Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (53 page)

But her problem wasn’t what other people should do. McCoy’s question hung fire in her mind, tantalizing her. She had never given him an answer.

Starfleet again. To give up constant fear, and drudgery—being
hru’hfe
was never easy—and to go back to freedom, the stars, other worlds, other people. To see how her old friends on Earth and Mars were doing. To bleed
red.

She shuddered. Abruptly it seemed an odd color to bleed.

McCoy might be doing it right here, very shortly, if whatever he was planning didn’t work out. And she didn’t know how to help him.

You don’t have to help me. Not yet.

She shuddered again.

I’m authorized to ask you this….

Arrhae wished he had not.

And she felt a little tremor in the floor, as if someone had dropped something.

Arrhae looked around. No sound. No one had dropped anything, it had to have been her imagination. McCoy was going on at length about cocktail shakers.

The tremor repeated itself, more strongly this time. Arrhae glanced quickly from side to side, wondering if anyone else had noticed or if it was indeed just a trick of her overwrought mind. It had to be; all the members of the Senate and the Praetorate were settling back into their attitudes of boredom and McCoy was preaching the virtues of first melting the sugar for a julep in a little hot water.

But just as he began to describe how some of the mint leaves should be bruised and others left intact, he stopped talking. Hloal t’Illialhlae and Subcommander tr’Annhwi were on their feet almost simultaneously, grinning. And then the grins were wiped from both their faces as a crack appeared in the middle of the floor, right before the Empty Chair itself.

The crack widened with a small, crisp
snap
that echoed astonishingly in the silence that had filled the Senate Chamber. Then it exploded wide open with a hiss as of strong reagents and a nostril-tingling scent of acid, and a
thing
reared up out of the Earth to begin rumbling across the floor, leaving a track in its wake that was eroded into the very marble slabs themselves.

What happened to him?
she thought, for Lieutenant Naraht was twice the size that he had been when Arrhae tripped over him only six days ago, and his rank-marked voder now looked like a badge rather than a piece of electronics. Whether Hortas had some sort of silicon-based late-adolescent growth spurt, or whether he’d just followed doctor’s orders and indulged in a bit of feeding-up between H’daen’s house and here, she didn’t know. It was enough that he had arrived, and arrived in such a way as to create the maximum amount of confusion. There was plenty of it, what with normally staid persons of rank running about like
hlai
with their heads cut off, and screaming, and the air sharp with acid fumes, and the shouting of orders that no one heeded….

Terise began to suspect that McCoy just might manage to pull this off after all.

For McCoy, it all made a most satisfying parallel to the scene on
Vega
’s bridge after her holds were blown open. A phaser whined shrilly, almost at his elbow, as one of the four guards drew his illegally carried sidearm and sent a bolt of disruptor-level energy crackling into Naraht’s side. The Horta didn’t even notice, but the Rihannsu guard did briefly, before McCoy shifted his stance on the podium and jabbed that so-convenient elbow backward into the man’s throat.
One thing about being a medic,
he thought as he dived to scoop up the fallen phaser,
you know which parts to aim for.
Then thoughts of anything other than survival got pushed aside as more phaser fire ionized the acid-heavy air and blew the podium to jagged fragments….

He was lucky; apart from that one attempt to dust him, they kept stubbornly shooting at Naraht despite the fact that it was clear they were wasting their time and ammunition-charges. But when a living Representative of the Elements moved among mortals, those mortals could scarcely be blamed for throwing rational behavior to the winds. Naraht wasn’t being damaged, but he was angry, confronted with ludicrously imbalanced odds and doing whatever had to be done moment by moment, whether that meant barging about like a sentient tank, breaking things and people with the brisk efficiency he brought to everything. “Took you long enough to get here!” McCoy shouted at him across the room.

“Doctor,” Naraht said, ramming a firing guard into the wall, “let’s see
you
burrow through two hundred fifty-three miles of rock that fast.”

“And another thing,” McCoy shouted, “what happened to you? You’re twice your size!”

Naraht laughed, a sound so bizarre that several Rihannsu who had been about to concentrate their fire on him broke and ran away. “You’re the one who’s always twitting me about needing to put on some weight! So I snacked on the way. Besides”—and the artificial voice got unusually cheerful—“the granite here is
very
good.”

Several other people concentrated phaser fire on Naraht, three beams together. It must have stung: Naraht charged them. One of them did not get out of the way fast enough, holding his stance and firing. Then the man tried to scream and didn’t finish it before Naraht lunged over him and left a shriveled, flattened, acid-eaten lump behind. Very few corpses looked as dead as those left by a Horta….

McCoy took a chance to do some pouncing of his own, out from behind a sheltering bench that was neither high enough nor thick enough for his liking, to grab Arrhae by the arm and drag her under cover. She tried to wrench free, and lashed out at him before realizing who it was, which was just as well since it made her look just as he wanted, a hostage seized by an armed and desperate man. A hostage, moreover, who was
hru’hfe
of a House presently riding high in the favor of Imperial Intelligence. With his captured phaser pressed to the side of her head, it looked as though McCoy was uttering warnings and threats, and thanks to Naraht’s rampage, no one was close enough to know any different.

“The ship’s on its way down, Terise,” he said, using her real name quietly despite the noise and violence only a score of feet away. “Not long now—then we can go home.”

She twisted away from him, far enough to turn and see his face, almost far enough—McCoy dragged her back a bit—to put herself at risk again, and took a quick breath of the smoky, smelly air, and said, “You go. I’m staying.”

He looked at her carefully. “You must have expected it, Bones,” she said. “Surely you must. If I go home, I’m just another sociologist with her nose buried in a stack of books, more memories than some, but that’s all. No family, no ties, nothing. Here—here I’m unique. I’m of some use. And I’ve grown used to ch’Rihan, used to the people and the customs, I…Oh, Elements, Bones, I
love
this place!”

He glanced away from her for several seconds. When he looked back, he was smiling slightly. “Do the job, Terise. Do the job and do it well.” He took a moment to stick his head up and snap off two quick shots, then ducked behind the bench again, staring expectantly at the Senate Chamber ceiling. “We’ll have to find another outside contact,” he said. “There’s no one to pass your reports through anymore.”

“I’ll work something out. A
hru’hfe
has a
little
pull.” And she evidently had a thought, for her eyebrows went up in the Rihannsu version of a suppressed smile. “Maybe in goods shipments,” she said. “There
is
some clandestine trade across the Neutral Zone. You could order some ale….”

“I already have,” McCoy said, and laughed under his breath. “Listen. You take the phaser and make a break for it, I’ll go after you and grab you. You throw me and go for Naraht. I have a confession to make—” He cocked an eye at her, feeling slightly sheepish. “I second-guessed you and told Naraht you’d probably want to stay. He won’t hurt you too much. Keep your eyes closed. The acid is pretty strong up close when he’s busy. Your people’ll be convinced whose side you’re on.”

She took his hand, neither squeezing nor shaking it but simply holding it. “Leaving my adopted family would hurt more,” she said softly.

“Prosper, then,” McCoy said as quietly. “Stick with them. And if you can, if they’ll listen…tell them that the rest of the family is waiting for them to come home and join the rest of us.”

Arrhae nodded. Then her grip tightened and the balance of her crouch changed, and McCoy yelped as she bit him in the hand he was trying to keep over her mouth. The phaser was ripped out of his hand, and he was slammed sideways into the bench so hard his head spun….

Arrhae ir-Mnaeha tr’Khellian broke free of her captor in the sight of many present, stole the phaser right out of his fingers, and fled before he could seize her again. If there had been more phasers in the chamber, or if she hadn’t been so frightened that she forgot to use it, he could have easily been killed or struck down by a stun-charge so that the various penalties could have been executed after all. Instead, she ran from him and was attacked at once by the Earth-monster that had ravaged the Senate, injuring or killing many. Senators and Praetors, people of note and substance, saw Arrhae stand her ground as many of military Houses had not, and shoot her phaser at the monster while it bore down on her and brushed her aside as if she did not exist….

Arrhae sprawled on the ground, gasping with the pain of a collarbone that had snapped like a stick when Naraht’s fast-moving bulk had slammed into her braced shooting-arm. Her entire left side throbbed and tingled both with the impact and the heavy-sunburn sensation of mild acid burns. McCoy had been right, it did hurt. But she had been right too…and sometimes that fact could make a marvelous painkiller.

Home. Home by choice. At last.

Arrhae took that thought with her to the shadows….

Someone was yelling for more guards—none of whom had yet answered the summons—and was adding demands for heavy weapons.
Come on, what are you waiting for?
he thought…and as if on cue, a fine plume of dust started spiraling down out of nowhere, adding its powdery texture to the cocktail of suspended solids in the air. Other plumes joined it quickly, and a wedge of stucco popped out of the frieze that ran between walls and ceiling proper.

Then the whole roof and ceiling structure shuddered as some vast weight settled on them, and moaned with intolerable anguish at the strain. It was a horrifying thing to hear a stone building seem to groan with pain, and inside the Senate Chamber all had become as quiet as when they saw the first crack in the floor. Someone went to the great double doors and pulled them open, looked out—and refused to cross the threshold. He turned very slowly and walked back to his place on the veto side of the house with his face the color of new cheese and his eyes seeming sunk back into his head. Only when he was seated again did he look his fellows in the face. “The building is ringed with soldiers,” he said to all and none of them. “They are not Rihannsu. And there is a starship on the roof.”

Nobody laughed.

A column of crimson sparkle came alive in the middle of the floor as somebody beamed in from the “starship on the roof,” and still nobody spoke or moved. As the transporter-dazzle faded, McCoy got off the floor, dusted himself down, and endeavored without much success to put right the ravages of the past few minutes’ activity.
The cavalry’s arrived,
he thought. But he didn’t say it aloud.

Ael i-Mhiessan t’Rllaillieu stood there surveying the Senate Chamber of Ra’tleihfi on ch’Rihan, and said nothing. She looked much as she had when McCoy had seen her last: a little, straight, slender woman who came about up to his collarbone, with long dark hair neatly braided and coiled around her head—a woman whose face looked fierce even when it was quiet, a lady whose eyes were always alert and intelligent, sometimes wicked, often merry.

Right now the eyes were very alert indeed, but not so merry. To McCoy she had the look of a woman briefly possessed by memories. She had a right to be. From what she had told him, the last time she had stood here she had seen her niece, the young “Romulan” commander whom McCoy and Kirk had known, formally stripped of House-name and exiled. It had been a little death for everyone involved, McCoy thought.
And Rihannsu rarely leave death unavenged. She not only has them where she wants them, she has
you
there, too, Leonard, my boy. What if she decided on a whim to get rid of you as well? In her eyes, way back when, when we first met, you were as culpable for the commander’s trial and exile as Jim Kirk was.
…

He brushed the thought aside as a result of all this physical exertion. The tension of it made him a little paranoid sometimes. Ael was simply standing and looking around the place, not so much at people but at the building itself. Many of the ancient sigils hanging here and there now had blastholes in them, and the white marble of the place was all burn-scorched and spattered with the viridian of blood.

She moved at last. Her boots crunched on broken stone and other, grimmer remnants as she walked slowly forward, her eyes moving, always moving, from face to face, from floor to walls to ceiling. Their gaze rested a moment on the smashed body of one of McCoy’s guards, a phaser still clutched in one hand even though the arm lay feet from where it should have been. “Weapons,” she said softly. “Indeed.” The silence in the room became profound. The holster at her own belt was conspicuously empty.

Ael picked her way carefully across the torn paving. “
Bloodwing
roosts on the roof,” she said conversationally, “and her phasers have stunned all for a kilometer around this building. No use in waiting for your guards. Or for any small patrol-craft foolish enough to try anything. The phasers are no longer set to merely stun.”