Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (86 page)

The phrase “guilty as charged,” used as a joke, occurred to Jim, but he decided it would be unwise to use it at the moment. “There must be
someone
normal here,” he said instead.

“
Au,
the odds are still short,” said tr’Siedhri. “Has anyone here
not
in the military ever held an honest job? No, it’s just me, I fear, and little what’s-her-name there, the housekeeper-as-was: Arrhae i-Khellian as she is now.”

“Meaning that she ‘was’ something else?”

“Perspicacious,” Gurrhim said. “But we won’t speak of it. No, she’s noble now, that’s all that counts. They can’t take that from her, not even if they kill her. Once a Senator in ch’Rihan, always one—while you breathe, anyway.”

“Breath,” Spock said from behind the captain, “can be as precious a commodity for a Senator, then, as votes?”

The Praetor looked at Spock with another of those what-a-shiny-bug expressions. “Now here’s a wonder,” he said, “for who would have thought a Vulcan had any tittle of wit about him? But you too are slightly out of the ordinary as we reckon things. Votes, yes, Commander. The Senate depends on them. On our level of the House, we’re Praetor-blood as soon as we’re born. A sad state of affairs. No need or reason to prove oneself worthy of the position…just heredity on your side, and that as fickle and unpredictable an ally as it is for everyone else. Time passes, inbreeding sets in, the vigor of noble old houses runs out of their descendants like blood from a slit vein…” He shook his head. “Nothing is as it was when we were young.”

It was a complaint Jim had heard often enough before, but rarely with such a clear sense that the person voicing it was grandstanding, and to some purpose. He wondered what the purpose might be, for this man, who as he understood it had a fearsome reputation as a warrior in the ground forces when he was young, and later made the difficult transition to the Fleet with distinction, reaching Ael’s rank before being called to the Praetorate and resigning all but a reserve commission. “Time, then, for the Elements to move toward reunion?” he asked.

The look tr’Siedhri gave Jim was amusing. “Not just yet,” he said. “A few things to do before then…about which we will no doubt be speaking shortly.”

“Not ‘we,’ I think,” Jim said. “I am far less senior than some of the people here, Praetor. One of our poets better described my present role, I fear: ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’”

A small smile, a subdued expression, was the response, and it looked odd on this man, who seemed constructed for the big gesture and the exercise of power on a large scale. “Somehow,” Gurrhim tr’Siedhri said, “I do not think you will be kept waiting long.”

He lifted his glass. “Live well,” he said, and tossed the ale back in one gulp. Jim blinked.

The Praetor assumed a thoughtful expression. “Not a bad week, that,” he said, and picked up the decanter. “May I top you up?”

Jim let him do it, aware of Spock’s look resting on him and on the glass, and considered that prolonging this exchange would probably be worth the headache later. Anyway, McCoy could always slip him something to detoxify him a little; if anyone knew how to treat a Romulan ale overdose, considering recent history, it was McCoy.

“I should ask my friend to join me,” Jim said, attempting to put off for a few seconds at least the prospect of doing to this glassful what tr’Siedhri had just done.

“Oh,” tr’Siedhri said, “surely a Vulcan would not—”

“Surely,” Spock said, “not.”

“It was my other friend I was looking for,” Jim said, turning away a little desperately. He was just going to have to drink the stuff down; there was no way out of it.

“Indeed?” tr’Siedhri said, looking past Jim.

Jim turned and saw McCoy. And someone else.

The doctor was not ten meters away, looking absently at the stars through the nearby wall. In front of him, making her way from one group of Romulans toward another, as calm and unconcerned as a cloud passing in front of the moon, a handsome, dark-haired Rihannsu woman passed him by in a drift of robes that shimmered like midnight silk. The long, dark, delicate scarf trailing sashwise over her shoulder and floating gently behind her now slipped lazily down her back and whispered to the shining white floor, pooling there as still as a shadow gone truant.

“Our other ‘normal’ one,” tr’Siedhri said, too softly for anyone but Jim to hear.

McCoy heard the susurrus of the falling scarf, reacted with slight surprise, bent down, and picked it up. He strolled after her, and the sound of his footsteps brought her around.

“Sorry, ma’am,” McCoy said, “you dropped this.”

All this was happening, relatively speaking, away at the edge of things, but Jim, stealing a glance around the room, saw that some other eyes were now turned that way. One tall, thin woman by the door, in a long, relatively simple dark robe that would have passed for a very stylish evening dress in Earth society at the moment, was watching Senator i-Khellian very closely from behind a small knot of Rihannsu who were talking energetically about something else, oblivious to McCoy and the Senator.

McCoy slipped the delicate silk through his hands once and then presented it to the lady, as if it were more a weapon than an ornament of dress. The Senator looked quizzically from it to McCoy, and her expression took on an air of faint distaste as she looked him up and down. “It is not as if I don’t have enough of them to be able to afford to lose one now and then,” she said to him, very coolly, “and do not need to ask
you
to bring them back to me. Indeed, the last time we met you were more eager to throttle me than to be of any assistance. This is a pleasant change. May it be the herald of other unexpected civilities.”

She reached out and took the scarf from him, draping it over one forearm and giving him a nod of dismissal. McCoy’s bow was exactly that of a Southern gentleman being correctly polite to a lady who is being very correct with him. “At your service, ma’am,” he said, and waited for her to turn away before doing so himself.

Off she went in her cloud of dark silk, and McCoy turned back toward the buffet table, seeing Jim and Spock there, and their sudden companion. He ambled over toward them, nodded to the Praetor, and picked up a glass. “Captain,” he said, “Mr. Spock.”

“And so this is the other criminal,” said tr’Siedhri mildly. “Now my evening is complete, at least unless t’Rllaillieu should put in an appearance. Gentlemen, live well.” He raised his glass and drained it again.

Jim did the same, only hoping that this time his eyes wouldn’t water. As usual, the hope was in vain.

“Doctor?” said the Praetor, as McCoy filled his own glass.

“Here’s mud in your eye, sir,” McCoy said, and knocked his straight back without having to be coached. A moment later he took a long breath and said, “You people are masochists.”

“
Au,
no. Sadism, more usually, is our people’s vice,” said the Praetor. “This is merely self-abuse. Gentlemen.”

He gave the three of them just the slightest bow and went off toward the middle of the room, where various Rihannsu were talking quietly with Ambassador Fox. Jim glanced around and could see nothing of the tall woman who had been watching Senator i-Khellian; everyone else seemed to be looking everywhere else.

McCoy, meanwhile, was watching him with some slight concern. “You,” he said, “are going to have a head on you the size of a Rigelian’s in about an hour if you don’t get back to the ship and have a dose of Old Doc McCoy’s Famous Patent Nostrum for Overindulgence by the Diplomatically Minded.”

“Believe me, Bones, it was on my mind,” Jim said with feeling, for his eyeballs were starting to feel as if they were vibrating slightly in his head. “Let’s go do it now.”

“Not at all,” McCoy said. “Rude to leave the party so soon. Give it half an hour or so, then you two go down to sickbay. I’ll follow.”

Spock put an eyebrow up. “The doctor is merely attempting to be left alone with the buffet. Or to run a covert physical on me a month early.”

“You just keep believing that, Mr. Spock,” McCoy said. “And as for the illicit pleasures of the table, which you are so far above,
I
saw what you were doing to that
plomeek
dip. Don’t try to deny it.”

They strolled off under the stars.

Half an hour later Jim and Spock were in sickbay, waiting impatiently. McCoy came in about ten minutes after they arrived, having stopped at his quarters to get rid of his dress uniform. “Damn thing’s like being in traction,” he said as he came through the doors. “Don’t know why the surgeon general’s office hasn’t challenged the dress uniform on humanitarian grounds before now. Here.”

He put out his hand to Spock, who held out a hand, slightly startled. McCoy dropped two tiny data chips into it. “They were stuck to her scarf, under the roll of the hemming. Almost missed them.”

“Someone was watching her make the pass,” Jim said. “Tall, dark-haired woman, black robes.”

“Green eyes? Kind of a high coloration for a Romulan?” McCoy said. “Uh-oh. I think I may know that one. She must have been keeping away from me, or I would have spotted her for sure. She’s intelligence, Jim.”

“Wonderful,” Jim said. “Spock?”

The Vulcan was looking closely at the chips. “It is one of the high-density solid media,” he said, “but not the newest. I will take them up to the bridge and see what they contain.”

“I think I have a good guess,” Jim said.

“Tried them in the reader in my quarters,” McCoy said. “Both of them were gibberish.”

“They will not be for long,” Spock said. “Captain, if you will excuse me…” He headed out.

“Bones,” Jim said, trying not to sound too plaintive, “there’s a little man in my head rehearsing the percussion line for the ‘Anvil Chorus.’ Could you please…”

“Yeah, me too, just keep your tunic on.” McCoy sat down behind his desk and began rummaging through it for a particular hypospray. He glanced up. “Jim,” he said, “I’m kind of worried about Terise. Her cover was never meant to stand this kind of scrutiny.”

“It withstood enough scrutiny to allow her to be elevated to the Senate, Bones…”

“In a hurried way,” McCoy said, finding the hypo he wanted and getting up, “and with a lot of emotional overreaction going on in the upper levels of the government at that point, and the need to make a hero out of somebody, yes. But now there’s going to be time for more detailed investigation. Both back on ch’Rihan and on the ship that brought her here, which has to be crawling with intelligence operatives. Every word she says is going to be scrutinized.” He slid open one of his meds cabinets and started going through it. “And she’s here in the first place, you can bet, because someone high up in the government has decided to use her to find out what someone else high up in the government is doing during these talks. No matter what she says or does, she’s going to be in danger.”

“She’s a very intelligent young woman, if what you told us is true,” Jim said. “We’re going to have to assume that she’s capable of taking care of herself.”

“She’s more than half Rihannsu, by choice,” McCoy muttered as he came up with the vial he wanted. “I’m just hoping that’s going to be enough. She’s swimming with the sharks for real at the moment, and there’s nothing we can do to help.”

“Meanwhile,” Jim said, “Spock’ll see what he can make of what she gave you.”

“Yeah, well, what surprises me is that there should be two of those things. One I can understand. The second one is—what? An afterthought? A revision?”

“We’ll know pretty soon.
Ow!
”

“Sorry, I have to do this bolus. Timed release won’t help with what you drank.” McCoy reversed the hypo and gave himself a spray in the arm. “
Ow!
Lord, that smarts.”

“Crybaby.”

“Now sit down,” McCoy said. “Even Spock isn’t going to be able to decode those chips in five minutes.” He went over to the food slot and had it produce a pitcher of cold water and a couple of glasses. “And then tell me what that Praetor said to you…”

Eisn was just risen, and so was tr’Anierh when he heard the flitter landing outside his study and sighed. He was barely dressed and had only just had morning-draft, and here the man was already. “Who would be a Praetor of the Empire?” he muttered. “All my influence and I can’t even keep one of my peers out of my house until I’ve broken fast…”

He heard the door open, and the poor opener’s faint protest. Down the hall he could hear Urellh pounding his way, noisy as a herd of
hlai.
Then the study door flew open, and in Urellh came bustling, all good cheer, actually rubbing his hands together.
Why does he never storm into Arhm’n’s house this way?
tr’Anierh thought wearily.
Or perhaps he does, and I am merely his second stop today. Oh, happy Arhm’n, to be rid of him already…

“The earliest reports have come back,” Urellh said. “Matters are going well.”

Tr’Anierh sat down again behind the desk as he watched Urellh pace up and down the room. The man was unable to sit still when he was excited; it was astonishing that he had been able to keep people from knowing what he was thinking when he was still in the Senate.
Except that most of the Senators of his time were as dim as he,
tr’Anierh thought. “So what have you heard?”

“In the initial meeting they glossed over the attack at 15 Trianguli,” Urellh said. “It was not without mention, of course, but they are so nervous as to the result of the negotiations that they have not put nearly as much weight on it as they might have. It goes very well indeed.”

“Was the woman there?” said tr’Anierh, moving over to the bookshelves to start putting away the volumes he had been using the night before.

“No, she had been sent off somewhere out of the way,” said Urellh, producing his first frown of the morning. “More’s the pity. But she is not far, our people there think. They have begun remote sensor sweeps to locate her ship.”

Tr’Anierh nodded. “I would not hope for too much success too quickly in that regard,” he said, “but we will see what the scans reveal. They may become incautious of her while they try to prolong the talks to see what else they can discover about our situation.”

“They will have just been given more to chew on than they will like,” Urellh said, “and their minds should be more on others’ troubles than on ours.” He looked abnormally pleased.

That by itself bothered tr’Anierh, for he had recently come into rather more information than he wanted about some of Urellh’s doings and had been puzzling over what to do with it. “Well,” he said, “that is as well. We would not want them paying too much attention to our own preparations just now.”

“They would be paying less attention still had those seven ships not been where they were not wanted,” Urellh said. But he said it with much less venom than tr’Anierh would have expected. “However, it turns out that that ill-thought-out venture has perhaps done us a favor. There were folk aboard a few of those ships who might have done us a disservice had they returned.” He was frowning now. “The less comfortable and aggressive some elements of the other power blocs in the Senate feel at the moment, the better I like it.”

Tr’Anierh took a long breath. “I have been meaning to talk to you about this,” tr’Anierh said, “and this is probably as good a time as any.” He had been thinking of how to phrase this for some days; now he threw all those ideas away as useless temporizing. “As regards those disturbances on the outworlds…”

Urellh’s frown got more threatening. “They are unimportant. A seasonal manifestation.”

“I am not so sure of that,” tr’Anierh said. “Urellh, I have seen clearly enough how intelligence has been trying to manage this business, and the tactic is not working. I was willing enough to give it a chance to produce a positive result, but it has not done so. We should not be hunting those people down. The more intelligence does so, the more foolish they look, especially when those they are hunting escape them and spread the word. And if our people in the outworlds are indeed growing dissatisfied with our rule, we should be working to find out why, and to put the problem right.”

Urellh looked at him as if he had grown another head. “What should be done,” he said, “is what
is
being done. They are being told what we require of them, and how to obey. If they do not obey, the results will be predictable. That predictability is what keeps them in order—”

“It is
not
keeping them in order,” tr’Anierh said, turning on Urellh with a suddenness that actually made the man take a step backward. “I have other sources of news than those you see fit to allow around you, Urellh. A thousand dead on Jullheh three days ago in the rioting; the government buildings set alight on Saulnrih, and half the state’s spacecraft there destroyed or stolen in a night. This is a new definition of
order!
The men and women in those seven ships had friends, and now they are stirring up others on their behalf.”

Urellh glared at him. “That,” he said, “is your problem to deal with, of your making, not mine. If I were of a suspicious turn of mind, I would think perhaps you sent those people into harm’s way specifically to produce this result.”

Tr’Anierh’s face went hard as he took a couple of steps toward the other. “You would think hard before you made that claim as a certainty,” he said softly, “for it would be the Park for you then, for certain. I am one of the Three, Urellh, whether you like the fact or not, whether you think the number too large or not. You had best study to resign yourself more completely to that fact.” Urellh’s face closed over as if he did not care, and he held his ground, but tr’Anierh was not fooled. “And as for your earlier accusations, I have only one thing to say. What about Eilhaunn, Urellh? How was it that the Klingons happened on
that
world at just such a time? Apparently knowing everything about where its defenses were—and what defenses it had?”

Urellh did not even have the grace to look embarrassed. “I know well enough that one of your creatures was responsible for that. Where does that leave you now with the Elements, after such behavior toward ‘My people, whom I rule’?” There was no use trying to contain his scorn anymore. “Driven off as slaves now, sold to Klingon worlds, into lives of abuse and scorn, if lives they have at all! How have you protected
them?
”

“If it was not that world,” said Urellh, “it would soon enough have been another. The Klingons were coming
anyway,
tr’Anierh! They would have struck deeper into our spaces, and found richer prey, richer worlds, ones more important to us, had the beasts not had a bone thrown them—something to satisfy their own command, something that would not affect our own security too deeply. Now they are stripping Eilhaunn, yes, but little enough they’ll find for their pains. No industry to speak of, nothing of worth but slaves—and a long way to come for just those!
That
they will notice. They will think again before their next raid, for such poor payment. And they have shown their side of the board, in doing so. Now the Federation are looking their way, when once they had been concentrating wholly on us. That will cool their ale for them. No, we have lost a few lives, and gained many. And gained time, which is more precious than lives right now, for even though we seem to have acquired an early advantage in the talks, the game is still delicately balanced—”

Tr’Anierh looked at Urellh through his carefully suppressed distaste and anger and thought,
The package. Where is it now? More, who does know where it is?
It was something he dared not ask about directly. To show interest at all would be to show his own side of the board, and where his counters lay. “I am still not sure I care for the physical circumstances,” he said. “The Lalairu cannot be trusted not to interfere, and the Federation has begun to move much more significant assets into that area, as we know. Those six ships all by themselves—”

“Are enough to keep the Federation and the Starfleet people busy for the moment,” Urellh said lightly, having apparently regained his composure. “Too busy to see the seventh that passes, if all goes well. If it does…then all our problems will be over, quite soon.”

Tr’Anierh nodded, trying to look casual about it, trying to look as if the momentary unease had blown past him now. “Well,” he said, “then all the trouble and disruption will have been worth something after all. And once it finally happens, the outworlds will fall into line quickly enough. The traitress’s allies will be either destroyed or powerless, and the Klingons will swiftly enough learn to lie quiet lest they receive such a package themselves.”

“I thought you would see sense eventually,” Urellh said. Tr’Anierh held his face still until Urellh turned, for even now the man had no sense of his own arrogance and how transparent it was. “We have an early session today…” He was already halfway to the door.

“I know. I will be there.”

Urellh went out without closing the door, as usual. Softly tr’Anierh crossed to it, shut it, and began to walk slowly toward the windows again, looking out at the expanse of reinforced pavement, with flitters and small courier craft parked on it, that ran up against the distant wall.

He is too intent on his own vision,
tr’Anierh thought,
to see or allow the validity of any other. I wish he were merely mad; he might be turned from this course if he were. But he is all too sane.

Now all that remains to be seen is whether I can make Arhm’n aware of the danger, and get him to turn my way rather than Urellh’s.

And there was the other image, the image of the destruction of whole worlds. That was on his mind more or less constantly now, coming between him and his sleep and making the light of Eisn and the very greenness of the sky look uncertain in his eyes. Tr’Anierh shivered.
Even the news of this thing,
tr’Anierh thought,
should be enough to strike fear into them. Knowing we have such a device, the Federation would not then dare move against us. We would have leisure enough to restore order in our own good time.

But one way or another…they must know about it.

Tr’Anierh looked around the comfortable room, the shelves of books, almost properly organized now, the beautiful table with its delicate inlay over which he idly brushed his fingers. He thought of what lay outside that door, these windows—people and machines and wealth, the accessories of power, hard-earned over many years, all marshaled and ready to do his bidding. All he had to do to stay where he was, to keep what was his, was keep silent.

Let matters take their course. Do nothing. Nothing would happen to him. He was, after all, one of the Three.

Yet…

Are there things worth giving up all this for?
There had seemed to be, when he was younger. Was that simply a stage that he had grown out of? He would have thought so. But now old doubts and fears that tr’Anierh had not felt for years were assailing him, and, having long ago given up the discipline of struggling with them every day, he was losing this struggle now.

The inlay in the table caught his eye again as his fingers brushed it, that one long stanza from “The Song of the Sun”:

He turned, looked out at the lawn. The sound of Urellh’s departing flitter had almost faded to nothing against the normal morning city sounds. Things grew very quiet, very still, as tr’Anierh looked out into the burgeoning day, at Eisn’s amber sunlight striking in sideways and casting long shadows from the trees that surrounded the compound. The shadows, to his dismay, looked more real than the light; the light looked temporary, endangered, ephemeral.

Tr’Anierh turned and headed quickly out of the room.

Aboard the
Enterprise,
Spock had returned to sickbay, not in a matter of minutes, but after nearly an hour. He dropped a small data solid on the desk. Jim picked it up and turned it over in his hands. “The cryptography,” Spock said, “decoded correctly, but I wished to take some extra time to be sure of the encoded signatures associated with the material.” He looked grave.

“And?” Jim said.

“They were both genuine. But the material is, to put it mildly, explosive. It comes in two different sets, as you will have gathered from the two chips. One set of data purports to be from another Federation operative on ch’Rihan, who I fear we may assume has come to what the doctor would doubtless describe as ‘a bad end.’”

“And just how can we assume that?” McCoy asked.

“Because I have run a syntactic and stylistic analysis on that entire set of data, Doctor,” Spock said. “Even within a single short letter or message, each unique writer has specific telltales, stylistic tendencies from sentence structure to punctuation, that can serve as a guide to the genuineness of the text as a whole. In this case, there are alterations to the operative’s text, in a style that differs quantifiably, to no less than an eighty-four percent certainty, from its main body. The immediate suggestion, to my mind at least, is that the material was taken from this operative under, shall we say, less than optimum circumstances, and altered afterward so that we should accept it as genuine. Mostly the data has to do with troop and ship movements in the parts of Romulan space closest to the Neutral Zone, and if my conjectures as to the purposes of those who altered it are correct, we are meant to believe that the Rihannsu are not preparing for any major offensive, or rather not one against us, but for a ‘police action’ against rebellious elements within the Imperium.”