Star Trek: The Empty Chair by Diane Duane Page B

obscurities which, if she were lucky, she would be able to puzzle out eventually.
“He shall have ale enough to swim in, if he wants it,”
Veilt said at last.
“Agood turn past believing, he’s done us today. This makes many things much simpler.”
    Ael smiled. “So see how saving us has done you good after all,” she said, much more lightly in tone than she might have. “Veilt, I am all of a muck sweat with fighting, and must go make myself ready to be in company with beings that have noses. Your pardon.”
    “Of course. But Ael—”
    She paused.
    “Perhaps the apology should have been mine.”
    “Wait until you meet Kirk,” she said, “and then tell me so again. Out.”
    “It’s a monster,” McCoy said.
    “It’s a monster that saved our lives, Bones,” Jim said.
    They stood on the bridge, looking at the viewscreen. Spock was over at his scanner, taking readings; McCoy and Jim and Scotty all stood gazing at
Tyrava.
    Scotty shook his head. “What have they done with that thing’s nacelles?” he said.
    “I was hoping you could give me an answer to that, Scotty,” Kirk said.
    Scotty examined the tripartite hull of the ship with a practiced eye. “If you were dead to caution, and had a population made up of suicidal maniacs, then maybe…
maybe
you could run the warp conduits down the centers of those hulls.” He looked skeptically at
Tyrava.
“But you’d have to be absolutely certain that you had a warp technology that wasn’t going to fail you. And if you
had
something like that…” He shook his head.
    “Could ‘something like that’ be derived from the little device that Arrhae sent over to us from
Gorget?”
Kirk said.
    “Captain,” Scotty said, “it’s too soon to tell. I haven’t had time to find out the half of what that wee thing
does
yet. There’s not just one, but at least three new technologies containedin it. The first one has similarities to the transtator, but entirely differently conceived. The other two—” He shook his head again. “K’s’t’lk is taking some time off the Sunseed business to look at it now. She may see something she recognizes; the Hamalki have a whole different view of their sciences.”
    “I’ve noticed,” McCoy said. “Let’s just hope that whatever she sees in that little gadget doesn’t give her any strange ideas. The last thing we need right now is to wind up in some other reality, getting all transcendent.”
    “I’ve already warned her about that,” Jim said. “I think we can assume we’re safe from that eventuality. But we may have worse ones to deal with.” He glanced at the chrono. “Come on, we’d better get over there.”
    They made their way to the transporter room and climbed up onto the pads. McCoy rolled his eyes expressively at the ceiling as the transporter tech worked the sliders. The world dissolved in dazzle.
    When the brief storm of light faded, they found themselves standing in the center of what appeared to be a huge, round, empty space several hundred meters across—a black glass floor, gray walls, and a domed gray ceiling apparently about forty meters up. Jim looked around him with astonishment and appreciation, and a bit of unease at all this empty space inside a vessel.
But is this perhaps the wave of the future?
he thought.
Really big ships? Are starships on the present scale just a temporary aberration? Or, at least, starships the way we have them now.
    His unease, as he stood there looking around him and waiting to see what would happen, wouldn’t quite go away.
I wonder,
Jim thought,
if this is the way Ael felt the first time she came aboard
Enterprise.
A little outraged at the sheer size of things, compared to what she was used to.
He gazed up and around again, trying to judge the size of this vessel by using the size of this waste space that seemed to have simplybeen thrown away.
Yet perhaps
…Jim looked around again, looked at the floor. “Spock,” he said, gesturing at the floor.
    Spock nodded.