Star Trek: The Empty Chair (40 page)

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Authors: Diane Duane

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Spock was looking more mystified by the moment. “That seems an accurate assessment of the circumstances. But I fail to see—”

“So did I,” Jim said, “and now I feel like an idiot. You, of course, won’t be able to fall afoul of any emotion so sheerly messy. Lucky you. Tell me something, though. Do I correctly remember you telling me that you and your father have studied cryptography together?”

“It would be more accurate to say that I studied cryptography with him,” Spock said. “Though he would describe his interest as merely that of what an Earth-human would call a hobbyist, his talent is considerable.”

“So you would have no problem in composing what seemed a perfectly normal message to Sarek,” Jim said, “and concealing other data in it.”

Spock’s eyebrows went up again. “Either as straightforward code, or as digitized data, the idea presents no difficulty.”

“That’s what I thought,” Jim said. “So you’re going to conceal information about the incoming nova bomb inside that message to your father, and you’re also going to conceal in it my request that he take that information to the President of the Federation without delay.”

Spock nodded. “The suggestion has great merit. I am absolutely at your disposal, Captain.”

“And you’re sure,” Jim said, “that you can encode, or encapsulate, that message in such a way that no one but your father can get at it?”

Jim could have sworn that he saw the slightest smile cross his first officer’s face, but it was gone again so quickly that
he had to admit that it might have been a trick of the light. “Of that, Captain, I am quite certain,” Spock said. “When you have composed your message, inform me and I will import it and encrypt it.”

“Good,” Jim said. He let out a long breath. “It’s not a perfect solution, but it’ll mean, at least, that the information about the nova bomb gets back to Earth and into the hands of the one human there who knows for sure that I haven’t gone insane.”

Spock nodded. “Captain, I regret not having thought of this myself, but then I was uncertain for whom outside of Starfleet you might have intended the message.”

Jim made a face. “I
hate
sealed orders. Spock, when you have your own command,
never
let anybody stick you with sealed orders. When you think of all the trouble they’ve caused us, especially with the Romulans…”

“Should I ever acquire a command of my own,” Spock said, “the exigencies of command structure itself suggest that I am as likely to get ‘stuck’ as you are, Jim.” He gave his captain a look that even for Spock was fairly wry. “But I will bear that in mind.”

“Good,” Jim said, and suddenly felt as if a great weight had been lifted from him. “Meanwhile, have you heard anything from Scotty about how they’re coming with fixing the antiseeding technique?”

“I have just received messages from him and from K’s’t’lk both,” Spock said. “But the matters you have brought me are, relatively speaking, rather more urgent. I will deal with them instead.”

“Thanks, Spock. I’ll talk to you later.” He went out.

SEVENTEEN

Jim and Ael walked slowly into engineering an hour or so later, deep in discussion of tr’Hrienteh’s computers. “Everything,” Ael said. “Every private communication on my ship for the past year may have been compromised. It is going to be very difficult to tell for sure.”

“If anyone can find out,” Jim said, “Spock can. Leave it with him.” He shook his head. “When will Veilt and Thala be ready for us?”

“Within the hour. But, Captain, with or without the data from tr’Hrienteh’s computer, they agree with you: we should set out immediately for ch’Rihan. The government there is apparently in considerable disarray, the uprisings have spread to ch’Rihan from ch’Havran, and there will be no better time for us to strike—for good or ill.”

“Let’s hope for good,” Jim said. “Scotty?”

Scotty and K’s’t’lk were leaning over a tablescreen about two meters wide, arguing over some schematics. Jim peered down at the most complex of the schematics, then shook his head. It looked to him as much like an unusually involved board game as anything else. “Captain,” Scotty said, and turned right back to K’s’t’lk. “Lass, you’re missing the point. The problem the last time was just a function of the power.
This
solves that problem once and for all.”

K’s’t’lk was chiming in an agitated way, and sounding
very out of tune. “I promised the captain there would be no creative physics!”

Scotty acquired a calculating expression. “Aye. But there’s nothin’ creative about de Sitter space. It’s just
there—
we’ve known about it for centuries now. Infinitely massful, and infinitely hot, at near big-bang heat indeed. Too useful not to use, if only you can get at it by conventional means. Now if you stuck a wormhole into de Sitter space—”

K’s’t’lk jangled, incredulous. “One which had exactly the right mass-conduction characteristics to suit our needs? If you plan to just reach out into space and find one lying there waiting, then Sc’tty, you’ll be tempting Dr. McCoy to come down and put you on such a course of psychotropics—”

“Nobody does that kind of thing anymore,” said McCoy from behind Kirk and Ael. “Teaching the brain to readjust its own chemistry works so much better.”

“Doctor, please,” Scotty said, and turned back to K’s’t’lk. “Lassie, it wasn’t a natural wormhole I had in mind. I’d thought of constructing a tailored one.”

“No one’s been able to get one to last more than a billionth of a second in the laboratory,” K’s’t’lk said, dubious. “Without blowing up the laboratory, anyway.”

“Serve them right for conducting those experiments in ground-bound facilities, then. Not that there hasn’t been positive technological fallout from that kind of thing. Don’t forget, Cochrane got his first ideas about warp induction from that wee accident at the Brookhaven collider, just before the war.”

Spock appeared behind them. “Well,” Jim said, “how about it?”

Spock leaned over the schematic, examining it. One eyebrow started to go up. “I read the abstract you attached to your message, Mr. Scott,” Spock said, not looking up. “If you are discussing the construction of tailored micro-wormholes—especially in the light of the early Brookhaven
experiments—then a billionth of a second might indeed be all that would be required to produce the desired result. Very considerable amounts of energy could be released by even so short an access to de Sitter space.”

He straightened up and folded his arms, considering. “The difficulty would be a matter of precision: keeping the wormhole open for exactly the right time necessary to conduct the necessary amount of energy into the target, as well as in making sure it can be shut down while conducting such a flow. The wormhole experiments of recent years have all been attempts to connect into much more innocuous alternate universes, where the ‘differential of dynamic’ and the overall balance of energy states has been roughly equal. Such as that of our own universe with the one where our own ‘dark’ counterparts exist.”

“Aye,” Scotty said, looking glum. “Pumping unlimited amounts of energy into our universe. We’re playing with fire.”

“Every engineer plays constantly with the Elements,” Ael said, “or so tr’Keirianh tells me. I see little chance of our doing so safely. Therefore we must needs nerve ourselves to the dangers, it would seem.”

Scotty shook his head. “We could upset the local spatial ecology somethin’ fierce. Control—”

“It is an issue,” Spock said, “but I think not insurmountable. And the solution you are suggesting is an elegant one. Any nova bomb ignition starts out by instituting a collapse sequence. The insertion of the correct amount of energy would abort the sequence, canceling it out both by means of sine flux inversion and carbon-carbon cycle denaturation. I shall apply myself to the necessary mathematics and provide you with findings at the earliest opportunity.”

Mr. Scott still looked dubious. “Scotty,” Jim said, “we’re running out of time. That thing’s getting closer and closer to Earth. No one knows where it is, and if it’s got one of those
new cloaks on it—which I’m betting it does—no one’s going to. I’ve sent messages back to Starfleet about it in every way I can think of that’s safe—” He glanced at Spock, who nodded slightly. “But if I’m getting this right, and you think this resonance-wormhole-whatever technique can be used to keep that nova bomb from getting into the sun, or can disrupt its effects when it does get in, then it’s worth doing. And doing right away.”

“Captain,” Scotty said, upset, “remember what happened to 553 Trianguli!”

“Something a whole lot worse is going to happen to Sol, and Sol III, if you don’t give whatever you’re planning a try!” Jim said. “I know this sounds terrible, but the sun collapsing is just slightly preferable to the sun blowing up. At least there’s a chance to save some lives. But, frankly, neither option is acceptable to me. So do whatever you have to do, build whatever you have to build, and do it now!”

Scotty sighed and nodded. “You give me the numbers,” Scotty said to Spock, “and I’ll build what you describe.”

Jim nodded and turned to McCoy. “Bones, this meeting—I think it would be smart if we brought Gurrhim with us. Can he travel?”

McCoy rolled his eyes. “More like, can he be
stopped
from traveling,” he said. “Ever since he saw
Kaveth
arrive, he’s been itching to get over there. Apparently they’re some kind of relatives of his. He’s fit enough now. I’d have discharged him already, if it weren’t for the security situation. But I take it, after what happened with tr’Hrienteh, that the lockdown doesn’t pertain anymore?”

Jim thought about that. “Probably not. If necessary, Bones, we can smuggle him down to the transporter room and make sure that our meeting on
Kaveth
doesn’t happen anywhere public. But let me think about it for a little. I’ll get back to you. Anything else here that needs my attention?”

“No, Captain,” Scotty said. “We’ll call you when we’ve got our prototype built from Mr. Spock’s figures.”

Jim nodded, and he and Ael headed toward the door. “Och!” Scotty said then. “Captain?”

Jim looked over his shoulder.

“I forgot. That other question you messaged me about this morning?” Scotty grinned. “Aye, we can do it. Gurrhim’s wee widget suggested a method. I’ll have more data for you later.”

Jim started to grin; it felt strange, after the pain of the hours before. “All
right,
Scotty. You may have just won us this war. Get on it.”

Kaveth
was another ship in the mold of
Tyrava,
but bigger. Ael heard with amusement the sound Kirk made when he got his first clear sight of it after the battle. The ship’s designers had gone, not for three outer hulls, but five; they were set far back along the bullet-shaped main body, producing altogether a sleek and deadly look. This probably should have been no surprise, for Kaveth-Clan was famous for the artistic sensibilities of its children, and for their gifts in design, whether in something so prosaic as a box for starchroot bread or as purposefully elegant as designer clothing or weaponry. In the ancient days when the Kavethssu first took flight, the saying was that they might chop you to bits, but they would do it with style. When they were done with you, you would be fit at the very least for an alien “craft butcher’s” front window, or for an art gallery, if nothing further.

When the party coming in from
Enterprise
and
Bloodwing
appeared on
Kaveth’
s main transport pad, Ael made sure she was standing in such a way as to see Kirk’s expression without seeming to have oriented herself so. Sure enough, his face was worth seeing. As he turned slowly around him, looking up and up, and his jaw slowly dropped,
Ael became sure that the captain had never beamed into a rain forest before—at least, not one that was
inside.
Kaveth-Clan had originally lived in the south-tropical continent of ch’Havran before the Empire relocated them half a century ago to distant outworlds like Mirhassa and Ssuvat, in an attempt to isolate what was seen as a dangerous desire to uphold the right of self-expression in the face of power. When the Kavethssu were stripped of their possessions and forcibly exported to those worlds, the Empire never suspected under how many cloaks and tunics were concealed the most delicate and best-loved of the Hearthworlds’ plants. Now the massive boles of
tafa
trees, gracefully braiding their way upward in metallic-corded green-blue cables an arm thick, and the huge golden downhanging trumpet-flowers of
firjill,
surrounded the pad half a
stai
deep on every side.

“Eden,” Jim said softly. “Tell me there are no snakes.”

“What would a snake be?” Ael said, though she knew.

“Here?” Jim said. “Superfluous.”

That whole large space was empty. They stood there, and after a moment Ael saw coming toward them a shape she had not seen for many years, since her younger days in Fleet. Thala tr’Kaveth was one of those astonishing women who simply did not change with age: raven-haired, tall, and slimmer than any woman had any right to be past her twelfth decade and her sixth child. The joke in the old days had been that her immediate family was a clan all to itself; and indeed the Kavethssu had a reputation for being willingly fertile, almost aggressively so. The joke among the Outworlds had always been that, were the Kavethssu Imperial, there would have been no need for armaments with which to conquer an empire; they would simply have overrun it by sheer numbers.

Now the Clan-mistress of
Kaveth
came toward them and greeted them all with warmth. Ael’s hand she took and held to her cheek in a surprisingly open gesture of affection. “Instructress,” she said—for Ael had been one of Thala’s teachers
at the Fleet during Ael’s brief flirtation with the academic life there, many years ago—“I fear I have run away from school a little farther than previously.”

Ael laughed. The others, who knew the story, smiled; Ael turned to Kirk, introducing him to her erstwhile pupil. “Thala was given to me to tutor in piloting, long ago,” she said. “I fear my teaching methods weren’t to her liking. She left Fleet shortly thereafter to become a farmer.”

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