Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (25 page)

Or is it so strange?
he thought, as all around him the many parts reached for the one in whom their wholeness best rested, and ever so slightly, mind-blind as Jim usually was, he found himself caught up in the search.
Ael’s crew has certainly done the same kind of thing for her. And how many times has mine done it for me? Always, always we’re more alike than we dare to admit—

The air was singing with tension and resolve, though physically no one moved. Outside, the sound of the explosions, the cries and the phaser fire, all sounded very far away. The battle was inward now, one great mind swiftly turning over the thoughts of many smaller ones—some inimical, some desperate, some valiant or preoccupied or blood-mad, all frightened in one way or another. Very few parts of the great searching mind knew anything just now but a terrible, cool, controlled anger they would have rather not admitted to. One part knew that brand of anger, and other emotions as well, and accepted them all together. Two other parts knew mostly rage, and fear for their crews and their ships. All together the power of their emotions, admitted or not, and the power of their intention, wound together, reached outward, pierced—

“There!” cried T’Leiar, and as suddenly as it had coalesced, the great mind fell apart. But the memory and direction of what it had found—a single unconscious Vulcan mind—lingered still. Jim opened his eyes—amazed to find they had been closed—and felt as if he were attached to a rope, with the other end of it fastened to Suvuk. He could have found the man with his eyes closed. Involuntarily he looked up at the ceiling.

“Two levels up,” he said. “Next door to the master research computers. Ladies and gentlemen and others, let’s go!”

Mostly Ael knew about Vulcans what she had been taught as a child. Their remote ancestors had also been the remote ancestors of the Rihannsu; they were a Federation people now; and like all Federation peoples, they were hopelessly spoiled—rich, soft, and unable to take care of themselves. The inability was a matter of ancient history. There had come a time, long ago, when they could no longer cope with the constant fighting that was the inevitable heritage of a warrior people. Those who could cope had been “invited” to leave the planet. Leave it they had—supposedly without much regret. And those who remained had embraced a frightening, demeaning, bizarre discipline of nonemotionality—bottling inside them emotions that they began pretending not to have, as if that would make them go away. The Rihannsu, hearing about this after all the thousands of years, found it a choice irony. The meek had, after all, inherited Vulcan; the Rihannsu had gone out and conquered the stars.

There was nothing wrong with logic per se; it could be as uplifting as song, as intoxicating as wine, under the proper conditions. But it was hardly bread or meat—there was no living a whole life on it. To throw out love, hate, pain, desire, ambition, hunger and hunger’s satisfaction, that was asking too much. That was to turn life into a thin, etiolated shadow, lived like one long, dry, joyless mathematical equation.

Or so Ael had always thought. After first meeting Spock, she had begun to wonder whether her preconceptions had anything to do with reality at all. But then Spock was half Terran, and Terrans, though nearly as soft as Vulcans, still had virtues; courage and joy and wit and many other useful or delightful attributes. Spock, she had thought, would probably not be truly representative of a Vulcan. His inner divisions, his lights and shadows, and the reconciliations he had made among them, had turned him into far too complex and powerful a character.

Now, though—as she raced up a hall surrounded by living, breathing Vulcans, and not by her ideas about them, Ael wondered with some shame whether her brain (as her father had repeatedly insisted) was in fact good only for keeping her skull bones apart. The people around her spoke and moved and fought with a frightful cold precision that spoke more of the computer than of the arena; yet at the same time their ferocity matched that of the angriest Rihannsu she had ever seen. Their courage, as they charged unstoppable down hallways full of Rihannsu firing at them, was indomitable. And as for skill, phaser beams seemed to simply miss them, and if the station personnel threw grenades at them, the Vulcans simply managed somehow to be elsewhere. Some of it might be the mind-disciplines that seemed so much like magic to a Rihannsu. She wondered if their embrace of peace might somehow, paradoxically, have made their fierceness more accessible to them. But in any case Ael began to suspect that her belated perception of the Vulcans’ virtues was like that of a child who grows up and finds, abruptly, that her parents aren’t so stupid as they used to be when she was younger.

It was an annoying realization, but it was the truth; and as such, she wouldn’t have given it up for anything.

She stopped at the head of one more endless corridor, leaned up against the corner, and put her hand back. This had been something of a ritual for the past four corridors, and was proving a great success. Into the hand Ael reached out, someone—perhaps Jim, or Spock, or one of her own people—slapped a phaser or other small disposable object. Ael tossed it out into the corridor. If nothing happened—well, that step would be handled as it came.

Nothing happened.

She put her hand back again. Another object: a Rihannsu disruptor, this time.

She threw it out there. And white light and heat blew up practically in her face as a disruptor blast from down the hall exploded the disruptor she’d thrown.

“There they are,” she said to the people behind her. “Jim?”

“Right,” he said. And out they went into the corridor, as they had the last three times: diving, rolling, shooting, throwing overloaded phasers and whatever else seemed useful. There was a limit, though, to how many overloaded phasers they could use. Ael was praying for an armory somewhere around here. In the meantime, the Elements did for those who did for themselves, and who stayed alive to keep doing it. She concentrated on staying alive.

It took about ten minutes before this particular knot of station personnel was reduced to unconsciousness or death. It had been some time now since the subject of the ethicality of killing had even crossed Ael’s mind. She ached all over; she wanted to be back in her own bed on
Bloodwing
so badly that she could taste it; and it would be hours, maybe weary days, before there would be time for that, she knew. The only satisfaction that would come anytime soon was their arrival at the spot where the Vulcan captain was being held. Ael could feel the line inside her, stretched tight toward the man, around this corner and to the left.

“Clear, Captain,” one of Jim’s people out in the hall was saying. Jim grunted softly, pushed himself away from the wall. He had taken a wicked phaser burn along one arm in the intersection before last, and when he knew no one was looking, his face showed the same kind of weary misery that Ael felt. But let someone look at him, and there was suddenly energy in the eyes, erectness about the carriage, power and stern command.
Fire and Air,
Ael thought.
The Fire will burn bright until there is suddenly nothing left….

“We’re close,” Jim said.

Spock was right behind him, looking at Jim with concern, but saying nothing about that; his face was locked in a controlled fierceness much like the other Vulcans’. “Very close,” he said. “On the close order of fifty yards.”

“Tricorder scan—”

“Ineffective, Captain. All these walls are force-shielded.”

“Wonderful. Let’s go.”

The leading part of the group headed around the corner of the T-intersection, going left. Down at the end of the hall was something that surprised them all: nothing. The hall was empty. That was bizarre, for all the way up here, practically every foot of the way had had to be viciously contended. Now nothing—

“A trap,” Ael said. “Jim, have a care.”

“I don’t think so,” Jim said, eyeing the great door at the hall’s end. “Spock, scan it.”

The Vulcan did, and his face grew dim as he did so. “Captain, we have a problem,” he said. “That door and the walls around it are solid hyponeutronium.”

Ael looked up in despair. “Collapsed metal? We have nothing that can possibly break that—”

“Ship’s phasers, perhaps,” Sehlk said from behind them. “Nothing else.”

Ael turned and walked away from the door, reduced to simple annoyance. “There are no guards here because they know they don’t need any,” she said bitterly. “And Suvuk is on the other side of that door somewhere.”

All the Vulcans who had managed to fit into the hallway stood staring at the door as if sheer loyalty or logic would be enough to break it, phasers lacking. Spock and Jim and Sehlk were talking desperately at one another, hypothesizing hurriedly.
It will do them no good,
Ael thought.
We have at last come up against a problem all our fellowship and resourcefulness and cleanness of heart can’t solve….

She walked right up to a wall and thumped it angrily with one fist.
It isn’t fair!
And as usual, the old cry brought her father’s old reply up:
The Elements aren’t fair either….

Elements…it was a silly time to get religious. But what was the old saying? Meet a problem with another problem to make a solution. Meet Fire with Fire, and Earth with Earth, and Water with Water….

Earth!

She ran back down the hall where the many Vulcans and
Enterprise
people and her own crewfolk leaned against the walls, silent or whispering, waiting for orders. One of them would not be leaning. He would be flat down on the floor, glittering, answering everyone with the same solid, cheerful, gravelly voice….

She had to trip over him to find him, finally, which was all right, for that was how Ael usually came by her solutions. “Mr. Naraht,” she said, catching herself on the wall with both hands, “come quick, we need you!”

“Yes, ma’am!” the rock said, and Ael hurried down the hall with him coming after in a hurry. People got out of Naraht’s way when they saw him coming, knowing by experience (or hearsay, in the Vulcans’ case) how fast a Horta could move when it was excited.

She led him back around the corner and up to the captain and Spock and Sehlk. “Gentlemen,” she said, “I have a question for you.”

They turned to her, and their eyes fell on Ensign Naraht, and Jim looked up at Ael in astonishment. “No,” he said, “I think you’ve got an answer for us!”

He got down with some care on one knee—one of his own people has misaimed a kick, in one of the countless fights behind them, and had nearly crippled Jim as a result. “Mr. Naraht,” he said, “would you see if you can eat through this door in front of us?”

“It is hyponeutronium,” Spock said.

Naraht rumbled and shuffled his fringes about on the floor. “Sirs,” he said, sounding pained, “I don’t know if I can. I’ve rarely eaten anything denser than lead. But I’ll do what I can.”

The Horta shuffled over to the doorway, reared up a little way against it. There was a hissing and a sharp smell of acid in the air; the deckplates under Naraht began to smoke.

“Careful, Mr. Naraht,” someone said from beside Ael. It was McCoy, watching the whole process with tired amusement. “Don’t go through the floor.”

Naraht didn’t answer—just held his position for several seconds more, then slid down. There was a great ragged patch of the dark hyponeutronium metal missing, about an inch thick and shaped like Naraht’s underside.

“Go on, Ensign, you’re doing fine,” Jim said.

“In a moment, Captain,” Naraht said, sounding distressed. “It’s awfully rich….”

Both McCoy’s eyebrows went up. Ael watched Jim get up and turn most carefully away from the door, hiding a terrible smile. “Proceed, Ensign, if you please,” Spock said very gently. “We are quite short of time, and the success of the entire operation may now lie with you….”

Naraht said not a word. He reared up again and laid himself against the door. The hissing and fuming of acid in the air became terrible, so that people had to retreat from the corridor, and McCoy went hurriedly about spraying something into everyone’s eyes to protect them from damage. Long minutes, it went on. Ael got herself sprayed and went out into the corridor again…just in time to see Naraht, with a strangled little cry, flop forward through a two-meter-wide hole in the door. From inside, disruptor fire hit him, ineffective as usual…which was as well, for Naraht didn’t move.

“Now!”
Jim shouted, as if all the lost energy had suddenly returned.
“Don’t touch the edges!”

And immediately after the captain dove through the door, the sound of phaser fire broke out on its far side; and Spock and McCoy and many another dove through that door after Jim and Ael, none of them being too careful about the edges, and none of them caring. This room was rather like the large control room near which the Vulcans had been kept; full of consoles, control areas and data pads—and only slightly full of Romulans, several of whom lay stunned on the floor. Ael stood with Jim, turning in the smoky room to pick up the directional line again—and found herself looking at a simple, blastable door and being powerfully drawn toward it. She didn’t wait. She blasted it.

She was halfway through the door already by the time the smoke cleared, Jim and Spock and McCoy coming after her. The room was set up as a wretched little barracks—a ’fresher, a food dispenser, and several cots; and on one of the cots lay Suvuk, in fetal position—still unconscious, but alive.

“Bones, take care of him,” Jim said. “Spock, the computers. Ael, please go with him, assist him if you can—we’ve got to get that virus program running. Send Sehlk in here when you have a moment.”

They did not have to; Sehlk pushed in past them as Ael and Spock were heading out. “I will need an input station,” Spock said quietly. “This looks like one—”

“Here’s the initializer,” Ael said, and began touching switches. The computer was not unlike the library computer on
Bloodwing,
a later model of a brand she knew well. “Astonishing that these things run at all,” she said, as she brought the main operating system up.

“Lowest bidder?” Spock said.

She grinned and kept working. “There you are. Can you access from this command level?”

“Easily. Now then—” His hands flickered over the keyboard with almost insulting ease. Ael turned from him to see one of the stunned Romulans slowly recovering, looking around him at the incredible wreckage, and (with considerable trepidation) at a roomful of angry Vulcans.

One of them was giving him her particular attention. T’Leiar, with two or three of her security people about her, was holding the man by the front of his coverall and conversing with him in no amiable tone. “You will introduce us,” she said, “to the head of this research project.”

The man glared at her. “I am its head. And it will be my pleasure to see you all executed for the damage you have been doing it—”

“We have not done nearly any damage to the heart of it as yet,” T’Leiar said, “but we shall. And as for the pleasures you expect to enjoy, I suggest you reckon them up quickly. We have business with you after which the probability is high that you will no longer understand pleasure—or anything else.”