim tilted his head to one side as if listening to something. “You gave him a rodent?”

Jim smiled.

“I stuck an intradermal translator in the Praetor this morning,” McCoy said. “Sorry, Gurrhim, I just can’t stop calling you that. But, Jim, we’ve got to get the translator system’s damn idiom-handler looked at again. Every time we think we have it pretty much running right, something new pops up.”

“I’ll speak to Uhura,” Jim said. “She mentioned it to me herself, but she’s got a lot to do right now. Gurrhim, you’re our guest for the time being, and until our situation clarifies itself after our next stop—”

“Augo?” Gurrhim said.

Jim stared at him.

“It would seem the logical next step,” Gurrhim said,
“judging only by what the doctor has told me, that we are at Artaleirh, where we have won a battle with a small but significant segment of Grand Fleet. But even after Augo, Captain, my personal resources are limited enough by circumstance that it would not benefit me to try to go home. Not just yet.”

“They’d just try to kill you again,” McCoy said, “and this time, they’d probably manage it.”

“Even if ‘they’ did not desire to simply kill me,” Gurrhim said, “whoever ‘they’ were—I would guess that one or more of the Three are somewhere behind the attempt—then there would also be the possibility of being arrested and tried for treason.”

“Which treason in particular?” Jim said.

“Well, escaping from my assassination,” Gurrhim said, and smiled slightly. “To a Federation vessel, yet. And by now ‘they’ would have had time to assemble plenty of evidence of whatever treachery it was that impelled them to try to assassinate me. Probably I will already have been arraigned for such in my absence on ch’Rihan. The end of such a proceeding would be for the government to seize my assets and properties on ch’Havran and elsewhere, and take control of my various corporations. But then, on the other hand, if the government assumed that I was dead…” He trailed off, thinking, and a dry, amused look started to spread across his face.

“Is this preferable?” Jim said.

Gurrhim shook his head. “Well, were I alive and attainted a traitor, and my name written and burned, then the government would simply seize all my properties and funds. I estimate that such an outcome would harm the revolution that is to come, which I know in advance my family will support. We have spoken of it often enough in private. But if I am dead, then control of my chattels passes to my children. And my son and daughters, while naturally having to seem to acquiesce
with the Imperium’s demands as to what needed to be done with them afterward, would have their own opinions about how to handle such demands. We feel strongly about our holdings; they were hard-won, in the face of much interference from that same government. In particular, even if the Empire might eventually become frustrated with my children’s noncooperation and seize one or another industry from us, they would hardly know how to
run
it right off, and during that transitional time, many things might go missing, or otherwise astray.” He raised his eyebrows, an innocent look. “Funds. Physical plant.”

“Might be smarter, then,” McCoy said, “if you stayed dead, for a while, for tax purposes.”

Gurrhim stared at McCoy, then guffawed, and then stopped and groaned and clutched at his gut. McCoy raised his eyebrows, reached behind him, and handed Gurrhim a pillow. Wincing, Gurrhim hugged it to his abdomen, and then, properly splinted, began to laugh again, more circumspectly. “True it is,” he said, gasping slightly, “that medicine is the cruelest art. But you cut to the heart of the matter, Doctor, as might be expected.” Now it was McCoy’s turn to groan. “Let me, then, remain dead, by all means. For the time being, at least.”

“Your family…” Jim said.

Gurrhim’s face went grim. “I dislike bringing such suffering on them,” he said. “But I must balance that against what joy they will feel, once all this is over, to find that I live after all. And if accident so falls out that, after Augo or whatever follows it, I die at last, well, then no more harm is done. They are most unlikely to learn that I died twice.”

Jim thought about it for a moment, glanced at McCoy. McCoy nodded. “All right,” Jim said.

He went over to McCoy’s desk and hit the comms button on his desk monitor. “Bridge. Commander Uhura.”

She looked at him from the screen.
“Uhura here.”

“Commander,” Jim said, “send a message in the clear to
Bloodwing,
to Ael’s attention. Regret to inform you, and so on and so forth, that the Praetor Gurrhim tr’Siedhri has unfortunately died of his injuries.”

“He has?”
But then, as she studied Jim’s expression, a very small smile appeared on Uhura’s face.
“I mean, of course he has, Captain.”
And the smile vanished again.
“Such a shame.”

“No incoming communications from
any
source are to be directed to the Praetor without clearing them through me first,” Jim said. “Nor is he at any time to be referred to as if he’s still breathing. Meanwhile, pass this to security and flag it for Mr. Spock’s attention: sickbay is to be off limits to all
Bloodwing
personnel but Ael until further notice.”