Star Trek: The Empty Chair (27 page)

“The inertia of history,” Jim said.

She glanced at him. “Is that what your people call it?”

“I don’t know,” Jim said. “But I know what you mean. The fear of not mattering, of having made no difference.”

“Yes.”

They sat quietly for a while longer. When Jim looked at her again, Ael’s expression was rather drawn. The admission had cost her something.

“What does one do at such times?” Ael said.

Jim shook his head. “Stick it out, and see what happens.”

Ael laughed. “Yet more adhesives.”

“Maybe. Sometimes they’re all that makes the difference.” Jim looked down into the crowd. “Hear that?”

Ael listened. “Hear what?”

“The change in the noise level.”

She shrugged. “That happens once every forty
t’stai
or so in any gathering, my people say.”

Jim nodded. “It’s something cyclic. Practically everything in human life—excuse me, hominid life—has some kind of cycle attached to it. So why is
this
one surprising you? You carry the banner up high for hours at a time, then after a while you have to let it fall, but not forever. You push and fight and make your way forward in a battle, and then sometimes you have to fall back a little, until the moment comes to start pushing forward again. The uncertainty, the difficulty—you’ve been there before, in battle. So have I. The cycle’s just a little longer than usual this time. But it’s still a cycle. Ride it out.”

Below them, the sound started to come up again. Ael had a long sip of her drink, and then turned slightly to look over her shoulders at the stars, and at the air-blued curve of Artaleirh sliding by under them as
Enterprise
made her way toward the terminator, and night.

“That cycle is longest, though,” she said. “Worlds around their stars, stars in the long flow through the galaxy’s arms, as all the little spirals fly apart. And then perhaps back together again.” She looked over at Jim with just a little humor
showing in her eyes again. “Or have they changed the theory again, this year? Sometimes the scientists say the universe is ‘open,’ and the cycle can never repeat, then two or three years later they reverse themselves.”

“We could ask K’s’t’lk,” Jim said. “But if you ask me, I think we should just stick it out, and see what happens.”

Ael looked at him for a moment, and then raised her glass to him. Jim clinked his against it; they drank.

They sat there for a great while longer, talking about all manner of things, while underneath them sunset and dawn and sunset passed over Artaleirh at the usual accelerated rate. Every now and then they got a glimpse of
Tyrava,
like a shadow in deeper night, pacing them above and behind, glinting now and again in planetlight, or the light of Artaleirh’s star slipping up through the atmosphere in yet another dawn. Below the gallery, the singing and the laughter went on, coming to crescendo and fading, and always coming up again in another wave of sound. Jim was not aware of actually counting the cycles, but he knew that at a certain point he would have to stop merely being aware of them. One of those silences would be meant for him, and the crew was waiting.

“I cannot think how they all fit in here,” Ael said. “And who is running the ship?”

“It takes fewer people to run
Enterprise
than most people would think,” Jim said. “But you know that. I would rather the news didn’t get around too much, though.”

He stood up and leaned on the gallery railing. There had to be at least three hundred and eighty of the four hundred and thirty down there; people of many species, eating and drinking and talking like there was no tomorrow.
And maybe there’s not,
Jim thought. There was no point in putting it off any longer.

“If you prefer,” Ael said, “perhaps I should go back to
Bloodwing
now.”

“Why bother?” Jim said. “About a third of your people are down there already. What happens here, you have a right to hear.”

She bowed her head to him, then, and lifted her empty glass, but said nothing more.

Jim went over to the stairs and started to make his way down. As he went, he noticed how quickly the room was starting to go quiet.
Not just twenty after the hour,
he thought.
Not this time.

He made his way over to the side of the room where there was a one-step dais used for informal theatricals, dancing, or the occasional performances of the
Enterprise’
s jazz band. As he stepped up onto it, the quiet settled down hard over the room, and held.

“Thank you,” he said, and then had to stop for a moment, because his throat suddenly dried up on him.

Jim swallowed. “Some of you will in recent days have been discussing among yourselves the correctness, in view of our oaths to Starfleet and the Federation, of the actions I’ve taken, and which I am about to take.”

There was no sound, no rustling. His people were still, watching him.

“I am convinced that the course we are about to pursue is in the best interests of the Federation. I am willing to face a court-martial, if necessary, at the end of all this, to justify my actions. And I’m almost certain, even at this point, that I’m going to have to. I stand on the brink of a series of actions that at the very least will make me extremely uncomfortable about the future, but which I believe my oaths demand of me.”

More silence. He took a long breath and went on. “I am aware that some of you are going to find my actions questionable. I am therefore taking this opportunity to offer you a choice to act on your own consciences. If at this point any of you feel that what has been happening, or is likely to
happen, will conflict with your oaths, I want you to disembark and be returned to Federation space.” He looked around at all the terribly immobile faces. “The Artaleirhin have undertaken to send a ship back to RV Trianguli. There they will transfer anyone who wants to return either to
Mascrar,
which is still there, or to one of the Starfleet vessels shortly scheduled to be coming into that neighborhood in the pursuit of the war.”

Silence. They looked at him.

“Captain—”

Sulu.

Of all the voices he would not have expected to hear raised,
that
voice spoke up now, and the sound of it bit him deep. Jim looked over at his helmsman, wondering what to say
now,
wondering how
Enterprise
would possibly cope without him. And if Sulu, veteran of so many difficult and dangerous situations aboard
Enterprise
until now, felt this way, how many others would feel the same?

“Captain,” Sulu said. “We
have
been talking, some of us.” The voice sounded a little shamefaced. “We thought—”

Here it comes.

“—that we should give you something, just so that you understood our feelings.”

Sulu turned to Chekov, standing in the crowd behind him, and then the pair of them stepped out of the crowd, holding something dark in their arms.

They unfolded it, shook it out. Black, with a flash of white in it, settling as Sulu and Chekov grabbed the upper corners and held the silken shimmer of the thing up to show it.

Black silk. A skull, white. Crossed white bones underneath it.

Jim, very slowly, began to smile.

“Mr. Sulu—” he said.

“We’re not leaving, Captain,” Sulu said. “We’ve stuck
with you for a long time now, when things looked bad, or strange. You’ve never given us reason to regret that. We’re not about to change the pattern now.”

Jim looked up. “Is this unanimous?”

The response deafened him. Not that he cared. He was blinking hard.
My eyes don’t work at the moment. Why should my ears?

He swallowed once more, then assumed the sternest expression he could muster under the circumstances and said, “Mr. Sulu, Mr. Chekov, put that away. For now,” he added, unable to restrain a flash of a crooked smile. “Meanwhile, ladies and gentlemen…” Thanks was almost demeaning in a situation like this: more, it could be taken as a suggestion that he had believed things might go otherwise. Finally Jim simply looked over the crowd and said, “Let’s bring the evening to a close in a while. Don’t rush, but we have a busy day tomorrow.”

There was a murmur of agreement. He would have said “Dismissed,” but it seemed unnecessary. People nodded to him and then began saying their good nights (or good mornings) and filtering out as if they’d been planning this all evening.

Jim stood there and watched them go. There was no movement behind him, but as the last of the crew left the room, he turned and saw Spock and McCoy standing there, shoulder to shoulder.

McCoy looked at Jim. “Yo ho ho,” he said.

“Declined,” Jim said, “with thanks. Come on, Bones, let’s go get some rest. We have to be up early in the morning. Haven’t you heard there’s a war on?”

Then he went straight out, trying not to look as if he were hurrying. But behind him he could feel Spock and McCoy looking at each other, and McCoy was grinning. Near the doors, he paused just briefly to look at the woman up in the gallery, who stood there, leaning on the railing, silhouetted
by starlight, watching him go. At this distance, in the subdued evening light of main recreation, Jim couldn’t make out her expression, but he thought he didn’t need to. She was standing straighter than she had all day, and though her face was shadowed, he could feel the edge of her smile.

Jim headed for his quarters.

A day and a half later,
Bloodwing
and
Enterprise
set out together for Augo. They did not go alone.

With them went the nine Grand Fleet vessels that the Free Rihannsu had captured so far. They might have been hastily crewed and short on supplies, but their weapons were in order. All had been newly equipped with the same quantum-vacuum shielding that had protected Artaleirh’s cities and armed the planet against its enemies. As important as the weapons, or more so in the eyes of the ships’ Rihannsu crews, every ship had ceremonially had its old name stripped from it—respectfully, for the ships had done nothing to disgrace themselves. The old names’ charactery had been scoured from the hulls and chiseled or burned off their inner keels, and every one had been renamed by her crew—all the Elements’ names and natures being invoked in the appropriate manner, and plasma borrowed from Artaleirh’s corona to hold the space in their drives for what would later be used when they were recommissioned into a fleet based out of Eisn or, if necessary, some other star.

It was that image, more terrible than almost any other, that kept recurring in Ael’s mind as they made their way out of the Artaleirh system and into the longest night. Rihannha had a great love of place. Years in time and light-years in distance removed from her long-lost home, Ael still had to do no more than close her eyes to see the way the light fell over
the hillsides and fields of her family’s old farmstead, the hole in the outbarn wall where the
sivit
wandered in and out between grazing times, the overgrown orchard with the fifth tree in the third row from the house fallen down, but blooming stubbornly every year nonetheless. The houseless, wandering life that had been forced on Ael by her personal rebellion against the will of the Praetorate was hard enough for her to bear. But she suffered it far worse in the persons of her crew, who could have cast her off for homes of their own at any time since the attack on Levaeri VII, and still could have as recently as RV Trianguli. For
mnhei’sahe’
s sake they stayed by her, and so her own
mnhei’sahe
required her to do the same by them. Nonetheless, it was hard.

“Aidoann,” she said, standing behind her center seat and leaning on the back of it, “where will you go?”

Aidoann looked up, bemused. “When,
khre’Riov?”

“When ch’Rihan and ch’Havran are liberated, and I am a Praetor.”

Aidoann gave Ael a glance half humorous and half annoyed. “I would have thought you intended to find a cave in the mountains above the Firefalls and go into retirement there,
khre’Riov.
‘No more cities for me, no more shipboard life, I’m going to go up the mountain and be a hermit,’ that’s what you’ve always said. Have you made a change in career plans and not told us?”

“Oh, of course,” Ael said. “Indeed, why stop at Praetor—why not make myself Ruling Queen?” Then Ael wrinkled her nose in disgust; even as a joke there was nothing particularly funny about it. “You must forgive me,” she said to Aidoann, “but you tempted me to it. I was serious, though. If there were nothing to stop us—where would you go?”

Aidoann looked a little unfocused all of a sudden. “Masariv again, I suppose, assuming that the Empire hasn’t moved all the people off it and scorched its earth. My folk were never terribly cooperative colonists, and we see from
the bulletins that much worse has been done to places that hewed far closer to their loyalties than we Marasivsu did.” She looked thoughtful. “My House—how many of them are left now, I wonder? We were never a big family, and even so the House-home was small for us. There was always talk about ‘fusing’ with some other House; but while she lived my mother would never hear of it. And where my father and brothers might be now—”

Aidoann broke off suddenly, before the wistful look became too sorrowful. “But, Ael, my shame to complain. It was far harder for you; you are all your own House now. I feel selfish, saying anything.”

Ael shook her head. “Now then, cousin,” she said, and for the first time wished the term spoke to a genuine family relationship rather than just one of close companionship. “Don’t feel that you’ve troubled me. I was more curious about where I should look for you when all this is over and we’re all rich and free to go where we please.”

Aidoann smiled, a wry look. “From your mouth to the Elements’ ears,
khre’Riov,
assuming that They have ears. Meanwhile you haven’t much farther to look for me than my quarters. Will you be all right alone here for a while? It’s coming to my rest time, and Himif should be up here to handle comms, this shift, but I told him not to rush. He was helping the master engineer with something.”