Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (18 page)

Jim wished he could have too. “And what did she deduce from that?”

“If she’s smart, the same thing I did after I played with him a couple of times; that Mr. Freeman is quite bright, and knows it, and occasionally gets incautious. What is
not
occasional about him, though, is his extreme dislike of looking dumb in front of people—and he will sometimes resort to very unorthodox solutions to save his game.”

“You call that a save?”

“It was for him. The next game he played with Lia—”

“There was a next game? I would have killed him.”

“They used to call them ‘the gentler sex,’ didn’t they once? Let’s wait and see if Freeman can still walk after his yearly injections next week. Anyway, next game, he wiped the rec deck up with her. Then he fetched her a drink and was the picture of gallantry. He’s a very good winner.”

Jim chuckled. “Bones, do me a favor, will you?”

“What?”

“Play 4D with Ael.”

At that Bones looked somber, and pulled Jim a bit off to one side, well away from the freestyle demonstration of Romulan hand-to-hand combat that seemed to have resumed over in the far left corner of the room. McCoy eased himself down into one of a pair of chairs in a conversation niche, and said, “I already did, a few hours ago.”

Jim had a sudden sinking feeling that that line of Ael’s about learning the game in “a few minutes” had not been mere casual braggadocio.
Damn
the woman! “And?”

“She blew me to plasma.”

“She beat
you!
”

“Don’t look so shocked. Don’t go all sorry for me, either! I learned lots more from the loss than I would have from the win. But it wasn’t a pretty picture.”

“What did she do?”

“Oh, no, Jim. I leave that as an exercise for the student. You’ll find a recording of the game in my office running files under the password ‘Trojan Horse.’ She knew I was recording it, by the way.”

“And?”

“She didn’t care. She knew what I was up to and just didn’t care. Chew on
that
one, Jim.”

“Later. There’s Uhura and your demolitions expert; I was looking for them.”

“Not for Ael, of course.”

“Of course. Come on, Bones.”

“One thing, Jim, before we go over there.”

“What?”

“Get some sleep this afternoon. You’re looking a bit raw…and besides, a brain full of lactic acid by-products and short on REM sleep makes for poor command performance.”

“Noted….”

They walked together over to the massive control console for the holography stage. Very little seemed to have changed since several days ago. There was Uhura, working at the controls on top of the console; and there was the lower half of Lieutenant Freeman, sitting cross-legged between the pedestal-legs of the console. The upper half of him was inside the works of the console; as Jim and McCoy came up, one arm came out from inside, felt around for one of the tools littered about, grabbed a circuit spanner, and went back inside again. The only addition to the scene was Ael, looking over Uhura’s shoulder with an interested expression.

“Got it, Nyota,” said the muffled voice from inside. “Try it now.”

“Right.” Uhura looked up at Jim, grinned happily, and said, “Say something, Captain.”

“Certainly. Aren’t you supposed to be on the bridge?”

“HEUOIPK EEIRWOINVSY SHTENIX GFAK HU MMHNINAAWAH!”
the console said, or at least that was what it sounded like.

“What the devil was that?” said McCoy. “Sounds like you’ve got a problem there, Lieutenant. A malfunction that shouts.”

“No, Doctor. It’s taken us the last half hour to get it to do that.” Uhura beamed at Jim. “Captain, I’m on my break at the moment. But this is the answer to that little poser you handed me the other day. And also the antidote, incidentally, to the trouble we had with signal leakage while Ael’s people were running communications.”

“I’m all ears,” Jim said. “One moment, though. Mr. Freeman, are you just shy, or did Lieutenant Burke finally lose her temper and do a hemicorporectomy on you?”

The half-a-person whooped with that very distinctive laugh of his—an even funnier sound than usual, smothered as it was inside the console—and carefully came out from under, brushing himself off as he stood. Regardless of his age (in the mid-thirties), his six-foot height, and his silver-shot hair (now somewhat disarranged from being inside the console), Jerry Freeman always struck Jim as one of the youngest of his crew. The man was eternally excited about something—for example, right now, those old sterries—but though the subject of the enthusiasm might change without notice, his total commitment to the subject of the moment never did. “What are you two up to?” Jim said.

“Words of one syllable, please,” said McCoy.

“Oh, come on, Bones. You have to learn some big words sooner or later. E-lec-tron. Can you say that?
Sure
you can….”

Freeman took a moment to smooth his hair back in place. “We’re confusing the intercom system, Doctor,” he said. “Among other things. But what the captain needed was a more effective jamming system for subspace communications than Fleet has bothered to design for wide-area use. Mostly they’ve tried to handle the ‘beam-tapping’ problem in deepspace communications by avoiding it…defeating it at sending and receiving ends with ‘unbreakable’ codes, hypercoherent wavicle packets, all that silliness. But what technology can produce, technology can sooner or later decode or unravel.”

Uhura was leaning on one elbow beside Ael with a humorous look on her face, watching her protégé lecture. “You can’t solve a problem that way,” she said. “Fleet has been ignoring the medium through which the messages travel, considering deepspace too big and unmanageable to handle. And it’s true that ‘broadcast’ jamming of the sort done in a planet’s ionosphere is impossible out here; while the relatively small-scale jamming already available to us is useless for our present purposes. So what Jerry and I have been doing is finding a way to make space itself more amenable to being jammed…a method that’s an outgrowth of the way Jerry’s been making digital documents more amenable to being rechanneled.”

“Mr. Scott helped,” Jerry said. “We used material from the parts bank to build a very small warpfield generator of the kind used in warp-capable shuttlecraft. We attached that to one of the little message buoys that the ship jettisons in jeopardy situations. Then we adjusted the warpfield generator so that it would twist space just slightly over a large cubic area, causing the contours of surrounding subspace to favor randomly directed tachyon flow along certain ‘tunnels’ at a certain packet frequency—”

“Good-bye,” McCoy said. “I’m off to do something simple. A hemicorporectomy, possibly.”

“It makes subspace much easier to jam,” Mr. Freeman said, sounding rather desperate. “That’s all.”

“Why didn’t you say that?” McCoy muttered.

“I did.”

“It also takes a lot of power,” Jim said thoughtfully. “Even a hefty warpfield generator would only have a limited life expectancy.”

“Yes, sir. Four hours is our predicted upper limit. But for those four hours, nobody trying to use subspace communication is going to hear anything but what sounds like a lot of ‘black noise’—stellar wind and so forth. And whatever they try to send will be perverted into the same noise.”

“Range?”

“Presently about a thousand cubic light-years, Captain. If you want more, you can have it, but the life of the generator becomes inversely shorter in proportion to the extension of the jamming buoy’s range.”

Jim nodded—he had rather expected that. “All right. How many of them can you put together for me in the next four hours?”

Uhura and Freeman looked at each other. “We’ll need more people—”

“Get Scotty and the engineering staff on it.”

“We don’t dare overdrain the parts bank, sir,” Freeman said. “Will three more be enough?”

“They’ll have to be. Ael, how about it? How fast are your people likely to understand this if they come up against it?”

The commander looked dubious. “Hard to tell, Captain. They are not all idiots like LLunih, or as complacent as t’Kaenmie and tr’Arriufvi, who’re pacing us in
Helm
and
Wildfire.
I would delay as long as possible before deploying such a device; that would give any interested observer less time to become suspicious and start deducing what was going on.”

Yes,
Jim thought,
you would say that, wouldn’t you? No matter what you were up to.
But he put the thought aside for the moment. “Agreed,” he said. “At our present rate we should be hitting the ‘breakaway’ point, where we drop our pursuit, in about five hours, correct?”

“That’s so, Captain.”

“Fine. We’ll drop one of those buoys there as we begin the engagement, to keep your three friends from yelling for help. One we’ll drop in the area of Levaeri when we reach it. To the third one I want the fourth warp generator attached so that it has starflight capability as well as the subspace alteration function. We’ll send it off past Levaeri, along the likeliest vector of approach for an unexpected ship. Think about that, Commander, and let me know.”

Ael blinked at Jim. “But if the ship is unexpected—” Then she smiled. “Ah, Hilaefve’s Paradox, eh Captain? Very well. I will think about it for you.”

“Good. Uhura, Mr. Freeman, take what people you need and get on it. One thing before you go:
why
have you taught the holography console to shout gibberish?”

Uhura chuckled. “Captain, it takes months of practice and skill to handle a ship’s communications board so that there’s no signal leakage through the shields. The problem is, after working with a board for awhile, a comm officer does that without thinking of it—and I didn’t think to warn poor Aidoann. Not that she would have known what to do about it—I haven’t had time to teach her all the board’s little tricks. So Jerry took the same random number generator he used in the jamming buoy’s tachyon-switching protocols and adapted it to the multiuse programmable logic solid that every intercom in the ship has inside it. The solids will now encode and decode voices and data at their sending and receiving ends; signal along the circuitry, which is where the leakage comes from, will now only manifest as that gibberish you heard—so that even while Ael’s people are handling our intercoms, we can say anything we have to without worrying about being overheard, or needing people to run around with notes….”

“Nice work,” Jim said, and both Uhura and Freeman looked exceptionally pleased. “Now I need another four hours of it. Uhura, have Lieutenant Mahasë cover for you on the bridge till you’re done. Both of you scoot!”

They did. Jim watched them go, and Ael moved around to join him and McCoy. “If we’re to be in battle in four hours,” she said, “I’d best go see to
Bloodwing
and make sure my people are ready.”

“Sounds good to me, Commander. Bones, I’m about ready for my nap. Have me paged at point six, unless something requires my attention sooner.”

“Right.”

Ael went off in one direction, and the doctor in another. Jim just stood there for a moment, watching them both out of sight—then headed down to his cabin, via engineering, thinking very hard about chess.

He was still thinking about it two hours later, after his nap turned into a tossing-and-turning session, and even one of McCoy’s mild soothers left him completely awake. On Jim’s desk screen, the ship’s computer had obligingly translated the chesscubic’s holographic display of McCoy’s game with Ael into a 2D graphic, and displayed it for him. It made a fascinating study—the first moves sure on McCoy’s part, tentative on Ael’s; then roles reversing—McCoy moving with more of an outward show of caution, apparently seeing what Ael would do if offered the run of the cubic. There was a point at which the computer recorded a long interval between moves; she had hesitated. Jim could almost see those cool eyes of hers across the cubic, suddenly lifted to assess not only the tactical situation but the man who sat across from her—who was, at the moment, himself a tactic. And then came a series of moves that were, to put it mildly, insulting. She became “polite” to McCoy. She moved out into the cubic, but genteelly, almost as if not wanting to beat him, almost as if they were playing on the same side. McCoy put up with it for about ten minutes, then timed about half his pieces out, preparing to dump them on her like a ton of neutronium in six very visible moves. He could seem insulting too, when it suited his purposes.

And she derailed Bones as totally as Bones had derailed Spock. Three of her pieces timed out, not even critical ones. Three moves later, McCoy’s pieces all came back—into cubes that were suddenly no longer vacant. Annihilation, all over the board. McCoy had one stronghold left for his king and both of his queens.

Ael sacrificed both her queens to his—and checkmated his king with three pawns and a knight fork.

Her first game.

She didn’t even care, Jim. Chew on
that.

He did. It tasted awful.

—and the red alert sirens started whooping, and there was no time to waste worrying anymore.
Trust her,
he told himself bitterly as he leapt up from the chair, pulling the velour on over the undertunic.
Or don’t. But make up your mind.