Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (85 page)

Jim nodded. He remembered her from McCoy’s report, and now privately thought that he had not understated the woman’s potential dangerousness. It was always unwise to assume too much about facial expressions across hominid species, but humans and Rihannsu were alike enough in some regards that Jim was pretty sure t’Illialhlae did not have his best interests, or
Enterprise
’s, at heart. “If she hands me a drink,” he said softly, “I’ll let you scan it first.”

“I fear the Lalairu would not appreciate that, Captain,” Spock said. “They have guaranteed our safety while we are under their roof.”

“I’ll grant you, it’s some roof,” McCoy said, glancing up. “But all the same, I won’t let her serve the punch while
I’m
nearby. Speaking of which…”

He headed off across the room. Jim, for his own part, glanced around among the final group of Federation people arriving, and as Ambassador Fox headed past Jim toward the Romulan delegation, Jim suddenly caught sight in the ambassador’s group of a face he had been expecting to see, though he hadn’t been sure of exactly when. A small man with sandy hair and a wrinkled, genial face, wearing a beige and brown singlesuit that looked as if it had been applied to him with a shovel, and carrying the unmistakable telltale of a big book under one arm. The sharp eyes in that face caught Jim’s and lit up.

“Sam!”

Samuel T. Cogley, Esquire, headed across the acreage of floor toward Jim, reached out, and shook him vigorously by the hand. “Been too damn long,” he said. “Too long by half. Hello there, Mr. Spock! Nice to see you. How are you, Jim?”

“Concerned by the circumstances and the surroundings,” Jim said as they walked off a little way, and he nodded for Spock to come with them, “but otherwise, fine. How’ve you been?”

“Oh, a little busy, working on this case,” said Cogley. “After all, asylum law was hardly a specialty for me. But it’s like anything else—you start getting interested, and then it’s too late…”

Jim chuckled. When it had become obvious how things were going, he had strongly suggested to Ael that she was going to need some form of help on the Federation side that did not have phasers attached to it. “Certainly,” she had said, “if you know someone who handles lost causes…” Jim had grinned and immediately sent off a message to the best handler of lost causes he knew.

Afterwards he’d gotten a sneaking feeling that Starfleet might have preferred some other defender at these proceedings, but there was nothing they could do about it when Sam Cogley volunteered his services. Merely knowing and having successfully defended James T. Kirk was not enough to disqualify a counselor who was known for many other successful if positively quirky defenses here and there in Federation space. In fact, there were certainly people in Fleet who would have taken Cogley’s involvement as a sign that the best had been done—was being done—for Ael, and they were perfectly willing to let him go ahead, since the chances were better than even that the best might not be good enough.

“Have you had a chance to look over the preliminary paperwork?” Jim said.

Sam put his eyebrows up. “I’ve done better than that,” he said. “I did opening submissions earlier today.”

“What?”

Sam smiled slightly and steered Jim and Spock toward one of the great windows. “There’s already been an initial session,” Cogley said, very quietly. “It’s usually the case in proceedings like this. The diplomats involved, the real ones or their representatives rather than the negotiators of title, try to get together and do a little sorting out before the official sessions start. Fox sent an assistant in early with instructions; the Romulans did the same. Establishing ground rules, feeling out the sentiments of the other party…the usual.”

“Without telling
us?
” Jim muttered.

“It’s how business gets done,” Sam said.

Jim let out a long breath. “Well, we’re just here as enforcement, really,” he said. “I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that we hear about things a little late.”

“That’s true. But I’ll keep you posted as best I can,” Sam said. “Though we don’t want to spend too much time together in public, so let’s keep this brief. Anyway, things are already going moderately well. I was able to throw a few procedural
sabots
into the machinery earlier. Though apparently that suits Fox’s intentions at the moment.”

“Diplomacy,” Spock said, “is after all the art of prolonging a conflict.”

“Prolonging it at the jaw-flapping stage, instead of the photon torpedo and phaser stage,” Sam said, “yes, indeed. If today’s been anything to go by, we’re doing well in that regard. We spent the better part of an hour just attempting to settle whether Commander-General t’Rllaillieu was extraditable.”

Jim was slightly surprised. “I would have thought she was.”

“Oh, that wouldn’t be at all certain.” Sam smiled with pure enjoyment. “See, the concept of extradition requires
ab initio
that the two jurisdictions agree in recognizing the action in question as a crime. Not the action as a
class,
mind you, the Federation side rejected that out of hand.”

“You mean you rejected it and they jumped on the bandwagon.”

“When the band’s playing the right tune,” Cogley said, “sometimes it’s hard to resist. But the Federation’s reaction to what happened at Levaeri V, when the Romulans started complaining to them about the destruction of their ships and their space station and its personnel, was fairly straightforward. Their immediate counterquestion was: ‘Well, what were you doing with all that Vulcan brain tissue? Oh, and now that we think of it, exactly what were you doing with the Starship
Intrepid?
’” Sam grinned. “From the Starfleet point of view, there wasn’t any crime committed.
Enterprise
and
Inaieu
and the other ships went in to recover our hijacked personnel and materials. Then the Romulans said, ‘But this woman has stolen one of our starships. We want it back.’ ‘Ah,’ Starfleet says, through Fox and his cronies, ‘but she’s applied for political asylum here, stating that what she did was an act of resistance against a corrupt government, and that she used no more than reasonable force to allow her and her crew to escape. And naturally all her crew have filed for asylum as well, and are backing her up in their testimony.’”

Jim said nothing for the moment. The reality was a little more hazy, for Ael had applied for nothing, as he understood it. Starfleet’s agreement with her that she could take refuge in Federation space had been an informal one.
They wanted to pump her for information about the Imperium,
Jim thought,
and didn’t find her terribly forthcoming at that point, so they never went any further in formally confirming the privilege.
It was a matter that had made Ael, as Jim understood it, somewhat uncomfortable—not that she would ever reveal that discomfort to Starfleet. But now apparently someone had produced documentation to suggest that a request for asylum had been formally made and accepted. Or else someone had implied that such documentation existed.

Very, very interesting…

“Look, Sam,” Jim said, “stay in touch. We’re not going anywhere, and I’ll really be wanting to hear your slant on this thing as it unfolds.”

Sam nodded, glancing sideways to see Commodore Danilov rather stiffly and quietly greeting Hloal t’Illialhlae, who herself seemed to be concentrating on keeping her face an absolute mask as she spoke. She might as well not have bothered; the way she was holding the rest of her body suggested her loathing and fury all too clearly. “I can understand that,” he said. “I’ll do what I can for you, and for her. But one thing, Jim. If there are going to be any sudden moves, let me know.”

Jim nodded. “Do my best.”

Sam took himself away toward Fox’s group. Jim looked after him as he went, and said to Spock, “I didn’t see what the book was.”

Spock’s expression was difficult to read. “It was
The Lives of the Martyrs.
”

Jim let out a breath. “Huh,” he said. “Well, come on, Mr. Spock. Let’s eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow—”

Spock favored him with a look suggesting that he found the quote profoundly inappropriate.

They headed for the buffet tables nonetheless. Jim was aware that it would probably be unwise for him to make a first move toward the Romulans. Like the other captains, he was aware that he was here on sufferance—for the rest of the negotiations he and the others would be aboard their ships, since their presence at the proceedings would certainly have been seen as potentially provocative by one side or the other. For the moment, Jim busied himself briefly with making a small tidy sandwich with some grilled and “pulled” stayf—heaven only knew where the Lalairu were getting stayf; for all Jim knew, they were cloning it themselves—and watching what McCoy would have referred to as “the group dynamic.”

It was uncomfortable. At first the two groups did not have much to do with each other; each stayed mostly gathered to itself, looking at the others and making no overt move toward them.
Caution, or xenophobia, under the guise of nonintrusiveness,
Jim thought.
Or a desire to have a more structured environment in which to meet than this…
But the Lalairu were making no attempt whatever to bring the two sides together. Possibly they might have thought it a violation of their neutral role. Or perhaps they were simply wise enough to realize that sooner or later, curiosity would do for both sides what amity would have done in a less loaded situation.

Fox, for his own part, was talking to a small, slender man in Romulan ground-forces uniform whom Jim did not recognize. He committed the man’s face to memory for the moment—dossiers with pictures and vids would doubtless be making the rounds shortly—and turned his attention elsewhere, to that tall, striking woman t’Illialhlae, again. It was truly astonishing how hostile she could look, how deadly.
If she bit me, I’d want shots right then,
he thought, trying to remember whether Ael had said anything about her. He couldn’t remember offhand, but the thought of shots suddenly made him wonder what McCoy was up to. And come to think of it, where was Spock? He had drifted off while Jim was assembling his second sandwich.

Before he got started looking around, Jim moved over to one of the tables where drinks were laid out, picked up a decanter, and was pouring himself a small tot of Romulan ale when he felt a shadow fall over him. He looked up.

Blocking the starlight was one of the tallest Romulans he had ever seen, a big bear of a man in an older-style military uniform with a sort of floor-length dark green tabard over it. The man had short bristly hair and a craggy, fierce, broken-nosed face. He was looking at Jim with an expression that, while hostile, seemed to embody an amiable kind of hostility, like that of one who admired the handsome colors of a bug prior to stepping on it.

Jim straightened up and reacted to the look the only way he could, holding up the crystal decanter from which he had been pouring. “Ale, sir?”

Those dark, angry eyes widened a little, and then the man bowed to him a little and said, “I take that very kindly.” He held out his glass.

“Say when.”

The man looked at him oddly. “Why?”

“I’m sorry, sir. I mean, tell me how much of this you’d like.”

The rough face split in a grin. “More than it would be wise for me to drink, at the moment. Half the glass, if you would.”

Jim poured, privately considering that the day he drank that much of the blue stuff at one sitting would only be the day on which McCoy finally worked out the bugs in the removable-brain routine for humans. He briefly considered topping up his own glass and ditching it after he and this man parted company, then shrugged and put the decanter down.

Jim raised his glass. “Your health,” he said.

The Romulan studied him. “That’s something it surprises me that you would wish for.”

“Common courtesy,” Jim said, “would seem to suggest it. Other healths used by officers of previous services”—he smiled—“would seem to be inappropriate here.”

“And what healths would those be?”

“Well, a typical one, in armed services where the officers did not usually advance much in position in peacetime, would be, ‘To a sudden plague or a bloody war.’”

There was a pause, and then a great guffaw of laughter. It startled Jim, for he had never heard such a sound from a Romulan before. He had to laugh too, just at the sound of it; it was infectious.

“Maybe,” the Romulan said, “maybe I see what the damned traitress sees in you.”

“You have the advantage of me, sir,” Jim said, borrowing Bones’s phrase. “I don’t know your name.”

“Gurrhim tr’Siedhri, they call me.”

Aha,
Jim thought, for that was a name he had heard in passing from Ael. The dossier on him would make interesting rereading, later, in view of this meeting. He looked thoughtfully at the Praetor’s uniform. “Space services, perhaps?”

“Only long ago,” tr’Siedhri said, “when they were differently constituted than they are now.” Was that a breath of anger behind the nostalgia? “Now I am just a farmer.”

Jim had to grin at that. “With all due respect, sir, I don’t think it was talk about farm subsidies that brought you here.”

Tr’Siedhri’s eyes widened, and he produced that roaring laugh again. Heads turned around the room, and astonished eyes were fixed on them from here and there. Jim, looking past tr’Siedhri for a second, caught a glance from the t’Illialhlae woman. For once she had forgotten to keep her face still. Her glance at tr’Siedhri’s back suggested she would like to see some edged implement buried in it—deep. “Why, here’s fine news,” said tr’Siedhri, “that you know our local business,
my
local business, so well. The Praetorate must after all be as riddled with spies as they’ve been claiming. Indeed the odds are short that there’s anyone here who’s not a spy of some kind.”