Star Trek: The Empty Chair (49 page)

There were none. “Then let’s do it,” Kirk said. “Seven-k. Go, go, go!”

The ships began to move in a smooth synchronized curve, outward and downward into the system, toward the plane of the ecliptic. Slowly Eisn grew in the viewer, and slowly the little sparks of light of ch’Rihan and ch’Havran, locked in their eternal dance, began to swell on the viewscreen. In her bridge, Ael stood up with the Sword in her hands, watching them grow. Her hands were sweating, and in them the Sword slipped, and was cold.
At last,
she thought.
At last.

“Khiy,” Ael said. “It’s time. Take the ship around the back of
Tyrava.
Find a good flat spot to lock down. There are plenty of grapples back there, as we saw from their plans.”

“Ie, khre’Riov.”

As they slipped around the rear of
Tyrava,
the view of
Eisn was hidden from them. Minutes later,
Bloodwing
made herself fast to a grapple sequence toward the back of
Tyrava’
s huge bulk. The whole ship clattered and rumbled with the sound of the grapples linking through the matching mating clamps on
Bloodwing’
s belly. Most larger Rihannsu ships had such, but for the sheer size of the surroundings, this was more like landing at a spaceport than anything else. Ael looked out over the huge expanse of the hull and prayed that it would stay sound, as
Tyrava’
s shields came to life again overhead.

Ael picked up the Sword and slapped the comms button on her chair. “All-call,” she said, and the ship came alive with her voice. “Move out, my children. For the moment, we abandon ship. Once in
Tyrava,
go where your hosts direct you.” She glanced around her bridge, let out the usual unhappy breath at leaving it, and waved Khiy to the lift. “Time to go.”

They headed out. Together she and Khiy made their way down through the cramped corridors to the belly of the ship and the underside exit bay. Just being there again was odd. The last time they had used the airlock when grappling to another structure was when they had still been in Grand Fleet.
It seems a lifetime ago.

Inside the bulk of the main mating clamp, they found the farside airlock already undogged for them. It was very strange to open their side of it and smell a strange ship’s air flowing into
Bloodwing.
But there was little time to waste savoring the strangeness. Ael waved her crew on down the broad access ladder. One of the last to go down was Aidoann, moving like someone with a very sore head, Hvaid helping her.

Last of all Ael followed her crew down into the strange, slightly heavier gravity of
Tyrava,
then pulled from one of her pockets something she had not used since Fleet HQ—the electronic key that would open her ship to them again. The
inner hatch shut down, and chirped its reassurance that it was locked.

At the bottom of the ladder they found themselves in yet another of
Tyrava’
s tremendous corridors. Crewfolk were running down toward a marshaling area at one end, all armed, some armored. They were getting ready to go downplanet when this phase of the attack was through. One crewman came hastening over to Ael. “Madam,” he said, “Veilt asks me to bring you down to the launch bay. Kirk and his first officer and the Hamalki are there. They are getting ready to go downplanet.”

“Lead on,” Ael said, and they all trotted down the corridor in the crewman’s wake.
Tyrava’
s own attack klaxons were sounding, and everywhere, in every direction, crewfolk ran by their hundreds, eventually their thousands. Being here was like being in a city that was about to be bombed.

Ael put that simile far away from her for the moment, as they came into another marshaling area. At the far side of it, K’s’t’lk’s little gig was sitting. Kirk stood by it, along with Spock. The golden latticework of the thing intrigued Ael, but she had no time to spare for admiring its beauty. She hurried over to Kirk, who glanced at her, and the Sword.

“It goes where I go, for the time being,” Ael said, “and probably for some time after that. Where are we wanted? The bridge?”

“No need for that, it seems,” Kirk said. “Believe it or not, they’ve got a ‘spare bridge’ right over here.” He waved off to one side. There, off to the right of the force-fielded hangar door through which K’s’t’lk had brought her ship, was an area with not only a huge viewscreen but a tank as well, and a number of chairs.

Ael privately doubted that any of them were going to be sitting very much. On that huge screen, the dive in toward Eisn could be seen more and more closely. The sun grew larger. “Captain,” Ael said, “
Enterprise—”

“Mr. Sulu has the conn,” Kirk said. “He knows the battle plan as well as I do.” He looked at Ael. “Ready to go?”

She nodded. “When it’s time—”

On the screen, Eisn grew larger. The planets were now clearly visible—two half crescents against the night—as
Tyrava
and her cohorts swept into the system. They were no more than a hundred million kilometers from the planets, and there was no resistance—here, at least.

Kirk studied the screen. “A little quiet out there,” he said.

Ael simply nodded. She held on to the Sword, saying nothing, and watched the sun grow.

They swept past Eisn. Ahead of them, as they dropped into the plane of the ecliptic, Grand Fleet Headquarters could be seen off to one side of ch’Rihan. Ael swallowed hard. She did not know which of the two she had more desire to see; the planet, or the thing she was about to destroy. But it was ch’Rihan that drew her eye. Those continents, those seas…

And then the light and the fire came boiling up from Grand Fleet. “Here we go,” Kirk said. “Spock, that shield retune—will it hold?”

Next to him, Spock stood quite still and watched that bloom of deadly fire come toward them. “The odds are overwhelmingly in our favor, Captain.”

“How overwhelmingly?” Kirk said.

“There is,” Spock said, “of course, always a possibility—a probability I should actually say, a very small one.”

“How
small?” Kirk said.

“Oh, certainly no more than—” Spock looked thoughtful. “—approximately zero point zero zero zero zero zero one percent.”

Kirk folded his arms and looked at the viewscreen. “Oh, well, if
that’s
all—”

And the ball of fire struck
Tyrava,
which shuddered in all her bones. The whole ship jumped, the shields, seen on the viewscreen, whited out, and the lights flickered.

Ael swallowed. Seeing the lights flicker was never a good thing on a ship as huge and complex as
Tyrava.
But then they came back up again, and the screen as slowly came up out of the white blindness that the energy weapon had imposed upon it. “As I said,” Spock said, very calmly, “only a hundred thousandth of a percent.”

Kirk looked at him. “Mr. Spock, sometimes I suspect you of pulling my leg on purpose. But certainly you’d never do such a thing at a time like this.”

Spock managed to look delicately offended. “Certainly not, Captain.”

They stood there and watched
Tyrava
dive closer to Grand Fleet, with
Kaveth
coming up next to her now. They watched another of those blooms of guided plasma leap up at them from one of the ships riding guard over Grand Fleet HQ, and another one from another ship, and a third from the Fleet facility itself. They watched that weapon fire at them again, and at
Kaveth,
and at them both at once—not just once but a number of times. And it did no harm. Oh, the ship shook, things fell down, and people clutched at one another. Ael very carefully put the Sword down on the chair again, and braced herself against the back of it, as she had done many times before on
Bloodwing.

“Transporter interdiction is in place,”
Veilt’s voice said.
“Ten seconds to optimum range…”

Kirk looked at Ael. “How many people in HQ,” he said, “when it’s battle-staffed?”

She looked at the screen. “Between fifteen hundred and two thousand. Many of them are good people, who genuinely enlisted to do their worlds’ service.” She let out a breath. “Unquestioning service.”

And once again her eyes strayed to ch’Rihan, off to the left of Grand Fleet HQ as they approached, and now rapidly swelling into something that took up almost all that side of the screen. Jointly,
Tyrava
and
Kaveth
fired down at the massive
space station. The weapons fire from Grand Fleet HQ had stopped a few moments before: now all its power was being diverted to its shields. For a long time, as
Kaveth
and
Tyrava
swept around the great space station in concert, that shield resisted, always stubbornly reinforced where it was beginning to waver. The two great ships fired on, while around them raged a small cloud of Grand Fleet vessels of every shape and size, firing wildly at the interlopers, trying to overload the two ships’ shields by sheer amount of pumped-in energy rather than the power of any one weapon. But finally one spot on that blue-burning shield around the station started to burn less brightly blue under
Kaveth’
s concentrated fire, and less brightly still, and finally trembled down into darkness.
Tyrava
came sweeping around and brought her own beams to bear on the spot where
Kaveth
had been firing. The beams burst through and struck the station.

Ael wished she could turn away and avoid the sight of what was happening, but she did not have that right. She stood still, and watched as the joint beams from the two great ships started to carve the station open like a piece of fruit. She watched it spill silvery air and fire and exploding plasma out into the cold starry night. And then the beams hit the matter-antimatter core at the station’s heart, and it blew.

Kaveth
and
Tyrava
peeled hastily away. As they did, the defense satellites in high orbit lashed out at them with beams like Grand Fleet’s, but smaller. The great ships’ shields flickered under the assault, but did not go down. The remaining Grand Fleet cruisers, homeless now, also threw themselves at
Tyrava
and
Kaveth,
and one by one, those that did not flee were destroyed.

Kirk looked over at Spock and K’s’t’lk. “It’s time,” he said. “Veilt?”

“We are done,”
Veilt said.
“We have achieved local space superiority. All remaining Free Rihannsu vessels, take high guard. This is situation nine-b: physical interdict, double
planet englobe, no vessel from planetside on either world to be allowed to leave the immediate neighborhood. Ready landing parties, launch. All remaining landing parties to their staging areas.”

On the screen, Ael could see the troop carriers beginning to fall away from
Tyrava,
one after another, a seemingly endless series of them. They were huge. Every one of them carried three times the complement of
Enterprise,
which in turn had four times the complement of
Bloodwing.
They launched, and launched, and launched.
And how many of them will come back?
she thought sadly. You could never reasonably hope that all of them would make it home when you were engaged in combat on this scale.

Kirk turned toward Ael, gathering her and Spock and K’s’t’lk in with a look. “Let’s get down there,” he said.

The invasion of ch’Rihan began.

Though the invasion might only be beginning, the War of the Free Rihannsu was already over—not that most of them knew it. Once Grand Fleet Headquarters was gone, and most of Grand Fleet itself had been destroyed, the Empire’s ability to project power was effectively finished. Now what power it had left was confined to the two worlds where it had active ground troops.

On the planet that was actually less important in the conflict, except as a snare, the Empire’s raw numbers were good enough to give the invading task a run for its money, but the way in which those numbers had been emplaced was dire, and Jim could only shake his head at the folly of a government that so thoroughly ignored its own experts. Hastily convoked to rubber-stamp the Three’s decision, the Senate had ordered the Imperial Groundforce Command to send nearly two-thirds of their available forces, a total of a hundred fifty thousand troops, to ch’Havran. Again on the Three’s instructions, the Upper Generals had been required—over their most strenuous protests—to scatter those Imperial troops all over the planet by their thousands and tens of thousands. This was what Jim had desperately hoped they would do, but would not have dared to count on. Fortunately, the paranoia of the Three, assisted by the fact that Gurrhim had major family enclaves in several large cities, made them try to protect
all
of these against an incursion by the traitor.

In so doing, they doomed their troops. The Three had misread not only Gurrhim’s supposed intentions—which Jim had been counting on—but the temper of the Havrannssu as well. Led by Gurrhim’s family and adherents, they did what no one had really expected, not even Ael or Gurrhim: they rose. In cities of a hundred thousand or more, when there were suddenly ten thousand Imperial troops quartered on them, the already angry and frightened populace started to come to the conclusion that one man may indeed be able to shoot ten people, but only if all the bystanders stand still and let him. And the Imperial Ground Forces themselves, willing enough to fight against evil alien invaders, or the traitress whom their government hated, became much more conflicted when faced with the prospect of having to shoot fellow Rihannsu or Havrannssu. In tandem with the uprisings—
surprisingly well-coordinated,
Jim thought,
but then they’re a
tidy
people—
came mass troop defections, along with the informal execution of many officers whose orders the troops no longer saw any point in obeying, on either moral or practical grounds. It would take many weeks before the unrest on ch’Havran died down, or was quelled.

What remained to be settled was just who would be quelling it.

The situation on ch’Rihan was more complex, but in a way, not as serious. Initial scans from
Tyrava
as K’s’t’lk was getting ready to shuttle them down were more promising than Jim had hoped. Most of the Imperial Ground Force troops remaining on the planet had been concentrated around Ra’tleihfi, and their disposition provided no insurmountable obstacles to an invading commander. But Jim noted what he had expected—a significant concentration of troops in the Valley of the Firefalls, the most straightforward route into the city, and one that an invading force would need to secure to prevent further flanking attacks by a determined defender.