Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (58 page)

“An excuse for them to push outward,” said Fleet Admiral Mehkan, “would certainly be welcomed.”

“Well, it’s not as if there aren’t also elements in Fleet which would welcome the resolution of a persistent tactical problem on one of our borders,” the president said. “Massive resources are spent policing and patrolling the Neutral Zone every year. Everyone would find it an improvement if suddenly that necessity went away…wouldn’t they?”

The Fleet Admiral twitched a little. The president noticed, and said nothing about it. “Yet at the same time,” the president said, “no one has wanted the situation to resolve itself in an uncontrolled manner. Sometimes, unfortunately, you just don’t have a choice. We’ve known for a while that there would be a war involving the Romulan Empire within the next five to ten years. Political tensions, economic pressures, even personal issues at high levels in the Empire have been bringing it closer and closer. Now here it comes: a little sooner than expected, maybe. But hardly unexpected.”

He got up and came out from behind the desk, pausing in front of his terrace door and gazing out for a moment. Across the Seine, the lower half of the Eiffel Tower was now visible; the rest was lost in fog, producing an effect suggesting that someone had come along and sliced its top off with a knife. “That being the case…what matters is to protect our own people, naturally; but also to try to steer events so that they do the most people the most good over time, both on their side of the Neutral Zone and on ours.”

“The altruistic approach…” said Fleet Admiral Mehkan.

“I know that tone of voice, Dai,” said the president, beginning to pace slowly in front of that window. “I did Strat-Tac only a year after you did at the Academy, and I remember old Dickinson’s lectures as well as you do. My job simply requires that I approach the problem from a slightly different angle. A wider one, maybe. War…” The president paused. “Any war is undesirable, Dai. A war that benefits one of your opponents at the expense of the other, and weakens both…that’s also undesirable, but less so. However, a war that leaves you with, instead of two opponents who keep each other busy, only one opponent, now much stronger due to the defeat of the other…that is very undesirable indeed.”

Mehkan said, “And things have been trending that way for some time, Mr. President.”

“Yes. Well, events seem to be giving the forces in the Romulan Empire a different focus to ‘crystallize out’ around. We have two main concerns. Tactics, and readiness.” He looked up at the chief of staff of Starfleet. “And two questions. If we go to war with the Romulan Empire, can we defeat them?”

Fleet Admiral Mehkan was very slow to answer. “Strat-Tac says yes,” he said. “But it would be a long, bloody exercise. There would be hundreds of millions of casualties, maybe billions, on both sides. And it would take both sides decades, if not a century or more, to completely recover.”

“And if the Klingons come in on their side at the beginning?”

This time there was no pause in Mehkan’s answer. He shook his head immediately. “A shorter exercise. A
much
higher death toll. The modern version of what they once called ‘mutual assured destruction’…the possible loss of starflight capability to all three cultures, if things went on long enough.”

“An unacceptable outcome, obviously. But I suspect Strat-Tac thinks the Klingons would wait to see how things went…then come in and attack the weaker of the two combatant parties at an opportune moment.”

Mehkan nodded. “Their own Empire is slightly overstretched at the moment in terms of supply lines,” he said, “and I think they’re sensitive to the possibility that the Romulans, once hostilities were well enough under way, might attack the further-flung Klingon worlds with an eye to cutting off the trade routes to the inner planets.”

The president leaned against the terrace door, gazing out. “Well,” he said, “it’s going to start. So our job is to keep this war from killing any more of us, and any more of them, than is absolutely necessary; and to manage it in such a way that the powers left standing at the end of it are unlikely to go to war again for a long time.”

“And if we can’t?”

“We have to,” said the president. “By whatever means. And one fairly straightforward means to the end is lying ready to our hand…if we use it intelligently.”

Fleet Admiral Mehkan looked profoundly unhappy. “I wish we knew for sure that we could trust her,” he said.

“We can trust her to be Romulan,” said the president.

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“And we don’t so much have to trust her,” said the president, “as to anticipate her. In
that
regard…we have at least one resource who does that fairly well.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” said Mehkan. He got up and went to stand by the terrace door as well. “Mr. President…there are people high in Command who are going to resist this suggestion strenuously.”

“You among them,” said the president.

“Kirk is increasingly difficult to predict as time goes by. If he—”

“If we selected starship captains just for predictability,” said the president, “most of them would be dead within the first year of their first five-year mission. Lateral thinking, creativity, the ability to outflank the dangers that face them…that, I would think, is the set of characteristics Fleet sorts for. Or have the criteria changed since we last did a review?”

“No, but—”

“You know what the problem is as well as I do,” the president said. “It is not a question of predictability, in the case of the captain of the
Enterprise;
it is a question of loyalty…in this particular case.”

“Only,” said the chief of staff, “a question of where that loyalty lies.”

“I have no doubts, in this case,” said the president. “By the time things come to a head, neither will you. In the meantime,
Enterprise
herself has significant symbolic value to all sides involved in the argument which is about to break out…and that value would be much lessened with a change in her command.”

He took one last look out the window, then turned back toward the desk. “So take care of it,” said the president. “Get
Enterprise
out there. Cut Kirk orders that will protect Fleet if…action has to be taken.” His face set grim. “But leave him the latitude he needs to get the job done. Our job, meantime, is to put together the assets she will need after the trouble starts. I want a meeting with the chiefs of services tomorrow at the latest. It’ll take at least a few days, possibly as long as a week, for the Romulan force to materialize where we have to take official notice of them. We need to start putting our assets in place immediately, before it can possibly be seen as a reaction to what’s about to start happening. And then…”

“Then we wait,” said the chief of staff of Starfleet.

“The worst part,” said the president, “as always. Get caught up on your sleep this week.
I
sure will, because once things start happening, we’re both likely to lose plenty.”

Fleet Admiral Mehkan nodded and headed toward the office door. Halfway through it, he paused and looked over his shoulder.

“There really
is
no way to avert this, is there?” he said, very softly indeed.

The president shook his head. “This time, unfortunately,” he said, “we’re right. We’re just going to have to pray we’re not as right as we’re afraid we are.”

Mehkan went out. The president of the Federation let out a long breath and looked out the window again at the mist lying over the city, softening and obscuring everything in a veil of increasingly radiant obscurities as the sun now tried to come out above it all. The soft view would not last long. Soon enough would come the awful clarity of phaser fire in the darkness, ships bursting in vacuum, the screams of the committed and the innocent together. At times like this, he hated his job more than anything.

Nevertheless, he turned back to his desk and set about doing it.

On ch’Rihan, in the planetary capital city Ra’tleihfi, stands an old edifice built with the elegant classical proportions of the “Ehsadai” period—that time when the Rihannsu were new to their planets from the depths of space, and just beginning the business of taming the Two Worlds to their will. The building itself was much newer than the Ehsadai era, having actually been built after the fall of that terrible woman Vriha t’Rehu, the so-called Ruling Queen. The Rihannsu who built it were, like many of their people, looking back with both relief and longing to a time when the arts of peace and war in the Two Worlds had seemed to be at their height. By building again in that style, and incorporating what remained of the older structure on the same site, the architects hoped to remind Rihannsu everywhere of what they had so nearly lost to the tyrant—freedom, honor, the rule of ch’Rihan and ch’Havran by the millions descended from those who had crossed space to live there, as opposed to rule by the whim of any one Rihanha, however well-intentioned.

But memory is such a fleeting thing. Soon enough, within ten years, twenty, fifty, the tyrant’s awful depredations were happily enough forgotten by people busy rebuilding their lives and countries after the wars that Vriha t’Rehu’s ambition triggered. Soon enough, as the Senate and Praetorate resumed their ancient powers, the old jockeying for power began, as the few fought for influence among the many; and the people scattered across the worlds accepted this, once again, as part of the normal conduct of life…some few Senators or Praetors overawing their many co-gubernals by virtue of family connections or wealth rather than drawing them into agreement by common sense. The Rihannsu forgot, and the Senate and Praetorate were content not to remind them, that the Two Worlds are rarely in such danger as when only a few hold rule; and they forgot what the building meant, except that it was old and beautiful.

Now, on this morning of the thirty-fifth of Awhn, that building was still old; but its beauty was marred. There was a great crack running right across the massive low dome that was the central chamber’s ceiling, roof, and another straight across and through the mighty slab of marble which had floored the great chamber under the dome, big enough to hold the whole Tricameron in session at once. Now formal sessions of both Senate and Praetorate were being held elsewhere while workers labored among the ugly pillars and struts of emergency scaffolding inside the building; and outside, tractor beams and pressors were supplementing the normal stresses that had formerly held the dome unsupported over the chamber. The architects had planned superbly, but they had not anticipated that the chamber would ever have a starship sitting on its roof.

The three men who stood there now, under the scaffolding, looked across the blaster-scarred and acid-stained marble of the chamber and said nothing. The workers, for the time being masters of this domain, paid no attention to them. The three men in their somber dark uniforms of state, sashed in black, not gold, were themselves paying little attention to the workers. The gazes of all three were directed toward the far side of the room, where there sat an old, old chair. One of the workers had thrown a couple
ells’
length of protective sheeting over it, but this did not disguise the fact that the chair was empty.

“Come on,” said one of the men, the tallest of them, a big, fair, broad-shouldered man with a long, somber face. The three turned away and walked toward the entrance, which once had been perhaps the noblest part of the building, with its great bronze doors all cast and carved with episodes from the Empire’s history. But the doors had sprung out of their sills when the ship came down, and were now off being repaired, leaving nothing but protective sheeting hanging down and crackling noisily in the hot fierce wind that ran down the streets of Ra’tleihfi in this season.

They stepped out into the day, a fair green day under that windy sky, and stood a little to one side at the top of the great flight of steps leading down into the city’s central plaza, all surrounded and walled about with the close-packed spires and towers of the capital. A constant stream of workers came and went past them, and also many city people, coming up the steps as far as they were allowed to see the damage done, and going away again, muttering. Tr’Anierh, the tallest of the three, looked at these casual observers coming and going, and said under his breath, “Perhaps we should seal this off.”

“Why?” said the second man, the one in the middle; a short roundish man with a broad, cheerful face, bushy eyebrows, and hair beginning, perhaps prematurely, to be streaked with gray. “It’s good for them to see what the damned traitress did. And what their taxes are going to have to pay to repair. Anything that brings
that
home to them is worthwhile.”

Tr’Anierh looked over at the third of them—a Rihanha of medium height, medium build, medium skin tone, dark hair, a man almost resolutely ordinary-looking even to his customary bland expression—and wondered, as always, what he was thinking. “Well, Urellh?” he said. “Does Ahrm’n have the right of it here?”

Urellh tr’Maehhlie let out a breath as if he grudged it. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s not the people whose opinion will matter when we bring her back. It’s the Senate, and the Praetorate. They’re the ones who have to be reminded how she slighted them, denigrated their power, took the oldest symbol of it into her own thieving hands and ran off with it. When we go fetch her back, we must make sure that no distractions from outside keep them from killing her at last. More, though: we must make sure that they do not mistake her capture, and the Sword’s return, as all that’s necessary to bring this episode to an end.”