Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (57 page)

Deep in the longest night, in a ship passing through the empty space thirteen light-years from 33 Trianguli, a Rihannsu woman sat in a hard-cushioned chair behind a desk and looked out through a small viewport at the stars, waiting.

Her surroundings were blessedly familiar; her own small cabin, in her own ship. It was everything outside, now, which was strange to her—the spaces in which she was a barely tolerated guest, the stars that filled them, either unheeding of her presence or subtly inimical to it….

She raised her eyebrows briefly at her own fancy.
I grow whimsical,
she thought, and her gaze slid sideways from the surface of her tidy desk to the chair which now sat by itself against the far wall.
But perhaps, having
you
around, there is reason.

In the present dim nighttime lighting of the cabin, what lay across the arms of the chair seemed barely more than a sliver of shadow; pure unrevealing darkness, absorbing whatever light fell upon it. Not quite straight, but very faintly curved, the sheath and the hilt seeming to fade seamlessly into one another by the skill of the ancient swordsmith, the Sword occupied another empty chair much different from its former one, and the thoughts of the woman whose cabin it now shared.

Occupation…
She smiled faintly. It was as good a word as any for the hold which this object had had over her since she put her hand out in the Senate chamber, two months and a lifetime ago, to take it. In her people’s traditions there had always been tales of creatures or objects which expressed the Elements unusually perfectly. These tended to bend the universe out of shape around them, as intense gravity fields bend light, and equally they bent awry the intentions of those mortals who had close dealings with them.

She had little thought to find herself, ever, so used. It had simply come to her, in that moment’s impulse in the Senate chambers, that she would willingly take possible disaster on herself in order to save the most sacred part of her people’s heritage from further dishonor. Now she wondered, sometimes, exactly whose impulse that had been; exactly who was the Sword, and whose were the hand and will wielding it.

In the weeks following that day, when she and her crew had returned to these spaces where the Federation had allowed them to take refuge, she had spent a number of hours in what was little better than shock—amazement at her own temerity, worry over what would follow it, fear for her crew. Then pragmatism set in, as always, which was as well; for within only a few days more, the messages began to arrive. Her act had swiftly begun to bear fruit in the form of consequences, and the fruit was ripening fast, faster than even she could have imagined.

And soon, now, if she was any judge of events, the first fruit would fall.

The comm signal sounded, and the suddenness of it made her start. She had to laugh at herself, then, though there was no one here to hear except that dark and silent listener lying across the arms of the chair, it wearing its eternal slight uncommunicative smile.

She reached out and touched the control on her desk.
“Ie?”

“T’Hrienteh says a message has arrived for you in the last comm packet,
llhei….”

Aidoann’s voice had a slight tinge of eagerness to it, and Ael knew whence that eagerness came. All her crew had been infected by it since she came back to
Bloodwing
carrying what now lay on the chair across from her.

“Send it along to my computer,” Ael said. “I will read it here. And Aidoann, for the Elements’ sake there is little point in
you
‘madam’ing me. The crew will think we have fallen out.”

A pause, then a chuckle.
“Very well,
ll
—Ael.”

“Not in private, anyway,” Ael said, hearing her antecenturion’s old slight discomfort with amusement, and wondering idly how many years yet it would take her to lose it. “We can afford a little ease among ourselves these days, as long as our performance in action is not impaired. Which I think unlikely to happen. In any case, it is not as if some superior officer is going to come along and reprimand us for a breakdown in discipline.”

That
image made Aidoann laugh outright. “So,” Ael said. “What has tr’Keirianh had to say about the engine tests this morning?”

“He said little, madam, but smiled a great deal.”

Ael’s mouth quirked up a little at that. Her chief engineer might be sparse of speech, but he had no skill at concealing his feelings. “Dangerous to make assumptions,” she said, “but that would seem to bode well.
Ta’khoi…”

As she cut the voice connection, her terminal showed her the herald for an incoming message, encrypted. “Decrypt,” she said, and sat back, watching the terminal go black, then fill with amber characters that shimmered into meaning from meaninglessness.

About half the screenful was comm routing information, interesting only insofar as one chose to be endlessly fascinated by the means her correspondents found to evade the ever-increasing interest of the security services on ch’Rihan and ch’Havran. Some of the messages were relayed numerous times among the subject worlds of the Empire and right out to the fringes of Rihannsu-dominated space before making their way out into the spaces beyond. This one, she saw, had gone clear out into the Klingon communications networks—which in itself was amusing, considering what one of these messages might eventually mean to the Klingon Empire if things went the way she thought they might—and from there had passed to one of the commercial subspace relay networks in the “nonaligned” worlds buffering between the Klingons and the Federation, before making its way to her ship.
The long way around
…she thought, and touched the screen, stroking the routing information away and bringing up the message.

Under the origin and destination fields, both forged, the message itself was brief. The body of it said only:

There was, of course, no signature. She sat back and looked thoughtfully at the two long “parts numbers,” carefully rearranging their digits in her mind according to the usual method…then held very still for a few moments, digesting what those two sets of numbers together meant.
So quickly…

She folded her hands again, leaned her chin on them once more, calculating.
They are furious, indeed, for their innate inertia to be so quickly overcome. Yet I cannot believe their consensus is genuine. I have merely given them cause for a show of unity. Beneath that, no question but that their divisions remain.

Yet will those still run deep enough to serve my turn?

She shifted her eyes back toward the dark, slight curve of the Sword, and felt it looking at her.
Impossible, of course…
But the feeling persisted, and others had reported it as well. How something so inanimate could yet seem to have awareness of its surroundings, and an intent that looked out at the world through that awareness, Ael could not tell. Yet for many long years this potent artifact had lain in that chair in the Senate, untouched, unmolested by even the most violent and powerful of the personalities who passed through—and that fact argued some indwelling power of the Sword’s more dangerous, in its way, than Ael much liked to think of.

She got up, then, came around her desk, and stood before that chair, looking down at the slice of darkness that lay there defeating the dim light of her cabin. “Well,” she said softly. “Now is the time, if ever. Shall we serve each other’s turn? I am willing…”

She reached out slowly, hesitant; her fingers dropped to the hilt, brushed it…. Nothing happened; no jolt of power, no arcane or silent voice shouting agreement down her bones. She expected none, well knowing the difference between a symbol and the powers it stood for. Nonetheless, the answer to her question was plain.

She turned away and waved the cabin lights up, then went back to the desk, reached down for the comm control again. “Bridge.”

It was young antecenturion Khiy’s voice.
“Yes,
khre’Riov—?”

She had to smile that so many of her people still called her that, though none of them belonged to the service any longer, and the service indeed would be the instrument of all their deaths were they ever caught. “The message which has just come in tells me what I thought it would,” she said. “They are finally coming for us…” She could not hold back a somewhat feral smile. “We have much to do to prepare.”

“Khre’Riov—” Khiy’s voice held a most unaccustomed nervousness.
“Are we going back with them?”

Ael laughed softly. “Did you truly think it?” she said. “Aye, going back…but never in the way they think, or the company. Is Aidoann still there?”

“
Here,
llhei.”

“Shortly I will have some more messages to send, and we must take care with the routing of some of them, lest they come too soon where they are wanted. T’Hrienteh and I will confer about this at length. But first you should call the crew together. There are things to be discussed in detail before we go forward.”

“
Yes,
khre’Riov!” Aidoann said, and the comm went dead.

Ael t’Rllaillieu gave the Sword in the Empty Chair one last glance, and smiled briefly; then waved her cabin door open, and went out to battle.

There would be those who said she had started this war. Ael was not so sure about that.
But beyond doubt,
she thought,
I shall be the one to finish it….

In the heart of Paris, just off to one side of the Palais de Chaillot, between the great reflecting pool and the Avenue Albert de Mun, stands the tall and handsome spire of the “troisième Empire” edifice built late in the twenty-second century to house the offices on Earth of the president of the United Federation of Planets. It was November now, though, and half the spire was hidden in the chilly fog which had come down on the city the night before and shrouded all its lights. The mist had risen a hundred feet or so, but no more. Now the view from the terrace outside the room where the president was meeting privately with the chief of staff of Starfleet Command was mostly indistinct, with only a glimpse or two of distant buildings showing here and there as flitters and little ion-driven shuttles passed, and the mist swirled with their passing.

The room was very still even though the door to the terrace was open, the mist muting the sounds of the city outside; and the thin pale light fell cheerlessly on the dark-paneled walls and the Shaashin, Kandinsky, and T’Kelan oils hanging there. In the middle of the room hovered a large oval sapphire-glass desk on paired pressors, and behind it next to a matching cobalt-blue chair the president stood, his tall dark bearlike bulk slightly stooped as he looked down at the desk, reading from the display embedded in it. He had been up all night, and looked it.

“When did you receive the message, sir?” Fleet Admiral Mehkan said. He was a smaller man, considerably slenderer than the president, and very fair, as a lot of people from Centaurus are.

“It must have been about midnight,” said the president, touching the display to bring the report up again. “The Strat-Tac people,” he said, “are very thorough in their briefings. I’d thought this would have arrived a little sooner—but apparently her enemies back home have been making sure they have everything they need in place before they move.”

“And now,” said the chief of staff, “we have to start working out what to do…”

“Sit down, Dai, please,” the president said. Mehkan sat down on a chair like the president’s on the other side of the desk.

The president lowered himself into his own chair, leaning on the desk while he finished rereading the report. “She’ll have received the same message, I assume,” he said.

“At about the same time, yes, sir. Her sources supply us as well, rather more directly.”

“And you’re sure that the source of the information is completely reliable.”

“It’s not just
a
source, Mr. President. It’s
our
source.”

The president nodded slowly. “I had wondered…. Well, the interesting part of all this,” he said, “is going to be anticipating what she does.”

“She has to have known they would come right after her,” said the chief of staff.

The president nodded. “Unquestionably. If I understand the relative importance of the artifact she took with her, to produce the same result on Earth she would have had to have stolen the Articles of Federation, or the old Constitution, or the Magna Carta….”

“Combined with the Crown Jewels, the Black Stone, and the Holy Grail,” said Mehkan. “The Romulan government will do anything they have to, to get that thing back…or to make sure it doesn’t fall into unfriendly hands.”

“Such as ours,” said the president.

Mehkan nodded.

“But it’s still just an excuse,” the president said. “They’ve been waiting for a chance like this for a long time. There are elements in the Senate which have been looking for a cause célèbre, something to push their relationship with the Federation out of the rut it’s been stuck in for all these years. The Neutral Zone chafes them, limits their trading opportunities, annoys their expansionist and nationalist lobbies…”