Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (12 page)

Ael followed Spock silently through the corridors of
Enterprise,
trying to understand the people walking those corridors by studying their surroundings. She could make little of what she saw, except that she found it vaguely unpleasant. The overdone handsomeness of the transporter room and the ridiculous luxury of the officers’ lounge had put her off; she had found herself thinking of her bare, cramped quarters in
Bloodwing
with ridiculous nostalgia, as if she were hundreds of light-years away from it, marooned in
Cuirass
again. But the situation was really no different.
Here as there,
she thought,
I am among aliens—and if what I plan succeeds, I will have to live so for the rest of my life. I had better get used to it.
And she followed Spock into his quarters expecting something similar—something Terrene-contaminated, overdone, something that would make her even more uncomfortable than she already was.

But she got a surprise. For one thing, the room was warm enough to be comfortable. For another, except that they were bigger, the quarters might have been a twin to her own for the general feel of them. The place was utterly neat; sparsely furnished, but not barren; and if it accurately reflected its owner, she was going to have to revise her estimation of Vulcans upward.

There were some things there, such as the firepot-beast in the corner, that she knew enough about Vulcans not to inquire of; like a good guest she passed them by. But other things drew Ael’s attention. One was a stereo cube, sitting all alone on the ruthlessly clean desk. In it a dark stern Vulcan man stood beside a beautiful older woman, who wore a very un-Vulcan smile. Ael put out a hand to it, not touching, thinking of her father. “This would be Ambassador Sarek, then,” she said, “and Lady Amanda.”

“You are well informed, Commander,” Spock said. He had been standing behind her, not moving—holding very still, as Ael fancied someone might who had a dangerous beast at close range and did not want to frighten it.

She laughed softly at his words, and at her own thoughts. “Too well informed for my own comfort, perhaps.” She turned from the portrait toward the wall that adjoined the panel dividing the sleeping area from the rest of the room, and looked up at the very few old weapons adorning it…and breathed in once, sharply.

“Mr. Spock,” she said, “am I mistaken? Or is that, as I think, a S’harien up there?”

The look in his eyes as she turned to face him was not quite surprise—more appreciation, if that closed face could be said to express anything at all. “It is, Commander. If you would like to examine it…”

He trailed off. Ael reached up with great care and took the sword down from the wall, laying it over the forearm of her uniform so as not to risk fingerprinting the exquisite sardonyx-wood inlay of the scabbard. The sheath’s design was lean, clean, necessary, brutal logic and an eye for beauty going hand in hand. The hilt was plain black
kahs-hir,
left rough as when it had been quarried, for a better grip: logical again. “May I draw it?” she said.

Spock nodded. Whispering, the steel came out of the sheath. Ael looked at it and shook her head in longing at the way even a starship’s artificial light fell on the highlights buried in the blade. No one had ever matched the work of the ancient swordsmiths who had worked at the edge of Vulcan’s Forge, five thousand years before; and S’harien had been the greatest of them all. The pilgrims to ch’Rihan had managed to take five of his swords with them. Of those, three had been broken in dynastic war, shattered in the hands of dying kings and queens; one was stolen and lost, thought to be drifting in a long cometary orbit around Eisn; one lay in the Empty Chair in the Senate Chambers, where no hand might touch it. Certainly Ael had never thought to hold a S’harien. The sword in her hand spoke, by its superb balance, of things Ael couldn’t say; of history, and home, and treasures lost forever; of power, and the loss of it, and the word there was no one to tell….

She looked up at the Vulcan in unspeakable envy and admiration, her voice gone quite out of her.
A fine showing you’re making!
Ael thought bitterly.
Struck dumb by a piece of metal—

“It is an heirloom,” he said, as if sensing her momentary loss. “It would be illogical to leave it locked in a vault, where it could not be appreciated.”

“Appreciation,” Ael said, in a tone that was meant to be light mockery; but her voice shook a bit. “That’s an emotion, is it not?”

He looked at her, and Ael saw that without meld, without the use of touch or anything else, Spock still saw her nervousness with perfect clarity. “Commander,” he said to her, innocently matching her tone, “‘appreciation’ is a noun. It denotes the just valuation or recognition of worth.”

She stared at him dubiously.

“I believe you are telling the truth,” he said. “And if you are, I cannot say how much I honor you for daring to do what you have done, for peace’s sake. But for both the captain and myself, belief will not be enough. We must be utterly certain of you and of what you say.”

“I understand you very well,” Ael said. “Understand me also; I have given up pride—though not yet fear. However, I demand that you do to me whatever will best convince the captain.”

Spock lifted his head, hearing footsteps in the hall. Ael, considering that it might not be wise for the captain to come in and find her facing his first officer while holding a sword, gave Spock a conspiratorial glance and turned her back on him, savoring the feel of the S’harien in her hand for just a moment more….

The door-buzzer sounded. “Come,” Spock said quietly. In came the captain and the doctor, and as the door shut behind them, they stood uncertainly for a moment, looking at Ael. She turned to face them, and her fear fell away from her at the bemusement on the doctor’s face, the surprise on the captain’s.

“Gentlemen,” she said to them, picking up the S’harien’s scabbard from the desk and sheathing it again, “I had no idea that the
Enterprise
would be carrying museum pieces. Can it be that all those stories about starships being instruments of culture are actually true?”

And to her utter astonishment, she saw that her cautious flippancy was not fooling the captain, either. He was looking at her with the small wry smile of someone who also knew and loved the feel of a blade in the hand.

“We like to think so, Commander,” he said. “You should come down to recreation, if there’s time…we have some interesting things down there. But right now we have other business.” And he glanced at Spock much as Ael might have glanced at Tafv when there was some uncomfortable business to be gotten over with quickly.

She bowed slightly to him, sat down in the chair at Spock’s desk. The Vulcan came to stand behind her. Ael leaned back and closed her eyes.

“There will be some discomfort at first, Commander,” said the voice from above and behind her. “If you can avoid resisting it, it will pass very quickly.”

“I understand.”

Fingers touched her face, positioning themselves precisely over the cranial nerve pathways. Ael shivered all over, once and uncontrollably; then was still.

Her first thought was that she couldn’t breath. No, not that precisely; that there was something wrong with the way she was breathing, it was too fast…. She slowed it down, took a longer deeper breath—and then caught it back in shock, realizing that she couldn’t
take
that deep a breath, her lungs didn’t have that much capacity—

Do not resist,
her own voice said in her head without her thinking any such thing. Surely this was what the approach of madness was like.

No! They are breaking faith with me, they are going to drive me mad—no! No! I have too much to do—

Commander—Ael—I warned you of the discomfort. Do not resist or you will damage yourself—

—oh, bizarre, the words were coming in Vulcan but she could still understand them—or rather she heard them at the same time in Rihannsu, and in Federation Basic, and in Vulcan, and she understood them all. Her own voice speaking them inside her, as if in her own thought—but the thought another’s—

Better. Our minds are drawing closer…. Open to me, Ael. Let me in.

—impossible not to; the self/other voice was gentle enough, but there was a strength behind it that could easily crush any denial.
Would
not, however—she realized that without knowing how—

—closer now, closer—

—Elements above and beyond, what had she been afraid of? What an astonishment, to breathe with other lungs, to see through another mind’s eye, to journey through another darkness and find light at journey’s end…. That was no more than she did on
Bloodwing,
than she had done all her life; how could she possibly fear it? She reached out for the other, not knowing how: hoping will would be enough, as it had always been for everything else—

—we are one.

She was. Odd that there were suddenly two of her, but it seemed always to have been that way. With the odd calmness of a dream, where outrageous things happen and seem perfectly normal, she found herself very curious about the events of the past few months, the whole business regarding Levaeri V, from beginning to end. Luckily it took little time, in this timelessness, to go over it all; and she took herself from beginning to end in running commentary and split-instant images—the crimson banners of the Senate chambers, the faces of old friends in the Praetorate who solemnly said “no,” or said “perhaps” meaning “no.” There were the faces of her crew, glad to see her back, outraged nearly to rebellion at the thought of her transfer from
Bloodwing.
There were the hateful faces of the crew of
Cuirass,
and there was t’Liun’s voice shouting over ship’s channels for her to come to the bridge. There was Tafv, dark and keen, reaching out to take her hand as she boarded
Bloodwing
again, raising her hand to his forehead in a ridiculously antique and moving gesture of welcome. And her cheering crew, all of them like children to her, like brothers and sisters. There was
Bloodwing’
s transporter room. And there was another transporter room entirely, with men in it. One fair and lithe, with an unreadable face and a very unalien courtesy; one dark and fierce-eyed, with hands that looked skilled; and one who could have been one of her own brothers, if not for Starfleet blue, and the memory of old enmities….

Her sudden curiosity invited her to look more closely at those enmities. She resisted at first—they were old history, and their consideration bred nothing but anger. But the curiosity wouldn’t be balked, and finally Ael gave in to it. That image of her sister’s-daughter standing before the Senate after her defeat at the captain’s and Spock’s hands, after the loss of the cloaking device to the Federation. Ael’s impassioned, desperate defense of her before the Senators—useless, fallen on hearts too obsessed with vengeance and fear for their own places to hear any plea. Ael stared again down the length of the white chamber, looking toward the Empty Chair, while around her the voices proclaimed her sister-daughter’s eternal exile from ch’Rihan and ch’Havran, the stripping of her honors from her, and worst, the ceremonial shaming and removal of her house-name. Ael had protested again at that, not caring how it would endanger her own position. The protest had gone unheeded. She stood at marble attention while the name was thrice written, thrice burned, and watched bitterly as her sister-daughter went from the chambers in the deepest disgrace—no longer even a person, for a Rihannsu without a house was no one and nothing.

And where is she now?
she cried to that curious, silent part of her that watched all this.
Wandering somewhere in space, or living alone on some wretched exile-world, alone among aliens? How should I not hate those who did such a thing to her?
Nor was there any forgetting Tafv’s bitter anger at the exile of his cousin, his dear old playmate. Yet he had come to know cool reason, as Ael had, just as this sudden new part of her had learned it when he was young and occasionally angry. Hate would have to wait. Perhaps some kind shift in the Elements, at another time, would allow her a chance to face her enemies and prove on their bodies in clean battle that they were cowards, who had consented to deal in trickery to achieve their means. Now, though, she needed those enemies badly. Personal business could not be allowed to matter where the survival of empires was involved.

The new part of her agreed silently and said nothing more for a moment. Ael seized that moment, for she had her own curiosity. Here was one of those enemies, inwardly linked to her. Becoming “curious” in turn, she reached out to it; and the other part of her, in a kind of somber acknowledgment of justice, suffered her to do so. Ael reached deep—

She had for years been picturing some kind of monster, a half-bred thing without true conscience or sense of self, the kind of person who could work a treachery on her sister-daughter with such cool precision. But now, as in her estimate of what his rooms would be like, she found herself wrong again, so very wrong that her shame burned her. Certainly there was the vast internal catalogue of data and store of expertise that she would have expected from a man whom even among the Rihannsu was a legend as one of Starfleet’s great officers. But what she had not suspected was someone as torn as she was, and as whole as she was, and in such similar ways. Someone who had sworn himself to a hard life, for what seemed to him a greater good more important than his own, and who had suffered for the oath’s sake, and would again, willingly; someone who was also powerfully rooted in another life, a heart’s life—based around a planet where he could hardly ever walk, and relationships he could never fully acknowledge, because of what he had chosen to be. No oaths were attached to those choices—just simple will, rock-steady and unbreakable.
That
person she had not suspected. Alien he might be, but there was that very Rihannsu characteristic, the unshakable, unbreakable loyalty to an idea, a goal, a man who embodied it. The best part of the ruling Passion, a banked fire, but burning this man out from within, and never to be relinquished, no matter how much it hurt—