Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (72 page)

“You were…close to him.” She was watching Arrhae very closely.

“Only in terms of seeing to his needs,” Arrhae said, “as one might see to the needs of a guest of one’s House.” And irked by the intensity of t’Radaik’s regard, she scooped up a little of the
osilh
with the flatbread, and ate. It was a calculated insult, to eat in front of someone and not offer them anything, especially if they fancied themselves your equal…but right now, Arrhae didn’t care.

T’Radaik’s eyes narrowed. “And he treated you in a friendly manner.”

“In that he did not kill me when last we met,” Arrhae said, becoming increasingly annoyed as she began to suspect where this was leading, “if you regard that as ‘friendly’, yes.”

“You might then have reason to be grateful to him,” said t’Radaik, “and to wish him well.”

“I might also feel like killing him should we meet again,” Arrhae said, tearing off another bit of bread and scooping up more stew with it, “but somehow I doubt that such an action would suit your intentions at the moment.”

T’Radaik gave Arrhae a lofty look. “It would not. The service requires your assistance. You will be given a package which will be—”

T’Radaik stopped suddenly as Arrhae put down the piece of bread and fixed her with an angry stare. Arrhae lifted her right hand, turning its back to the Intelligence officer so that her signet was in plain view.

“The service may indeed desire the
deihu
’s assistance,” Arrhae said, keeping her voice level, “but the service is the
Senate
’s servant. Does it not say so, in great handsome letters, right around the seal emblazoned across your main building in Ra’tleihfi?”

T’Radaik simply looked at her. “I have been charged by the Praetor Eveh tr’Anierh to assist you,” Arrhae said, “and to
his
wishes, I am obedient. But I would advise you to mend your manners, Commander, and mind your tone, or the Praetor will hear of both. There is rarely such a galling sight, or one so likely to provoke the great to action, as an ill-behaved servant stepping out of its place.”

T’Radaik opened her mouth. “And you are thinking that you knew me when I was only a
hru’hfe,
” Arrhae said softly. “Think more quietly, Commander. Things change, in this world. ‘Half the Elements are mutable; nothing stays the same,’ the song says. And no matter what I was three months ago, the office of Senator still commands some respect. Now tell me about this package, and whatever else you need me to know, and then begone. I have no intention of allowing you to make me late for my next meeting.”

T’Radaik swallowed, a woman choking down anger, but not dismissing it. It would be saved carefully for another time. “The service has a small package which it asks you to deliver,” she said. “It will be left here in your rooms later today. Should the Terran Mak’khoi be present at the negotiations, you are requested to see that it comes to him.”

“Not without knowing what is in it,” Arrhae said, picking up the rolled-up morsel of flatbread and popping it into her mouth.

T’Radaik frowned. “That is no affair of yours.”

“Indeed it is,” Arrhae said after a moment, “for a Senator’s
mnhei’sahe
rides on such knowledge, and on acting correctly upon it. I know enough of how the service works to desire to be sure of what passes through my hands.”

“A data chip,” said t’Radaik. “Nothing more.”

“Oh? Well, I shall open it first, and read every word.”

Arrhae thought as she tore off one more bit of flatbread that taking on quite so assertive a shade of green did not improve t’Radaik’s otherwise highbred looks. “I am not such a fool as to think it is love poetry,” Arrhae said. “It will either be something that does us good, or does McCoy or the Federation some harm. I will know which before I assist you.”

T’Radaik looked at her darkly. Then she said, “Disinformation.”

Arrhae waited.

“There are Federation spies among us,” t’Radaik said, “and you more than most people here should know it.”

This stroke Arrhae had been expecting, and now she raised her eyebrows and gave t’Radaik an ironic look. The thought of what had happened to her old master Vaebn tr’Lhoell after he “sold” her away into the safety of House Khellian was much with Arrhae, but if t’Radaik expected her to react to the painful memory with terror, she had misjudged her. “Such is inevitable,” Arrhae said, “as inevitable as our having spies in the Federation, I would suppose. So?” She used the bread to eat one last bit of stew.

“We catch them, sometimes,” said t’Radaik, and this time she actually smiled. “Usually we manage to get at least some useful information out of them before we kill them. In this case, we managed to get quite a lot.”

“I am delighted for you,” Arrhae said. “Again: so?”

“We desire that the information the spy sought, along with other data of our own providing, should come to the Federation by quicker means than usual,” t’Radaik said. “Seeing that you have had contact with the criminal and spy Mak’khoi in the recent past, you are the perfect one to pass it to him. If you must justify your actions, you will pretend concern for him, and feign that this information comes from someone who was trying to contact him when he was on ch’Rihan last—for we have learned that his capture by our forces was not an accident. It was planned by the Federation itself, to allow him to check on some of their agents here.”

Arrhae allowed herself to look astonished while she took another drink of ale, relishing the burning fruit of it as much as t’Radaik’s annoyed look. “They must have little concern whether he lives or dies,” she said.

“Little enough, though they make such a great noise about his value as a starship officer. But there are indications that some in Starfleet are becoming weary of
Enterprise
’s officers in general, not just her captain, and wish they could be rid of them.” T’Radaik smiled. “Possibly the only goal we share. Mak’khoi’s being sent on this mission of espionage may have been a way to reduce the number of those officers by one. In any case, at least one of the Federation spies on ch’Rihan was instructed to try to make contact with Mak’khoi while he was here, passing him certain information about the Empire. He failed to make that contact. But he also failed to sufficiently cover the tracks of his attempt to make it. We caught him, and he gave us the information he had been preparing for Mak’khoi. Now, having examined it, we desire the data to reach Mak’khoi…suitably altered. That information will come by him to
Bloodwing
…and once there, will do its best work.” Her smile was that of a woman enjoying this prospect entirely too much.

“For all this trouble,” Arrhae said, “I hope you may be sure of that.”

“Oh, we will be informed promptly enough when the information has come where it needs to be.”

Will you really?
“Well,” Arrhae said, trying to sound offhanded about it as she put down the cup, “this sounds as if it will not unduly affect my honor. I will find a way to pass the chip to Mak’khoi, should he present himself.”

“We are sure he will,” t’Radaik said. “The first night of the meeting with the Federation starships, tomorrow night, there will be a social occasion—” Her look was sardonic. “As if one can be social with such vile creatures, half aliens, half animals. Nonetheless, we will go along with the charade, and at this meeting you will certainly have the opportunity to speak with Mak’khoi, and to pass him the material in question.”

A soft chime came from the office: the alarm that Arrhae had set in her computer. She reached for the lap-cloth by her plate, dusted her hands with it, and stood up. “Very well,” she said, and very rudely turned her back on t’Radaik, going off to fetch her carryall for the meeting she was about to attend. “See to the package’s delivery, then. You may go.”

The door hissed open. Arrhae turned and just caught sight of t’Radaik’s back going out. As the door closed again, Arrhae permitted herself just the slightest smile. She detested that woman, and she suspected t’Radaik had known as much before Arrhae ever opened her mouth.
No harm in letting her know she is right,
Arrhae thought.

At least, she hoped there would be none….

It was summer in that hemisphere of Samnethe, and the weather had been holding fair for some while: hot and sunny, the sky piled high with good-weather cloud. In and out of that cloud, the rakish and deadly shapes of Grand Fleet shuttles could be seen all day, ferrying troops and equipment up to the birds-of-prey, the great starships presently in orbit. Now it was sunset, the heat of the day cooling. Mijne t’Ethien leaned against the fiberplas surface next to the door of the group shelter where she and fifty others, men and women, slept together since the government warnings of imminent attack had gone out, and the ingathering to the secure site at the planet’s main spaceport, Tharawe. The hum of the place that one heard all day, from the habitués of the other five thousand houses of fifty, always began to hush down as dusk crept in. Now, in that peace, with her washing done and the daymeal inside her, Mijne leaned there and looked past the security fence toward the spaceport field, and was filled with wonder. Early that morning the sky had been full of the ugly swooping shapes of Klingon vessels, of phaserfire and the shriek of impulse engines. Now it was empty and peaceful again, and only the occasional shuttle going about its business broke the silence.

“They beat them,” Mijne said to herself. “It is a miracle.”

Behind her, a rough old voice said, “It is the dawn of a disaster; one which will start tomorrow.”

Mijne turned to look at her grandfather with a mixture of annoyance and fondness. He had been predicting disasters since the two of them had been brought here. “Resettlement,” the government had called it, “due to a state of emergency.” “Internment,” Amyn tr’Ethien had muttered when the message came down the terminal on that rainy morning, “as a matter of expediency.”

“Don’t be silly, Grandsire,” Mijne had said then, and she said it again now. She had been annoyed at having to shut up the summerhouse just after it had been opened, but it seemed foolish to rail against the government’s attempts to keep them all safe, and there was no protecting a population scattered as thinly across a planet as Samnethe’s was. The growing Grand Fleet presence stationed at the planet would have had to fly all over the place, patrolling living area and wasting its resources and manpower. It made much more sense to gather them all together where some security could be found. “The Klingons, it seems, hit our defenses as hard as they could, and couldn’t break through except to destroy a few hangars and small ships on the ground, not even anything important.”

“You believe that, do you,” her grandsire said. Mijne rolled her eyes. She did not mind being the last member of her family alive to take care of him; one had, after all, a duty to one’s House. But he could be annoying sometimes, and since they came here he had embarrassed Mijne with his outspoken opinions and his doomsaying a goodly number of times.

“Why shouldn’t I believe it?” Mijne said, walking away from the common house.

He walked away with her, linking his arm through hers, plainly knowing her intention—to get him away from there before he embarrassed her further in front of those with whom they were currently rooming—and clearly amused by it. “Granddaughter,” he said, “when was the last time you were near a news terminal? Not that those are to be entirely trusted, either.”

She laughed. “Grandsire, you’re so paranoid.”

He laughed at her too, shaking that head of shaggy silver-shot hair. “Consider it one of the side effects of venerable old age. But what have you to base the statement on, except rumor?”

She rolled her eyes again. He was in one of his pedantic moods tonight. “It’s all we’ve got, at the moment.”

“But not necessarily better than nothing,” he said. “I have lived a long time, Granddaughter, and I—”

“—have seen many things,” she said in unison with him: mockery, though not entirely unkind. “All right, then, you old fortune-teller, you old stargazer. Tell me how the Elements have decreed that events shall fall for the next day or so.”

They had walked a short distance away from the common houses over the beaten-down, dusty ground; he looked at her, smiling slightly, and wouldn’t answer. They kept walking into the cool of the growing dusk, in the general direction of the security fence.

He stopped, and she did too, and together they looked toward the low, dimly seen line of the hills twenty miles away. “What a lovely evening,” she said, “even down here in the heat.”

“Yes, it is,” he said. His eyes were raised higher, to where a bright-burning point of light hung over the hills: Erivin, the only other planet in the system besides Samnethe, closer to the primary than Samnethe was, and its evening star at this time of year. “The last evening, for me.”

She looked at him, wondering what he meant. “Oh, Grandfather! Don’t tell me your heart has been paining you again.”

“Not at all.”

“And the Klingons aren’t going to come back! They’ve been beaten. Everything is going to be all right now.”

“Is it.”

She looked into his face, confused.

“Granddaughter,” he said, “tomorrow everything changes. Tomorrow is the day our status shifts. And I do not know if I will survive it.”

“What?”

He patted the hand which lay over his, and walked her on a little ways. “When I was in Grand Fleet, on outworld patrol, in the ancient days,” Mijne’s grandfather said, “I saw how our ground ancillaries behaved when things needed to be repaired in a hurry. I grant you, it’s hard to see the port well from here, especially the way they keep opaquing the fence during the day. But they have the fence on automatic timing now, and they’ve misjudged the time of twilight, which is why we can see
that
as well as we can. Just look at it.”