Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (66 page)

The bubble continued to bend itself up and up from the star’s chromosphere, arching, inflating, its “surface” swirling like that of a soap bubble with that virulent blue glow—getting taller all the time, impossibly tall, compared to the star. Any spicule, any prominence, would long since have either fallen back into the chromosphere, or blown away entirely…but not this thing. It
grew
. From engineering, over the roar of the engines, he heard a voice like a very nervous xylophone saying,
“Dear Architectrix, Sc’tty, look at it, it’s not supposed to do
that—!”

Oh, wonderful,
Jim thought.
“Bloodwing—!”

“Right behind you, Captain,”
Ael’s voice said. But they were
not
right behind
Enterprise,
they were well behind.
If their shields aren’t tuned properly—

The other Rihannsu ships had seen that upward-straining shape too. They turned, in a welter of different speeds and in seven different directions, and fled.

Blue, bulging, awful, the bubble strained outward…and then the bubble burst.

The Sunseed effect, as K’s’t’lk had said, released so much energy into such a small volume of space at such a speed and intensity that much of it had no choice but to propagate into subspace as a sleet of stripped ions, cyclotron radiation, and other subatomic particles. Once there, the newly created ion storm did not go faster than light itself, but it affected anything in subspace that did, such as ships with warp fields. The effect, so close to its source, was as if a great hand had grabbed
Enterprise
and was trying to use it for a saltshaker. Jim hung on tight, grimly determined that even if he died right now, he was going to do it in his command chair and not rolling around on the floor.

But dying was apparently not in the cards. The shaking began to ease off. Jim stared into the screen and saw eight sparks of light scattered over a great area of space behind him, all of them brilliantly backlit by an orange star, suddenly abnormally bright, with an equally sudden, swiftly expanding spherical halo of dimming but deadly blue-white fire. That halo expanded to meet them, surrounded them, rushed past them—

Seven of them flowered into fire themselves, one after another, as their shields failed, and in both realspace and subspace a billion tons of plasma struck them at a temperature of nearly two million degrees. The little spheres of pure white fire produced by the instantaneous annihilation of all the matter and antimatter in what remained of their warp engines was briefly hotter: but not by much, and not for long.

And one spark burned bright for a moment, its tuned shields shrieking light…then dull again, and duller still as the star behind it began to recover from its very brief solar flare.

“Bloodwing,”
Jim said.

Silence.

“Enterprise,” Ael said, after a moment.

Jim breathed out. “Is everyone all right over there?”

“My nerves are a casualty, I would say,”
Ael said.
“But the shields held, for which I praise Fire’s name…having seen It so close to hand, and lived. We have some minor structural problems, I believe.”

“We too will need to examine the hull, Captain,” Spock said. “But initial indicators seem to suggest only minor damage.”

“Good. Let’s get it taken care of,” Jim said, and stood up, now that it was safe to do so. “Scotty, K’s’t’lk, nice work.”

“Thank you, Captain,”
Scotty said.

“I must apologize, Captain,”
K’s’t’lk said.
“I had hoped for better.”

Jim paused. “Sorry?”

“There was supposed to be a lovely evenly generated ionization effect that propagated right around the corona,”
K’s’t’lk said, sounding mournful.
“Not just a coronal mass ejection like that, all lumpy and asymmetrical.”

“I thought it worked rather well,”
Ael said, sounding dubious.

“But not the way it was supposed to,”
K’s’t’lk said.
“Captain, Commander, I am mortified. We were very nearly all roast.”

“You mean toast,” Sulu said.

“Toast, thank you.”

“Nonetheless,”
Ael said,
“we are all alive…a situation on which I would have been unwilling to suggest odds when I first saw what was waiting for us. If a few adjustments in your version of the process need to be made, well, that is the history of science. But meantime, the effectiveness of the tuned-shield approach against the Sunseed routines is very neatly proven.”

“Assuming one knows the frequencies to which the shields must be tuned ahead of time,” Spock said. “Assessing and tuning them when the star cannot be analyzed ahead of time, but must be assessed at the
same
time, will be a considerable challenge.”

“I leave that to the three of you,” Jim said. “Meanwhile, we have another problem. There were seven Romulan ships in Federation space when they had no business to be there. I don’t suppose that was the diplomatic mission….”

“If it was, we have committed nearly as serious a breach of protocol as they did,”
Ael said dryly.
“But I very much doubt they had anything to do with the ships we are still expecting.”

“So do I.” Jim sighed and rubbed his face. “Commander Uhura, prepare a message with a record of what just happened here and prepare to send it off to Starfleet, suitably encrypted.” For the moment he was willing to put his concerns about possibly broken encryption aside. If the Romulans could decode this message, let them. It would give them something to think about. “No technical details for the moment, though; keep it dry. Let me see it when it’s done. I’ll be in my quarters for a little while.”

“Bridge?”

Jim punched the comm button again. “Problems, Bones?”

“Nothing serious, but I’m glad you told me to fasten things down, down here. What the devil was
that?”

“I’ll have Uhura send you down a recording to view at your leisure,” Jim said, and grinned. Now that it was over, grinning was possible again.

“Thanks loads. Out.”

Jim turned to Spock. “Mr. Spock, when is the task force due?”

“Twenty-eight hours and eighteen minutes from now, Captain.”

“Very well. Let’s get whatever repairs need to be done out of the way, and take the evening off. Keep the shields up, though, except as necessary. Commander, perhaps some of your crew would join us for dinner, and afterward.”

“Our pleasure, Captain.”

“Excellent. Maybe you would call me in my quarters in a few minutes? There are some things we should discuss.”

“Certainly, Captain. Out.”

Jim got up, went into the lift, and tried to order his thoughts. After a pell-mell encounter like the one of the last few minutes, sometimes this took a while. But he busied himself with one of the breathing exercises Bones had taught him, and shut his eyes while the lift hummed along, concentrating on seeing space as a calm place again, full of cold and silence and the fierce pale light of the stars. By the time the lift doors slid open again, things were better…except in one regard.

The call was waiting on his viewer when he came in and sat down in front of it. At the sound of his movement, Ael looked up. She had moved down to her own cabin from
Bloodwing
’s bridge.

“So you were right,”
she said,
“about the ambush.”

“And so were you.”

“I? I did nothing but agree with you.”

“True.” Jim leaned his elbows on the desk, laced his fingers together, and put his chin on them. “And without discussion. Which suggests to me that you had previously had your suspicions as well…which you did not exactly spell out to me.”

She went quiet at that.
“I dislike being thought merely paranoid,”
Ael said.

“You also dislike being wrong,” said Jim.

“Yes,”
Ael said,
“but more lives than mine, or mine and
Bloodwing
’s, are on the line here. Various people’s actions in the Empire will be powerfully influenced by ours…and many innocents may live or die according to what those people do, when news of what has happened to us will make it back to the Two Worlds.”

“It won’t be brought back by
those
ships.”

“No.”
There was a brief pause.
“Even now, Jim, even after what we went through at Levaeri, when my son, my own son, turned traitor and tried to take your ship, and he and all the people who turned with him suffered the penalty for such betrayal—even after that, I still believe there are still most likely agents of the Empire aboard my ship; crew who did not reveal their affinities then, but conceal them still, passing messages back to ch’Rihan when they can. I did not dare generally reveal my thoughts about what might be waiting for
Bloodwing
at 15 Trianguli if we had kept to the original schedule; and I did not tell my crew at large that we were going to divert to Hamal first, or that we would leave it accompanied, instead of going alone to 15 Tri. Now behold what has happened…for
Bloodwing
comes to the spot where it was intended to wait alone, and finds seven Rihannsu ships waiting. And now no ship will go home to ch’Rihan to tell what happened; which is a good thing.”

“Commander,” Jim said.

Her eyes widened a little at his tone.

“How the
hell
am I supposed to trust you,” Jim said, “if you won’t trust
me?
”

She made no answer to that right away. After a moment, Ael glanced down at her desk.
“I see that I have done you an injustice,”
she said.
“Habit…can be very difficult to break.”

“Something for you to talk to your chief surgeon about, maybe,” Jim said. He was angry, but he wasn’t going to let that affect him any more than necessary. “God forbid I should criticize you for calculating…your calculation has saved both our lives, once or twice. But there’s no reason for you to do it
alone.
Especially when it’s my crew’s lives on the line, as well.”

She was silent.

“In the meantime, I was right, and you were right, to take the course of action we did. And you’re right about this too: regardless of how many spies may still be aboard
Bloodwing,
we now have enough evidence for my own purposes that there are intelligence leaks fairly high up in Starfleet, and those leaks are reaching straight back to ch’Rihan. Very few people at our end of things knew when you were supposed to be at 15 Tri, alone, to meet the task force that will shortly be arriving. My problem is that, after what’s happened, they’ll know that
I
have reason to suspect those leaks. This may translate into a loss of advantage for me, depending on how high up the leaks go…and I’m damned if I know what to do about it.”

“They will not know that,”
Ael said,
“if I tell them that
I
convinced you to accompany
Bloodwing
there.”
Jim opened his mouth.
“They will half believe that anyway, Jim; for Starfleet cannot at the best of times be very sanguine about our association. Certainly they must look at it and see all manner of things that are not there.”

Jim closed his mouth again. After a moment he said, “Interesting idea.”

“And this I will be glad to do when the task force arrives,”
Ael said.
“It seems like the least I can do…by way of apology.”

Their eyes met. After a second, Jim let out a breath. “Let’s see if it’s genuinely necessary,” he said.

“Very well.”

“Meanwhile,” Jim said, “the presence of those ships themselves is evidence that you were right in more than one way. There
will
be a war, now. Their presence in Federation space, without permission given beforehand for the transit, was itself an act of war according to the terms of the treaty that established the Zone…which tells me that someone in your government is getting ready to throw that treaty right out the window, no matter
what
Starfleet decides to do about you and
Bloodwing
and the Sword. From our two points of view, that certainly is going to change things.”

“Yes,”
Ael said softly.
“It will.”

“I want to discuss this with you further,” Jim said. “But let’s leave that for this evening, when your crew are here as well. That way there’ll be a little less notice taken when you spend a good while talking to me…in places where we can’t be overheard, by your crew
or
mine.”

She briefly gave him a rather wicked look. Jim flushed. “Not like
that,
” he said crossly.

“Indeed not,”
Ael said.
“The thought was furthest from my mind.”

Jim raised his eyebrows. “Why, thank you. I think.”

“You are very welcome. What time shall I begin the leaves, Jim?”

“A couple of hours.” She reached out for the control for her viewer.

“Ael,” he said.

She paused, looking at him thoughtfully.