Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (50 page)

“We were excited,” said the captain of the Federation vessel
U.S.S. Carrizal
during the postmission debriefing following its return from the Trianguli stars, a little more than a hundred years ago. “It was the first hit we’d had in nine months of scouring that sector. A hominid culture, obviously highly developed, a large population, it was everything we had hoped for. Better yet, the same people were on
two
worlds…an Earth-Moon configuration. Mike Maliani, our astrogator, suggested Romus and Remus as nicknames for the planets until we found out their real names from the people who lived there. After the twin brothers in an ancient Italian myth.” On the debriefing tape, Captain Dini smiles rather ruefully. “I was never a specialist in the classics: I wish I were. Mike’s misspelling of ‘Romulus’ is going to haunt me to the grave. But at that point I thought he knew what he was talking about.”

A pause. “Anyway, we were really excited. You know how few spacefaring species there are: the standing orders are to closely examine any we find. But we weren’t so excited that we went in without the proper protocols. We gave them everything we had: the classic first-contact series—atomic ratios, binary counting, pictures. You name it. There was never any answer, even though we’re sure they knew we were there. They had an outer cordon of defense satellites that noticed us, and after the messages from the satellites were received on the planets, the message traffic on the bigger planet increased by about a thousand percent. But there was nothing we could do with it by way of translation—after that first message there was silence, and everything that came later was encoded—some kind of closed-satchel code, very sophisticated, and no way to break it in anything short of a decade, without a supercomp or the code key.”

There is a long silence on the tape as Captain Dini shakes his head and looks puzzled. “We never came any closer to their planet than two orbits out,” he says, “right beyond the fifth planet in the system. We never came near them. We just observed, and took readings, and went away quietly. I’ll never understand what happened.”

What happened was the First Romulan War, as the Federation later called it. What it looked like, from the Federation side, was a long, bloody conflict started without provocation by the Romulans. From the other side it wore a different aspect.

The appearance of
Carrizal
caused such a panic as the Rihannsu had never known since they became Rihannsu. In terms of a Rihanha’s lifetime, it was thirty generations and more since the settlement, and the actual records of the appearance of aliens on Vulcan, all those many years ago, were not so much lost as largely ignored. People
knew
through the history they were taught in the academies what had happened on Vulcan in the old days…and the history had bent and changed, what with telling and retelling, and neglecting to go back to the original source material. Not that that would have helped much. The source material itself had been altered in the journey, but very few—scholars and historians—knew this, or cared. What the Rihannsu knew about this incursion into their space was that it closely matched the pattern followed by the Etoshans so long ago: quiet observation coupled with or followed by proffers of peaceful contact. They were not going to be had
that
way again.

Ch’Rihan and ch’Havran had, over sixteen hundred years, become superbly industrialized. The Rihannsu have always had a way with machines: and this, coupled with their great concern for taking care of the worlds they found after such journey and suffering, produced two planets that were technologically most advanced at manufacture, without looking that way. Few factories were visible from the atmosphere, let alone from space. Aesthetics required that they be either pleasant to look at, or completely concealed. Many factories were underground. Release of waste products into the ambient environment, even waste so seemingly innocuous as steam or hot water, was forbidden by Praetorial indict, and a capital crime. A starship passing through, even one looking carefully, as
Carrizal
did, would see two pastoral-looking worlds, unspoiled, quiet. One would hardly suspect the frenetic manufacture that was to start after
Carrizal
’s departure.

There was frantic action elsewhere as well. In the Praetorate and the Senate some heads rolled, and the survivors scrambled to start working on the defense of the planet—or to otherwise take advantage of the situation. The defense satellites had not been approached closely enough by the invading ship to trigger their weaponry. Cannily, it had stayed out of range. There was no way to tell if the Two Worlds could be defended against the ship that had appeared there, no telling what kind of weaponry it had. But from their experience in air combat (almost every nation of each planet had its own air force, which they used liberally for both friendly and unfriendly skirmishes), the Rihannsu military specialists knew that even a heavily armed ship should not be able to do much against overwhelming numbers.

They got busy, digging frantically through ancient computer memories and printouts and film and metal media for the forgotten space technology they needed. Had the ships been spared, even one of them—had their data been preserved in one place rather than scattered all over two worlds—the Federation’s boundaries might be much different now. But even what remained was useful, and the Rihannsu were frightened. It is unwise to frighten a Rihanha. Within a year after
Carrizal
’s visit, ch’Rihan’s numerous nations had built, among them, some three
thousand
spacecraft armed with particle-beam weapons and the beginnings of defensive shields. Ch’Havran had built four thousand. They were crude little craft, and their cylindrical shapes recalled those of the ships, though there was no need for them to spin for gravity: artificial gravity had been mastered a century or so earlier.

It was three more years before the next ship came. The unlucky
Balboa
came in broadcasting messages of peace and friendship, and was blown to bits by the massed particle beams of a squadron of fifty. After that the Rihannsu grew a little bolder, and went hunting: a task force caught
Stone Mountain,
to which
Balboa
had sent a distress call, and captured her by carefully using high-powered lasers to explosively decompress the crew compartments. They towed
Stone Mountain
home, took her apart, and shortly thereafter added warp drive to their little cruisers.

The Federation considers the war to have begun with the destruction of
Balboa.
In the twenty-five years of warfare that followed, no less than forty-six Federation task forces of ever-increasing size and firepower went into Rihannsu space to deal with the aggression against them, and even with vastly superior firepower, most of them suffered heavy damage if not annihilation. “I can’t understand it,” says one fleet admiral in a debriefing. “Their ships are junk. We should be able to shoot them down like clay pigeons.” But the huge numbers of the Rihannsu craft made them impossible to profitably engage; even “smart” photon torpedoes could target only one vessel at a time. When there were twelve more climbing up your tail, the situation became impossible. Starfleet kept trying with bigger and better weapons—until two things happened at once: there was a change of administration, and the Vulcans joined the Federation.

The only indication of what the Rihannsu looked like had come from a very few burned and decompressed bodies picked up in space. When Vulcan was discovered, and after negotiation entered the Federation, their High Council was pointedly asked whether it knew anything about these people. The Vulcans, all logic—and selective truth—told the Federation that they were not sure who these people were. There had indeed been some attempts to colonize other worlds, they admitted, but those ships had been out of touch with Vulcan for some seventeen hundred years. The first Vulcan ambassador, a grimly handsome gentleman who had just been posted to Earth, made this statement to the admirals of Starfleet in such a way that they immediately found it politic to drop the subject. But through the ambassador, the Vulcan High Council gave the Federation a piece of good advice. “Make peace with them,” Sarek told the admirals, “and close the door. Stop fighting. You will probably never beat them. But you can stop your ships being destroyed.”

The advice went down hard, and Starfleet tried to do it their own way for several years more. But finally, as Vulcan’s increasing displeasure became plainer, Fleet acquiesced. The war ended with the Treaty of Alpha Trianguli, probably the first treaty in Federation history to have been negotiated entirely by data upload. No representatives of the two sides ever met. The Rihannsu had no interest in letting their enemies find out any more about them than could be revealed by autopsy. They might be back someday.

The treaty established what came to be called the Romulan Neutral Zone, an egg-shaped area of space about ninety light-years long and forty wide, with 128 Trianguli at its center. The Zone itself was the “shell” of the egg, a buffer area all the way around, one light-year thick, marked and guarded by defense/monitoring satellites of both sides. Everything inside the Zone was considered “the Romulan Star Empire,” even though there was as yet no such thing. The Federation was not exactly hurt by this treaty: as far as they were concerned, there were no strategically promising planets in the area. Perhaps they were not looking hard enough. Later some Federation officials would kick themselves when finding out about Rhei’llhne, a planet just barely inside the Neutral Zone in Rihannsu space, and almost richer in dilithium than Direidi.

So the war ended, and as far as the Federation was concerned, for fifty years nothing came out of the Zone, not a signal, not a ship. Perhaps, some thought, the people in there had gotten sick of fighting. Wiser heads, or those who thought they knew what stock the “Romulans” had sprung from, suspected otherwise.

The Rihannsu had stopped fighting indeed, but as for being tired of it, this was unlikely. There was a matter of honor,
mnhei’sahe,
still to be resolved. So much of the Two Worlds’ economies were poured into starship weapons research that they still have not recovered entirely from the austerity it caused the contributing nations. They rebuilt the defense satellite system to hundreds of times its former strength, and trained some of the best star pilots ever seen in any species anywhere.

They also decided not to make the mistake their forefathers had made with the Etoshans. The Rihannsu scientists spent literally years translating the complete contents of the reference computers of the Federation ships they had so far managed to capture. They realized from what they found that they were one small pair of planets caught between two Empires, and that to survive, they were going to have to have an Empire themselves.

So began the “expansionist” period of Rihannsu history, in which they tackled planetary colonization with the same ferocious desperation they had used to build a fleet out of nothing. They needed better ships to do this, of course. They wound up reconstructing numerous large people-carriers along the ship model, though, of course, with warp drive these craft did not need generation capability. Twenty planets were settled in eighteen years, and population-increase technology was used of the sort that had made ch’Rihan and ch’Havran themselves so rapidly viable. Not all the settlements were successful, nor are they now: Hellguard was one glaring example.

During this period the Rihannsu also developed the warbird-class starship, acknowledged by everyone, including the Klingons and the Federation, to be one of the finest, solidest, most maneuverable warp-capable craft ever designed. If it had a flaw, it was that it was small; but its weaponry was redoubtable, and the plasma-based molecular implosion field that warbirds carried had problems only with ships that could outrun the field. Another allied invention was the cloaking device, which tantalized everyone who saw it, particularly the Klingons.

The Klingons didn’t get it until much later than the Federation did. The Klingons got other things, mostly defense contracts.

The relationship was a strange one from the first. The Rihannsu economy began to be in serious trouble, despite the beginning inflow of goods and capital from the tributary worlds, because of all the funds being diverted to military research. There was also a question as to whether the research was, in fact, doing any good: a warbird out on a mission to test the security of the Neutral Zone ran into a starship called
Enterprise
and never came back again. At the same time, the Klingon Empire was beginning to encroach on the far side of the Neutral Zone, and the first two or three interstellar engagements left both sides looking at each other and wishing there were some way to forestall the all-out war that was certainly coming. Rather cleverly, the Klingons made overtures to the Rihannsu based on their own enmity with the Federation, and offered to sell them ships and “more advanced technology,” some of it Federation. Everyone, they claimed, stood to benefit from this arrangement. The Neutral Zone border on their side would be “secure,” and the Klingon economy (also in trouble) would benefit from the extra capital and goods.

The deal turned out to be of dubious worth. For one thing, the Rihannsu buying ships from the Klingons was comparable to Rolls-Royce buying parts from Ford. The Klingon ships were built by the lowest bidder, and performed as such. Also, most of the Federation technology the Klingons had to offer was obsolete. But the treaty suited the aims of the expansionist lobbies in Praetorate and Senate, and so was ratified, much to the Rihannsu’s eventual regret. In the meantime, the Rihannsu shipwrights (and some of the ship captains) muttered over the needlessly high cost of Klingon replacement parts, and did their best to tinker the ships into something better than nominal performance. Mostly it was a losing battle. Klingons build good weaponry, but their greatest interest in spacecraft tends to be in blowing them up.