Star Trek: The Empty Chair (44 page)

“Someone’s head,” Urellh said under his breath, “is going to take leave of his or her shoulders when we discover who failed to get us timely intelligence of those ships’ existence.”

“There will be time to worry about that later. Those vessels made very short work of ours at Augo. Possibly they did more damage than all the other ships there combined. They must be our primary targets.”

“And just what are we supposed to attack them with?” Urellh said, waving his arms in the air. “Good intentions? We have nothing suitable on-planet for dealing with such things. Look at the size of them; think what their warp engines must be like, how much power they must develop!
There must be some small
worlds
that have less power available to them!”

“Analyses of the recordings brought back from the engagement have revealed some promising weaknesses,” said tr’Anierh. “The ships are using hexicyclic screens of a new type, and their weapons are similarly derived. Some of the Home Fleet ships and all of the defense satellites have weapons that can be tuned to go straight through those shields. The main question is where to best target the vessels. The Fleet tacticians are looking at the issue.”

“That’s some small help,” Urellh said. “But I think you are missing a point here. That cursed woman is more dangerous than any ship, no matter how large. If we could find a certain way to get rid of her during the attack, that would go a long way to ending the problem. No matter their size, the only reason those ships are here is something to do with
her.
Unfortunately she’ll probably stay hidden away, on
Enterprise
for all we know, or possibly on one of those giant vessels. She’d never be so lost to folly as to actually show herself in-system in
Bloodwing
itself.” He was pacing and fretting again now. “And there’s still too much uncertainty regarding what her other plans might be. Damned two-faced traitress, she wouldn’t even tell her closest friend more than a word here or there about what she had in mind.”

“In that she merely proves herself the careful commander we unfortunately already know her to be,” Armh’n said, sitting down on one of the benches by the window and looking out over the city. It was night, near midnight in Ra’tleihfi’s time zone. Light gleamed in the rain-wet streets below, and the shine of buildings and passing ground traffic, though there was less than usual of that due to the continuing security alerts. “And friend or no friend, the spy was her medical officer, after all. Did you seriously expect her to waste her time discussing invasion strategy and tactics with the ship’s healer?”

Urellh glowered at Armh’n. “Fortunately for us,” tr’Anierh said, “I have some intelligence regarding the invading fleet’s intentions that you may find both interesting and useful. Our sources tell us that they are intending for ch’Havran. And they have brought Gurrhim with them.”

The other two stared at him, open-mouthed.

“Impossible!”
Urellh said. “Our spy reported that he had been killed! She reported it from
Bloodwing
itself! I heard the message from Kirk’s own vessel, his own comm officer’s voice.”

“Apparently,” tr’Anierh said, “the detestable traitress already harbored some suspicions that there was an active agent aboard her ship. The report was disinformation. They saved the man’s life and brought him back here with them to be their tool on ch’Havran. Probably they’ve promised him that he’ll be some kind of puppet governor afterward.”

“I would be suspicious,” Armh’n said, “that this report might not itself be disinformation. Has there been anything that could be construed as more concrete proof? Imagery, eyewitness reports?”

Tr’Anierh’s eyes narrowed just briefly in annoyance. These men had come to assume that almost everything they heard was a lie. Themselves unwilling to waste the truth on anyone, it seemed to them that any other sensible person must therefore be as great a liar as they. “Not as yet,” he said. “We will have to monitor that situation. If they truly have him, they will doubtless try to display him to the Havrannssu population via video or some similar method. We must prevent that. Otherwise the deluded idiots over there will flock to whatever force arrives to claim it supports his cause. And if he himself really is alive, and should make planetfall there, especially anywhere near his old power base, the place is all too ripe for him to consolidate power and come after us at his leisure. So we must keep the invading fleet, large or small, away from ch’Havran at all costs—keep them out of transporter
range, at the very least, and deny them any other manner of landing.”

“There is another matter about those large ships that requires our attention,” Armh’n said. “One of the ingathering Grand Fleet vessels made planetfall at Kavethti to reprovision on its way in—and found the place a desert. The whole population was gone.”

“Klingons, perhaps,” Urellh said.

Armh’n shook his head. “There were no signs of combat. The cities were simply abandoned wholesale, and not in a hurry; residences were empty of possessions, industries had been stripped of all but the biggest equipment. If the missing Kavethssu should be
in
one of those ships…”

The three of them looked at one another in considerable concern. “There could be thousands of them,” tr’Anierh said.

“Tens of thousands,” said Armh’n.

“Or more,” said Urellh.

“We cannot let them get near either ch’Rihan
or
ch’Havran,” said Armh’n. “Ships we could have handled. But that many troops? Never.”

“Ch’Rihan is more easily defended,” Urellh said. “There are plenty of troops here, and using the orbital mass-transport facilities at Grand Fleet headquarters, we can put them anywhere on the planet we require within a single rotation period. If we need extra warm bodies to throw at the invaders while we deal with their ships, the civilian population can be mobilized. But as regards the Havrannssu, their mobilization had better start now—both as defense and preventive measure, should rumors of Gurrhim’s status start to spread. Send as many army units over as possible and round up the city populations, issue them weapons, prepare them to resist the landings.”

“They will not be willing,” Armh’n said.

“They will be willing enough with the ground forces’ disruptors pointed at their heads, and their children in safekeeping
to guarantee their enthusiasm,” said Urellh. “So let us get that matter in train. There then remains only the question of what to do with that wretched woman when we do get our hands on her at last.”

“Kill her and be done,” tr’Anierh said.

“Certainly that’s too easy a fate for her now,” said Armh’n. “For look how far she’s come. Even if we recover the Sword now, and put it back where it belongs, everyone who looks at it is going to immediately think, ‘Once upon a time someone stole that, and then returned with it to the very heart of the Empire, trying to make it all her own. Someone could do that again.’ We need to make certain that any image of the Sword has that woman’s shed blood associated with it. Her death must be public, prolonged, excruciating, and shameful. And with that in mind, our fleet’s main priority must be to take whatever ship she’s in, extract her from it, and get her offside somewhere until we can deal with the invading vessels. Once she’s known to be in chains in Ra’tleihfi, the rebels on both worlds will realize that the only way to buy their own lives back from us is to repulse the invaders. Without her, Kirk and
Enterprise
will depart. Without her, the crews of the rebel ships will have nothing left to follow. They—”

Urellh’s communicator went off in his pocket.

He frowned furiously, and tr’Anierh began to suspect that he had been too quick to judge the other’s inability to work himself into one more rage. Urellh pulled the communicator out of his pocket, keyed it awake.

“Have I not told you
never
to—” he said to the air, but then he broke off. “They have
what?”

The other two looked at him curiously.

“That cannot be the case. It is probably another software failure like that little one we had last—”

He broke off again. Tr’Anierh and Armh’n looked at each other with surprise as they saw sweat start to pop out on Urellh’s forehead.

“How long until they are operational again?”

A silence.

“Well, what about the satellites on the other side? We should still be able to—”

He held still, looking out through the window at the night. “That’s very interesting,” Urellh said, quite low. “Yes. Yes, well, see what else you can—All right, go on. I am done.”

Urellh slowly put away the communicator and just looked sightlessly out into the night for some moments. Then he turned to Armh’n and tr’Anierh.

“The monitoring satellites in the Outmarches have ceased to answer,” he said.

Tr’Anierh looked at Urellh and started feeling something like panic crawling at the bottom of his gut. It made no sense. The news that there were about to be enemy ships,
alien
ships, in Eisn homespace tomorrow, should theoretically have affected him far more direly. But those satellites had always been a promise of a kind of security—a physical reaffirmation that, even at their least understandable, other species could be dealt with to a certain extent, successfully held at arm’s length. Now even that old certainty was starting to crumble.

“Good Elements all about us,” Armh’n said, getting up from his bench. “Who has done such a thing? The Federation? The Klingons?”

Tr’Anierh shook his head, starting to go colder still. “The Klingons would seem the more likely culprits. Why would the
Federation
be involved? They
insisted
on those satellites, they were an integral part of the treaty, so long ago. They would hardly—”

“I would tend to agree with you,” Urellh said, deadly quiet, “since apparently the satellites on the Federation side have gone silent as well.”

The three of them stared at each other. Tr’Anierh’s mouth was going dry.

“Klingons,” he said. “And to think we had such plans of playing them off against the Federation.
Now
we see what their intentions are. They will let these damned rebels reduce what’s left of Grand Fleet to scrap, and when that’s done, they will descend on us right here in our own homespace and take the Empire for their own.”

But Armh’n was shaking his head. “No,” he said. “Don’t you see it?
The Federation satellites are gone too.
Don’t you realize what this means?”

The other two looked at him, uncomprehending. “Have you already forgotten the Starfleet vessels at Augo?” Armh’n cried. “They’ve destroyed the satellites
themselves,
to make sure neither we nor anyone in the nonmilitary parts of the Federation is able to tell what’s going on in this part of space—and now they’re on their way here! The task force they sent to Augo was simply there to test our ability to defend ourselves against an incursion by enemy forces. They found that ability poor. Now, with oversight from their soft-minded civilian populations cut off, with no way for evidence of what’s about to happen to reach the Federation worlds, Starfleet is coming here in force to deal with us once and for all. Perhaps with the Klingons as well. And perhaps…” He trailed off. “Perhaps this is because they have found out about the device.”

“They have not,” tr’Anierh said. “If they had, they would right now be spending every available resource to destroy it, and they have not. Our own spies in Starfleet have told us so. It remains hidden, as it must until it is activated just before its strike. You must keep your nerve, Armh’n. This is ill news, but hardly the worst.”

There was silence in the room for a few minutes as each man contemplated his own vision of what “the worst” looked like. “This is all moons’-shine until we have better data that is not three-quarters subjective evaluation,” tr’Anierh said. “Meantime, Grand Fleet is mobilized. The admirals will be
meeting with us in the morning. The defense satellites are primed and fully manned. There is nothing we can do now, except wait our time.”

“And consider our options for leaving here when the enemy—”

“No,”
tr’Anierh said. “That is something I will not do. Nor, by the way, will
you
be permitted to do.”

Tr’Anierh saw the looks of shock, of anger, on the others’ faces, and had a brief moment of wicked pleasure as he watched those faces work and change. “After the business at Augo,” he said, “I thought perhaps I had been paying too little attention, not only to my own security, but to the question of our joint accountability. So I asked some of my own staff to ‘exceed their instructions’ and ‘get carried away’ regarding the way the control codes are handled for the final activation of the nova bomb.” He smiled. “You will find that they can no longer be independently activated. All three controls must be activated within a second of one another, all three must be no more than two arms’ length from one another, and all three must be activated from within ten miles of the city limits of Ra’tleihfi.”

The other Two of the Three stared at him, aghast. “If you had been a little less intent on saving your own skins at the expense of mine,” tr’Anierh said, “and a little more intent on saving this Empire rather than abandoning it until it was bombed into a shape you better liked, who knows, you might have anticipated and prevented this. But now the culpability, if nothing else, will be a little more evenly distributed. Now you will be more intent on the preservation of the heart of the Empire than you have been, if you are at all concerned about the ‘last great blow’ truly striking home. And if in the process you have been paid in your own coin for your duplicity…” Tr’Anierh shrugged. “I, too, get carried away sometimes. But it will not be happening to me this time—or not me alone. Should it finally happen, believe me, you two
will be carried away along with me, one way or another.”

Neither Urellh nor Armh’n had a word to say. “So,” tr’Anierh said. “Let us consider how and where best to meet the attack.”

Through the long night of inner Rihannsu space the armada made its way, slowly growing as it went. It had met no resistance since Augo, and that worried Jim.