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

disruptors.
    As the green fire lanced out from
Esemar,
Sulu’s and Chekov’s hands came hammering down on their respective boards simultaneously.
Enterprise’
s tractors flashed out, fastened onto another of the remaining wire-framed asteroids, gripped it and swung it around and back. The ship wallowed a little, decelerating, and her course skewed as the mass she was manipulating turned her briefly into a two-body system. Jim hung on to the arms of his seat, expecting to be thrown out of it at any moment. But
Esemar
had no time to shift her field of fire, which she found suddenly blocked away from
Bloodwing
by the swiftly swelling shape of yet another asteroid, swung at her from the other side. In a flash of empathy, Jim could imagine himself seeing what
Esemar’
s bridge crew now saw on her screens. More green fire, lancing out without effect at that sudden and horrible rock as it got closer and closer, and on her bridge, orders being shouted, but hopelessly, no time to see them enacted, and the desperate thought,
The shields held this long, against rocks nearly that size; maybe—maybe—
    But these were not just any rocks. They caught
Esemar’
s forequarter shields solidly between them, crushing through them, crushing into the hull beneath; the ship’s kinetic energy combined with the asteroids’ combined velocities, the resultant energy discharging itself disastrously through the ship’s structure. And the asteroids kept on going, crashing into each other.
    Things blew. Things blew beyond even what one might have expected in an explosion involving a failure of a big ship’s matter/antimatter drive. A little sun bloomed where
Esemar
had been, and scarlet-shot, violet-sparked clouds of dust and gas and half-vaporized dilithium ore blew outwardfrom the primary explosion, following the self-annihilating remnants of
Esemar
as it kept plunging along its original trajectory.
Llendan,
still close to
Esemar,
tried to veer off, but not fast enough, not far enough. The outward-boiling explosion caught it, battered it, and as the particulate, ionized dilithium hit its shields, it took them down. The explosion blew through where the screens had been, and shattered
Llendan
like an empty eggshell. Its own warp core failed, exploded, and in its turn, as it plunged past, the remnant ignited two more of the asteroids that Sulu had had wireframe-tagged in his last sample. More of that bright-shot smoke blasted outward.
    Emphatic,
Jim thought. “Once again your choice of adjective is right on the button, Mr. Spock. Mr. Sulu, my thanks—that was the first thing on my wish list. Engagement command and control is gone.”
    “They’ll have transferred it,” Uhura said.
    “If they had time, they transferred C&C to
Gauntlet,”
Jim said. “Which is doing nothing.”
    “Its comms are down too, Captain,” Uhura said. “Not silence anymore; carrier is absent.”
    I don’t know what Courhig and his people are doing, but maybe I shouldn’t complain,
Jim thought.
I’d sooner have Grand Fleet think that we’re using some obscure secret weapon on them than have the word get back that all we did was run away and hit their ships with rocks.
“Where are
Arest
and
Berouinn?”
Jim said.
    “Heading sunward at warp six,” Chekov said. “On an interception course for
Sumpter.”

FOUR
    The hair stood up on the back of Jim’s neck. “Uhura, get me
Bloodwing!”
    “Hailing her, Captain. No immediate response. The other ships are maintaining silence.”
    Jim began to sweat again.
    Spock, looking down his scanner, suddenly looked more tense than he had. “Their screens are shifting frequency, Captain.”
    Tuning!
“Engineering!”
    “Bloodwing’
s on, Captain,” Uhura said.
    “Scotty, one moment. Ael!”
    “My apologies for the delay, Captain; we were busy.”
    Jim had a look at the tactical display that Sulu had just refreshed for him.
Bloodwing
was arcing away from a trace that had been
Chape,
and was now an expanding cloud of