Star Trek: The Empty Chair by Diane Duane Read Free Book Online Page A

clearing away from the second bombardment, and once again the blue-glowing force fields pushed themselves back up into shape.
Moerrdel
and
Elieth
arced away from the city they had been attacking, heading toward another city in the planet’s northern hemisphere, this one sitting on the banks of a great river.
    “Keep them in view,” Jim said. Sulu nodded, touched his control panel. The tactical view shrank while the scan view pulled back to show the two Imperial ships as they made for the upper atmosphere, tracing great-circle routes toward that second city. It lay near the terminator, drifting into dark. Minute after minute it lay there, with no light about it but the faint hazy greenish glitter of what might have been city streetlights, far below.
Elieth
and
Moerrdel
dove, disruptor fire stitching down through the shadow of oncoming night—
    —and the blue domes sprang up, at the last possible moment, almost as if in mockery. All around the cities, smoke and fire leapt up, the local atmosphere going almost opaque with dust. The Imperial vessels swung about, fired again, and again.
    Nothing. The dust passed away in a blast of local wind provoked by the sudden heat pumped into the area’s air; the fields outside the domes were pitted and crevassed by the disruptor barrage, even molten in places. But the cities stood.
    “Most interesting,” Spock said, as calmly as if he were passing comment on the progress of some experiment in a test tube. “The hexicyclic wave is a variant on one of several emitted by the device that tr’AAnikh brought us along with the wounded Senator.” He straightened. “There is some truly fascinating technology coming out of the Rihannsu colony worlds, Captain.”
    Kirk filed that statement away for further consideration as he watched the Grand Fleet ships head across the planet again, past the terminator and into Artaleirh’s night side, apparently to see if there was some city on that world that they
could
successfully attack. Jim shook his head at such dogged commission of outrage. “Mr. Sulu, keep an eye on them,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll waste much more of their time there. I want to know when they come out of close orbit again. Where are the big ships?”
    Sulu increased the size of the tactical display. “
Gauntlet
and
Esemar
have been hanging back, Captain. They were expecting us to come out after them, I’d guess.
Arest
and
Berouinn
have been moving slowly toward the asteroid belt, scanning, but not getting too far from the capital ships.”
    Jim’s smile was bitter. “Wondering what other little surprises we might have in store. Well, they won’t hang back for much longer. Uhura, what do their comms sound like—and the comms from the ships attacking the planet?”
    She looked over her shoulder and gave Jim an amused look. “Nothing you’d benefit by hearing, Captain,” she said, sounding dry. “If my grandmamma was here, she’d be telling me to go find a bar of soap to wash these people’s mouths out with.”
    Jim wondered briefly how long it had been since soap came in bars, and hit the comm button on the arm of his seat.
“Bloodwing!”
    “We hear,”
Ael’s voice said.
    “I wish you’d warned me about what was going to happen on the planet, Commander!”
    “The people on Artaleirh were themselves none too sure it was going to happen, Captain,”
Ael said.
“The technology had not yet been quite so vigorously tested. It would not have made any difference to how we had to behave for Grand Fleet’s benefit.”
    It would have made some difference to my state of mind,
Jim thought, but wasn’t going to say. He was all too aware that, though Ael might trust him, he had another level of trust to achieve with the Romulans in this system and elsewhere, no matter how welcome they said he and his ship were.
    “But now the Fleet knows that the planet is of no use as a target,”
Ael said.
“Now they must engage us. Indeed, they cannot return