Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (40 page)

Rea’s Helm
was the first ship to leave Vulcan, on 12 Ahhahr 140005. She spent three leisurely months accelerating out of Vulcan’s solar system at nonrelativistic speeds, sending back close-flyby data from the nearby planets as she passed them. Behind her, in twos and threes, came the names still preserved in the Rihannsu fleets, both merchant and military, and never allowed to lie idle:
Warbird, Starcatcher, T’Hie, Pennon, Bloodwing
and
Corona, Lance
and
Gorget, Sunheart, Forge
and
Lost Road
and
Blacklight, Firestorm
and
Vengeance
and
Memory
and
Shield.
The ships stayed in communication via tightbeam laser and psilink. At first they tended not to stay too close to one another, in case some disaster might take several ships out at once. But the first ten years of the journey broke them of this habit, as the sixteen ships forged outward and found interstellar space singularly uneventful, and close company a necessity.

There were numerous minor malfunctions aboard all the ships, as might be expected when technology has been custom-built for the first time and tested only as far as logic requires by a people both cautious and extremely impatient. But for those first ten years very few lives were lost: mostly results of maintenance-people’s accidents while in vacuum, falls in high-gravity areas while ships were in acceleration phase, and so forth. There were several crop failures, mostly of non-survival-required crops like flatroot. When the wiltleaf blight struck the graminiformes on
Vengeance
and
Gorget,
the other ships were still able to supply them with surpluses of their own root production. (It is amusing to note that to this day, Rihannsu hailing from the south-continent areas settled from the populations of
Gorget
and
Vengeance
will tend to refuse to eat flatroot: those unfamiliar with finer points of their history will put this down to “religious tradition.” But diary entries of that time are full of condemnation of “the wretched root,” which was about all the two ships’ people had to eat for nearly two years.) The travelers were encouraged—if such minor problems were the worst they would have to contend with, they would do well indeed. It only remained to see what the universe itself had waiting for them in the way of planets.

The first star the ships reached, 88 Eri, was as we presently know it: a type K star with fifteen planets, all barren and too hot for even a Vulcan to appreciate them—there were lakes of molten lead on the closest planets. The ones farther out had long had their atmospheres burned off, and the travelers had neither the equipment nor the patience for extended Vulcaniforming. They looped around 88 Eri and headed for 198 Eri, another of the K-type stars that had looked equally promising.

The cost of relativistic travel first began to be felt here, though the travelers had long been anticipating it. Their exploration of this first of many stars—acceleration, deceleration, in-system exploration, and assessment of planet viability—had taken them three years by ship time: on Vulcan, thirty years had passed.

The reestablishment of communication came as a shock for everyone involved. To begin with, while the travelers were accelerating, and for most of the deceleration stage, psilink communication had naturally been disabled. To a sending mind on Vulcan, the thoughts of a mind moving at relativistic speeds were an unintelligibly slow growl; a receiving mind on one of the ships, when listening to a Vulcan mind, would hear nothing but another person living (it seemed) impossibly fast, too fast to make sense of. And even when the travelers were nonrelativistic, there were other problems. Some of the linking groups, specially trained to be attuned to one another, had had deaths; some planetside teams had lost interest in the travelers, being more concerned with occurrences on Vulcan. And indeed there was reason. Surak’s teachings were spreading swiftly: there was some (carefully masked) dissatisfaction, even discontent, that energy should be wasted communicating with people who had disagreed violently enough with them to leave the planet. And Surak was no longer there to speak on their behalf in the planet’s councils. He was dead, murdered by the Yhri faction with whom he had been dealing peace on behalf of those already united.

The news hit hard, though the travelers had disowned him; there was mourning in the ships, and S’task was not seen for many days. There was a ship’s council meeting scheduled during the period when he was missing, and the other councillors, S’task’s neighbors, were too abashed by what they had heard about the depth of his grief to inquire of him whether he planned to attend. When they came together into the council chambers of
Rea’s Helm,
they found S’task’s chair empty, but laid across it was a sword, one of the S’hariens that Surak had brought him. The councillors looked at it in silence and left it where it was. When S’task returned to council a month or so later, he would not comment, he simply found himself another chair to sit in. For many years thereafter, the sword remained in that chair, unmoved. After
Rea’s Helm
made planetfall, and new chambers of government were established on ch’Rihan, the chair sat in them in the place of honor, behind senators and praetors and an abortive Emperor or two, reminding all lookers of the missing element in the Rihannsu equation: the silent force that had caused the Sundering, and still moved on the planet of their people’s birth, though the man who gave it birth was gone. To touch the sword in the Empty Chair was nothing less than a man’s death. Even naming it was dangerous—oaths sworn on it were kept, or the swearer died, sometimes with assistance.

The journey went on, and had no need to turn homeward for its griefs: it found others. The second starfall, around 198 Eri, was disastrous. It was not quite as bad as it might have been, since numerous of the ships’ councils had elected to have the ships accelerate at different rates, thereby stringing the ships out somewhat along their course. With psilinked communications, ships farther along the course could alert others of whether a star was viable or not, and the other accompanying ships could change course more quickly. The tactic was a sort of interstellar leapfrog, one that many other species working at relativistic speeds have found useful.

This might have worked out well enough, except that communications with Vulcan were again impossible. There was therefore no way that the travelers could be warned of what Vulcan astronomers had detected in the neighborhood of 198 Eri with equipment newly augmented by improvements obtained from the Hamalki. Seven of eighteen ships were lost over the event horizon of a newly collapsed black hole.
Pennon, Starcatcher, Bloodwing, Forge, Lost Road, Lance,
and
Blacklight
all came out of the boost phase of the psi-based “bootstrap” acceleration to find themselves falling down a “hole” through space in which time dilated and contracted wildly, and physical reality itself came undone around them. Even those ships that had warning were unable to pull out of the gravitational field of the singularity, though every jump-trained adept aboard the ships died trying to bootstrap them out again. The inhabitants of those ships spent long days looking through madness at the death that was inexorably sucking them in. No one knows to this day what the final fate of the people aboard the ships was—whether they died from the antithetical nature of “denatured” space itself, or whether the ships mercifully blew up first due to gravitational stress. Those from the surviving ships unlucky enough to be in mindlink with them succumbed to psychoses and died quickly, possibly in empathy, or slowly, raving to the end of their lives.

The tragedy slowed down the journey immensely, as the ships approached 198 Eri and found its planets as hopeless as 88s had been. Every argument that could come up about the conduct of the journey did so almost immediately, and the arguing continued for several years while the ships orbited 198 Eri and stored what stellar power they could. Should the travelers turn back? Little use in that, some said. Vulcan might not want them back, and besides, what friends and families had been left behind were all old or dead now: relativity had taken its toll. Or keep going? Unwise, said others, when even empty-looking space turned out to be mined with deadly dangers you could not see until they were already in the process of killing you. Should they keep all the ships together (and risk having them all destroyed together)? Or should they spread them out (and risk not being able to come to one another’s aid)? Should they stop using the bootstrap acceleration method, despite the fact that it used no fuel and conserved the ships’ resources more completely than any other method? And the question was complicated by the fact that there was no more help available from Vulcan, even if any would have been offered them. The ships had recently passed the nine-point-five light-year limit on unboosted telepathy. Even at nonrelativistic speeds, no adept heard anything but the mental analogue of four-centimeter noise, the sound of life in the universe breathing quietly to itself.

Three and a half years went by while the ships grieved, argued, and looked for answers. They found none, but once again will drove them outward: S’task had not come so far to turn back. Many in the ships were unwilling, but S’task carried the council of
Rea’s Helm
and declared that his ship at least was going on: and the others would not let him go alone. Under conventional ramscoop drive at first, then using bootstrapping again as the memory of pain dulled a little, the ships headed for 4408A/B Trianguli, a promising “wide” binary with two possible stars.

4408B Tri is, of course, the star around which orbits the planet Iruh, and the travelers could not have made a worse choice of a world to examine for colonization. If they had analyzed the Etoshan data more thoroughly, they might have avoided another disaster, but they did not. At one time the Inshai had cordoned off the system, but they were now long gone from those spaces, and all their warning buoys had been destroyed by the Etoshan pirates during their own ill-fated attempt to subdue the planet. So it was that the travelers’ ships came in cautiously, by ones and twos, and found 4408A surrounded by worlds covered in molten rock or liquid methane, and 4408B orbited by six planets, one of which registered on their instruments as a ninety-nine percent climatic match for Vulcan…and rich in metals, which Vulcan at its best had never been. The first two ships in,
T’Hie
and
Corona,
slipped into parking orbits and sent shuttles down to take more readings and assess the planet’s climate and biochemistry. The shuttles did not come back, but long before there was alarm about the issue, it was too late for the travelers in orbit.

The Iruhe were doing as they had done with so many other travelers: they had sensed their minds from a distance and insinuated into their minds an image of Iruh as the perfect world, the one they were looking for. What use is an accurate instrument reading when the mind reading it is being influenced to inaccuracy? And not even Vulcans were capable of holding out against the influence of a species rated one of the most mentally powerful of the whole galaxy, with a reconstructed psi rating of nearly 160 (the most highly trained Vulcans rate about 30: most Terrans about 10). The crews of the shuttles served as an hors d’oeuvre for the Iruhe, and confirmed what had fallen into their toils, a phenomenal number of fiercely motivated, intelligent, mentally vigorous people. With false “reports” from the shuttles that seemed absolutely true, because the crewpeople seeing them were supplying familiar faces and details from their own minds, the Iruhe lured
Corona
and
T’Hie
into optimum range—close synchronous orbit—and proceeded to suck the life force out of the entire complement of both ships, over twelve thousand men, women, and children. Then they crashed the ships full of mindless, still-breathing husks into Iruh’s methane seas, and waited eagerly for the rest of the feast, the other travelers.

The torpor of a whole species of intellivores after a massive and unprecedented gorge was the only thing that saved the other ships.
Sunheart
coasted in next, and her navigations crew noticed with instant alarm that the ion trails of
T’Hie
and
Corona
stopped suddenly around Iruh, and did not head out into space again.
Sunheart
’s command crew immediately made the wisest decisions possible under the circumstances: they ran. They veered off from the paradisial planet they saw, and warned off the other ships. In the hurry there were several mistakes made in navigations, and
Firestorm
and
Vengeance
fell out of contact with the other ships and only much later made the course corrections to find them again. But the hurry was necessary: there was no telling how long or short a grace period they would have had before the Iruhe “woke up” and noticed the rest of their dinner arriving.

The travelers were, in any case, very fortunate. Few species had gotten off so lightly from encounters with Iruh: many more ships and several planets (after the Iruhe got in the habit of moving theirs around that arm of the galaxy) were to fall victim to the insatiable mind-predators. Not until some seventeen hundred years later, when the Organians were asked to intervene, could anything effective be done about the Iruhe. And the irony is that no one knows to this day just what was “done.” The planet is empty and quiet now, and there is a Federation research team there, sifting the ruined landmasses for what artifacts remain.

The courses of the traveler ships still remaining become harder to trace from this point onward.
Firestorm
and
Vengeance
wandered for a long time, hunting the other ships, hearing the occasional psi-contact and using the vague directional sense from these to try to course-correct. The other ships meanwhile went through much the same experience—years and years of wandering among stars that turned out barren of planets, or among stars that had planets that were useless to them. The travelers had thought that the odds of finding a habitable world, away from the aliens that troubled them so, were well in their favor. They found out otherwise, painfully. Here again, paying attention to the data from the Etoshans might have helped them. The Etoshans knew how poor in habitable worlds the Eridani-Trianguli spaces had been. It was one of the reasons they had been so surprised to find the Vulcans in the first place.