Star Trek: The Empty Chair (36 page)

He shrugged and got on with it. Another round began—Ael started it, this time—and before long the table was foundering in an uproar of laughter, with whole piles of chips changing hands from second to second. Only Spock held aloof from the laughter, but Jim wasn’t concerned. He had long learned to pick up on the amusement carefully concealed behind his first officer’s eyes. When the deck came around to him, Jim found himself forced to surpass his wildest output of that strange time on Sigma Iotia II.

Much more madness ensued. And it must have been at least two hours later when Jim noticed that Scotty was leaning back in his chair, rubbing his eyes, and tr’Keirianh, to his immense embarrassment, could not quite stifle a yawn.

Jim stood up, stretching. “It’s time. Gentlemen, ladies, thanks for your company. I have an early morning, and so do all of you. We’d better go get some rest.”

The players rose and started to say their good nights, heading for the doors. Ael paused by Jim and gave him a weary smile. “Not a night I will soon forget,” she said, “assuming the Elements spare me for long memory.” She glanced over at McCoy. “But a word with you first, McCoy. For you, everything is a diagnostic.”

McCoy raised his eyebrows. “Nothing could have been further from my mind.”

She cuffed his shoulder in an amiable way. “You are incorrigible,” Ael said.

“And you are a talented observer,” McCoy said. “Message? If there was one, it would have been just this: in some situations, the only sane thing to do is change the rules. Just make sure you change them
your
way.”

She gave him a look. Then, in company with tr’Keirianh, Ael went off to the transporters, and to
Bloodwing,
with an unusual expression on her face. McCoy and Jim stood together and watched them go. The door to the rec room slid shut behind them.

“What was that about?” Jim said.

“Tension relief,” McCoy said. “I’d say it worked. And for your part, I think you enjoyed being reminded of a time when the situation was no worse than having a couple of guys pointing machine guns at you.”

“Oh, come on, Bones, it was worse than that. The Iotians—”

McCoy shook his head. “Never mind that. What time will
things start getting crazy in the morning? Just so I know when to start securing the various valuables.”

“Beginning of alpha shift,” Jim said. “We’ll be dropping out of warp and going on red alert about an hour after that.”

McCoy clasped Jim’s shoulder, then headed out. “Call me if you need anything.”

Jim nodded and turned to stand for a few moments regarding the stars streaming past the big glasteel windows.

He stood there in the quiet for a while.
“Something, Captain?”
said the voice of Moira, the rec computer.

“No,” Jim said. “But thanks.”

He went to bed.

Six hours later, just before the end of gamma shift, Jim was sitting in the center seat, looking into his new tank.
Sulu was right,
he thought.
You could really get used to this. The question is, am I used enough to it now?

The bridge crew had been coming in early as well. Spock had been there before him, and as Jim had come in, had simply handed him a padd full of status reports. “
Enterprise
is ready,” he said, and went quietly back to his station, plainly not wanting to disturb his captain’s train of thought.

Jim had gone through the reports and confirmed that they said, in rather more words and detail, simply what Spock had said. In particular, the ships of the joint fleet had checked and double-checked their connections to
Enterprise’
s,
Bloodwing’
s, and
Tyrava’
s joint command-and-control system, and everything was operational. Every ship’s movements would be repeated into the holographic tank at the front of the bridge, where Jim would very shortly start his admiralty-level work.

Now he sat in the center seat, watching all his people doing their job in their normal calm, and started to endure the worst part of such an engagement: the waiting.

“Enterprise.”

“Tyrava?”
Jim said, relieved.

“Warp egress in three minutes, Captain,”
Veilt said.
“We
will be at optimum pre-battle envisioning position, ‘above’ the system.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jim said, and went to sit in the center seat again. “Do you have more recent disposition data for me?”

“Coming over now.”

The display in the tank changed. Jim walked over, peered down into it, counted the little sparks of light that he saw there. “Veilt,” he said, “I’d really like to know where those other thirty ships are.”

“Forty,”
Veilt said.

Jim passed a hand over his eyes. “Another ten?” he said. “When did we hear about these?”

“Within the last hour,”
Veilt said.
“Captain, I would suggest that the ‘fog of war’ has begun to descend in earnest. Our earlier discussions suggested that there is no way Grand Fleet has this much materiel available. However, we cannot be certain, as they have not taken us into their confidence.”

“Noted,” Jim said. He put out a hand, and without a word Spock stepped up beside him and put a padd into it, with the battle plan already brought up to the correct page. He pulled the stylus off the padd and started making notes. “I’m sending you some emendations to part three that take the new numbers into account.”

“We have four versions of part three already, Captain.”

“You’re about to have six. Do you want to disseminate it, or shall I ask
Bloodwing
to handle that?”

“We will handle it gladly, Captain. We have many more personnel available to double-check the translation.”

God knows how many of whom aren’t really on our side,
Jim thought. But this was no time for paranoia. “Thank you, Veilt. And sir—if by chance we have no other time for this before things get busy—the Elements’ own luck to you.”

There was the briefest pause.
“Captain, the same to you, and I think the saying is, ‘and many more.’”

Jim smiled. “Out. Uhura,
Bloodwing?”

“Bloodwing,” said Aidoann’s voice.
“My apologies, Captain. I am not used to these automatic connections either, but the
khre’Riov
says that they will save us much time.”

“Is the commander there yet?”

“On her way now.”

“Egress in two minutes,” Sulu said.

“Right,” Kirk said. He hit the button on the center seat that gave him all-call; that at least still worked in the normal way. “All hands,” he said as calmly as he could, “battle stations, battle stations. This is no drill.”

The sirens started to whoop. Jim had to smile at himself at that point. Habit could make you say funny things, especially when this was a scheduled maneuver, and every soul inside this vessel knew perfectly well that this was no drill.

After a couple of moments the whooping stopped. “Ready to drop out, Captain,” Sulu said.

“On the mark, Mr. Sulu.”

The warp engines died back to a whisper, and instantly the ships and other bodies displayed in the tank snapped into new positions. Jim could see the whole system laid out before him in three dimensions…and once again he was pleased at how, for once, random effects had worked in their favor. The two planets around which the Grand Fleet facilities orbited, or on which they were sited, were nearly in opposition to one another—one of them at aphelion, and one of them at perihelion in an orbit that was very skewed from the system ecliptic. “I make that about four hundred million kilometers apart,” Kirk said, looking over his shoulder at Spock.

“Affirmative,” Spock said, “within twenty-three million, six hundred eighty thousand, five hundred twenty-three point six six kilometers or so.”

“‘Or…so,’” Jim said.

Spock did not rise to the bait. “Once again, Captain, the ships in-system have divided their forces.”

Jim shook his head grimly. “They’re slow learners, Mr. Spock. I think we may have to speed up their learning curve a little bit.
Tyrava?”

“Captain,”
Veilt said.
“We seem to find them very poorly disposed.”

“You’ve got that in one,” Kirk said. “I’d still like to know where those other forty ships are.”

“You would not be alone,”
Veilt said.
“Nonetheless, we cannot wait to see if they arrive.”

“Agreed,” Kirk said. “This disposition closely matches—” He glanced off to one side at the screen. “—variation two-c of our joint plan.”

“It does,”
Veilt said.

“Let’s implement, then. And for everything’s sake,
Tyrava,
watch out for any sign of the hexicyclic wave we saw on Artaleirh.”

“Agreed,”
Veilt said.
“Out.”

They swept in toward the closer of the two planets, tagged as Thanith, the one around which orbited the smaller of the two Grand Fleet supply facilities. From it, a little swarm of ships fled outward to meet them; the larger capital ships hung back. “They know what’s coming,” Kirk said, settling back into the center seat. “Fleet A, this is Kirk.” He glanced at Uhura to make sure the message was going out. She nodded. “Engage to plan. Go, go, go!”

In the tank, he could see many of the smaller ships, led and protected by two of the captured Romulan vessels, arcing outward in a great formation like an opening flower. It could have been mistaken for a standard englobement, but it was no such thing. Under cover of the Free Rihannsu capital ships, the smaller vessels were arcing around behind the investing capital ships, making their way to where they could start the routines that had subordinated and rendered helpless the present Free Rihannsu vessels. The investing ships might not have been clear about what exactly
the smaller ships intended to do; but they fired at them regardless.

This did them little good. As Kirk had anticipated, the sheer numbers and the nimbleness of the smaller ships, especially in intersystem combat like this, made them difficult for the big ships to handle. He also knew that a significant proportion of them, perhaps seven to ten percent of them, would be lost in the attack. But he knew, and Veilt had agreed, that in a situation like this, there were definitely acceptable levels of loss. The small ships would buy time and create a distraction for the still smaller, more stealthy ones that would be fastening themselves to the big capital ships, suborning their systems, and taking them offline. If they could be reduced without being destroyed, that would be useful, but right now the large-scale situation of destroying them, and denying them to Grand Fleet, had become as valuable a goal as keeping them. Either way, the main priority was to render them useless for command-and-control.

Most important of all, now, was to take out the biggest of the supercapital vessels, the ones that were acting as C&C for the capital ships. Rigorous and rigid as Rihannsu command structure could be, Jim knew that the planetside C&C facilities would not easily share power with the capital ships suddenly wished on them by Grand Fleet from afar. Neither would the Grand Fleet facilities take kindly to planetside commands telling them what to do with their ships. Jim had been counting on this split; Ael had let him know about the depth of it. The two rival groups would not easily pick up one another’s function, no matter what they’d been threatened with.
Pick off all of one side’s C&C, therefore, and both sides get easier to handle.

Jim watched the biggest capital ships plunge away from the smallships attacking them, like infuriated cattle fleeing a swarm of stinging flies. They were trying to break away from the little ships and come to grips with the larger vessels
they saw hanging tantalizingly just out of range. “
Tyrava,”
Jim said, “now.”

“As in the choreography, Captain,” Tyrava’
s comms officer replied.

Jim smiled, hearing the sound of Veilt reminding him, at one remove, that he understood the battle plan perfectly well. “Thank you,” Jim said, allowing the amusement to show in his voice just a little. He gazed into the tank, watching
Tyrava
come coasting in toward the farther planet, a not insignificant bulk even at this distance and scale.
Tyrava
had been well out into the system; now she had swung in fast from the outer portion of the system, as initially agreed. The enemy capital ships, some ten of them, gave up chasing the small ships and turned to engage.

It was a mistake, as Jim had intended it to be. Those capital ships that lost their attention on what the small ships were doing swiftly became vulnerable to them, while
Tyrava,
in a leisurely manner, began carving up the first couple of the capital ships. This, as usual, was the point in whatever engagement he was studying that would normally make Jim nervous: the point where everything seemed to be going according to plan. The dictates of the War Gods were very much on his mind, especially Churchill’s old warning that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

He cast a quick glance over at the other Grand Fleet facility. Its own ships were holding close, not moving out; they were waiting to see what happened. “All right,” Jim said. “Time, I think, to stir things up a little on the other side.”

“We would appear to have things well in hand over here,”
Veilt said,
“at least for the moment.”

“Understood,” Kirk said.
“Bloodwing?”

“Here, Captain,”
Ael said.
“We have been monitoring. Beginning sequence two-c.”

“Go,” Kirk said. “And watch out for them.”

“We will do that,”
Ael said.

The secondary task force led by
Bloodwing
and the two other Free Rihannsu capital ships flashed toward the second Grand Fleet facility. Its ships immediately leapt out of orbit and toward the attackers, flinging themselves wide in an attempt to keep the same maneuver that had been used on the first facility from being used on them.

It was all that Jim could’ve hoped for. The other Free Rihannsu capital ships, finding their enemies so obligingly scattered, were able to take them one-on-one. With their augmented weaponry, the battle began quickly to turn in their favor—though, again, they were being careful to disable, not to destroy.
The question is, of course, how quickly we’re going to be able to put those ships back into operation,
Jim thought, watching it all unfold in the tank.
If this fight is conclusive enough, it might actually significantly shorten the final conflict at ch’Rihan. Then again, of course, if it’s not, there’s always the possibility it will provoke an intermediary engagement somewhere between here and there.
It was a prospect that had been haunting Jim’s nightmares for some time.
Yes,
Jim thought,
the choreography is going very nicely.