Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (75 page)

“No,” Jim said. “It just came that way.”

She gave him an amused and extremely skeptical look. “You truly believe that this is a coincidence?”

“The universe has seen stranger ones,” Jim said.

Ael raised her eyebrows at him, leaning back in the seat. “Perhaps. Though I should like to discuss the statistical realities of the situation with Spock someday. Doubtless even in his dry way he might cast light on the provenance of this miracle which he might not otherwise intend.”

Jim wasn’t sure what to make of that idea. “But there are those of my people who would have taken such an apparition in our own skies as an explicit message from the Elements,” Ael said. “An invitation to venture out and discover what it was that had engineered such a spectacular and transient terror. Or simply a message that so colossal a coincidence could not have simply happened: that it was indeed
made,
and that there were makers.”

Jim nodded. “Oh, we have our own people who think that the Preservers or some other of the ‘seeding’ species passed through fifty thousand years or so ago, and nudged the moon just enough in its orbit to produce the effect.” He shrugged. “There’s no proof of it, naturally. The moon does have some microscopic orbital ‘wobbles’ that can’t be accounted for by its interactions with the Earth and the sun; but as for what causes them—” He shrugged.

“But meanwhile,” Ael said, “the wonder remains. And may yet do us good, for worlds used to eclipses even without such a perfect fit tend to be further ahead in research on coronal science than others. Earth being one of them.”

Scotty smiled. “Flattery will get you everywhere, lass,” he said, not looking up.

Jim looked back at the eclipse, still caught in the repeating loop of the few minutes of totality as seen from the northern Pacific. The so-called Great Eclipse or Fireball Eclipse of 2218 had not only had an unusually long totality, but had coincided with a sunspot maximum, and the solar storm ongoing during the umbra’s track across the Earth had produced coronal behavior like nothing ever seen before during an eclipse—outrageous, frightening, enough to give the impression to a viewer that the sun was actually angry, and might do something terminal to its subject worlds. Ael reached out and touched the control to let the image continue through its normal cycle. “…It’s temporary, at any rate,” Jim said. “The moon’s getting slowly further away from us. Thirty or thirty-five thousand years from now, and the fit won’t be perfect anymore. Nothing but annular eclipses for us, then, until the oscillation stops and the moon’s orbit begins closing in again.”

“And then what?”

“Then it starts to fall,” Jim said, “and tidal forces pull it apart. If we’re lucky, Earth ends up with rings. If we’re not lucky…rings, and most likely a ‘cometary winter.’”

Ael looked rueful. “Much later, though, I assume.”

“Five or six hundred thousand of our years, give or take a few.”

Ael smiled slightly. “Not something we need worry about overmuch, then. Our own concerns lie closer in time.”

Jim nodded. The corona licked and lashed in apparent fury; then there came a tremor at the trailing limb, the solar brilliance piercing through the lunar valleys, and the “diamond ring” effect flashed out in full glory, blinding. Ael stood up, gazing at it with the expression of someone faced with an insoluble riddle. “The Elements clearly do have a sense of humor,” she said at last, as the sun showed a full blazing crescent of its limb and the corona faded to invisibility. “Unwise of us to ignore it when we see it being displayed. Few are angrier, the poet says, than those who tell a joke and hear no laughter….”

“I don’t like to step on anyone’s punch lines either,” Jim said.

McCoy came in and paused, looking at the eclipse with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Jim noticed the look. “Problems, Bones?”

“After I saw the recording of the bridge view from yesterday,” McCoy said, folding his arms, “I don’t much like the look of
that.
”

“If you like, Doctor,” Spock said as he came in the door, “I will send down to catering for a pot for you to bang on, to frighten away the wolf.”

“‘Wolf’?”

“The one you no doubt feel sure is eating the sun.”

McCoy’s look got slightly sourer as he sat down at the table. “No need to get cute, Mr. Spock. I was merely suggesting that the sun here looks like it was about to pull the same kind of trick 15 Trianguli tried yesterday.”

Spock sat down with a slight expression of weariness. “Earth’s primary has been known to produce the occasional coronal mass ejection,” Spock said, “but normally it does so unassisted.”

“Yes, well, 15 isn’t likely to try anything like that unassisted
now,
is it, as a result of being tampered with?”

“I would estimate the odds for that as being—”

“Minuscule,” Scotty said, and “Vanishingly small,” K’s’t’lk said, and “Statistically insignificant,” Spock said, all of them together.

Jim and Ael exchanged a glance. “So much agreement,” Jim said, sitting down at the head of the table, “frightens me more than usual. I would move out of the area immediately, except that people are meeting us here. How long till the task force turns up now, Spock?”

“Twelve hours and thirty-three minutes, Captain.”

“Thank you.”

Other crew began coming in: more science department staff, especially several of the more senior astrophysics specialists; and a couple more department heads, including Uhura; and some of Ael’s people from
Bloodwing,
among them tr’Keirianh the master engineer and Aidoann t’Khialmnae, who was doubling as science officer until another more junior crewman should be elevated to that position from the ranks.
Or what they have left of ranks,
Jim thought as the rest of the group filtered in.
I wish I could help her out somehow. Spock’s had a look at their automation by now, but there’s no substitute for people you can trust….

“Are we all here?” Jim said. “All right. Anything we need to handle before we get started?”

“One thing, Captain,” Uhura said. “Just before I left the bridge, we received a message from the
Sempach.
There have been some schedule changes, it seems. At least a couple of the other ships will be joining us en route to the meeting point at RV Tri, and
Sempach
is now scheduled to rendezvous with us much earlier than the other starships meeting us here, perhaps within the hour. Commodore Danilov sends his compliments, and would like to see you at your earliest convenience.”

“Very well.” Uhura would have repeated the commodore’s phrasing word for word, which made Jim just slightly nervous. “Earliest convenience” might sound polite enough, but it was not-very-secret code for “the minute I arrive, and not a second later.” Dan was either very worried about something, or his nose was out of joint, or possibly both. But at least Jim thought he might hear something from Starfleet that they hadn’t seen fit to transmit to
Enterprise
on the usual channels.
Or I’m going to get a very long grilling about what happened when we got here….

“All right,” Jim said. “Let’s hear what you’ve got.”

K’s’t’lk tapped at the reader on the table in front of her and brought up her own notes, which she started chiming her way through at speed for the benefit of the science department staff on hand. Jim, who had read her preliminary abstract over breakfast and had then immediately resolved never to do such a thing again before the caffeine took, now settled back to wait for the expanded analysis, which would mean more to him than the raw figures.

It took a while, during which he had leisure to worry about Danilov’s arrival. “We had been looking for indications of what stars would definitely not be candidates for the Sunseed process,” K’s’t’lk finally said, “so that we could concentrate on the ones that
were,
and could avoid spreading our energies into areas that didn’t require them. We feel we don’t really need to worry too much about stars that genuinely fall into the ‘dwarf’ category, because they are the most difficult candidates for induction…and indeed, without some genuinely inspired on-the-fly calculations by Mr. Spock, we would not have managed induction at 15 Tri at all. Our conclusion is that dwarf stars are not massive enough to produce coronae with a high enough ‘ambient’ energy level to induce ion storms using Sunseed. And this includes Sol, which is a genuine nonmarginal dwarf G0, so that’s one less thing for the Federation to worry about.”

The computer console chirped softly as Scotty worked over it, preparing another display. “However, there are plenty of other non-dwarf stars that have inhabited planets,” Scotty said, “the ratio being about one dwarf to four. Based on what we’ve seen most recently, and on data from the induction that followed the pursuit of
Enterprise, Intrepid,
and
Bloodwing
by the Romulans on the way out of Levaeri V, we’ve managed to cobble together some suggestions for protecting normal main-sequence stars from such inductions. All these are very tentative, of course….”

Scotty killed the eclipse hologram, and the space above the middle of the table started filling up with diagrams and bar charts and pie charts and graphs with jittering lines. “While the coronal mass ejection we produced was a ‘standard’ one of the halo type with helium alpha,” K’s’t’lk said, “there were interesting variations. One of the most telling phenomena for our purposes was the way the sunspots came up all of a sudden during the induction, completely unnaturally, in a pattern that bears no resemblance whatever to the usual ‘butterfly’ diagram, the plot of the heliographic latitude of the sunspots versus time.
Much
too much intrusion of the spots into the polar latitudes, suggesting that Sunseed’s specific effect on the solar magnetic field is to derange the field intensities not above, but
below
local average rates, a ‘curdling’ effect which spreads all through the lower stellar atmosphere and…”

Jim glanced down the table at Ael. She was making desultory notes on a clipboard-padd, though nothing like the hurried and systematic ones which were being made by tr’Keirianh beside her; and she looked up, caught Jim’s glance, and smiled, very slightly, a look of complete bemusement. Jim went back to making his own notes for the moment, which were mostly about things to discuss with Danilov when he got in.

“…this being the case, the ‘best’ candidates, the top of the ‘bell curve’ and the stars most susceptible to this kind of interference, would be Bw stars with sufficiently weak helium lines, or Be stars with the necessary ‘forbidden’ lines in their spectra,” K’s’t’lk was saying. “And fortunately, few of these have planets.”

Scotty looked up then. “But most other stellar classes suffer as well. Nearly
all
stars with planets around them, in both Federation and Klingon space, fall on the upper side of the bell curve—probably nearly all the Rihannsu ones as well, though data on that is less certain. We have good astrocartography on the area, but less data on which stellar systems are populated.”

“I will gladly help you there,” Ael said. “But some of the rumors coming out of the Empire suggest that the data may not be correct for long. Populations are moving, or being moved, or in extreme cases being wiped out, along the fringes of the Imperium. Mostly the latter.”

Scotty nodded, pausing to bring up another starmap in the hologram over the table, one which filled with a map of the Neutral Zone boundary and many pulsing points of light. “At any rate, as you see here, nearly every populated star system in which the primary is
not
a dwarf is now a potential target for attacks which at best will make interstellar shipping difficult, and at worst will impair starships’ ability to achieve high warp, damage many of them, destroy some of them. This weapon can be moderately easily deployed by an enemy willing to divide his forces sufficiently, going from star to star at warp speeds and leaving bigger and bigger ion storms in his wake.”

“There is also a possibility that Mr. Scott and the commander have not mentioned,” Spock said, “which is a theoretical one, impossible to test…but I would dislike seeing any test made. If too many ion storms of this sort were started at one time by a group of ships in a given area of space, the storm front could possibly gain enough energy to propagate itself for a prolonged period along a wavefront light-minutes or even light-days long. At such energy levels it could propagate into subspace as well, deranging its structure and fabric.” Spock looked much more troubled than the mere unpredictability of results could account for. “Such an ‘ion firestorm’ might render subspace useless for communication, or even incapable of supporting speeds higher than
c
…which would at best mean that there were patches or ruts in subspace where starships could not go. At worst it could mean the end of warpspeed travel in this part of the galaxy, for everyone involved.”

Jim looked at Ael. “Do your people know about the possibility of this effect, do you think?”

“I cannot say,” Ael said. “But if they find out about it, I make no doubt they would consider its use as a weapon of the ‘doomsday’ sort.”

Jim nodded to Scotty, who killed the displays. “So. Recommendations?”

Scotty looked uneasy. K’s’t’lk jangled, an unnerved sound, the Hamalki version of nervously clearing one’s throat. “Captain,” Spock said, “my simplest recommendation for the moment is not under any circumstances to allow Romulans, the party most likely now to use the Sunseed routines, into Federation space in strength. But that may shortly become impossible.”