Star Trek: The Empty Chair (48 page)

“Mr. Sulu!”
Kirk said at the same moment.

“Yes,
khre’Riov!”
Khiy said, already flinging
Bloodwing
away. But that furious ball of force was still coming at them, expanding, and—Ael blinked. It could not actually be
following
them as they turned.

“I very much dislike that, Captain, whatever it may be!” Ael said.

“A programmable plasma,”
she heard Spock say.
“It shares some of the characteristics of the old molecular-disruptor weapon mounted on early birds-of-prey, but it would appear to have been upgraded somewhat.”

“Too much so for
me!”
Ael said, watching it match them arc for arc and keep on closing. “Khiy, get ready to go to warp.”

“Ready,
khre’Riov,”
he said.

“Go!”

Bloodwing
leapt away from the other vessels, curving up and away from Eisn. That ball of force followed. “Shield status?” Ael said to Aidoann as the thing got closer.

“They are at full,
khre’Riov,
but that thing is radiating such power that it will go right through them.”

“If Spock is right about that thing’s antecedents,” Ael said, “we may be able to outrun it, as we’ve done with its predecessors. Khiy, make all haste! Tr’Keirianh?”

“I hear you,”
was all her master engineer said. It was going to have to be good enough.

Bloodwing
ran, and the forceball ran behind her. Ael gazed at it on the viewscreen, its view now showing space behind them, the engagement continuing in the distance. Was it attenuating? Ael shook her head, watching it come closer.

“Warp three,” Khiy said. “Warp four.” He looked up at the screen, unbelieving. “
Khre’Riov,
that can’t be
accelerating!”

“It should not have been able to turn, either!” Ael said. “Just
go,
Khiy!”

He threw the ship into another of those turns that made
Bloodwing’
s bones groan with the stress of it, and still the forceball followed them, growing closer. But it was beginning to thin. “Yes,” Ael said. “Go, just
go!”

“Warp five.”

It was not easy for a ship of
Bloodwing’
s class to accelerate so quickly.
But she is in a class by herself,
Ael thought, gripping the arms of her seat, bracing the Sword.
Go, cousin. Think what you bear, and save us one more time!

Khiy swerved again, and once more the forceball followed them. But it was growing fainter, even as it accelerated one more time. Ael saw it coming faster and faster, and shook her head, hit the all-call button. “Brace, my children, brace, collision imminent! Collision—”

The thing struck them as tr’Keirianh coaxed one last burst of acceleration out of the warp engines. Everything shook as if some huge fist had struck
Bloodwing
a great blow; the bridge went dark. Ael took that last long gasp of air that becomes second nature for one who routinely is in situations where the next gasp may be of vacuum. But though things stayed dark for some seconds, the hull did not crack, nor did the engines give out. A moment later the lights flickered back on again.

Aidoann was on the floor; she let out a little gasp, a little moan, as the lights came on. Ael left the Sword on the center seat and went to her, letting out that breath. She had thought often enough before that she saw her death coming, but this time it had just been a touch too close. She bent over Aidoann, helped her up. “Cousin, come on,” Ael said. “Can you get up?”

“The count,” Aidoann said faintly, and got to her knees.
“
Khre’Riov,
just help me sit for a moment, I have to get the count of ships.”

“You will do no such thing,” Ael said. “You will take yourself down to sickbay and tr’—” Then Ael stopped, and breathed out, and shook her head. Old reflex had asserted itself; it was hard to avoid. For so long, there had been that friendly face sitting in the cramped little space, always with a kind word or bandage, or at least a kind word when the bandages were few.

Ael helped Aidoann up to her seat. “Hvaid,” she said, turning to the weapons officer, “you had some training with—with our healer.” Already Ael was finding herself having trouble saying the name.
Maybe I now better understand those who have trouble saying mine, if they see my actions as anything like as treacherous as hers.
“Go you down to sickbay and run the basic diagnostic program on Aidoann. I would not like to think that she was concussed and still trying to stand up. Go now!” she said, as the two of them started to protest that they were needed here. “We have a lull for the moment. I will pull together the damage reports and do whatever’s necessary up here for the next little time. Go now, while these few quiet moments last.”

She turned to Khiy. “We have been run a good way off from the others. That may have been someone’s intent, or an accident. No matter. Get us back to the armada. And be careful how you go.”

The remaining Grand Fleet vessels were fleeing. Kirk stood in front of
Enterprise’
s tank and watched them go.
“They’re falling back closer to ch’Rihan,”
Veilt said from
Tyrava. “I would be careful how we follow them, Captain. If we go straight in, or straight toward Grand Fleet headquarters, we will doubtless run into an ambush. And unfortunately, we have no way to break this new cloak. Such is a matter of long study, not something to be done in an hour.”

“Normally I would agree with you,” Kirk said, “but when you have all
your
best people, and Ael’s engineer tr’Keirianh,
and
Spock and Scotty and K’s’t’lk all in one place, I expect better results than usual. So let’s jump down to…” Jim paused, picking up his padd, starting to page through it, and then tossing it aside; he already knew what he would have been looking for. “Seven-l. That section suggests that at this point, any forces we can successfully scan are probably the visible component of a trap for us—unless they are moving at considerable speed between ch’Rihan and ch’Havran, in which case they are the result of our ‘Hail Mary’ play.”

Jim could just hear Veilt putting up his eyebrows.
“Captain, forgive me, but just who is ‘Mary’ and why would it be hailing on him?”

“Um, let’s just say that it’s a slang phrase, and leave it at that. At any rate, three-k through-l suggest that this is the point in our choreography for a long elliptical insertion toward ch’Havran, one from which we can quickly break off toward Grand Fleet HQ. Let’s pass all the ships the necessary ephemerides corrected for our present location, and get ready to start our fall into the system.”

“Captain?”

“Ael,” he said, relieved. She would have been the next topic of discussion. “Where are you? Is
Bloodwing
all right?”

“Well above the ecliptic,”
Ael said,
“and while we have some damage, we can function. But I desire no more violent maneuvers for a while. Aidoann is hurt, and so are a number of my other people, shaken about when that last plasma disruptor hit us.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. Looks like Grand Fleet has a few tricks up its sleeve that your sources didn’t know about.”

He heard Ael let out a breath.
“Our thoughts march together, Captain,”
she said.
“That was a very interesting weapon. I covet it, rather, as it suggests they have solved the
problem of the old matter-disruptor’s worst weakness. For all its effectiveness against the enemy, the technology had an unfortunate tendency to—I believe in your idiom the phrase would be, ‘hot run in the tube.’ Lack of maintenance, or lack of staff trained in proper maintenance of the weapon and its delivery system, meant that over time we lost nearly as many of our own ships to it as did the aliens we used it to attack. The technology was abandoned for a while. But if someone in Grand Fleet has hit on the idea of using newer technologies to update the older system, making the disruption plasma programmable as Spock was suggesting—”

“There’s no reason it couldn’t be done,”
Jim heard tr’Keirianh say from his position.
“In fact, if you attached a singularity to one of those old systems—”

“Tr’Keirianh,”
Ael said,
“you and your singularities! Tell me this is not something you’re seriously considering.”

“Well,
khre’Riov,
it had occurred to me that—”

What usually occurred to Jim when he heard his own chief engineer start a sentence that way was that it was better to steer the conversation in some other direction, quickly. “Uh, forgive me, Tr’Keirianh,” he said, “but, Ael, is your shielding sufficient for the moment? We’ve got work to do.”

“We have some protection,”
Ael said,
“but not nearly enough to suit me. Certainly I do not desire to have that thing fired at me again, at anything like such close range! And I suspect you share this desire.”

“I think you may have something there,” Jim said. “All right, time to get cracking again.” He paused and looked into the tank. “I expect Grand Fleet to be well protected, probably by ships with that weapon,” Jim said. “Probably it’s carrying some itself, now. So we have two choices.”

“What, Captain,”
Ael said, with just the slightest smile in her voice,
“you mean you’re not going to direct us to the page for eight-a, ‘sudden discovery of unknown superweapon?’”

“As a matter of fact—” Kirk said.

Ael cleared her throat.
“Were your gift for extrapolation not likely to keep the souls of many of us inside our skins today, I would swear you do it merely to annoy.”

“Ahem,” Kirk said, and grinned. “The question now becomes, to what targets will the people commanding Grand Fleet commit the vessels carrying those weapons, if in fact Fleet headquarters itself isn’t adequately protected? I think they’ll be concentrating on
Kaveth
and
Tyrava.
They’ll have had some time to prepare their strategies for such ships, but not very much. And under the circumstances, to make sure that they don’t have enough time to move any useful materiel up to Grand Fleet or down from it, I think we had better get
Tyrava
down in there in a hurry and start interdicting transporter function.”

“It is a little earlier than we have thought to be doing that,”
Ael said.

“Yes, well,” Jim said, “I know you’d just love to flaunt
Bloodwing
in their faces some more and fight her all over the system, but if you were wise, you’d get your butt off that ship, send her out of harm’s way, and put yourself somewhere well defended enough that we can ensure that at the end of this exercise, you’re still alive.” He was taking care to sound wry about it. This was no time to allow Ael to get into one of her aggressive lone-wolf moods. “And since Mr. Spock is looking at me, with
that
expression, and his eyebrows up, I can only suggest that you would be about to have some company in the form of
me.
I think it’s become time to transfer the flag to
Tyrava,
at least for the moment, where K’s’t’lk’s gig will be ready to take us where we need to be when the troops go down. Which reminds me; do you have body armor that you wear in battle situations, or something similar? If you don’t, we can run something like that up for you.”

“I am a naval officer,”
Ael said.
“Even on ceremonial
occasions, we never wear armor. But I agree. If we are going down onto a ‘dirt’ battlefield, probably some minimal amount of protection is best.”

“Listen to her,” Jim said to Spock, slightly amused. “We’ll take care of it. Meanwhile, we still have Grand Fleet HQ to think about.” He looked at his tank.

Ael said,
“On the off chance that Grand Fleet or ch’Rihan has managed to install planet-based weapons of the kind we saw at Artaleirh—not that I think they have, but much can be done when one is terrified and has a few days’ space—I would prefer to attack Grand Fleet when it is on the side of ch’Rihan, away from ch’Havran. Better to be caught between one set of such weapons rather than two.”

“Agreed,” Kirk said. There was a moment of silence while he ran the planet positions forward in his tank. “We’ll have a time slot suiting that description in one hour and forty-eight minutes,” he said. “That window of opportunity will last approximately—”

“Fifty-six minutes, your time,”
Ael said.
“I know Grand Fleet’s ephemera all too well. I will bring
Bloodwing
over, and we will grapple her to
Tyrava
’s hull.”

“Ael, why grapple outside?”
Veilt said.
“We have several holds big enough to take
Bloodwing.”

“Veilt,”
Ael said,
“you know I take that very kindly. But with all the respect due to your great experience, I would rather resist that suggestion. We will grapple to you. If there should later be need or desire, we can then let go quickly. But I would be glad if you would offer my people sanctuary until
Bloodwing
is ready to fly free again.”

“Let it be as you say,”
Veilt said.
“But you should get over here now. And,
Enterprise,
we would be pleased to offer you the same refuge if you like.”

Jim thought for a moment, then let out a breath. “With respect, Veilt, thank you, but no. There are certain—” He paused. “—legal niceties.”

“Such as the fact that being taken inboard by another vessel can, in the case of an unfriendly court-martial, be seen as a willing act of surrender,”
Veilt said.
“I take your point. Nonetheless, Captain, in case of emergency, we have room to take all your crew.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jim said. “Meanwhile, let’s move on Grand Fleet HQ. Damage and readiness reports, all vessels.”

The next few moments became a hubbub of voices and various electronic beeps and hoots as people reported in by voice or simply signaled by a beep or two that they were ready. “This is section seven-k,” Kirk said. “Ladies and gentlemen, stay sharp and watch out for one another. I expect Grand Fleet to have another of those plasma balls. I don’t want anyone getting personal with it. At the same time, our job is to protect
Kaveth
and
Tyrava
until they can get close enough to Grand Fleet to do what needs doing. Any questions?”