Star Trek: The Empty Chair (23 page)

“Yes, Captain,”
Uhura said, though looking somewhat bemused. She made a note on her padd.
“Shall I have guards posted?”

Jim threw a glance at McCoy. McCoy shrugged. “I was going to move him out of the IC area this afternoon anyway, and into one of the private rooms. But then again, we’re having a gathering tonight, aren’t we?”

Jim nodded. “Hold off on the guards until guests start boarding the ship this evening,” he said to Uhura. “Then post them only inside sickbay. And they’re not to be obviously identifiable as security.” He glanced at McCoy again.

McCoy raised his eyebrows. “I can always use some ‘extra staff’ to haul things around. We can put them in medical uniforms for the time being.”

Jim glanced at Uhura.
“I’ll take care of it, Captain,”
she said, turning to her station to begin instructing the computer accordingly. The screen went blank.

Jim nodded and turned away. Ael’s comment, some time back, about being none too certain about all of her crew—not even now—was on his mind.
Though I wonder exactly where her suspicions lie.

“You’ll want to leak some ‘evidence’ to support the claim,” McCoy said thoughtfully. “I can do you some images of what Gurrhim looked like when he came in, and process them a little, but not so most people would notice.” He grinned. “We can even do his autopsy.”

“I will be glad to help you,” Gurrhim said.

“You will
not,”
McCoy said. “You may have a rubber brain inside a cast-iron skull, Praetor, but even your people aren’t immune to psychological damage from this kind of image. You just lie there and I’ll find you some other kind of entertainment. Something to read, perhaps.”

“I cannot think when I would have last had time to simply enjoy some reading,” Gurrhim said, his face suddenly acquiring a nearly angelic look of delight that sorted oddly with the lines of calculation and deviousness in that face. “Perhaps there is something to be said for being shot after all.”

“Praetor,” Jim said. “Yes, I know, don’t say it, I don’t care. I have a feeling that if things go well, you’ll be entitled to the title once again someday. I just want to ask you one thing before I go, though I do want to talk to you more about this some other time, when you’re feeling better. Right now I have little other opinion to go on. Ael’s I’ve heard plenty of. I’ve heard some of Veilt’s, and I hope to hear some more. But your opinion would interest me. Not as a Senator or Praetor, but as a Rihannsu citizen. When this revolution starts, are people going to support it?”

The blissful look faded somewhat. “Captain,” Gurrhim said, “were I so talented a prophet as you seem to think me, I would be many times richer than I am, by mere gambling, rather than having had to work so hard for so long. This matter is complex. Our people are oppressed, overtaxed, overgoverned by a structure that once was far looser and more forgiving, but has been tightening on them little by little, like a noose. That fact, hardly any of them would deny. But the
oppression has been
our
oppression, if you follow me. It is native. Some there are who will see your involvement and instantly assume that what seems a revolution from within is actually being controlled from without, by our old enemies. Or those whom we have been taught are our enemies—for it’s been a century and more since the Empire and the Federation have been involved in anything more but the merest border skirmishes—an old war gone cold, but ‘warmed up’ at intervals when the government needs it for something, such as tightening that noose a little further.”

Gurrhim frowned. “The Klingons are another story. We have warred with them more or less constantly over the last three decades, and many people see the Empire as it’s presently constituted as being the only realistic defense against being overrun by the larger Empire next door. If the government was wise, it would invoke that fear as a reason against the revolution to come. But is it wise enough to do that? There lies a danger for you, if it does. And there is always an additional unpredictable factor in such a situation: the Fleet. Finally, the armed forces are the ones who will decide what happens to any revolution. The government itself has no guns; it depends on Grand Fleet and the ground security forces to do its bidding. Once upon a time it held them bound to it by
mnhei’sahe,
the desire to keep the given word to something that was worth serving. Now those bonds are weaker, or are constructed of money or power or fear, rather than virtue. Will they hold under stress?” Gurrhim started to “shrug” with his hands again, then thought better of it and dropped them.

“So,” Jim said, “you genuinely don’t know.”

“I think perception will matter a great deal,” Gurrhim said. “I think the actual conduct of the war will matter a great deal. It must do no more harm to Rihannsu people and Rihannsu property than it absolutely must. It must leave Rihannsu sovereignty intact. And it must not take too long, lest
it start to recall memories of all those years of border skirmishes, and become a ‘normal thing.’ If that happens, we are all doomed: the Rihannsu and the Federation together, and maybe even the Klingons.”

Jim nodded slowly.

“But beyond that,” Gurrhim said, “there is a chance. If you take the opportunities offered you, and if your ally with the Sword does not back away.”

That remark surprised Jim. “The favorite Rihannsu tactic,” Gurrhim said, “is to hit and run. But comes a time when you cannot run, when you must stand. The Commander-General has had little practice at that. To do her justice, because of what the Fleet did to her, on the orders of their political masters, she has had little opportunity. Now, though, she must exercise that virtue. I hope she has it to use.”

Kirk nodded again. “Jim,” McCoy said, glancing up at the vital signs monitors, “you go on now. I want this man to get some rest.”

“Right,” Jim said. “Gurrhim—thank you.”

The Praetor nodded and put his head wearily back down on the pillow.

Jim left sickbay and headed for engineering, deep in thought. When he arrived the place was in its usual state of seeming busy even though nothing in particular was going on, with crew hastening in all directions. Scotty liked to see his people on the hop, and Jim knew that the engineers humored him in this regard. They also seemed to get a lot of work done in this mode, so everybody was happy.

He paused just inside the doors to look around, and caught the sound he had been listening for: the Scots burr mingled with a sound like a sporadically shaken wind chime. Jim followed the sounds into the center of engineering, where, over by one of the larger control panels, a design table had been set up. There the chief engineer and what appeared
to be a giant twelve-legged glass spider were examining the holographic projection, rotating gently in the air, of a star’s limb and corona, with a superimposed spectrogram—a long rainbow band with dark lines through it here and there.

“It’s a bonny setup,” Scotty was saying to K’s’t’lk. “Just look at those iron lines. You could use them for crowbars.”

Jim raised his eyebrows as he came up behind the two of them, looking up at the spectrogram. “I take it this is a good thing?”

“Oh, good morning, Captain,” Scotty said. “Aye, it is.”

“What are we looking at?”

“This is 553 Trianguli,” K’s’t’lk said. “It’s a star we’ll be passing on our way to Augo. Well, not precisely passing, but we’d like to make a stop there.”

“What for?”

“Remember the little problem you tossed me last night?” Scotty said.

“Oh, Scotty!” Jim said. “You’ve found a lake to walk on
already?”

Scott’s smile had that slightly self-satisfied tinge that had often made Jim feel happier than any number of citations from technical journals.

“In a manner of speaking,” Scotty said. He stood back from the holographic representation of the star’s corona and shifted to another display, a long strip of spectrum interrupted by thin lines all down its length, and most markedly by two of them, like railroad tracks, right in its middle. “There are the Fe IX lines, Captain. You need strong ones if you’re thinking of seeding a star. Robust lines mean the coronal plasma’s of the right minimum density, which in turn is a diagnostic that tells you the star’s core is stable.”

“After 15 Trianguli,” Jim said, “the star’s stability would definitely be on my mind.” He gave K’s’t’lk an amused look; she jangled gently, embarrassed.

“Well, we did the best we could with what we had,” Scotty said. “And that on short notice. But the situation’s much more clear-cut here. And we’ve time to prepare.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Mr. Scott,” Jim said, “but why exactly do we need to seed 553 Trianguli?”

“So that we can experiment with how to stop the process at a distance,” K’s’t’lk said.

Jim blinked. “You really have a method that doesn’t involve another ship running into a star’s corona and destroying the one that’s doing the seeding?”

“Yes,” K’s’t’lk said.

Jim sat down. “I take it this isn’t something that you two did since yesterday.”

“Captain,” Scotty said, “we’re engineers, not miracle workers.”

Jim was tempted to laugh at them, and restrained himself. “Go on, tell me what we’re going to have to do.”

Scotty actually shrugged. “We’re going to have to build some field generators. They’re going to be heavy on exotic parts, and labor-intensive as the dickens. But beyond that, all you need is enough power to produce the field effect. We can use the warp engines to kick-start it. After that the generators will take care of business.”

“And you have to know which star your opponent is trying to seed,” K’s’t’lk said. “Once you know that, you go to the nearest star of roughly equivalent stellar type, within a class on either side. Then you power up the field generators and ‘unseed’ the target star.”

Jim stared at her.

“You go to the nearest star
of roughly equivalent type?”
he said.

“I know,” K’s’t’lk said, sounding rather embarrassed. “It’s so clumsy. If we had more time, we would be able to work out how to do it with
any
handy star. But since we’re in something of a rush—”

Jim leaned over and looked the Hamalki in the eyes, or as many of the twelve as he could manage at once. “T’l,” he said, “that was
not
intended as a criticism!” He looked up at the chief engineer. “Scotty, are you sure this is kosher?”

“Aye, well,” Scotty said, and it was his turn to sound embarrassed now, “I’m still looking closely at the math myself, for it’s more at Mr. Spock’s and K’s’t’lk’s level than mine. As for the parts of it I do ken, it’ll take a wee while before we have all the uncertainties shaken out of the equations, and as usual, the test will tell us better than anything else where we’ve gone wrong. Or right. Mr. Spock’s double-checking the parameters right now. Once he signs off on the equations, I can pull together a design team and we can build the hardware.”

“Do we have everything you need?” Kirk said.

“What we don’t have, we can fabricate,” K’s’t’lk said.

“And you really think you can have this ready by the time we leave in a couple of days?” Jim said. “Just so you know—I don’t contemplate taking long in transit to Augo. Just long enough to meet at one outworld rendezvous point to pick up the other small outworld fleets that’ll be going in with us and
Tyrava.”

“We’d thought as much,” Scotty said.

“No, we’ll be ready, Captain,” K’s’t’lk said. “It was the instrumentality that had us stymied, but we’ve got that worked out now. At least the theory’s as sound as theories usually get before anyone tests them to success and makes further theorizing a pastime rather than a necessity.”

Jim shook his head. “I can see you two are going to be making the technical journals again.”

“Well, we might get an article out of it,” K’s’t’lk said, “but not for coming up with anything new. This physics is a few hundred years old, on your world, and about six hundred years ago on mine.”

“We use one aspect of it on the ship already,” Scotty said,
“to manage the inertial damping fields that keep the
Enterprise
from turning into a lump o’ twisty girders at warp speed.”

“And keep us from turning into so much pulp inside her,” Jim said. “That far I follow you. Are you using the technology to play with the star’s gravity somehow?”

“Well,” Scotty said, “it’s not quite as simple as that…”

He caught his captain’s warning look, and trailed off. K’s’t’lk, though, just laughed. “It’s not that bad, Captain. The inertial damping fields are just an outgrowth of the warp-field equations. They pull limited amounts of directed ‘virtual mass’ out of the quantum vacuum, the electromagnetic zero-point field that fills the universe—what they used to call the plenum. The star-unseeding protocol just takes the same principle a little further, exploiting the ‘heresy’ that grew out of Einstein’s original principle of equivalence.”

“I remember you mentioning that a while back,” Jim said. “It sounded like a strange term for a physicist to be using.”

This time Scotty laughed. “It gets stranger. Einstein thought gravitation and electromagnetism were connected somehow, and finally gave up on the idea because he couldn’t get the math to support it. But then some later theorists thought that maybe the electromagnetic zero-point field was what gravitation was
really
connected to.”

“And this was heretical?” Jim said.

“If you were a physicist on Earth at that point, yes,” K’s’t’lk said. “But later practical work bore the ‘heresy’ out. Our own version of it goes a step further yet. It states that the so-called ‘quantum leap,’ in which you do something
here
and something similar happens
there
without any direct spatial connection between the events, can be caused by mediating the events inside the zero-point field. So we pick a star, denominate a target star, then do something to
this
star, and something happens to that one over
there.”

The possibilities began spelling themselves out in Jim’s
mind. “If you were right about this,” he said, “you wouldn’t have to build field generators in every solar system to protect that system’s own star from being seeded. You could build just nine or ten of them, each near a candidate star that would represent one of the main stellar classes, and then wait for news that someone was trying to seed a given star. Set your ‘good’ star to target the one being seeded—”