Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (71 page)

So that’s one possibility,
he thought, sitting back in his chair.
And there’s another. One of these two breakouts is a feint, to distract us from something more important happening somewhere else.

He sat looking up at the map.
You must assume that they are preparing some great stroke against you,
Ael had said.
Revenge…

And they’ll have more reason for it than ever, now,
Jim thought.
Seven more of their ships, we’ve written off…with their own weapon, too.
He touched the tabletop and started the map rotating again, more slowly this time.
I need information we probably aren’t going to be able to get,
he thought.
I need to know what Rihannsu resources are sited over here at the moment.
He looked over at the area where the two Empires ran together near the Neutral Zone.
And what’s been moved into that area recently…

Again, information he probably wasn’t going to get, certainly not over an open channel from Starfleet. Not that he didn’t want to talk to them anyway about the status of the monitoring satellites, and those seven ships.

Those ships…

The idea that there should be a leak to the Rihannsu from Starfleet upset him profoundly. But at the same time, such leaks could be used to the advantage of a commander in the field…if you fed the correct information into them. You might be able to track the leak by where the information came out, in what shape. And even if you couldn’t, your opponent would be misled…with results that you could turn to your own advantage.

Jim sat there a long while.
Ael will be back in the morning,
he thought,
to look in on that conference with Scotty and K’s’t’lk. This is the last chance we’re going to have to confab before we have half of Starfleet looking over our shoulders.

Time to make our plans….

“Jim,” said McCoy’s voice behind him.

“I thought you’d turned in,” Jim said.

“No,” McCoy said. “Just off having a talk with Spock.”

Jim raised his eyebrows. “Anything I need to know about?”

“Ael.”

“What else,” Jim said, and yawned, and rubbed his eyes.

McCoy came to sit down by him, and looked up at the map. “Yes,” he said. “I thought so.”

“And what’s your tactical assessment, Doctor?”

“That you’re about to head straight up the creek without a paddle.”

Jim would have phrased it a little more strongly. “Bones,” he said, “thank you. I’ll call the Strat-Tac department at Starfleet and tell them you said so.”

McCoy’s look was unusually gentle. “Jim, listen to me. The way you’re heading, you are shortly going to be caught in between
Bloodwing
and Starfleet again. It’s not like you to make the same mistake twice.”

“Well,” Jim said, “you can put your mind at rest on that account, Bones, because this time I wasn’t the one who made it.” He looked up at the map. “
They
did.”

“Starfleet?”

“They did not send
Enterprise
to meet
Bloodwing
here just because they know she and I are…” He was about to say “friends,” but the word suddenly seemed both likely to be completely misunderstood, even by Bones, and completely inaccurate, for reasons he could barely describe to himself. He looked up to find McCoy looking closely at him. “Associates,” Jim said.

“And in some ways,” Bones said, “very much alike.”

“That may be so,” Jim said. “But they expect me to find out what she’s going to do—or worse still, to anticipate it—and to act on what I discover, in Starfleet’s best interests.”

“And can you do that?” McCoy said.

“It’s not a ‘can,’” Jim said, “as you know very well. It’s a ‘must.’ My oaths to Starfleet are intact, Bones, and I intend to keep them that way.”

“But at the same time…”

“She has her own priorities, Bones,” Jim said, settling back in the chair. “She wants peace…but she knows the only way that’s going to happen, on the Romulan side of things, is war, and sooner, rather than later.” He was quiet for a few moments. “I’m short of less slanted data at the moment, and I’d welcome some. But right now there isn’t any.”

“There may be some,” McCoy said, “when the Romulans arrive.”

Jim raised his eyebrows at that. “Oh?”

“Just a guess,” McCoy said, “but I would be very surprised if at least one of the sources Starfleet’s been gettin’ its data from was not on that mission when it turns up.”

Jim eyed McCoy thoughtfully. “Medicine is a creative art,” Bones said, “just like command…and doctors get hunches the same way starship captains do.”

“I hope you’re right,” Jim said. “Anyway…” He looked up at the map again. “Ael is a realist, if nothing else. I think she knows as well as I do that the situation, as it’s presently shaping up, will result in war, no matter what she does. Equally from the realist’s point of view, she has decided to play the active role, not the passive; to take control of the forces that are looking toward her now, as a catalyst, and to use them.”

Jim slumped in the chair and rubbed his eyes again. “Yup. She’s a catalyst, all right,” he said.

“Nuhirrien…”
McCoy, very softly.

“What?”

“You said people there were looking toward her. That’s
nuhirrien,
almost literally,” Bones said. “It’s Rihannsu. Charisma, we would say…the quality of attracting people, of being followed by them.” He let out a long breath.

“I keep forgetting, you did that chemical-learning course for the language.”

“Sometimes I still wish I hadn’t. I can’t even
look
at a bowl of soup anymore.”

Jim thought about that, and resolved firmly not to ask why. “Anyway,” Bones said, “
nuhirrien
is a dangerous characteristic, for Rihannsu. Dangerous for Ael, too, if it seems she’s got it.”

“Why?”

“It’s more associational than anything else,” McCoy said. “The Ruling Queen had
nuhirrien,
they say. People would follow her, the way they once followed Hitler, centuries ago.”

“Into tremendous evil,” Jim said softly.

“Sometimes. It can blind people to the realities.”

“We’d better hope it doesn’t come to that,” he said. “Bones, was there anything else? I’m about done here.”

“Just so you know,” McCoy said, “that, despite the imponderables…we’re with you.”

Jim stood up. “It’s worth knowing,” he said.

He killed the display and made for the door, with McCoy in tow. “You know,” Jim said, “you’re the one who should be talking to her. You’ve got the language, now.”

“She’s been avoiding me,” McCoy said as they went down the corridor, “or so it seems.”

There
was data, and a piece that Jim wasn’t sure what to do with. “Well,” he said, “see what you can do about it. Choices are going to have to be made thick and fast around here in a couple of days, and I don’t have all the information I need as yet.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Bones said as Jim paused outside the turbolift, and its doors opened for him. “Meanwhile, you should get some sleep. Early meeting in the morning.”

“Yes. Good night, Bones.”

“Night, Jim,” McCoy said, and the turbolift doors shut on him.

“Deck twelve,” Jim said. The lift hummed upward.

The big end of a court-martial,
Jim thought, and shivered.

If there was one thing Arrhae had not been expecting about going to space, it was having very much room to do it in. Long long ago, in another life (or so it felt), she had been used to fairly cramped quarters on starships; not unpleasantly so, but you wouldn’t have room in your quarters for a game of
nha’rei,
either. Since then, in all her life as
hru’hfe
in House Khellian, the sense of her personal life as something lived in a fairly tight, small space had been reinforced to the point where she simply forgot about the possibility of things being any other way. On becoming Senator, and more senior in House Khellian than any servant, things had changed…though again, not to extremes, the house was richer in honor than in space.

But once again everything had shifted. She had climbed into the flitter that had been sent for her the evening after she talked to Eveh tr’Anierh—having spent the whole day, it seemed to her, not packing, but reassuring the household that she would be all right—and realized that her life had become peculiar again. The flitter had not taken her to the spaceport, but straight up and out of atmosphere, to the new heavy cruiser
Gorget.
She had stepped from the comfort of the flitter out onto a great shining floor in the cruiser’s shuttle bay, with yet another honor guard waiting, this time of Fleet personnel; and these had brought small arms up to honor poise and walked her through the corridors of
Gorget,
Arrhae thought, like a queen. At a door high up in the deck structure of the cruiser they had halted, and one had opened the door for her; and Arrhae had walked into a space in which she could have had that
nha’rei
game, if she had chosen.

Huge windows on space, and carpeting, and antique furniture, and artwork, and a table off to one side, laden with food, and looking so good that Arrhae had to remind herself to treat it with disdain at the moment—the place was palatial.
If all Fleet lived like this, I could see why young Rihannsu would fight for commissions,
Arrhae thought. But she had a strong feeling that most crewmen didn’t live like this; she knew that
Gorget
had recently been refitted, probably with an eye to the transport of notables and government figures.
If a small fish like me gets rooms like these,
she wondered,
what do the more senior Senators and the diplomats get?

The honor guard had presently taken itself away, and Arrhae had discovered that the suite came with a small service staff of its own—maidservant and steward, the more senior of whom, Ffairrl the steward, bowed and scraped to Arrhae in a most unseemly way, one that suggested that he was either a spy (possible) or used to being mistreated by the high-ranking guests (equally possible). She allowed him to show her around the suite—a master bedroom with a bath suite that must have been most extravagant in water use, even aboard a starship where water could be manufactured at will from ramscoop “scrapings”; a bedroom and sitting room which together were nearly a quarter the size of House Khellian’s Great Hall; and the outer meeting room and sitting room, with a buffet sideboard loaded with piles of food and pitchers of drink, and a small ancillary workroom and study, equipped with a state-of-the-art computer and communications suite. The tour over, Ffairrl begged to be allowed to give Arrhae food and drink. This she allowed him to do, and then sent him away, over his protests, while she wandered through the place, getting the feel of it and wondering where the listening and scanning devices were.

In the little office Arrhae had found a tidy printout of information concerning the mission. This went well enough with the “solid” information which she had received by courier that morning, and had read between fits of dealing with her own panicky household staff. The solid had contained copies of the legislation that had empowered the mission to leave, the mission statement, the document with which the mission would present the Federation on arrival, and a much fatter document containing speculation by intel staff on the Federation’s possible reactions to the presentation document. The printout sitting on the desk included names and some limited personal information on each of the Rihannsu delegates empowered to actually negotiate on the Empire’s behalf, the Senators assisting them, and the so-called observer group, of which Arrhae was one. She flipped along to her own description and was amused to see its brevity.
Signeted 20.10.02156,
it said.
Senator for i’Ramnau-Hwaimmen. House: Khellian. Decorations: none.
Many of the other biographies had a category that said “Service,” but not hers. Arrhae wondered if someone had been embarrassed by the prospect of the jokes it might enable.

She had looked up from her examination of her biography that evening at the slight shudder that had gone through the ship.
Gorget
was moving out on impulse, heading past the golden glare of Eisn; when there was enough distance between her and the star, she went into warp. Arrhae had breathed out when that happened, and then realized how she had been holding her breath.
Anything could happen to me now,
she had thought.
What if I never see that star again?

The thought had left her peculiarly cold. Arrhae had pushed it aside, taking her reading out into the main room, where she could keep the buffet sideboard company.

The next day, and the day after that and the day after that, she had been kept busy with meetings with the other delegates, other members of the observing group, and with more reading. Arrhae knew that she had very much been tossed in at the deep end of Rihannsu politics, but she was moderately well prepared for that. Her years on ch’Rihan had not been spent only telling people where to dust and mop. Part of the job Starfleet had assigned her was to be as perfect in understanding of the language as she could, and this had meant doing all the listening and reading, of all kinds, for which her position allowed her time. By virtue of that—time stolen late at night, reading and watching the news services, days spent in judicious eavesdropping—she had learned as much about the politics of the Two Worlds as most Rihannsu ever did, and more than many ever bothered to. Now, of course, the game had moved up to a higher level, and she started meeting the faces who belonged to names which until now she had only read or heard of.

Noonmeal on the first day had been another lavishly catered affair—Arrhae made a note to herself to find out whether the ship had a gymnasium, or even a steambath where she might try to melt some of the carbohydrates off her between “briefings.” It had ostensibly been informal, a “meet and greet” gathering of the delegates, negotiators, and observers. The way people carried themselves, and the groups into which they gathered, soon enough told Arrhae that, despite the polite introductions, everyone knew what everyone else’s job was, and what their status was, and anyone who stepped out of position would soon enough be reminded. The negotiators kept to themselves, talking in a jovial and important way, and looked down on the delegates: the delegates did the same and looked down on the observers. The observers, having no one to look down on but the officers and staff of
Gorget,
did so, and Arrhae watched with considerable annoyance as they ordered the poor underlings around.

Arrhae for her own part tried to be social with her fellow observers as she met them over the second and third days. They were mostly jurists and tribunes—sober, sometimes somber people who seemed rather taken aback by the position into which they had suddenly been elevated—and a couple of other Senators whom Arrhae knew slightly. One of these, a round, blunt, balding little man named Imin tr’Phalltei, had plainly expected her to carry the drinks tray around out of habit when he met her first in the Senate, and was openly surprised to see her here. The other, a handsome, tall, broad-shouldered woman named Odirne t’Melanth, a Havrannsu with a name like that, had greeted her kindly when they met at that noonmeal, and Arrhae had realized that she found all this as disconcerting, and as absurd, as Arrhae did. “That lot over there,” Odirne said, signing with her chin at the negotiating group which had ostentatiously seated itself, as if of right, up at the top of the table, “do they even want to breathe the same air as we do? Great swaths of observing we’ll be able to do, indeed, once they get down to their work. As if they’ll let us near them when they’re making their alleged minds up about what to do!”

At first glimpse Arrhae was inclined to agree with her. Some of the negotiators were not exactly congenial types. And two of them were Praetors, though not on the level of the Three, of course—none of the Triumvirate would go out on a mission like this: their job was to sit home and rule on the information the underlings, even the very high-class underlings, sent to them. One of the two Praetors wore a face Arrhae recognized slightly from McCoy’s trial: Hloal t’Illialhlae, the tall, dark, hawk-faced woman who had been wife to the commander of
Battlequeen,
one of the ships lost to the Federation attack on Levaeri V. His death had made a martyr of him, and a harpy of her—if anyone would be pushing for the last drop of blood from the Federation in this negotiation, it would be she. The other Praetor was Gurrhim tr’Siedhri, a great name on ch’Havran. He was a big, bluff, growling
mirhwen
of a man, a fire-breathing warrior and former Senator, one of the stranger and more individual figures in the Praetorate, and very much a nobleman in the old mold—as proud of being a farmer (if on a spectacular scale, for his family’s lands spread around a quarter of the planet) as a poet. He was one of very few exceptions to the rule that the negotiators and general delegates on the mission were inimical to the Federation. Tr’Siedhri did not like the Federation much, but he did not hate it either; and he emphatically did not fear it—which, Arrhae thought, was possibly a contributing cause to his lack of hatred. Either way, his presence here was something of a puzzle to Arrhae, for he was ill liked by most of the other Praetors, who had to put up with him whether they liked it or not because of the vast wealth and power his family had amassed over the past three centuries.
Unless,
Arrhae thought,
someone has sent him here to embarrass him somehow—which will happen if he tries to treat the Federation fairly, and all the others side against him.

Or possibly someone wants to try to get rid of him,
said some small suspicious voice in the back of Arrhae’s head.

There might always be suspicion…but Rihannsu life was full of unproven suspicion and paranoia, and eventually it would fade.

Arrhae thought about that as the second and third days went by, and she went to meetings and firstmeals and lastmeals with her fellow observers, making sure that she was available for the contacts she had been told would come. The one that did come, finally, on the morning of the third day, was as unwelcome as it could have been.

Her steward was bustling around trying to feed her, and Arrhae had been trying to resist him, while attempting to put right the formal clothes that she had packed—they had all looked good in the clothespress, all these kilts and flowing dark tunics, but now they seemed to require endless belting and pinning to drape as they were meant to. And the doorchime had gone, and Arrhae had breathed out in annoyance; it would be the “door-opener”—not that
Gorget
’s doors did not open automatically by themselves, but this particular Fleet officer was doing the same office as a ground-bound opener, arriving to escort guests around the corridors of the ship, which was all too easy to become lost in, and making sure they got where they were needed without putting their noses in anywhere they didn’t belong, or stealing the silver. “Of your courtesy, get that,” Arrhae had said to the steward, turning away to try to straighten out one more wayward pin, and then very carefully sitting down to her dinner. She was ravenous; the good dark smell of the
osilh
stew that Ffairrl had laid out on the little table beside the most comfortable chair had been making her stomach rumble, and Arrhae was determined to do something about that quickly, before she embarrassed herself in the day’s first meeting.

The door slipped open and the steward said not a word. Arrhae sighed, looked up…and found herself looking at Commander t’Radaik of the Rihannsu Intelligence Service.

What have I done to deserve this,
Arrhae thought, trying to ignore the shiver that ran down her spine. The woman stood there, with those oblique eyes and sharp cheekbones of hers, tall and cool and good-looking in her dark, green-sashed uniform of tunic and breeches and too-shiny boots, and gazed down from her considerable height at Arrhae with an expression that suggested it took more than clothes and a signet to make the Senator. Still,
“Deihu,”
she said, and bowed, and Arrhae gave about her two-thirds of a breath’s bow from where she sat, not an overly committal gesture, one way or the other.

Arrhae looked over at the steward. “Out,” she said, so that t’Radaik would be deprived of the opportunity to say it first. Ffairrl took himself away at speed.

“Well,
deihu,”
said t’Radaik, looking around her with incompletely concealed amusement, “you seem to have settled in nicely.”

“Except for interruptions,” Arrhae said, “which not the Elements Themselves could prevent, it seems. What can I do for you, Commander?” She lifted the ale cup standing beside her plate, and drank.

T’Radaik bent that cool, arrogant regard on her again. “You have spoken in the past with the Terran, Mak’khoi,” she said.

“With no great pleasure,” Arrhae said, and at the time it had been true. She picked up a small round flatbread that was still warm, tore it in two, and turned her attention to the plate of dark, spicy
osilh
stew that Ffairrl had laid out for her.