Read Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages Online
Authors: Diane Duane & Peter Morwood
Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (34 page)
No writer has recorded those anguished conversations between Surak and S’task. From contemporaries we know only that they went on for days as the master tried to reason with the pupil, and increasingly discovered that the pupil had found reasons of his own which he was not willing to let go. Peace, S’task said, was not the way to deal with the universe that now awaited Vulcan. The only way to meet other species, obviously barbaric, was in power to match their own—power blatantly exhibited, and violently, if necessary. Over the next few months, through the information networks and “mindtrees” of the time, S’task spread his views, and his views began to spread without him. Surak’s coalition and support base far outnumbered that of those holding S’task’s opinion, but mere majorities have never much influenced Vulcans: and no one was really surprised when the riots began in late 139955. Several small cities were burned or wrecked, and Surak himself was almost killed in the disturbances in Nekhie, trying to deal peace with those who did not want it.
It was at this point that S’task went into seclusion, hunting solutions. He loved his master, though he had come to hate his reasoning: and he well saw that their disagreement would destroy any chance Vulcan would ever have of facing as a unified entity the powers watching it from outside. (This surveillance had been confirmed toward the end of 139954, when another ship from Etosha arrived—cloaked, it thought, against Vulcan detection. The ship’s wreckage, preserved by the desert dryness through thousands of years, is still visible outside Te’Rikh, carefully kept clear of sand by the Vulcan planetary park authorities.)
The problem was a thorny one. S’task was no fool: though he was sure he was right, he knew that Surak felt that way, too, and one side or the other was bound to be tragically right rather than triumphantly so. One side or the other would eventually win the argument, but the price of the victory would be centuries of bloodshed, and a planet never wholly at one with itself. Once again the ancient pattern would reassert itself, and S’task’s vision of Vulcan as one proud, strong world among many would degenerate into just one more thing to have a war over: the goal itself would be forgotten in the grudges that its partisans would spawn in others and nurture in themselves for hundreds of years. For this reason alone S’task was unwilling to push the issue to its logical conclusion, civil war. But another question, that of ethic, concerned him: he was still Surak’s pupil, and as such acknowledged that no cause or goal, however good, could bear good fruit of so evil a beginning. “The structure of spacetime,” Surak had said to him at their first meeting, “is more concerned with means than ends: beginnings must be clean to be of profit.” S’task had taken this deeply to heart.
So he proposed a clean beginning, and the proposition made its way through the mindtrees and the nets like lightning. If the world was not working, S’task said, then those Vulcans dissatisfied with it should make another. Let them take the technology that the aliens had inadvertently brought them, and add their own science to it, and go hunting another world, where what they loved would be preserved in the way they thought it should be. Let there be another Vulcan: or rather, the
true
Vulcan, Vulcan as it
ought
to be.
The arguments went on for fifty years, while the fartravel ships were being built, while more pirate attacks were beaten back and the first radio signals from other species farther out were decoded. Slowly the Eighty Thousand rallied around S’task, and on 12 Ahhahr 140005 the first ship,
Rea’s Helm,
left orbit and drove outward into a great silence that was not to be broken for two millennia. The last message from
Helm,
sent as it cut in its subdrivers, provoked much confusion. It was a single stave in the
steheht
mode. Like all other Vulcan poetry, its translation is never certain, but more translations of it have been attempted than of any verse except T’sahen’s Stricture, and so the sense is fairly certain:
Enthrone your pasts:
this done, fire and old blood
will find you again:
better hearts’ breaking
than worlds’.
It was the Last Song, S’task’s farewell to Vulcan, and the last poem he ever made: after it he cut the strings of his
ryill
and spoke no other song till he died. Some on Vulcan consider that a greater loss than the departure of the Eighty Thousand, or all the death that befell as they returned to the counsels of the Worlds two thousand years later.
In their absence, under Surak’s tutelage, Vulcan became one. The irony has been much commented on, that the aliens who presented the threat that almost destroyed Vulcan were eventually the instrument of its unification, and the world which had never
not
been at war became the exemplar of peace. It has been said that evil frequently triumphs over good unless good is very, very careful. This is true: but it should be added that good frequently has help that looks evil on the surface of it, and that “even God’s enemies are some way his own.” Surak spent his life, and eventually gave his life, for an idea whose time had come—an idea the accomplishment of which would fill other planets, in future times, with envy or longing. But the other side of the idea, the lost side, the incomplete, the failed side, was never out of his mind, or Vulcan’s. Among his writings after he died was found this stave:
Dethrone the past:
this done, day comes up new
though empty-hearted:
O the long silence,
my son!
His present cabin was one of the most comfortable berths that Leonard McCoy had enjoyed for a long while. The ship was a civilian liner, not subject to Starfleet regulations, and as an honored guest—and first-class passenger—he was getting the full treatment. At a guess he’d put on half a kilo in the past three weeks. Life on the
U.S.S. Enterprise
might not be so luxurious, but it certainly kept a man in trim; well, there’d be reassignment when this was over and he’d finished all he had to do. Back with Jim Kirk and the rest, “hopping galaxies” as somebody had once put it. McCoy smiled a little at that. With
Vega
running in otherspace at warp three, what else was he doing but hopping galaxies right now? Or star systems, anyway….
He pushed back from his desk and from the datapad still keyed for comparative xenobiology, knuckling a yawn to extinction as he watched information flick across the screens on their way to hardcopy dump. To all intents and purposes this was no more than a busman’s holiday. The zeta Reticuli orbital research facility didn’t need
him
for its setup inspection; any senior medic from Starfleet Academy would have been quite sufficient. But they wanted the famous Dr. McCoy from the famous
Enterprise
—and Command had agreed he should go.
So here he was, Leonard E. McCoy, fifty-year-old medical whiz kid, traveling first class on a luxury starliner, working on the learned dissertation he was expected to present, getting no exercise, getting bored, and wishing he were somewhere else. There was such a thing as getting too much R & R, and he was getting it right now….
The electronics squeaked politely at him as they finished transcribing, and produced a bound copy of his dissertation notes with the slightly self-deprecatory air of a chicken laying an egg. McCoy picked it up and thumbed through the pages, looking halfheartedly for typos so that he would have something worthwhile to grumble about. There weren’t any. That was the whole point of textsetting onscreen, but it was always worth a look anyway. He hadn’t forgotten the time when a glitch in the
Enterprise
sickbay processors had overprinted every fifth word of Jim Kirk’s monthly health report with a random selection of the most favored obscenities in seven Federation languages. Jim had laughed, and even Spock had been observed to raise one eyebrow. McCoy, however, had been audibly, indeed volubly, embarrassed, and had made a private promise that such errors wouldn’t get past him again. Hence his almost obsessive care over this particular piece of work. After presentation to the Facility’s medical board it was going straight into the
I.C.Xmed. Journal,
and that august publication would find mistakes neither ironic nor amusing. He set the checked script down and looked at it thoughtfully.
Always the same. Four submissions accepted, printed, and praised to the stars—and I’m still like a cat on eggs about whether I’ve got it right or not. Oh, well, maybe the fifth will feel diff—
Then the desk kicked down at his thighs and the whole ship jerked as viciously as a bone shaken by a dog.
That’s impossible,
a rational voice said at the back of his mind.
No it’s not,
said the same voice an instant later as his stomach supplied more data. Something had flickered the
Vega
’s artificial gravity net, slapping him—and presumably everyone else aboard—from null-G to maybe 4 G’s, and then back to 1-G standard all in the space of half a second. And that something had to be either a collision, or—
Proximity alarms began yelping as the liner shuddered out of warp and back to realspace.
Somebody had just fired on them!
Here we go,
he thought. It was almost a relief, in a peculiar way. Maybe the trip was going to be worthwhile after all….
McCoy hit two tabs simultaneously: one lit up the courtesy you-are-here starfield map on the back wall of his cabin, and the second unshuttered clearsteel ports set in the outer hull. Those he kept shut while the
Vega
was running at warpspeed; nobody—apart, of course, from Spock, who was the exception to so many rules—actually
chose
to look out at unfiltered otherspace. But he opened it up anyway, no matter how pointless that might seem in the interstellar void, because he wanted if at all possible to see whatever the hell was happening.
And he did.
For just a second there was only velvety dark pinpricked by the light of distant stars. The swirl of motion came from nowhere, a wavering haze that first set those stars to dancing and then swallowed them as it condensed into a ship hanging less than five hundred meters away. Criminally close—although that would concern this vessel’s captain not at all, if McCoy’s memory of ship-silhouettes was accurate.
The Federation’s five-klick traffic limit was not observed by Klingons.
At least (
at least?
) it wasn’t the familiar brutal hunchbacked-vulture shape of an
Akif-
or
K’t’inga-
class battlecruiser. This was smaller and more rakish, one of the
K’hanakh
class frigates—still with firepower capable of blowing a target into a cloud of free electrons if the word was given. But what in the name of all things holy was a Klingon raider doing this deep into Federation space? They were much closer to the Romulan Neutral Zone…and the Romulans often used Klingon ships. He would
much
rather that the ship was Romulan.
As if responding to his thought, the warship pivoted gently on its maneuvering thrusters and slid toward the
Vega
and McCoy. Already its outline was fading again. He got no more than a glimpse of the insignia painted across its underbelly—an abstract spread-winged bird of prey—before ship and painted bird alike were gone from sight. McCoy stared out at the emptiness of space for several minutes even though there was no longer anything much to see, then turned and lifted the bound dissertation with a reluctant feeling of relief.
Cloaking device,
he thought.
Well, that’s that. We’re rolling…it’s just as well…. I hate public speaking anyway!
McCoy grabbed his jacket from where he had thrown it and left the cabin at a dead run, almost too fast for the automatic door. He didn’t know his way around the
Vega,
but right now he wanted to get to the bridge, and he wanted it fast. The ship’s corridors were chaotic, full of panicky people, most of whom didn’t know what was going on; McCoy had a feeling that if they
did
know, the situation would get rapidly worse. He managed to stop one of the liner’s stewards—a Sulamid—as it whirled past him, and was dismayed to see the alternating blue-green patterns of its tentacles. This particular Sulamid was so scared that reflex was overriding the good manners which usually kept its emotional-display pigmentation under control.
“Sir sir not restrain, urgency prime/paramount thistime,” it said hurriedly, trying to squirm past him.
“Just hold on there, mister,” said McCoy, blocking as best he could. “Get me to the bridge; I’ve gotta speak to the captain.”
“Prohibited passenger bridge access alltime, doublemost prohibited thistime absolute.”
I’d hoped I wouldn’t need this, but…
McCoy reached inside his jacket and pulled out the flat case containing his Starfleet ID, flipping it up in front of the Sulamid’s five nearest eye-stalks. “Passenger yes—civilian not.” He tried to keep the impatient growl out of his voice and used holophrastic speech for quicker understanding. “Authority override: rank, position, knowledge previous situations same ongoing. Please immediate bridge/captain contact
now!
”
The Sulamid stared with all eight of its eyes first at the ID card and then at him. “Knowledge previous situations/situation thistime?” it said hopefully.
Too damn many for comfort, son.
“Knowledge yes. See presence alive/ healthy; confirm situations survived yes? To captain speaking important hurry please.”
Again the rustle, and a nervous writhing of three big handling tentacles. Then the Sulamid came to a decision and flipped two of the tentacle-tips at the floor. McCoy knew enough of this particular nonhominid species’ kinesics to recognize a despairing shrug when he saw one. Starfleet or no Starfleet, it plainly expected trouble from the captain. “Sir to bridge guide follow,” it said, and made off without waiting for an answer.
“—mind the damned procedures! Just get an all-band distress squawk out on subspace before that’s jammed too—”
“—taken out all the drive systems! Impulse? You gotta be joking—I said
all,
didn’t I…?”
“—our ID was running, I tell you! They knew we weren’t military traffic!”
“—which is why they attacked in the first place—d’you think if we’d been a Starfleet cruiser they’d have dared to—”
“—who are they anyway…?”
The bridge was in a state of lively turmoil when McCoy and the reluctant Sulamid reached it, and they went unnoticed for several seconds while the chaos boiled around them. Then someone with executive officer’s stripes and a ferocious mustache swiveled his chair and began to hammer data into a terminal-pad, saw something he didn’t expect, and did a double-take to confirm it. “What the—! You! Who the hell are you? No—just get off the blasted bridge, mister! And I mean
right now!
”
“I know who they are,” said McCoy, unperturbed by the yelling. “I saw them, and they’re—”
“Captain Reaves! They’re Orion pirates, sir!” shouted somebody at the comm board. “I caught an ID-transmission leak before they shut it down and—”
“Any visual contact?” The
Vega
’s captain kicked his command chair around, saw McCoy, and favored him with a blistering glare, then dismissed the presence of intruders on his bridge in favor of more immediately important matters.
McCoy was not so easily ignored. “You’ll not get a fix on that ship, Captain,” he said, cutting through whatever reply the liner’s flight crew might have made. “It’s cloaked.” He took advantage of the sudden silence to continue in a more restrained fashion. “Captain Reaves, it was pure luck that I looked through my viewport at where I did, when I did. I saw the ship drop out of warp and raise its cloaking device; we’re under its phasers right now….” His voice trailed off at the expression on the captain’s face. “You don’t believe me.”
“Mister, I—”
“—that’s Doctor, Captain. Of medicine.”
“All right. Doctor. So you
saw
this raider come out of warp and then you
saw
it disappear again. If you’re a medical man”—and from his tone Reaves was doubtful—“you’ll know how that sounds. Agreed?”
“Here.” For the second time in five minutes McCoy flipped out his Starfleet authority and held it up in front of the captain’s eyes. “Doctor, also Commander. I know what I’m talking about. I don’t care if they ID as Orions, Gorn, or my old Aunt Matilda! There’s a Klingon-built, Romulan-owned Bird of Prey frigate right outside your damned front door, so you’d better start listening. If they’re jamming on wide-band subspace frequencies, then try a narrow-focus tachyon squirt—”
“A man of parts, Doctor.” Reaves glanced toward two screens, swore softly, and looked quickly away from them. “Do you
really
know what you’re talking about?”
McCoy bristled just a bit. “Enough for your comm officer to understand. Let me finish before you interr—”
“Terran Starliner
Vega,
phasers are locked on target. Do not attempt to raise your shields. Prepare to receive a boarding party.”
The new interruption had nothing to do with the captain, or with anyone else on the liner’s bridge. Battered almost to incoherence by the energy-sleet of an activated cloaking device, it crackled from a speaker module on the comm station’s translator board. In the shocked stillness after the speaker cut out,
Vega
’s people looked at one another and then, helplessly, at McCoy and Reaves.
The young officer manning the liner’s external scanners didn’t look. He hit a bank of activator-toggles with a sweep of his hand and said, “Visual, sir.” Then he audibly caught his breath as the image he had tracked sprang to high-magnification life on the main screen.
The outline was vague at first, but rapidly became hard-edged reality. The warship decloaked—and they stared straight down the glowing maws of activated phaser conduits. That hailing transmission had been no idle threat; but then, neither Romulans nor Klingons were known for bluffing if superior firepower could be used instead.
“Oh, God,” said someone very softly. Four columns of glittering crimson fire swirled to life on the bridge, and nobody needed to hear the reports that abruptly began spilling from
Vega
’s internal communicators to know that the same thing was happening all over the liner. Each firespout collapsed into itself in a storm of glowing motes and became human.
No. Romulan.
Each trooper wore a helmet with his uniform and carried an ugly businesslike disruptor rifle, but the officer who accompanied them was bare-headed and held a phaser pistol nonchalantly in one hand. He looked about the bridge with that cool, neutral expression worn most commonly by Vulcans, then smiled at the man in the command chair. “I am Subcommander tr’Annhwi, set in authority over Imperial Vessel
Avenger,
” he said in good if heavily accented Federation Standard Anglish. “All aboard this ship are my prisoners.”