Star Trek: The Empty Chair Read Online Free PDF

screen, now once more showing the dilithium processing facility. Kiel came in to relieve tr’Keirianh, who headed off to her surgery. “Kiel,” Ael said, “give me all-call now. Battlestations, now, my children. Stand to battle, and the Elements with us!”
    The hooting of the sirens drowned out the furious beating of her heart.
    “We’ve got the asteroid database implemented,” Sulu said. “Captain, this procedure’s going to be on the opportunistic side. If the computer sees a target ship about to get into a situation where we will in turn be in a position to use a rock or two on it, it’ll alert us, then there’ll be two or three seconds for the hit/no-hit decision before we have to use the tractors or pressors.”
    “All right, Mr. Sulu,” Jim said. “We’ll call them as they come up. If I don’t specifically countermand you, or you, Mr. Chekov, then go ahead and use your rocks as you see fit. But understand the priorities. I’d love to help tr’Mahan out, but if someone is threatening
Enterprise
and there’s a rock handy, or even a phaser beam…”
    “Yes, Captain,” Chekov said, and “Understood,” said Sulu.
    “There’s one other thing,” Jim said. “About banging these rocks together, as opposed to simply banging them into enemy ships—what happens when you do that?”
    “A lot of heat, maybe some light. Possibly even some transient alpha,” Sulu said, “assuming you bang them together hard enough. Naturally plenty of fragmentation, some melting and fusing along the impact sites.”
    “That I would have expected. But, Mr. Sulu, a whole lot of these rocks have crystalline dilithium in them.”
    “Hmm,” Sulu said.
    Spock turned around from his station, looking interested. “In asteroid-sourced dilithium, the common dihedral form predominates by some ninety-eight percent. And under certain conditions of heat and pressure, the dihedral form can become moderately unstable. Normally the rarity of dilithium militates against wasting it on casual experimentation.But with threshold masses, and sufficient density of crystal or crystalline ore—and adding energy-state stimulation with phasers—impacts might result that could at the very least be characterized as…” He paused, looking for the right word. “…emphatic.”
    Jim grinned at that. “Mr. Spock, establish the thresholds for Mr. Sulu so that he can pass them to the computer. Emphasis can be a good thing. And I have to confess to a strictly empirical interest in what happens when you knock two such bodies together.”
    At that both Sulu and Spock gave Jim looks that at the very least were skeptical. “All right,” Jim said. “Maybe I really just want to know how far away we should be when it happens.”
    “Yes, sir,” Sulu said, and Spock nodded and turned back to his console.
    Uhura looked up suddenly. “
Sithesh
is hailing us, Captain.”
    “Put tr’Mahan on.”
    The Artaleirhin commander appeared on a bridge that was now dark as well as cramped, damped down to blue-green crisis lighting.
“Captain, the fleet is on its way in, and will be in-system within thirty minutes. IDs and coordinates are being fed to you now.”
    “Thank you,” Jim said. “Have you had a chance to speak to
Bloodwing
about what we’ve been doing out here?”
    “Yes, Captain. It is…unique.”
    “Not as unique as you being able to feed us the coordinates of cloaked ships,” Jim said, “but we’ll discuss that later. Good luck to you, sir, and good hunting.”
    “The like to you, Captain, and triumph over your enemies.”
The screen went dark.
    Not that it’s all that easy anymore to tell just who those are,
Jim thought. “Battle stations, red alert!”
    The sirens began whooping through the ship.
    “Nine ships as promised, Captain,” Sulu said as Uhura passed him the information. “Configuration data is embedded. Four heavy cruisers incoming—
Elieth, Moerrdel, Arest,
and
Berouinn;
two so-called