Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (4 page)

She shrugged, a quick amused gesture. “Sir, I thought so too. Problem is, I find that working on the
Enterprise
is more fun than taking a vacation anywhere else.” That made Jim grin back at her appreciatively; he felt the same way. She peered over McCoy’s shoulder at the cubic. “Looks like there’s shortly going to be plenty to do tonight, though. He always gives us more work when he’s upset….”

“Lia,” McCoy said, delicately touching one cubic-control surface after another and still not looking up, “hush up before I put r-levosulamine in your coffee and give you cerebral hemorrhoids.” Lia hushed, though not without a look of tolerant merriment at Jim and Harb. “…Spock? Ready for you.” McCoy looked across at the Vulcan. “Three moves.”

“Very well,” Spock said, and touched several controls one after another, taking his three permitted moves in rapid succession. First one of his bishops, then the second, moved out of their positions in the center cubic—not entirely relinquishing control of it, but drawing the noose around Jim’s king just a bit tighter; and the third piece, a knight, came in and sat on the one spot on the seventh level that Jim had been praying Spock would overlook. “Check,” Spock said calmly, tilting his head just a bit and gazing into the cubic as if to celebrate the lovely knight fork.

Jim groaned softly. Without a word Spock was commenting on what happened to people who set traps for their opponents and then purposely waved the fact in their opponents’ faces. “Your move, Doctor,” Spock said to Bones, with the same mostly-hidden sympathy he had shown Jim.

McCoy scowled at the control pad, touched one section. One of Jim’s few remaining useful pieces, a knight, slipped up from the second level where it had been protecting several pawns on a diagonal from Spock’s white-cube bishop. It took the secondary knight option, three levels straight up and one cube over, blocking the check and threatening one of Spock’s queens.

“A valiant choice, Doctor,” Spock said. “But I would not have expected you to make a move that would so prolong the game’s suffering.” He reached out a hand to his pad. “The response is obvious, though unfortunately rather crude. Queen to level eight queen’s-rook three, resuming the pin and now threatening your knight on the vertical diagonal.”

Spock rested his head on his folded hands again. “Your move,” he said calmly—

—and all hell broke loose in the cubic. One of Jim’s rooks appeared in the cube occupied by Spock’s whitecube bishop, sacrificing itself in their mutual annihilation. The other rook appeared in the cube to which Spock’s first queen had moved, and took her out too.

Both Spock’s eyebrows went straight up. “‘Kamikaze’ chess, Doctor?” he said, sounding—to Jim’s ears—as if he were fighting down astonishment very hard. “Marginally effective. But inelegant—”

“Mr. Spock,” Bones said, gazing into the cubic, “generally I prefer to work with protoplasers and light-scalpels. But for some things—knives are still the best.”

A pawn timed back in and blew up Spock’s second queen, the only piece on the board left in a really threatening position. And two other pawns timed in—one in the unprotected eighth file of Spock’s ground level, one in the eighth file of his eighth level—then both sizzled with transporter effect, and with charming simultaneity turned into queens.

Very slowly, Spock reached out and touched a control on his side of the cubic. Black’s king fell over onto its side, fizzed briefly bright with transporter effect, and vanished.

Jim and Harb and Lia all stared.

Spock’s absolute expressionlessness was more eloquent than any words. McCoy gazed into the cubic, lifted his arms to stretch, and as he did so, said very softly, as if to himself, “So. One whole being…” He stood up. “Thank you, Mr. Spock,” he said, nodding gravely at the Vulcan. Then McCoy turned away and grinned at Jim, leaning slightly toward him. “You really must stop underestimating yourself,” Bones said in Jim’s ear. And the chief surgeon straightened, and strolled off toward the rec deck doors, whistling.

The intercom whistled as he went, a note a third higher than McCoy’s. “
Bridge to Captain Kirk,”
said Uhura’s voice out of the air.

Jim simply looked at Harb Tanzer for a moment before answering. Harb shook his head at Jim and went off across the rec deck to find something to tend to. Lia Burke, staring in astonished delight after McCoy, realized what she was doing, excused herself, and strode off in the doctor’s wake. “Yes, Uhura?” Jim said.

“Sir, we have a dispatch in from Starfleet that needs your command ciphers for decoding. Do you want it in your quarters?”

“No, that’s all right. I’ll be up on the bridge in a few minutes.”

“Yes, Captain. Bridge out.”

Jim just looked down at the cubic for a moment, then across at Spock. The Vulcan, somewhat recovered, quirked one eyebrow at his captain. “Jim,” Spock said, “perhaps you will wish to make a note of the date and time. I admit to astonishment.”

“I admit to a damn sight more,” Jim said softly. “Spock, did I miss something?”

The soul of tact as always, Spock hesitated. “Various opportunities—yes. Yet the winner of a game does so no less than the loser. And where one mind may find a way out of a position, another may see no plain way—yet be no worse a player for it. The motivations and patterns within a living mind, the endless diversity of the ways those patterns deal with new occurrences—and one’s success at understanding those patterns, or not—those are what make play delightful. Not expertise alone. One of your Terran artists said it: ‘There is hope in honest error—none in the icy perfection of the mere stylist.’”

Jim heard the message, and smiled, knowing better than to thank Spock openly for it. “True. But I made enough ‘honest errors’ in that game to last me a month; and specifically, I never even saw the possibility of McCoy’s whole final scenario. I
should
have seen it. Was the table recording? I want to take that endgame apart later, with you looking over my shoulder and pointing out my mistakes.”

“Certainly, Captain. The analysis will be beneficial to your play.”

Jim nodded. “At this point, I suspect anything would be an improvement.” And he smiled again, this time at catching the amused flicker of eyes that said Spock appreciated not having any such statement made about
his
own game. “Come on, Mr. Spock—let’s see what miracle Fleet wants us to pull off today.”

“The question is,” said Uhura, gazing down at the communications station’s screen, “what’s really going on out there? You don’t send such a collection of firepower—along with a destroyer, no less—all out together on a routine patrol. Who does Fleet think it’s fooling?”

Those were fair questions, for which Jim had no answer. He shook his head and looked down at the dispatch burning on Uhura’s screen. To James T. Kirk, commanding NCC 1701
Enterprise
, blah, blah, blah…

Uhura frowned down at the dispatch, then glanced up at Kirk, looking wry. “It reveals a lot more by what it doesn’t say than by what it does, Captain. I haven’t seen such a roundabout way of referring to the Neutral Zone in years. Do you suppose Fleet’s afraid someone’s cracked our command ciphers?”

“Maybe. Though that’s supposed to be impossible….” Jim looked up from the message. “But you’re quite right, Uhura. There’s not so much as a hint about whatever’s going on out there.”

“Romulan trouble, certainly,” Uhura said. “And what exactly is ‘unusual breadth of discretion’ supposed to mean?”

Spock glanced up at the bridge ceiling, a resigned gesture, and for a Vulcan, an exasperated one. Jim shook his head. “It doesn’t mean anything
exactly
,” he said, “and that’s the problem. The section is a catchall reg for use in unstable situations. It means that if I need to go into this situation and break one or more directives, and if by doing so I keep the situation from blowing up, and Fleet likes the way I handled things, they’ll probably give me a medal. It also means that if they
don’t
like the way I handle the situation, they’ll probably court-martial me…whether I solve the problem or not.”

Uhura sighed. “Thus saving their own precious reputations, as usual.”

“Yes,” Spock said. “And thereby indicating that there is something afoot from which the higher echelons of Fleet feel their reputations must be saved. The situation must be grave indeed.”

“Speculating without data, Spock?” Jim said. “That’s a surprise.”

Spock made the gentle you-must-be-joking expression that Jim knew so well. “Sir, I am the
Enterprise
’s science officer. And politics is a science…no matter how clumsy, crude, and emotion-riddled a science I may find it. There is not much data, but enough to indicate this at least—that there is trouble of some kind occurring, or about to occur, in the Neutral Zone.”

“And that Starfleet wants its resident experts in things Romulan on the scene to deal with the problem,” Uhura said. “Meaning the
Enterprise…
and you two.”

Jim made a face. Having officers so sharp made for pleasant work much of the time, but it also meant that unpleasant truths came right out into the open. “Unfortunately, I have to agree with you both. But—that business aside—Spock, I can’t help being annoyed that, just as you’re starting to get some results, we have to break off our researches here, without even the courtesy of being given a good reason why, and go warping off on some fleet maneuver two thousand light-years away….”

“One thousand nine hundred sixty-eight point four five light-years,” Spock said. “Eight point three three days at warp eight.”

“Right. Dammit, just for once I’d like to start a mission, and take it right through to the end, and then stop, without being called away to do something else….”

“It is true,” the Vulcan said soberly, looking down at the dispatch, “that the data were finally beginning to correlate. But I am sure they will continue to do so in our absence.”

“Certainly…if some other ship continues the research. Heaven only knows if Fleet will bother to assign another. And besides, if what you’ve found so far is any indication, this isn’t just some dull little research that can be dropped and then come back to. If the stellar ecology in this part of space is really changing, the effects will be much more far-reaching than we even suspect now.
This
is the time to do something about it—not a month or a year from now, when it might be too late.”

Spock looked at Jim with an expression of ironic resignation. “Sir, we are entirely in agreement. But Starfleet, as we have noticed many times before, has its own priorities. And we have our duty.”

“Yes. I just wish their priorities and ours coincided more often. However, entropy is running, and things are the way they are….” Jim tapped a finger on Uhura’s console, thinking. “Well. Uhura, have the computer pull out the last several months’ Fleet dispatches and abstract everything that might be relevant to this business: intelligence reports, logs from ships on Neutral Zone patrol, what have you. Routine and classified information, both. Send it all through to my terminal and I’ll look at it before I go to bed.”

“Those data have been in your computer for the last twenty minutes,” said Uhura with a slow, mischievous grin, “and since you gave me your command ciphers, the classified materials have been there for about five.”

Jim smiled down at her. “Uhura, are you bucking for a raise?”

The smile she gave him back was amused, but weary. “Captain, gamma shift on this run has not exactly been Wrigley’s Pleasure Planet, if you catch my drift. I’ve been over my board from translator circuits to logic solids about a hundred times, out of sheer boredom.” She stretched a bit, cracking her knuckles. “Not a bad thing, actually; I’ve stuffed this station’s comm circuitry so full of neoduotronic upgrades that the main board can probably hear other ships
think
. But having something else to do is a delight. Which reminds me—” She turned back to the board. “Here’s something that came in just before that dispatch did. It should be done transcribing now.” She reached out to one of the comm board’s recording slots, pulled a slim cassette out of it, and handed the cassette to Spock.

“Mail?” Jim said.

Spock turned the cassette over, reading the labelstrip that burned bright at his touch, then faded slowly. “Not precisely, Captain. This appears to be some additional data I requested from the Federation Interstellar Commercial Transport Authority—a master list of all ship losses in known space over the past several years. It should be most helpful in ascertaining whether some trends I have been detecting in the data we’ve previously amassed are in fact real trends, or statistical artifact.”