Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (29 page)

“One light-second,” Sehlk said. “She’s firing—”

The ship rocked. And rocked again, but not with the same sort of response. Someone was firing phasers near their warpfield, distorting it from the leading side.

“Contacts—” Sehlk cried. “ID’s—”

But Ael sat up in her seat with a cry. There was no identifying them by shape, those white streaks that fled past them, lancing the starry night with fire; but she knew what they were.
“Constellation,”
Mr. Sehlk said, “and behind it,
Inaieu—
”

Ael turned and stared at Jim in astonishment. He was still staring at the screen, as if turning might change what had been. “They’re firing,” said Sehlk. “
Battlequeen
is turning to engage
Constellation.
Firing at her—”

He flicked a switch, reversed the screen. Behind them a sudden great flare and violence of light appeared, spreading outward and outward. Very slowly, Sehlk sat down at his station.

“
Inaieu
fired at
Battlequeen
point blank
en passant,
” he said, “
Battlequeen
is destroyed.”

“What about
Inaieu
?” Jim said, not looking away from the screen.

“Intrepid,” said the ’com.
“This is
Inaieu.
Suvuk, you old villain, where have you been? Shirking again?”

“Without a doubt, Nhauris,” said Suvuk. “Just as at Organia.”

“Nhauris,” Jim said, “nice job.”

“I keep my appointments,”
the Denebian said, and laughed her bubbly laugh.
“Let’s get across the Zone, gentlemen, before more of the Romulans notice that the silver is missing.
Inaieu
out.”

“Reduce speed, T’Khia” said Suvuk, “and set a course.”

“Aye, sir.”

Ael got free of her seat and went over to Jim, unable to stand it anymore. He looked away from the screen and regarded her with a truly insufferable smile.

“How did you do that?” she cried. “You called it to the minute, to the second, in all these light-years of space? How?”

He did not answer her but McCoy, who was looking at him in an astonishment as great as hers, but quieter. “You did tell me,” Jim said mildly, “that I should have more confidence in my game….”

…And there he stopped, apparently unsure what to say next, or whether to say anything. He clicked the viewer off. “Ael,” Jim said, “where
are
you headed?”

She turned to him from studying the medical scanner over one of the beds in sickbay, where they had been taking care of the worst injured of her people with McCoy. “There is a lot of space,” she said, “that neither Federation nor Empire owns; a lot of planets where a trim ship can make its own way, hiring out as a mercenary ship, a free trader…perhaps a pirate….”

“Ael!…”

“Oh come,” she said. “You know me better than that by now. Or you should.”

He swung back and forth gently in the chair. “Space hereabouts will not be safe for us,” Ael said, looking up at the scanner again. “We have exposed the mind-researches and Sunseed, and destroyed a great deal of supposedly indestructible Romulan material. Very embarrassing. They will not dare to strike at you in revenge—even if they find themselves able to get at you. Rihannsu have no luck with
Enterprise,
that’s certain….”

“The Vulcans would be glad to have you,” Jim said. “If Spock’s and Suvuk’s word weren’t enough—and I assure you they are—you’ve done more for that species—”

“I did not do it for them,” Ael said. “I did it for my Empire, and my oaths. I will not take coincidental thanks, or gratitude that is offered me for the wrong reasons.”

Her eyes rested on the door to the other room, where McCoy was working. “What about him?” Jim said quietly.

“He will not live,” Ael said, her back turned. “My doing.”

Jim looked at the table. “You can’t blame yourself—”

“It is not a question of blame.” Her voice was calm enough, but oh, the bitterness buried in it. “It’s merely the way the universe is, the way the Elements are. Become careless with Fire, and sure enough, Fire will burn you. Do treachery, and treachery will be done you. Kill, and be punished with death. All these I’ve done. Now I pay the price, in my own flesh and blood. And more: for I’ll die far from home, unless I dare the ban in my old age, and walk on ch’Rihan again, to be killed by the first person who recognizes me. And there will be no child or friend to hang up the name-flag for me before I die; no family, no one but my faithful crew who go into exile with me. Family…but not the same. Never the same.” She looked at him, almost in pity now. “And I would do it again, all of it. You still don’t understand….”

Jim looked up at her sorrowfully, again unable to find anything useful to say. “When will you be leaving?” he said at last.

“Ten or fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll meet you in the transporter room.”

Jim went out.

It was a relief, like a weight lifted, when he was gone. But the worse weight came right down on her as McCoy came out of the next room, and looked at her, and shook his head slightly.

“His brainstem and spine were severely damaged,” McCoy said. “Nonregenerable. He’ll die if he’s taken off support.”

“And if he is not?”

“A few days of pain. A few hours, if he’s lucky.”

“But the same result.”

“Yes.” McCoy’s voice was quiet, and very sad.

Ael bowed her head and went in.

There he lay, looking waxen already; and the pulled-up blanket only accentuated the place where his right arm had been. She stood by the bed a long time before speaking.

She could not see him as he was, close to death. All she could see was ten years ago, twenty years, forty: a child waving a toy sword and saying he would be like his mother. So he had been; and this was where the likeness had led him.

“You saw my writings,” Tafv said, a thread of voice, thinned to breaking.

Ael nodded. His room’s computer had been full of them. Years he had been planning this revenge for his beloved cousin. Oaths did not stand in his way when his opportunity arose, any more than they had stood in Ael’s way when she saw her chance to betray Levaeri V, and
Cuirass,
and all the others. He had been preparing for that opportunity for a long time, suborning the newer members of her crew with money and the promise of power; and the delivery of
Enterprise
into his hands had seemed to Tafv to be a gift from the Elements. What he would have done with it, and with her, that Ael knew from his writings too. He would have become rich, and famous, and powerful in Command. She would have been swiftly a prisoner, and then a corpse. He had never forgiven her for falling silent before the Senate, for ceasing to try to save his cousin, the young commander, though the attempt might have killed her, and Ael too.

“I did what I had to do,” he said. “I would do it again. It was
mnhei’sahe.
”

“I understand,” she said.

“Now you must also do what
mnhei’sahe
requires,” he said. And the effort exhausted him, so that he lay gasping.

She stood a long time before she could agree. And then she did what she had to; for treachery had no payment but death.

When she went out again, McCoy stood aside for her, not moving, not speaking. She paused long enough to trade a long glance with him.

“Thank you,” she said, and left.

And then there was only one more barrier: the transporter room, where Jim waited. At least there was no one else there.

“Spock asked me to make his farewells for him,” Jim said.

“He is a prize, that one,” she said. “All the Elements walk beside you in him. Take all care of him—and thank him well for me.”

“I will.”

She turned toward the platform. Jim made a small abortive motion that somehow made Ael stop.

“You never did tell me what ‘Jim’ meant,” he said.

Ael looked at the closed door, and at the intercom to see that it was off, and she told him.

He started to laugh—very hard, as might have been expected—and to her own great surprise, Ael started to laugh with him. “Oh,” Jim said after several minutes, “Oh, oh, no wonder….”

“Yes.”

He stood there with his arms folded—a gesture left over from the way he had been hugging himself while he laughed; seemingly to keep from hurting his stomach, or because it already hurt. This man…

“Now let me tell you what ‘Ael’ means,” she said, glancing again at the closed door. She told him. She told him what the second name meant, and the third. And then—very quietly—the fourth.

He looked at her and said nothing at all. It seemed to be his day for it.

Ael stepped up onto the transporter platform, and waited for him to step around to the controls. The singing whine scaled up and up in the little room. And bright fire began to dissolve them; the overdone little room in the great white ship, and the man who had no fourth name to give her in return.

But no,
she thought.
He
has
a fourth. And he gave me not just the name—but what it names.
Her…
whole and entire.

To her relief, and her anguish, the transporter effect took her away before she could move to match him, daring for daring, with an equal gift.

Jim stood there quietly for a good fifteen minutes, considering the words he had been told, especially the fourth one—considering the nature of the sword that had cut him.
Entirely appropriate,
he thought, remembering Ael in Spock’s quarters. After all, a sword was a thing of air and fire; and it was almost universally true that, with the best swords, you might not even know you’d been cut until you began to bleed….

He left the transporter room, heading for the bridge: something familiar, something his, something he could control.

Something he had not lost.

It was two months’ work, getting back to Earth this time, and then several days of dull and depressing debriefing on the Levaeri incident.

He put up with it all; it was part of the price of captaincy, after all. But his mind was elsewhere, especially on the last day.

By luck, or something else, the debriefing that day was at Fleet San Francisco, and the
Enterprise
was right overhead in synchronous orbit. He got out of the offices around five, went out into the fog, and called Spock; then once aboard, went down to his quarters to pick up the small object he was after, and take it right back to the transporter room.

The transporter chief had left—which suited Jim well. He paused only long enough to bring up a visual of Earth on the screen and note with satisfaction that the terminator had crept barely past the California coast; Seattle and San Francisco and Los Angeles were tiny golden spatters against a velvet darkness ever so faintly silvered with moonlight.
Perfect,
he thought, killing the screen. Jim set the transporter for the coordinates he wanted, checked his belt for his communicator, and set the console for delayed-energize.

When the shimmer died he looked around him a bit warily—he hadn’t been to these coordinates in years, and there was no telling how much the place might have changed. But he was pleasantly surprised to see that it was no different at all. Jim was surrounded by high hills, soft rounded shapes covered with scrub oak and manzanita, wild olive and piñon pine, and here and there a palm. The cooling air was sweet with sage and with the wet green smell of the creek in the gully to his right. It ran where it had run, where it should run, whispering around what seemed the same old stones. Jim smiled. Sometimes, just sometimes, things stayed the way they were supposed to.

He began to walk along the top of the gully, upstream, toward the creek’s source. A long time it was since he had last been here at Sespe. Once it had been a condor preserve, hundreds of years ago when the great birds were in danger of becoming extinct. Now that they flourished, Sespe was just another part of the North American Departmental Wilderness that surrounded it—a trackless, houseless place, accessible only on foot, or by transporter. Indeed Jim could have beamed directly to the place where he was headed but he wouldn’t have had time to get in the mood for what he had in mind. He started off into the great silence, moving as softly as he could; for there was no sound anywhere but the bare breathing of the wind, and his footsteps seemed too loud for the twilit sanctity of this place.

He passed other streambeds in the gathering dusk. They were dry, as well they might have been this time of year. But the watercourse Jim followed as he trudged up the hill was not affected by the weather. Breathing a bit harder than usual with the steady exertion, Jim kept climbing, making his way around the shoulder of one hill, crossing the stream with a splash and a shock of cold when he found this side blocked with an old rockfall. Another twist in the watercourse, and then one more—

Jim stopped. It was exactly the same,
exactly.
From the side of a high, dark hill, water sprang, slowing down as if from a smitten rock; and above the spring-source, growing straight out of the sheer hillside and then curving upward, there was the tree. It had apparently known some hard times since Jim had seen it last. It was lightning-blasted, this old twisted olive, so that branches were missing at the top; and the claw-marks of black bears, their calling cards for one another, were scored deep and ragged down its trunk. But the tree survived. Its roots were still sunk deep in the heart of the hill, and the sharp aromatic scent of its ripening fruit hung on the still air. Jim looked up at the tree with silent approval and began to climb toward it.

Reaching it took some doing—the stones of the hillside were loose—but Jim persevered. Finally he reached the great horizontal trunk, swung himself up onto it and stepped out to where the tree’s branches began to curve outward. One strong branch thick with olives reached out over the spring; the smell of splashing water and of new fruit mingled, a cool spicy scent of life.
Here,
Jim thought,
right here.
He took out the small bundle he had brought with him from the ship, untied the cord around it, and shook out the little pennon—a strip of supple woven polymer that would hang here and last through years of wind and rain, unchanged. Fasteners—Jim felt in his pocket for them, threaded the polymer strips through the eyelets in the pennon, then reached out to hold them shut around the tree branch one at a time, melting them shut with bursts from his phaser on its lowest notch.

Then down the tree again, and back to his vantage point by the streambed. The pennon hung down, swinging very slightly in a breath of breeze that came down over the hillside—the pennon’s scarlet muted in this darkness to an ember-gray, the black characters on it hardly visible except as blurs of shadow. Jim looked up at the sky. Not much of it was visible, hemmed about as he was by hills; but the brightest stars were out already, and others followed. The summer Triangle, Deneb and Vega and Altair, lay westering low. Jim smiled slightly at Deneb, then let his eyes drift on northward through the base of the Triangle, following the faint band of the Milky Way and the Galactic Equator through Cygnus into Lacerta, Cassiopeia, Andromeda. There was beta Andromedae; then a bit southward…Jim stood and waited for his eyes to get used to the gathering darkness. He knew he wouldn’t be able to see the star he was looking toward, anyway. But right now, sight, or eyesight anyway, wasn’t an issue. He waited.

And when he felt the moment was right, he drew himself straight and spoke her name the necessary five times—the fourth name by which only one closer than kin might know her, the name by which one was known to the Elements and Their rulers. One time each he spoke that name for the Earth, the Air, the Fire, the Water; and once for the Archelement which encompassed them all, that It might hear and grant the weary soul a home in this place when at last that soul flew. The fifth time he said that name, the wind died. A listening stillness fell over everything. Jim didn’t move.

That was when the great dark shape came sailing over the hilltop, low; planing down over the stream on twelve-foot pinions, black-feathered, showing the wide white coverts under the wings; a dark visitation of silence, grace, freedom, flight, indifference. Riding its thermal, the condor swept over Jim’s head, a shadow between him and the stars. It tilted its head as it passed—a glance, no more, a silhouette motion and a look from invisible eyes. Then it leaned to its port side, banked away on the thermal, was over the next hill, was gone.

The sigil-beast of my House,
she had said.

A big, ugly scavenger…but nothing can match it when it flies….

Jim stared after it, and let out a small breath of bemusement, uncertainty, wonder.
How about that,
he thought. The night breeze began to blow again; bound to the olive branch, the name-flag stirred.

Jim pulled out his communicator. “Kirk to
Enterprise.
”

“Spock here.”

“Mr. Spock, have someone get down to the transporter room and beam me up.”

“Yes, Captain.”
There was a pause. Jim got the feeling that Spock was glancing around the bridge to make sure no one was listening, for when he spoke again, his voice was private and low.
“Jim—are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Jim looked down at the watercourse, the way the dark apparition had gone, and for the first time in days, actually felt relieved. The feeling was very belated. He didn’t care; he embraced it. “Mr. Spock…you don’t suppose there might be some spot in the galaxy where we’re needed right now, do you?”

“Captain,”
the calm voice came back,
“our new patrol-information dispatches just received from Starfleet this past hour include news of two armed rebellions, a plague, and a mail strike; various natural disasters attributed to acts of deity, and unnatural ones attributed to inflation, accident and the breakdown of diplomacy; seventeen mysterious disappearances of persons, places or things, both with and without associated distress calls; eight newly discovered species of humanity, three of which have declared their intention to annex Starfleet and the Federation, and one of which has announced that it will let us alone if we pay it tribute. And probably most serious of all, a tribble predator has gotten loose from the zoo in a major city on Arcturus VI, and for lack of its natural prey has started eating peoples’ cats.”

Jim paused. “Well, Mr. Spock,” he said, very seriously, “it’s going to take us at least a week to get all that cleared up. I think we’d better get out there and get started, don’t you?”

“Undoubtedly, Captain. Energizing.”

The world faded into the golden shimmering of the transporter effect.

The pennon stirred again, saying one dark word, a name, to the wind, in the strong Rihannsu calligraphy.

Starlight glinted on the swift water. And one small star slowly subtracted itself from that light, soaring more and more swiftly outward, past the setting sickle moon and into the ancient night.