Star Trek: The Hand of Kahless (9 page)

“Not that set,” Kethas said. “The one in your room. The one beneath your bed.”

Vrenn felt his eyes twitch with staring. Kethas’s look was bland. Vrenn went to his room, brought back the envelope with the set of wood and card.

“There is never time to teach everything, so the important things must take precedence,” Kethas said, as they played through a standard opening. “And example works quickest…you do know the proverb: If you do not wish a thing heard—”

“Do not say it.”

“Yes. This will always be true; it will be so if you are a Captain, or an Admiral, or the Emperor. You will be watched, so live as if you are watched. Beds are a terrible place for secrets…you are about to lose your Vanguard.” And Kethas moved, killing it. He picked up the dead piece, turned the disc over in his fingers. “You know that there is a form of
klin zha
we have not yet played.”

“What is that, Father?”

“It is the form least often taught, less even than the Reflective, but in a way it is the most important of all to a Captain. I think we should play it now.” Kethas flicked his fingers, and the wooden Vanguard sailed through the air, into the fireplace, where the flames absorbed it with the smallest of whispers.

It had happened faster than Vrenn could think, and now he did not know what to think. He wondered if Kethas had flipped the piece through the fire, and out the other side, but he did not believe that.

Finally the Thought Admiral said, “Your move.”

Vrenn looked around the room, and the gameboards along the walls. He started to rise. “And which set will the Thought Admiral risk?”

Kethas waved a finger at Vrenn’s seat cushion. It looked like a casual gesture. It was not. Vrenn sat.

Kethas said, “You are not ready to count your enemy’s losses until you have learned to count your own. And remember that some enemies will never have learned to count.”

Vrenn looked at the board and pieces that he had made so carefully, kept so long; he tried to see them as nothing but scraps of fiber, bits of waste saved from the bin, and he could not. “What happens, then, when I kill a piece of your side?”

“Keep it,” Kethas said. “Eventually there will be only one set left. And then we will play the Reflective Game.”

Vrenn moved his Fencer and Goal, feeling the wood very warm and fragile against his fingers, like a living thing.

Romulan plasma hit Klingon shields: power leaked through in second and third harmonics, and the target cruiser shook.

“Damage?” said the officer in the command chair.

Vrenn Khemara ran his finger down a screen, bright in the red-lit Bridge; a schematic of the cruiser
Blue Fire
flashed into view, yellow blocks marking areas hit. Vrenn read off the reports in a few short phrases of Battle Language.

Below Vrenn, the Commander spat an acknowledgment and turned back to the main display. Vrenn looked up: across the Bridge, another Cadet flashed a hand at him, fingers spread. The gesture symbolized a Captain’s starburst of rank: in words it would come out approximately as “You’ll have a command by morning!”

Blue Fire
rolled to starboard. She was pulling Warp 3, and the floor-plates whined and the bulkheads groaned; a Cadet grabbed a strut to steady himself under the shifting gravity. The Commander caught sight of it. “Environmental?” he said, tone deadly even, eyes like disruptors.

The unbalanced Cadet strained toward his board. “Point eight six two, nominal,” he said.

The Commander acknowledged, turned back to the main view. All the Cadets understood very well: fall down, fall asleep, do as you like, as long as you’ve got the Captain’s answers when he wants them.

It was not the Captain of
Blue Fire
in the Chair. Squadron Leader Kodon was five decks above, in the Primary Bridge. Commander Kev, the Executive Officer, sat with the Cadets in the Auxiliary Bridge, calling for situation reports and helm responses exactly as if he were Kodon, and the Cadets worked their locked-off consoles just as if they controlled the ship.

Only the data were real.

There was a flash in the corner of the display as the cruiser rolled; Vrenn’s instruments picked up the wave of energy as a plasma bolt passed less than forty meters below their ship’s port wing. It had not been fired when Kodon started the maneuver: he had somehow foreseen the enemy action. Vrenn watched, and tried to learn.

The Klingons were outnumbered, five to three; but the Klingon D-4 cruisers were individually much more powerful than the Romulan Warbirds. “So we win, on numbers,” Kodon had told them, before the raid began, “but there’s a few things the numbers don’t count.”

Two Fingers,
the portside ship of Kodon’s Squadron, had picked up three of the Warbirds, which swarmed around it, firing plasma in continuous cycle, two ships’ tubes cooling while one blazed, trying to batter their victim’s shields down from all directions at once.

“One thing,” Kodon said, “is that ships
move.
Tactics are real, and if you don’t move right, you die.”

Blue Fire
was now turned perpendicular to
Two Fingers.
Commander Kev gave a firing order, and the Cadets on Weapons followed just as the officers above them. Six disruptors fired, making two pyramids of blue light whose points were Romulan ships. Romulan hulls buckled, as the forces holding their molecules together were suppressed and restored ninety times a second. That was disruption: or, as the big ships’ batteries were nicknamed, the Sound of Destruction.

Two Warbirds lurched out of their loops, and
Two Fingers
went to work on the third.
Blue Fire
came about again, to find a prey of its own.

There was a sudden swelling spot of white light in the forward display: the screen darkened, and it was still too bright to look at. Then the flash faded, and was gone. Stars came back on in the display. Ahead, the other ship of the squadron,
Death Hand,
had turned into the blast, to take it against her strong forward shields.

“The other thing,” the Squadron Leader had told them all, “Is that Roms have some pretty odd ideas about dying.”

Kev said, “Communications, signal Code
KATEN
to Squadron. Helm, when
KATEN
is acknowledged executed, I want Warp 4 at once.”

The Cadets tensed, almost as a unit. There would be no boarding this time, no prizes, not even a creditable kill they could stripe on their sashes. But this was only the first skirmish of the raid, as Kodon had outlined it to them all. Their goal was farther into the Romulan sphere. Vrenn certainly understood; it was not an elaborate strategy, even for the frontier squadrons.

Still, he wanted a kill as much as the rest of them.

Perhaps more.

Both enemy squadrons were trying to regroup, to disentangle from each other’s ships. The Klingon cruisers had more power, which counted most in large-ship maneuvers;
Death Hand
was able to bounce a Rom off its shields like a small animal off a groundcar’s fender.

Formation lights flared on displays, drifting toward marked target positions: the three D-4s moved, silently as all things in space, into a triskele formation, port engines inward. A Rom fired, the bolt glancing from
Blue Fire
’s shields.

“You may give him one for vengeance,
zan
Tatell,” Kev said, and as helm counted toward formation lock-on Weapons trued his crosshairs and his firing keys. Blue light reached out to the Rom, to the bronze raptor painted on its belly.

The bird was cut open from wing to drumstick.

Lights met their targets. “Warp 4,” the Helmsman remembered to say, and the Romulans—what was left of them—streaked by and were gone, as Kodon’s squadron pierced yet deeper into the space the Roms claimed as theirs, three times faster than their ships could follow.

Commander Kev stood, inspected the Cadets. He touched the phone in his ear that had sent him all of the actual Captain’s orders. “A good engagement,” he said, “damage done, no ships lost, only minor injuries to crewmen and none to officers…” Kev looked at Zhoka, the Cadet who had almost lost more than just his balance.

Kev paused, eyes narrowed, apparently getting some message through his earphone. “I am instructed to tell you that, by consensus of the Squadron Captains,
Blue Fire
is to be credited with one Romulan kill. May this be a favorable sign.”

Kev stood silent then, watching. The Cadets did not move. Vrenn thought the collar of his blue tunic must surely be contracting, but kept his hands firmly on his console.

Finally the Commander decided they had had enough. “Alert over. Stand down to cruise stations.” And he saluted. “
Blue Fire,
the victory!”

“The victory!”

Vrenn and his roommate, an engineering cadet named Ruzhe Avell, were playing Open
klin zha
in quarters. Vrenn had not played
klin zha
against a live opponent since halfway through his Academy year; until Ruzhe, everyone had too much minded losing.

Maybe Ruzhe didn’t mind because he didn’t pay attention anyway. “I still say it’s better in Engineering. We get to work on the real ship, not dead controls.”

“If something happened to the main Bridge, it’d be real enough.”

“And you know how long we’d last after that? You know, you can still get off that Command Path, and do something with honest metal and current.”

Vrenn felt a little annoyance at the word “honest,” but only a little. It was only another game between them, and he could hardly fault Ruzhe for being better at it than at
klin zha.
“I think I’ll stay up front in the pod. Away from the radiation.”

“There’s no radiation back there! We just keep the Drell design because it works!”

“All right, up front away from the Marines.”

Ruzhe growled, stared at the board. “You’re going to win again.”

It was true enough. Vrenn said, “Maybe you’ll get lucky, and the Roms will attack.” He moved a Flier. “After all, we got lucky enough to get assigned to a raid, on our first full cruise.”

Ruzhe said, “I heard one of the Lieutenants say everyone gets assigned to a raid, unless they’re just so hopeless they have to put ’em on garbage scows or runs to Vulcan.”

“Why?” Vrenn said. He had heard rumors like that, but only from superior-sounding Cadets. Never officers.

“Same reason all the frontier captains go privateer: if you
khest
it, it’s your fault, not the Academy’s.”

Vrenn knew that was true. “So I guess we better not
khest
it?”

Ruzhe laughed. “Sure you don’t want to work aft?” He bumped the board. Pieces tipped over. “
Gday’t,
I lose.”

“Well, you
khest’t
it.” Vrenn picked up a fallen piece. “Want to
khest
it again?”

“I’d like to
khest
just once on this trip,” Ruzhe said. “Got an Orion female in your closet?”

The piece slipped out of Vrenn’s fingers, bounced on the floor.

Kodon’s Squadron had been inside Romulan claims for seventy-eight days. There had been two more skirmishes, early on, and a kill for
Death Hand
and another for
Blue Fire,
but nothing, not even a contact, for over fifty days now. They were eating salvage from the third battle, Romulan rations, solid enough food but dull on the tongue. Vrenn at last understood his father’s story about Human
kafei,
and found it actually made the alien stuff more edible; but the trick didn’t work for the other Cadets. Some of those from old Navy lines had been given sealed parcels of food, with vague warnings about not opening them too soon; now anyone who had obeyed the warning had power, of a sort. Vrenn rather quickly saw the limitations of a fruitcake-based economy, and knew why Kethas had not so supplied him.

Still, it could be hard to be a strategist.

Vrenn was in the Junior Officers’ Mess, chewing determinedly at a piece of vacuum-dried sausage, when the sounds of a discussion floated in his direction. There were three Ensigns at a table across the room, and they had gotten on the subject of Orions, and (inevitably) Orion females. One of them, the Helmsman Kotkhe, was insisting he had actually been with one, prize of a Cadet cruise. “I admit I was lucky—”

“
Nobody
gets that lucky on a Cadet cruise,” said an Ensign with Medical insignia.

“I suppose you two think I care if you believe me.”

“Suppose we do.” That was Merzhan, the youngest Security officer on the ship. He kept to himself less than the other Security crew, and he showed a nasty sense ot humor on all occasions. “You wouldn’t have some evidence? A lock of her hair, tied up with a green ribbon?”

“Well, I—” Kotkhe’s hand stopped on the way to his pocket. Merzhan’s smile was thin as the edge of a knife, and the other Ensign looked nervous. Vrenn dumped his tray down the disposal slot, started for the door. He had seen the souvenirs you could buy in a leave port, knew how easily the green dye rubbed off. And he had heard, easily thirty times in his first Academy term, the tale of exotic delights that Kotkhe was now clumsily telling again. He’d have done better, Vrenn thought, to just quote some text from a volume of
Tales of the Privateers;
every other book in the series had the same scene in it.

“But there’s a thing they never tell you in the books,” Kotkhe said. “And that’s the place, the only one place, where an Orion female’s
not
green.”

Vrenn paused. He wondered where it would be, this time.

Merzhan’s eyes flickered over. “Well,” he said, “you’ve got
something
convinced.”

“I was just leaving,” Vrenn said, and knew at once it was the wrong response: he should have just gone out the door.
Ensigns love Cadets,
he had been warned at the Academy,
like you love jelly pastry. They won’t talk to the crew and there’s nobody else they can damage.

“Don’t go yet,” the Security officer said. “You’ll miss the best part.”

Vrenn took a step toward the door.

“I said,
don’t go,
Cadet.”

Vrenn stopped. It was a legitimate order.

Merzhan said, “Well, ’Khe, we’ve got something here to educate. Finish the story.”

Kotkhe seemed pleased; baiting Cadets was much safer than whatever game Merzhan had been playing. He went on to detail exactly where Orion females were not green. It was the usual version. “Now, Pathfinder, have you learned something to help you walk?” The title and the phrase referred to the Path of Command: the statement was thoroughly insulting without containing any explicit insult.

Vrenn said suddenly, “No, Ensign.”

Kotkhe’s jaw opened, snapped shut. “Say that again, Pathfinder. For the record this time.”

“If I hadn’t wanted it heard I wouldn’t have said it.” Vrenn had not realized just how angry he was. They had, without realizing it, pushed him into an area of his mind he had very carefully walled off. Now Vrenn wondered how much his strategic blindness would cost him.

There was a coldness in the room, the Ensigns still not quite believing what they had heard.
Sometimes to show teeth is enough,
Vrenn thought,
but if you bite, bite deep.
“What was there to learn? The lesson’s wrong. There’s no place they don’t have a little green. No place at all.”