Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (8 page)

Everyone found his, her or its place. Jim heard Rihaul sit down with the usual bizarre noise in her bowl chair, and had to repress a laugh again. Deirr weren’t really wet—their smooth, slick skin just looked that way, and in contact with some surfaces, acted that way. Rihaul had been complaining since the long-ago days at the Academy, where Jim was her math tutor, that the Fleet-issue plastic bowl chairs were the bane of her existence; sitting down in one invariably produced noises that almost every species considered embarrassing, and getting up against the resultant suction required mechanical assistance, or a lot of friends. Nowadays Nhauris and Jim had a running joke that the only reason she had become a captain was to have a command bowl chair that was upholstered in cloth.

“I think the first matter before us,” Jim said, “is to briefly discuss the strategic situation. Tactics will follow.” Spock handed him a tape; Jim slipped it into the table and activated it. The four small holoprojection units around the table came alive, each one constructing a three-dimensional map of the galaxy, burning with the bright pinpoints of stars. The map rotated until one seemed to be looking straight “down” through the galactic disk, and the focus tightened on the Sagittarius Arm—the irregular spiral-arm structure, thirty thousand light-years long and half as wide, that the Federation, the Romulans and the Klingons all shared. From this perspective, the Sag Arm (at least to Jim) looked rather like the North American continent; though it was North America missing most of Canada, and the United States as far west as the Rockies and as far south as Oklahoma. Sol sat on the shore of that great starry lacuna, about where Oklahoma City would have been.

“Here’s where we stand,” Jim said. The bright “continent” swelled in the map-cube, till the whole cubic was full of the area that would have been southwestern North America, Mexico and the Californias. “Federation, Romulan and Klingon territories are all marked according to the map key.” Three sets of very lumpy, irregular shapes, like a group of wrestling amoebas, flashed into color in the starfield: red for the Klingons, gold for the Romulans, blue for the Federation. There was very little regularity about their boundaries with one another, except for one abnormally smooth curvature, almost a section of an egg shape, where the blue space nested with and partly surrounded the gold. “Disputed territories are in orange.” There was a lot of orange, both where blue met red and where red met gold; though rather more of the latter. “These schematics include the latest intelligence we have from both Romulans and Klingons. You can see that there are some problems in progress out there. The alliance between the Klingons and the Romulans is either running into some kind of trouble, or is not defined the way we usually define alliances. This gives us our first hint as to why we’re out here, gentlebeings—unless Fleet was more open with one of you than it was with me.”

Suvuk shook his head slightly; Walsh rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “I’ve rarely seen them so obtuse,” Rihaul said. “Surely something particularly messy is coming up.”

“Indeed,” Jim said. “Which is why we will be needing to keep in very close touch with one another. Any piece of data, any midnight thought, may give us the clue to figuring out what’s going to happen. My staff has done some research involving recent Romulan intelligence reports; I’ll be passing that data on to you for your study and comment. Anything, any idea you may come up with, don’t hesitate to call me. My intention is to keep this operation very free-form, at least until something happens. For something
will
happen.”

“I wholly agree, Captain,” Suvuk said. “Our mission here is as surely provocatory as it is investigatory. One does not waste a destroyer on empty space, or space one expects to stay empty. We are expected to force the Romulans’ hand, as Captain Walsh would say.”

Jim looked with carefully concealed surprise at Suvuk, who had flashed a quick mild glance at Walsh.
Is it just me?
he thought.
But, no, Vulcans don’t make jokes. Certainly this one wouldn’t—
“Yes, sir,” Jim said. “With that in mind, here’s our patrol pattern as I envision it; please make any suggestions you find apt.”

The map’s field changed again, becoming more detailed. The long curved ellipsoid boundary between the two spaces swelled to dominate the cubic; stars in the field became few. “Here we are,” Jim said. “Sigma-285 and its environs. I suggest that we spread ourselves out as thinly as we can—not so far as to be out of easy communication with one another, but far enough apart to cover as much territory as possible with any given pattern.”

“The ships would be a couple of hundred light-years or so apart,” Walsh said.

“That’s about right; the boundaries I was considering for the whole patrol area, at least to start with, would be defined by 218 Persei to the galactic north, 780 Arietis to the south, and the ‘east-west’ distance along the lines from 56 Arietis to iota Andromedae; about half a galactic degree. This way, any ship in need of assistance can have it within from a day to an hour, depending on what the situation is.”

“
Inaieu
should at all times be at the heart of that pattern,” Rihaul said, “so that she will have minimum response time for the other ships.”

“That’s right,” Jim said. “That was my intention. I don’t propose to hold
Enterprise
at flag position, out of the way, during the operation; firstly because she’ll better serve us running patrol like everyone else, and secondly because she has something of a name among the Romulans. While out by herself, she may draw their attention, draw them out and give them an opportunity to let slip what’s going on, on the other side of the Zone; either by communication among themselves, or with us. We have experts in Romulan codes and the Romulan common language aboard, awaiting such an opportunity. And should there be an engagement, all steps are to be taken to preserve and question survivors…if any Romulans allow themselves to survive.”

“Noted,” Suvuk said. “Captain, have you yet assigned patrol programs?”

“They’re in the table for your perusal. Positions in the task force rotate.”

“I see that
Enterprise
is flying point for our first run down the length of the Zone,” Rihaul said, with a merry look at Jim, after she had studied the screen on the table before her. “Well, we could hardly grudge you that, could we? Your campaign, Captain. But do leave us something to do. We, too, get these sudden urges to save all civilization.”

“Captain,” Jim said to her, grinning, “I have a nasty feeling that this operation will provide every one of us with ample opportunity to indulge those urges. Meanwhile I give your request all the attention it deserves…. Anything else, gentlebeings? Comment? Suggestions?”

“Only that it would be logical to implement patrol immediately,” Suvuk said.

“So ordered, sir.” Jim got up; the others rose with him. “Everyone is dismissed to their commanders—would the captains remain? Bones,” he said to McCoy over the bustle in the room, mostly caused by Denebians running out as if to a fire, “no need for you to hang around if you don’t want to—”

“Jim, are you kidding?” McCoy was obviously far gone in self-congratulation. “Did you hear what that man said about my—”

“Oh. Well, as long as you feel that way about it—” Suvuk came up to them at that point, along with the Vulcan medical officer, Sobek. “Captain,” Suvuk said, “you wished to see me?”

“Only to deliver McCoy into your company, sir. He is so retiring that if I didn’t order him to, he would certainly never allow himself the vanity of discussing one of his papers at any length. In fact, I’m sure he’d love to see your sickbay—in detail. Please accompany Captain Suvuk, Bones. Don’t worry about us: we won’t wait up for you.”

Jim watched in amusement as the Vulcans led McCoy away, politely talking medical terminology at him at a great rate. Bones had no time for more than one I’ll-get-you-for-this look over his shoulder before they had him out of the room. “Spock,” Jim said softly to the Vulcan, who had been solemnly watching the whole process from behind him, “I haven’t had time to read it. Was the paper really that good?”

Spock looked at him sidelong. “After the spelling had been corrected,” he said, “indeed it was.”

Mike Walsh came over to Jim with that old calculating look on his face. “How about it, Jim? Got a few free hours for poker this evening?”

“No,” Jim said firmly. “But I have twenty credits that say you can’t beat our ship’s chess champ with a queen handicap.”

“Oh really? You’re on. When do we start?”

Jim looked at Spock, eyed the door, put an eyebrow up. Spock looked thoughtful, nodded fractionally, and headed out for the lift and the transporters. “Right now,” Jim said. “Come on, let’s get Nhauris up.”

“You two get out of here!”

“Dangerous business, coming between a captain and her ship. Obviously this chair isn’t doing too well at it…. Why, Captain, I do believe you’ve put on a bit of weight!”

According to a widely-held Rihannsu military tradition, the best commanders were also often cranky ones. Normally Ael avoided such behavior. The showy, towering rages she had seen some of her own commanders periodically throw at their crews had only convinced Ael that she never wanted to serve under such a person in a crisis. Pretended excitability could too easily turn into the real thing.

Now, however, she saw a chance to turn that old tradition to good advantage. She came back from her tour of her fleet not positively angry, but looking rather discommoded and out of sorts when she reentered her bridge. T’Liun noticed it instantly, and became most solicitous of Ael, asking her what sort of condition the other ships were in. Ael—hearing perfectly well t’Liun’s intention to find out the cause of the mood and exploit it somehow—told t’Liun what she thought of the other ships, and the Klingons who had built them, and the Rihannsu crews who were mishandling them, at great length. It was a most satisfying tirade, giving Ael the opportunity to make a great deal of noise and relieve some of her own tension, while leaving t’Liun suspecting her of doing exactly that—though for all the wrong reasons.

Then off Ael stormed, and went on a cold-voiced rampage through the ship, upbraiding the junior officers for the poor repair of equipment that was generally in good condition. Late into the ship’s night she prowled the corridors, terrorizing the offshift, peering into everything. The effect produced was perfect. Slitted eyes gazed after her in bitter annoyance, and in eavesdropping on ship’s ’com, after she had theoretically retired for the night, Ael heard many suggestions made about her ancestry and habits that revised slightly upward her opinion of her crew’s inventiveness. Ael felt much amused, and much relieved by the discharge of energy. But far more important, no one had noticed or thought anything in particular of a small interval she spent peering up a circuitry-conduit—an inspection from which she had come away frowning on the outside, but inside quite pleased. Ael fell asleep late, her cabin dark to everything but starlight—thanking her ancestors that the most immediate of them, her father, had once made her spend almost three months taking his own old warbird apart, system by system, and putting it back together again.

In the morning she took things a step further. She called together t’Liun and tr’Khaell and the other senior officers and instructed them that they were to begin a complete check of all ship’s systems. Her officers, not caring for the prospect of trying to do several weeks’ work in the several days she was ordering, did their best to reassure Ael that the systems were in perfect working condition. Ael allowed herself, very briefly, to be mollified—thus setting up for a rage that even her worst old commanders would have approved of, when a message came in from Command later that day, and t’Liun’s communications board overloaded and blew up.

Ael had been restraining herself the day before. Now she let loose, resurrecting some of the savagely elegant old idioms for incompetence that her father had used on her the day she forgot to fasten one of the gates of the farm, and three hundred of the
hlai
got out into the croplands. She raged, she flushed dark green-bronze (an inadvertent effect; she still blushed at the memory of that long-ago scolding, but the effect was fortuitous—it made the rage look better). She ordered the whole lot of them into the brig, then changed her mind: that was too good for them. They would all work their own shifts, as well as extra shifts doing the system analysis she had ordered in the first place. But none of them would touch the Elements-be-blessed communications board, which had probably been utterly destroyed by t’Liun’s fumblings. Who knew what orders Command had had for them, and must they now send messages back saying, “Sorry, we missed that one”? She would let t’Liun have that dubious pleasure, and served her right; but in the meantime someone had best bring her a tool kit, and the rest of them had best stay out of her sight and make themselves busy lest she space them all in their underwear,
now get out!

Afterward, when the bridge was quiet except for one poor antecenturion too cowed to look up or speak a word, Ael lay on her back under the overhang of the comm station and called silently on her father’s fourth name, laughing inside like a madwoman.
Possibly I am mad, trying to make this work,
she thought, first killing all power to the board so that none of the circuit-monitoring devices t’Liun had installed in it would work.
But how then—should I lie here and do nothing? No, the
thrai
has a few bites left in her yet….
Ael gently teased one particular logic solid out of its crystal-grip, holding it as lovingly as a jewel. The equipment she had been brought naturally included a portable power source; this she attached both to the solid and to the board, bringing up only its programming functions.

Reprogramming the logic solid, which held the ship’s ID, was delicate work, but not too difficult; and she thought kindly of her father all through it.
Ael,
he had said again,
times will come when you won’t have time to run the program and see if it works. It must be right the first time, or lives will be lost, and the responsibility will be on your head when you face the Elements at last—probably long before that, too. Do it again. Get it right the first time. Or it’s the stables for you tomorrow….

She sat up with the little keypad in her lap, touching numbers and words into it, and thinking about responsibility…of lives not merely lost, but about to be thrown away.
Bitter, it is bitter. I am no killer…. Yet Command sent me here to be a prisoner; to rot, or preferably to die. What duty do I owe these fools? They’ve pledged me no loyalty; nor would they ever. They are my jailers, not my crew. Surely there’s nothing wrong in escaping from jail.

Yet I swore the Oath, once upon a time, by the Elements and my honor, to be good mistress to my crews, and to lead them safely and well. Does that mean I must keep faith with them even if they do me villainy?…

The thought of the Elements brought Ael no clear counsel. There was little surprise in that, out here in the cold of space, where Earth was far away, and water and air both frozen as hard as any stone. The only Element she commonly dealt with was Fire—in starfire and the matter-antimatter conflagration of her ship’s engines. Ael had always found that peculiarly agreeable, for she knew her own Element to be Fire’s companion, Air, and her realm what pierced it: weapons, words, wings. But even the thought of that old reassuring symmetry did nothing for her now.
Loyalty, the best part of the ruling Passion, that’s of fire: if any spark of that fire were alive in them, I would serve it gladly. I would save them if I could. But there is none.

Besides…there’s a larger question.
She sat still on the floor of her bridge for a moment, seeing beyond it. There was the matter of the many lives that would be lost, both in the Empire and outside it, should the horrible thing a-birthing at Levaeri V research station come to term. Thousands of lives, millions; rebellion and war and devastation lashing through the Empire itself, then out among the Federation and the Klingons as well. For the Klingons she cared little; for the Federation she cared less—though that might be a function of having been at armed truce with them for all these years. Still—theirs were lives too.

And beyond mere war and horror lay an issue even deeper. When honor dies—when trust is a useless thing—what use is life? And that was what threatened the spaces around, and the Empire itself, where honor had once been a virtue…but would be no more. Tasting the lack of it for herself, here and now, in this place where no one could be trusted or respected, Ael knew the bitterness of such a lack right down to its dregs. Even the knowledge of faith kept elsewhere, of Tafv on his way and her old crew coming for her, could not assuage it. She had led a sheltered life until now, despite wounds and desperate battles; this desolate tour of duty had dealt her a wound from which she would never recover. She could only make sure that others did not have to suffer it.

She could only do so by sacrificing the crew of
Cuirass
to her strategem. There was too much chance that they would somehow get word back to Command of what was toward, if she left them alive. But by killing them, Ael would make herself guilty of the same treachery she so despised in them; and with far less excuse (if excuse existed), for she knew the old way of life, knew honor and upright dealing. There was no justifying the spilling of all her crew’s lives, despite their treachery to her. Ael would bear the weight of murder, and sooner or later pay their bloodprice in the most intimate possible coinage: her own pain. That was the way things worked, in the Elements’ world; fire well used, warmed; ill used, burned. All that remained was the question of whether she would accept the blame for their deaths willingly, or reject it, blind herself to her responsibility, and prolong the Elements’ retaliation.

She remembered her father, standing unhappily over one of the
hlai
that Ael had not been able to catch. It had gotten into the woods, and there it lay on the leafmold, limp and torn; a
hnoiyika
had gotten it, torn its breast out and left the
hlai
there to bleed out its life, as
hnoiyikar
will. Ael had stared at the
hlai
in mixed fascination and horror as it lay there with insects crawling in and out of the torn places, out of mouth and eyes. She had never seen a dead thing before. “This is why one must be careful with life,” her father had said, in very controlled wrath. “Death is the most hateful thing. Don’t allow the destruction of what you can never restore.” And he had made her bury the
hlai
.

She looked up and sighed, thinking what strange words those had seemed, coming from a warrior of her father’s stature. Now, at this late date, they started to make sense…and she laughed again, at herself this time, a silent, bitter breath. Standing on the threshold of many murders, she was finally beginning to understand….

Evidently I am already beginning to pay the price,
she thought.
Very well. I accept the burden.
And she turned her mind back to her work, burying her wretched crew in her heart while instructing the logic solid in its own treachery. First, she pulled another logic solid out of her pocket, connected to the first one and then to the little powerpack. It was a second’s work to copy the first solid’s contents onto the blank. Then, after the duplicate was pocketed again, some more work on the original solid. A touch here, a touch there, a program that would loop back on itself in this spot, refuse to respond in that one, do several different things at once over here, when
Cuirass
’s screens perceived the appropriate stimulus. And finally the whole adjustment locked away under a coded retrieval signal, so that t’Liun would notice nothing amiss, and analysis (if attempted) would reveal nothing.

Done. She went back under the panel again, locked the logic solid back into its grip, and closed up the panel again, tidying up after herself with a light heart. No further orders would reach this panel from Command. It would receive them, automatically acknowledge them, and then dump them, without alerting the communications officer. It would do other things too—as her crew would discover, to its ruin.

Ael got up and left the tool kit lying where it was for someone else to clean up—that would be in character for her present role, though it went against her instincts for tidiness. She swung on the poor terrified antecenturion minding the center seat, and instructed him to call t’Liun to the bridge; she herself was going to her quarters, and was not to be disturbed on peril of her extreme pleasure. Then out Ael stalked, making her way to her cabin. In the halls, the crewpeople she met avoided her eyes. Ael did not mind that at all.

She settled down to wait.

She did not have to wait long. She had rather been hoping that Tafv would for once discard honor and attack by ship’s night. But it was broad afternoon, the middle of dayshift, when her personal computer with the copied logic-solid attached to it began to read out a ship’s ID, over and over. She ripped the solid free of the computer and pocketed it, glanced once around her bare dark cabin. There was nothing here she needed. Slowly, not hurrying, she headed in the general direction of engineering. The engine room itself had the usual duty personnel, no more; she waved an uncaring salute to them and went on through to where
Hsaaja
stood. As the doors of the secondary deck closed behind her, the alarm sirens began their terrible screeching; someone on the bridge had visual contact with a ship in the area. Calmly, without looking back, Ael got into
Hsaaja,
sealed him up, brought up the power. It would be about now that they realized, up in the bridge, that their own screens were not working.

“Khre’Riov t’Rllaillieu urru Oira!” the ship’s annunciator system cried in t’Liun’s voice, again and again. But Ael would never set foot on
Cuirass
’s bridge again; and the cry grew fainter and fainter, vanishing at last with the last of the landing bay’s exhausted air. Ael lifted
Hsaaja
up on his underjets, nudged him toward the opening doors of the bay, the doors that no bridge override could affect now. Then out into space, hard downward and to the rear, where an unmodified warbird could not fire.
Cuirass
shuddered above Ael to light phaser fire against which the ship could not protect herself. Space writhed and rippled around
Cuirass
; she submerged into otherspace, went into warp, fled away.

Ael looked up with angry joy at the second warbird homing in on her, its landing bay open for her. She kicked
Hsaaja’
s ion-drivers in, arrowing toward home, and security, and war.