Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (39 page)

But it was the prospect of sleeper-time that she really didn’t like. Starfleet’s knowledge of the Romulan language was restricted to what clipped military communications the Neutral Zone spy-satellites were able to monitor—and that wasn’t anything like enough.

So she was going to be a slave. The ancient sold-into-bondage, chain-on-the-neck—“I gather it’s been refined down to a sort of dog collar with the owner’s name and address on it,” Perry had told her in an attempt at comfort—sort of slave who was one degree up from the domestic animals because slaves
usually
didn’t need to be told things more than once….

Granted that her master was to be Vaebn tr’Lhoell or one of the other Romulans who would only pretend to treat her as property, the whole notion still made Terise feel twitchy.
What if anything goes wrong?
had been her first thought. After she had heard how she was to be “sold as unsatisfactory” to a more highly placed household once tr’Lhoell was certain that she could conduct herself as a native-born Rihanha, it had been her final thought as well.

How final that thought might turn out to be, Terise didn’t like to consider. Certainly matters had proceeded apace once she had insisted that her acceptance of the mission be placed on record; almost as if somewhere high up in Starfleet there was a fear that she would back out if given enough peace to reconsider what she had done.

Terise was just a little bit uneasy at the speed with which she assimilated Romulan. She knew of the dangers confronting deep-cover operatives in hostile territory, and those dangers were not always a result of being caught. Sometimes the greatest hazards lay in
not
being detected, and in adapting too well to the role of an alternate personality. There was the standard cautionary tale of the longterm prisoner who tried to escape from jail by simulating madness, and who succeeded so completely that when he was released, it was into the care of an insane asylum. Such risks were not usual during an ordinary tour of duty in the lab of a starship, but this was no tour, and
nothing
about it was ordinary.

The name they gave her soon replaced her own—for the simple reason that no one at the Intelligence facility ever called her anything other than Arrhae ir-Mnaeha. Terise/Arrhae found the supposedly cumbersome Romulan names easy enough to manage, because only a few of them seemed to have more syllables than her own…or the name which had
been
her own and which was now fading away like a dream after waking. And they all had a meaning, which made the actual understanding of them a relatively simple thing once the language structure was shoehorned into her brain. But the shift in mindset necessary for that understanding, and for the many, many other things that intelligence people had spent so long briefing her about?

That was something which she was certain that she would never accomplish….

…Until she did.

“Madame, sirs, all is in readiness.” Arrhae made the announcement from just inside the doorway, and was careful not to look directly at the man Mak’khoi.
McCoy,
her mind corrected. She ignored the correction. He was Federation—and that meant he was an enemy until the time when he could be proven otherwise. It made matters easier if she thought of him only as an abstract danger, like a venomous
nei’rrh
loose in an empty room. The sort of thing that she could walk softly around, in the knowledge that if she didn’t disturb it, then she was safe. Always assuming, of course, that the
nei’rrh
in question wasn’t feeling irritable, or pugnacious, or had had its feathers ruffled.

This one was suffering from all three. He knew not only what she had said, but all the substrata of meaning behind her simple declaration. That he was to be imprisoned; that a special place had been prepared for him; and that she was not going to reply to his signal. That, most of all, burned in his eyes as he stood up and Arrhae at last glanced toward him, knowing that not to do so would appear unnatural. Not a
nei’rrh
at all, she thought. A
thrai,
with all the memory for wrongs done him that
thraiin
were supposed to have. She tried to visualize Mak’khoi bearing such a grudge for years until the time was ripe for vengeance, like that old Klingon proverb people were so fond of quoting with a sneer, and found that she could not. There was a gentleness about the man that ran so deep it accorded ill with the hot rage he wore like a garment. As if he knew himself justified in his anger, but would as soon find reason to put it aside, even here, among his enemies.

“Soon enough, Doctor,” she heard tr’Annhwi say. “When your trial is concluded and the sentence is in progress, think of my kinfolk as you howl.”

Arrhae had heard threats uttered before; now and again, when in their cups, officers and other persons of sufficient rank to have had more sense would go so far as to make dueling challenges over H’daen tr’Khellian’s dinner table, but what tr’Annhwi said, and the coarse, brutal way in which he said it to a prisoner with no means to respond, made Arrhae’s hackles rise and her dislike of the subcommander increase to detestation. She had many reasons, of which his behavior toward her in the hallway of her master’s house was only the most personal. Arrhae ir-Mnaeha might have begun as a slave, but as her career advanced, so she associated with persons of good character and learned to comport herself in similar fashion. Such folk did not threaten the helpless, even when they were enemies;
mnhei’sahe
forbade it. Rather, they treated all, and especially their dearest enemies, as companions and equals worthy of respect and honor;
mnhei’sahe
required it.

Except that
mnhei’sahe
seemed to have become an outmoded concept….

Except among people like her master and Commander t’Radaik, both of whom glared at tr’Annhwi in a way that wished him ill. “You will stay here, Subcommander,” t’Radaik said. “And later, I think, we might discuss and clarify certain matters. The courtesy once considered part of Fleet rank, perhaps—or which rank is more appropriate to a lack of it? Sit down, and await me.”

Tr’Annhwi stared at his superior for a few seconds, with the expression of a man not believing his own ears. Not that he had never been disciplined before—very few in the Romulan military could make that claim—but to have it happen before civilians and an enemy…

He sat down with a jolt, mouth hanging open and eyes that had momentarily been wide with shock now narrowing with affront and fury. T’Radaik ignored his little performance, ignored
him,
as if he had ceased to exist. She turned instead, and pointedly, to Dr. McCoy, and gestured—Terranwise, with a crooking of all her fingers—that he should accompany her.

“Not all the Empire is so lacking in manners, Doctor,” the commander said, speaking Standard and choosing the correctness of her words with care. “Only most of it.”

That was a perilous statement, and one which she dared not make in Rihannsu before so many witnesses. Only tr’Annhwi understood and might have proven dangerous—except that after his justly corrected rudeness, heard by all, any accusation that he could make would be seen only as spite.

Arrhae also understood, but was not so foolish as to make it known. She had very properly lowered her eyes while those of higher rank exchanged hard words; except in certain notorious Houses, servants were neither deaf nor expected to be, but they were expected to remain attentive while not
obviously
listening. At such times, her facial muscles relaxed to an almost-Vulcan impassivity so that no matter what was said, she would not react to it. But for all her control and all her training in the hard school of slave to manager-of-servants, Arrhae’s mouth still went dry at t’Radaik’s next words. She tried to watch the commander from under her brows while keeping her head bowed far enough to hide the expression which was surely plastered all over her face.

“Arrhae t’Khellian is
hru’hfe
to this House, Dr. Mak’khoi. She will attend you here, with”—a swift and winning smile was directed at H’daen—“her master’s permission, of course.”

H’daen gave his approval in the manner that he preferred over more modern things—such as saying
yes
and leaving it at that—with the elegant salute and half-bow that was so many years out-of-date. Even in the throes of early panic Arrhae wondered why the commander had made a request instead of issuing the direct order which was more right and proper. And McCoy gazed at her, seeming no more than mildly curious. Then he merely nodded and walked past her without another glance, smiling thinly as captives do when hope recedes.

A gallows smile, like that which Vaebn tr’Lhoell had worn when they dragged him away with the food and the wine and the blood all smeared across his face and clothing. Arrhae shuddered and began to issue orders for the dining chamber to be cleared and cleaned.

Vaebn,
she thought somberly.
Oh, Vaebn, what did you do wrong? And how do I avoid the same mistake…?

“…if matters are well with you, Arrhae, then they are well with me also.”

Though his verbal greeting was traditional, the handshake that followed it was not. Vaebn tr’Lhoell looked less like the Romulans of Terise’s enhanced imagination than did several Vulcans of her immediate acquaintance. He was of only medium height, around her own meter and a half, and very slender, with that cool serenity which so many people associated with pure Vulcans and which she had encountered in so few at intelligence center. Oh, they had been calm and logical enough, but there was always an underlying tension about them when she was present, especially after the hemochromic tagging and the augmentation surgery. This man, this Rihanha who was to be her protector and her mentor and her master—
O-sensei,
suggested the part of her mind that came up with an appropriate word or phrase now and then, usually too late for it to be witty and worth saying anymore—was more in control of himself than all of them together.

Has to be, I guess,
she thought in that garble of Romulan and Standard Anglish that her mind had been using of late,
because one false move and he’s dead. And
I’m
dead with him! I wonder why he does it? Why any of them do it? Even me…?

The start of the mission was as dangerous as the rest seemed likely to be. A cloaked scoutship had seemed like a good idea while Commodore Perry had been bandying it about like an ace up his sleeve, but Terise had learned later that the cloaking device had been “acquired” from the Romulans themselves, and so recently that it was still throwing the occasional tantrum when fitted to Federation vessels. The three small ships run by Starfleet Intelligence for their clandestine missions were prototypes; laden with new technology, each had several untraced bugs to make their flights more interesting.

This particular scout had developed a small, irregularly recurring fault in—typically—its cloaking circuitry at a stage in the mission—also typically—where turnabout was out of the question. They had flipped out of cloak for two seconds while crossing the Neutral Zone perimeter, barely twenty thousand kilometers from the close-cordon patrol cruiser NCC-1843
Nelson,
and those had been the longest two seconds of Terise’s life. Because they hadn’t been running an ID and had behaved—thanks to the malfunctioning cloaking device—like a Romulan vessel, they had been fired on, and had barely escaped with hull or hides intact.

It had given Terise an interesting demonstration of just how the ostensibly peaceful Federation military regarded Romulans, and never mind what Perry had said about cross-cultural education. She required no effort at all to guess how a notoriously belligerent warrior people might feel about the Federation, its personnel…and its spies.

She had been a “slave” in House Lhoell for fourteen standard months, and her “master” had tutored his stupidest possession exhaustively in the language, etiquette, and customs of the elevated society in which he moved. What the other slaves saw, and snickered over, was the new arrival spending a great deal of time in her lord’s private chambers and seeming excessively tired as a consequence. Terise/Arrhae didn’t let the coarse teasing worry her; some of her school “friends” had been just as cruel to a child far less able to cope than the Command-conditioned adult she had become.

She learned all the things that a native-born Rihanha was supposed to know, but the revelation of language came as she had been told it might: suddenly. Between one of Vaebn’s sentences and the next, familiar things went strange and then snapped back to being more familiar than they had ever been before. Only their names had changed. Or not changed, been remembered correctly for the first time. After that, everything seemed to happen faster and faster, like a ball rolling down a hill.

A short time later Vaebn tr’Lhoell purchased himself a new slave. She was young and startlingly beautiful, and within days of her appearance—and nightly disappearances into Vaebn’s private chambers—wagers were being laid among the other servants concerning how long Arrhae ir-Mnaeha would tolerate the situation. The staged fight when her patience “broke at last” surely provided gossip for months thereafter. Arrhae heard none of it. Her name, three-view image, listed abilities, and price were in the area computer’s database before nightfall, and she was away from House Lhoell by late afternoon of the next day, as if Vaebn had sold her to the first bidder of a reasonable sum.

She knew differently. House Khellian had no connections to Starfleet Intelligence, Vaebn had warned her of that much, or indeed any connections to anywhere much. But it was an ideal base for an operative on such a mission as hers. Arrhae wondered, sometimes, just how the sale had been arranged….