Star Trek: The Empty Chair (24 page)

“And stop the process,” K’s’t’lk said. “You also need to be close enough to a given star system, in terms of subspace radio communications, that a call for help will arrive quickly enough for the ‘unseeding station’ to
do
something in a timely manner. But any one set of stations could protect stars for some hundreds of light-years around. And the whole system, once in place, will prevent the ‘seedstorm’ effect which so concerned Mr. Spock.”

Scotty reached down to the design table and touched a control, shifting the image of the spectrogram to an image of the star itself, all blue, with prominences standing out in blue-white and white. “You get a reading of the star’s general coronal state from the Fe IX lines. Those lines give you warning of any sudden fluctuation of the star’s gross energy state—you match those with other diagnostics from mass gravimetry. Then you turn the field loose, using some of the star’s own energy to power the outreach stage of the ‘sync’ between the control star and the target. The zero-point field propagates the progressive resonance between the two stars until the target’s fully affected. Then the two stars go into sync. And the gross energy state of the control star then overrides the gross state of the target star, killing the seeding effect.”

“Side effects?” Jim said.

“We won’t know until we try,” K’s’t’lk said. “That’s what we need 553 Tri for. It’s barren of worlds.”

“What star do you have in mind for the target?”

“Well, 658 Tri has no planets either, and is only eight
light-years further on,” K’s’t’lk said. “It’s just on the Federation side of the Neutral Zone. We can observe it directly.”

“All right,” Jim said. “Now here comes the big question. Could this technique
itself
be used to seed a star?”

Scotty and K’s’t’lk looked at each other. “I’d have to think so,” Scotty said. “But it doesn’t matter if you can also use it to
stop
the seeding as soon as its starts. With the dissemination of stations of this kind, and information on how to build them, the technique ceases to be strategically useful—which is what you asked us for.”

Jim nodded. “If it works. We’ll give it a shot. Meanwhile, there’s something else I need to talk to you about, something we might need to do.”

Scotty and K’s’t’lk both looked at him attentively. “What did you have in mind?” Scotty said.

Jim took a long breath. “I think we need to destroy the unmanned monitoring satellites in the Neutral Zone.” As Scotty opened his mouth, Jim said, “On both sides.”

Scotty closed his mouth again. After a second, he said, “Captain, I hate to blow up technology that someone might need again later. And that’s something else I’ve been needing to discuss with you. It can wait a moment, though. How would it be if the satellites just stopped working?”

Jim’s eyebrows went way up. “No data in or out, to either side?”

“Until you give the word.”

Jim thought about that.
It would really be preferable,
he thought. “But no—there would be a certain psychological effect to be achieved by actually
destroying
the satellites.”

“Captain,” K’s’t’lk said, “without asking you for more detail, think about this. Those satellites are all a long way from anywhere, and both sides, we must assume, are shortly going to be very, very busy fighting each other. What if only
one
satellite was actually destroyed—say one on each side—but all the others just stopped working at the same time? The obvious
assumption for all concerned would be that they were
all
destroyed, and two parties at war are hardly going to waste valuable time sending starships to see if all the rest of the satellites had really been blown up.”

“Hmm,” Jim said. “All right, supposing you can deliver, on both counts. Just how are you planning to produce this wonder?”

“Ah,” Scotty said.

He went over to a console and keyed in a sequence on a touchpad on the top, then turned back to Kirk with something in his hand. It was the gadget that tr’AAnikh had brought back from
Gorget
with him.

“I promised the Praetor that we’d give that back to him,” Jim said.

Scotty looked at the little green metal sphere and sighed. “Captain, this wee bobble is potentially worth more than this whole ship and everything in it. Or more accurately, perhaps not the creature as a whole, but
this.”

He took the little sphere in both hands and twisted it slightly. It popped open and laid itself out in his hands in two hinged halves. The inside glittered with jewel-like data solids and dazzlingly machined metal, producing an effect like a giant Swiss watch of the old type with “intensive complications.” One or two of the solids burned inside with power, the light of them burning bright, fading, burning bright again, as if with a pulse.

Bu Scotty’s attention wasn’t on them. Set slightly off center in the device was what looked like a shiny, blunt push button sticking up from the core. With great delicacy Scotty pulled it out of the body of the sphere and held it up, glinting in the lights of engineering. It looked like a mere cylinder of charcoal-colored metal, just a few centimeters long.

“This wee beastie,” Scotty said, turning it from side to side, “may be as important to us in the future as the transtator was to us in the past, and the transistor a long time before
that—and fire, first of all. If you scan this in any normal way, it presents itself as an inert body, just a gadolinium casting. Scan it more aggressively, and you get a sense that it could have data encoded in it at the crystal-lattice level, though you cannot read it. You have to look at it much more deeply to discover that the encoding is happening at the atomic and subatomic levels, in the very shells of the atoms, and inside them—using the Heisenberg ‘space’ and all its associated uncertainties as if they were as reliably programmable as the on/off, one/zero states of a quartz atom when it vibrates. But it seems to implement quantum mechanics in ways that I cannot understand without far better tools for analysis than we’re carrying aboard
Enterprise
at the moment, so it’s best not to meddle too far.” He looked at the little thing with admiration.

“Captain,” K’s’t’lk said, “it’s this gadget that started us thinking about the zero-point field as a solution to the Sunseed problem, for this construct—it’s an insult to call it a machine—accesses the quantum vacuum for its own power. There are endless implementations possible for this technology.”

“We’ve seen a couple,” Scotty said. “One would be the force-domes that were protecting the cities on Artaleirh. Another is a way to cancel out local transmissions of any kind of messaging, in realspace or subspace. Not jamming—
cancellation,
as if the transmissions’d never gone out at all, until you tell the effect to stop. I won’t trouble you with the details, but that implementation’s what the two young lads used to get Gurrhim off
Gorget.
That much of this creature’s operation I can duplicate, so that we can do what you’re asking as regards the monitoring satellites. But this prototype is too precious to spend on such; it contains implementations of the basic technology that’ll take a whole team of physicists and engineers to understand. This technology could change our whole civilization, given time.”

This,
Jim thought,
is what we were sent to find and bring home. And the presence of this here implies so much more.
“I think you may be suggesting,” Jim said softly, “that if our destruction or capture seem imminent, this should be sent off on its own, with the intent to get it back to Starfleet at all costs.”

“Aye,” Scotty said. The look he was giving the little sphere was one Jim had occasionally caught him wearing in less fraught circumstances: that of a man privileged to examine the engineering version of the pearl of great price, ready to do anything to see that it is passed around as widely as possible to do the most possible good. “Now if this had been stolen technology…” He made a face. “Well, we’ve been down that road before. I’ve aye disliked taking another person’s work without seeing they’re credited with it and paid for it. And duty’s forced us into that path once or twice. Well enough. But this came to us, as it were, as a gift, and it wants using. Many a world that’s barren now could become livable with the technology underlying this to help dome its cities and protect its ships, and eventually to make terraforming far easier than it is now. Maybe there wouldn’t be such a scramble for planets that are naturally livable. Maybe there wouldn’t be a need to fight so many wars.”

Jim’s expression went just slightly wry. “Our people will probably keep doing that for a while yet, but if this thing will make that big a difference…”

“It could, if we can get it home and study it. But it’s not secure here, Captain. If we’re lost—”

“Work out something, Scotty,” Jim said. “We’ve replaced all those signaling buoys we used heading in to Levaeri V, so you might want to prepare a couple as decoys as well.”

“I had thought of that, Captain,” Scotty said. “But two problems with that. One—what if this bauble’s lost in the sending? And two—you’ve promised to give it back to the Praetor. I don’t like to break a promise.”

“Neither would I,” Jim said. “Well, I’ll leave the problem with you for the moment. Meanwhile, good work, you two. Get started on the monitoring satellite problem. And I’ll schedule a stop at 553 Trianguli.”

“Aye, sir. Thank you.”

Jim headed back to the bridge.

In a retiring-room deep inside the ancient House-home of House tr’Maehllie, in what were now the suburbs of Ra’tleihfi on ch’Rihan, an argument was in progress. It was an outgrowth of the argument that had begun, in much quieter mode, almost as soon as the young Senator i-Khellian had left tr’Anierh’s study and the door had shut behind her. But nothing had been settled there, and now, more than a day later, the argument had gained speed and urgency.

“I
told
you the Intel people were becoming more useless by the day,” Urellh was growling. “What was it about?
What was that message about?”

The retiring-room was nothing like as well furnished as tr’Anierh’s study, where he now very much wished himself to be. It was bare, lean, as devoid of ornament as the mind of the man who lived in it. But there was no avoiding passing on this news, and no avoiding suffering tr’Maehllie’s reaction to it in a space so acoustically bright that tr’Anierh was already on the edge of a headache. He shook his head. “We will never know now,” he said, “since as you say, the Intelligence people seem to have allowed the poor fool to help them a little
too
enthusiastically with their inquiries.”

“By my name, they’ll go the same way he did,” Urellh said, glaring out the window. “But much more slowly. In the meantime, I’ll assign a new team and find out every last moment of the wretched spy’s last few days. Where he went, who he saw and spoke to—”

“Urellh,” tr’Anierh said, “possibly we have other concerns right now. I have some strange reports from the Fleet
of late. Ships delayed in reporting back, or in making scheduled planetfalls in the Outworlds.”

“Indeed, and there’s another issue,” Urellh said under his breath. “The ships that went out to Artaleirh:
Where are they?”

“The Klingons destroyed them,” tr’Anierh said.

Urellh’s head snapped around. “What?”

“So they say; I have copied you a transcript of the message. Another department of Intel entirely from the one that has been so cheerfully killing off our potential informants has today received a message through one of their go-between agents on the Imperial homeworld. The Klingons say they destroyed the task-force fleet at Artaleirh, as well as ‘other alien vessels present at the engagement,’ whoever
that
may mean; we can only hope they meant
Bloodwing.
It would be too much to hope for to assume they also meant
Enterprise,
assuming she was still in pursuit. The Klingons have had no better luck with Kirk than we have, and if they’d truly destroyed that damned ship, they would have shouted the brag to everyone who’d listen. At any rate, the Klingons also say they have annexed the Artaleirh system.” Tr’Anierh couldn’t keep his face from twisting as if he had a mouthful of something bitter. “The message claims that the Klingons have offered to give us a discount on dilithium processing if we acknowledge the ‘changeover.’”

A brief and complete silence ensued. Then tr’Anierh spent the next few minutes thinking, rather clinically, that no one would be surprised if his fellow Praetor suddenly fell over one day, seeing that he kept on indulging himself in rages of this kind. It was some little while before tr’Maehllie was fit for anything but kicking the furniture and smashing up various inconsequentia of his daily life, and tr’Anierh thought,
It would not take much. His blood pressure is probably already too high. If it should be chemically assisted in
being raised somewhat, and then someone should spring a piece of news of this kind on him…

He sighed as tr’Maehllie flung himself into the only other chair in the room and started to calm himself. “They can’t have done it,” he said under his breath, glaring at the floor.

“They could have,” said tr’Anierh. “And we cannot now spare the resources to send another task force to drive them out of that space, even if they are still only there in whatever force they used to take it. The situation is worsening on the other client worlds, and there are persistent rumors out of Augo that something is about to happen there.”

“The Klingons wouldn’t dare come so close!” tr’Maehllie said, almost in a hiss, and tr’Anierh knew he was meant to take it for another rage starting, but he knew by the sound that tr’Maehllie’s reaction wasn’t anger. It was fear.

Tr’Anierh knew that fear too, but was not going to waste time railing against circumstance. “This is what we have always hoped would never happen. Civil unrest at home while we start to prosecute a war.”

“War I don’t mind!” Urellh shouted. “Elements only know we’ve been waiting for a chance to deal with the Federation once and for all, and it’s almost upon us—a matter of days only—but why does this have to happen
now?
We cannot handle both them and the Klingons at the same time!”