Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (94 page)

Spock straightened up, though he was still looking down at the scanner as if he distrusted what he had been seeing. Jim glanced back at him. “The Romulans still busy with their long-range scanning, Mr. Spock?”

“They are,” Spock said. “But that is not my concern at the moment.”

“It’s not?”

Spock left the science station and came down to stand by the center seat. “The scanning I have been monitoring is of a sort I have not seen in previous encounters with Romulan vessels,” he said. “It suggests they may have made some theoretical breakthroughs in their understanding of the nature and structure of subspace, and further analysis will be interesting. I have begun work on such analysis. But while monitoring the scanning activity, I also detected some interesting energy readings from two of the ships,
Pillion
and
Hheirant.
”

“Interesting? In what way?”

Spock raised his eyebrows. Jim had seen this expression before; it was that of a Vulcan who cannot admit to annoyance, but is experiencing it nonetheless. “Our own scans seem to be detecting power generation from within both
Pillion
and
Hheirant
considerably in excess of what ships of their size should require either for maximum projected propulsion or for maximum weapons use, or, for that matter, for both together. And if this were not in itself cause enough for interest, I am unable to determine from exactly what system aboard these ships the power in question is being generated, except that it does not appear to be directly associated with their engine rooms.”

“Some kind of weapon we haven’t been told about?” Jim said.

Spock let out a breath. “Insufficient data,” he said. “Our own scans are not proving as efficient as they should, especially considering that we are at such close range. I have recalibrated our scanners twice within the last three hours, with only marginal improvement in the resulting scans.”

“And it’s nothing to do with
Mascrar
being in the way?”

“No, Captain.”

Jim thought for a moment. “Some variant on the cloaking device?”

“That is a theory that had occurred to me, Captain, but the typical waveform signature of the cloaking device we know is missing. That does not, of course, rule out the possibility that a new one has been developed, and there are some waveforms presenting in the scans from
Pillion
and
Hheirant
that I do not recognize, but there is as yet no evidence to support the conjecture that they are associated with new cloaking technology. They could, for example, be parasitic on the ships’ communications systems. But unless I can improve the quality of our own scanning, there is no way either to confirm this or to rule it out.”

Jim’s attention went to the main viewscreen. He could just catch sight of one of
Gorget
’s long, swept-back nacelles below the curve of
Mascrar.
“There’s a lot of new technology out there,” he said. “Some of it has plainly been brought to impress us.”

“But what I am picking up is not associated with the newer ships, Captain.
Pillion
and
Hheirant
are two of the older
K’tinga
-class models.”

“Well, stay on it, Mr. Spock. I’ll be interested to see what you find.”

Spock nodded and went back up to his science station. The turbolift doors opened, and McCoy came ambling in. “I don’t suppose,” he said, “that anything’s happened to make them have that meeting early.”

“What do
you
think?” Jim said.

“Well, hope springs eternal…”

“Oh, Doctor,” Uhura said, “while you’re here—a message just came in for you from
Speedwell,
from the ambassador’s office.”

“For me?” McCoy said. “What the heck do they want from me?”

“It’s nothing they want
from
you. They have something
for
you. A package. It came over from
Gorget,
apparently, with this morning’s documents exchange.”

Jim looked at McCoy, wondering. McCoy raised his eyebrows. “Did they scan it? Do they have any idea what it is?”

“The ambassador’s assistant says it checks clean for explosives or other dangerous devices. He says it’s a bottle.”

McCoy smiled slightly. “Ale, I bet,” he said. “Shows you what the explosives scan’s worth. Ask them to beam it over, would you?”

“They’ll be doing that shortly.”

“Fine, I’ll go on down and get it.”

Uhura chuckled then. “My, we’re busy this morning. Captain, I have Commodore Danilov waiting for you, scrambled.”

“Put him on,” Jim said.

The screen flickered, and there was Danilov, looking pleased.
“Jim,”
he said,
“I wanted to thank you again for that message you sent.”

“No need, Commodore,” Jim said, rather surprised.

“I disagree,”
Danilov said.
“We just got in a message from one of the Zone monitoring stations. Long-range scan shows that a number of Romulan vessels that were patrolling the other side of the Neutral Zone near here have pulled out.”

So Fox was right,
Jim thought.
They’re starting to blink.

Or so it seems.

“There’s something else you should know about,”
Danilov said.
“Apparently things are breaking apart somewhat among the Romulan negotiation team. One of the Praetors, Gurrhim tr’Siedhri, is in the infirmary aboard
Gorget,
subsequent to an assassination attempt.”

“Good Lord,” Jim said. “How is he?”

“No details,”
Danilov said.
“Fox thinks this is symptomatic of a serious split among the senior negotiators. We’ll see what happens at the meeting later.”

“Have we heard back from Earth yet about Ael?” Jim said.

“We have,”
Danilov said.
“Later, Jim.
Speedwell
out.”

The screen flicked back to its view of
Mascrar
and the other vessels orbiting on this side with
Enterprise.
Jim sat back in the center seat and let out a breath of exasperation.
I am
not
cut out for this diplomatic work,
he thought.

Nonetheless, he settled in to wait.

Half an hour or so later, McCoy was leaning against the console in transporter room two, trying to control his impatience and failing. “What’s
keepin’
those people?” he said.

“Something to do with the assassination attempt aboard
Gorget,
” said the transporter chief. “None of the diplomatic people are where they’d usually be. The transporter chief over on
Speedwell
says she sent most of the ambassador’s people over to
Mascrar.
The rest could have used another transporter.”

“Typical,” McCoy muttered. He reached out to the comm button, hit it.
“Speedwell,
this is McCoy aboard
Enterprise.
Can somebody please track down this package or bottle or whatever it is that the ambassador’s office is holding for me? I have other things to do today…”

“Hold on a moment, Doctor,”
said a somewhat bored male voice. Then another voice, a female one, said,
“Chief Perelli, shuttle bay. We’ve got a kind of long box here. It’s annotated as ‘bottle’ on the docs manifest the courier brought over this morning.”

“That’s sounds like what we’re after. Would you run it up here?”

“Sure thing. Sorry for the delay, Doctor. This is medicinal, right?”

McCoy grinned. “If you get a chance to come over here, I’ll let you see
how
medicinal.”

A few minutes later there was a sparkle on one of the frontmost transporter pads, and a box wrapped in silvery prismatic plastic appeared. “Thanks, Chief,” McCoy said, going over to pick it up.

“Hey, don’t
I
get any?”

“Come see me when you’re off duty. You’re due for your multipox inoculation anyway; you can have that at the same time.”

“Uh…thanks.”

McCoy chuckled as he made his way out of the transporter room and back to sickbay. Slender, curly-haired Lia Burke, the head nurse, met McCoy going out as he came in, and glanced at what he was holding. “Oh, you got your bottle, finally.”

“Yes. And you can’t have any.”

“Hmph.”

“While on duty,” McCoy added belatedly as the door closed behind her. He went to his desk and picked up a phaser scalpel lying there, and started to use it delicately on the end of the package. The wrapping shriveled away, revealing a prosaic box. He upended it, looking for the opening. He found the seal and ran a thumbnail along it.

The side of the box opened up. Inside there was something silky and black, with a faint touch of fragrance about it, a warmly herbal scent. McCoy looked at it with a moment’s affection, but the warmth suddenly faded as he considered what this might mean.

He pulled the long, diaphanous scarf out of the box from around the bottle for which it had been used as wrapping, and ran it quickly through his hands. There was nothing hidden in the seams this time. But it was a message nonetheless.

McCoy picked up his medical scanner from the instrument tray nearby and ran it down the length of the scarf, just to make sure. Nothing.

Then he reached into the box and pulled out the bottle. The ale in it was unusually blue, the sign of a good “vintage,” at least a couple of weeks old. More, it had that slight cloudiness of
really
good Romulan ale, an indication that all the fruit solids hadn’t been filtered out of it.
Also,
McCoy thought, as he ran the scanner over the bottle,
it makes it that much harder to see anything that might be inside.

The medical scanner chirruped twice, the alert sound it made when it found embedded data content in a sample but couldn’t immediately read it.

McCoy’s eyes widened. He took himself and the bottle out of sickbay in a hurry, heading for the bridge.

Spock was still staring down his scanner. Jim was wondering if this wasn’t beginning to get a little obsessive. Still, there had been enough times before when Spock had focused on a problem until he wore himself thin, and his persistence had wound up being the only thing that saved
Enterprise
and everyone in her—one more aspect of her charmed life, too easily overlooked when outsiders examined the legend. Jim sat back and sighed. “Uhura—” he said.

“Another hour yet till the meeting, Captain.” She sighed too.

He had to smile. “Spock,” he said, “find anything worthwhile yet?”

Spock shook his head without looking up from the scanner. “Their long-range scans continue. Over the past twenty minutes I have seen that odd waveform again in several brief bursts, each several seconds long, from what seem to be two different sources associated with
Pillion
and
Hheirant.
But then the traces faded out entirely. I am at a loss to understand it. I begin to wonder whether I am detecting some sort of malfunction, except that—”

The turbolift doors opened. “Mr. Spock! Here! Quick!”

Jim turned around, surprised to hear McCoy so out of breath. Spock had looked up from his scanning with a rather severe expression, for McCoy was standing there next to him, holding a bottle of something blue. “Doctor,” Spock said, “this is hardly the time or the place—”

“Spock,” McCoy growled, “I’ve always thought you needed a humoroplasty, but by God as soon as I have two seconds to rub together, I’m going to change your surgery status from elective to required.” He shoved the bottle at Spock. “Now in the name of everything that’s holy, scan this thing and find out what it
says!
”

Nonplussed, Spock took the bottle and looked it over, then sat it on his science console and touched several controls. He put up one eyebrow. “There is a picochip attached under the stopper,” Spock said, and hurriedly touched several more controls in sequence. “Reading now…”

The screen nearest his station filled with gibberish, which then started to resolve itself.

He stared at it, then turned toward the center seat. “It is from Lieutenant Commander Haleakala-LoBrutto,” Spock said. “She reports that the Romulans intend to attack and destroy
Bloodwing
immediately on her return to the system—”

“Warp ingress, Captain,” Sulu said urgently. “Two vessels going subluminal, ten light-seconds out.”

“Uhura, copy that message to
Speedwell
and the other ships right away!” Jim said. “Mr. Sulu, take us out toward the ingress point, full impulse. Put it on screen. Mr. Chekov, ready phasers and photon torpedoes.”

“Enterprise,” Danilov’s voice said over the comm link,
“where do you think you’re going? Hold your position—”

“Read your mail, Dan!” Jim said. “Mr. Chekov—”

“Phasers ready, Captain. Photon torpedoes loading.”

“Mr. Sulu, what are the Romulans doing?”

“Nothing, Captain. Holding position. No evidence of weapons activity.”