Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (59 page)

“There’s more to revenge, then,” said Ahrm’n tr’Kiell, “than just her…”

Tr’Anierh looked back at where the doors should have been, glanced over toward the side-flight of steps leading out and down to the plaza, and moved slowly that way. The other two came with him.

“It’s time we faced the realities,” tr’Anierh said. “Things have been the same now for too long. We sit trapped here between two powerful enemies…one which has been kept from acting against us only by weakness caused by its empire being too far-flung for its forces to hold securely; the other by weakness at its root, a chronic unwillingness to fight unless forced to it by circumstances. And the first, as we now see, is shaking off its inactivity. The other is all too likely to do the same. Time we stopped acting the
hlai
trapped between two
hnoiyikar,
afraid to move one way or another lest one of the predators turn and bite its head off.”
And ideally,
tr’Anierh thought,
time we found a way to get them to turn their attention to each other and leave us alone.

“You sound,” said tr’Kiell, “like the Senate yesterday.”

“And the day before,” said Urellh, “and the day before that, and for many days before. Endless cries of ‘Revenge!’ and ‘Blood or honor’—but no one willing to lead the first ship out, against either side, for fear of being blamed for the bloodshed to follow.” His voice had acquired an edge of disgust.

“And would you, then, Urellh?” said tr’Anierh, trying to seem casual. But he turned away a little, not anxious to see Urellh see him holding his breath, or seeming in any way overinterested in the answer.
He has become entirely too sensitive to opposition, for whatever reason. If anything should make him realize how I detest his politics, everything I’ve been planning could be imperiled….

There was a long pause. “Aye, indeed I would,” said Urellh. “The blow to our reputations, even eventually to our sovereignty, is a massive one. The insult grows harder to bear by the day. And others are watching. Not the Federation.” His smile grew suddenly bitter here. “We see now what the Klingons think of a neighboring Empire that cannot stop one ship from coming in through our system defenses and taking the most sacred possession of our people.”

“But that was treason. The defenses were taken down from the inside—”

“And what does that matter? The Klingons will say to themselves, ‘Where once treachery’s rank weed sprang up, it can be sown again.’ No matter that it was chopped down once; they will see the ground as being favorable. They have always been willing to use such means if tactics required. And if treason does not work, they will use main force with joy. Any system that can be compromised by so few people, so quickly, has revealed a fatal flaw…and has revealed itself as easily broken by any who apply enough brute force to it.”

“That flaw has been mended,” said tr’Anierh. “Those people are dead now, or fled.”

“Happy the dead,” Urellh growled, “for they’re beyond what will happen to those who fled, once we catch them.” He looked over at Ahrm’n tr’Kiell.

Tr’Kiell shrugged. “If you expect news of new arrests, I have none. The Two Worlds are not a small place, and there are endless boltholes and empty places on both worlds where criminals and traitors can go to ground…especially on ch’Havran, which has never been as unified in its loyalties as it should have been. And then there are the client worlds…” He sighed. “Our intelligence services are doing what they can to find them, day by day…. But it’s a live traitor’s nature to come out and take up his treason again when he thinks it will be safe. And those who helped the cursed t’Rllaillieu take the Sword will find that it will never be safe for them, no matter how long they wait.”

“In any case,” tr’Anierh said, “the matter is now, as you say, beyond choice. The Klingons have spotted what looks like a weakness at the very heart of our empire. They are already moving to exploit it. And it’s when an enemy is moving that he is at his most vulnerable.”

“We hardly have the forces to strike at them directly,” said tr’Kiell, “with any hope of success.”

“Not if we are the only combatant,” said Urellh.

The others looked at him. “Communications are always subject to misunderstanding,” Urellh said, “and misdirection. Even in peacetime. Most certainly in wartime. And in the time just before a war, communications are more easily lost, misread or misconstrued than at any other time whatever. The Klingons are moving? The sooner, the better, for their movement will give the Federation pause. If word came to the Federation that the Klingons had struck—say, one of
their
outpost worlds—that news would serve to turn their attention away from us. With the result that we are left free to act—”

“They would not be so foolish as to become involved in a two-front war,” tr’Kiell said. “It would be suicidal, even for them.”

“They will become involved in whatever we present them with,” said Urellh, “as always. They are not a proactive people, the Federation. Indeed, they are not a people at all, but a confused mass of hundreds of bizarre species with hundreds of agendas, all conflicting; they cannot act boldly or straightforwardly, by virtue of their very structure. It is a fact we have been slow to exploit. But now we will make up for some lost time, Elements willing; we will show them what a united people can do…and what real boldness looks like. Information, meanwhile, can be twisted into many strange and unusual shapes in transit between worlds. We will see what can be done in this regard in the very near future.”

He fell silent, gazing out into the morning as some workers moving slabs of white marble on hovercarries went by. Tr’Anierh was glad of the few moments’ respite, for this unusually communicative mood of Urellh’s had begun to cause him concern.
What trap does he set for us here?
tr’Anierh wondered. After a few moments, though, he put the thought away. The three of them, by virtue of long careful manipulation of the economic, dynastic, and political assets that chance and ancient House affiliations had cast in front of them, had over the past several years risen to the position of
aierh te’nuhwir,
“first among equals” in the Praetorate. Each of them, by virtue of sheer personal power, now swung behind him a considerable bloc of the votes in both Senate and Praetorate. Each of them knew too many of the others’ secrets to be afraid of what the others might do. Tr’Anierh knew his fear, therefore, to be foolish, yet he knew the others had it too…and it kept them cautious.

“As for the Klingons,” Urellh said after the workers had passed, “they may come to see that the Federation is not invulnerable, either. There are members of their own High Council who would not be averse to sending their fleets in that direction, as much for the sake of changes in their own status quo as for revenge, battle, or booty.”

“An interesting concept,” said tr’Anierh. “But the main problem remains. The woman, and her cursed renegade confederates aboard our stolen cruiser
Bloodwing
…and the Sword.”

He looked closely at tr’Kiell. “The Senate is ready to act,” tr’Keill said. “If you think I have been acting to delay the matter, you think wrongly.”

“But you have a personal connection,” said Urellh, “and who could doubt that you would have mixed feelings about the situation?”

“I think the source of my mixed feelings is better dead,” tr’Kiell said, “and enough said about that. With luck, the Elements being with us, it will soon be so.” He fell silent for a moment, and then added, “And our other assets on
Bloodwing,
it would seem, are still in place; that confirmation was long in coming, and there was some uncertainty, but it came at last. So now we can give our increasingly noisy Senate something to do before it so completely loses its patience or its wits that it starts attempting to press the thorny chaplet of blame onto one of
our
heads.” His smile was wintry. “They may safely be turned loose to enact the legislation which we will propose them tomorrow.”

“Who did the wording?” Urellh said.

“I did,” said tr’Anierh. “It needed some delicacy of shading. But the meaning will be clear enough even for the Senate, and our fellow Praetors will of course ratify it without discussion. The task force to be sent out on this foray will number six ships: more than enough both to handle the business of entering Federation space on a diplomatic mission, and to be able to pursue our own interests even if they attempt to block us. Most particular attention has been paid to the newer aspects of the ships’ weaponry.” He smiled slightly. This was his own area of expertise. “We will go to them, seemingly with our hands open, and demand the return of a war criminal for trial on her homeworld. If they turn her and the Sword over to us, that will be well. If they merely allow us to pursue her, that also will be well. She cannot long elude pursuit, and we will track her down and bring her and the Sword home—or just the Sword. And if they do
not
assist us by allowing pursuit, or turning her over to us—”

“Then war,” tr’Kiell said.

“They will have forced us to it,” said Urellh, in a tone meant to simulate regret. “We will have no choice but to do what is necessary to recover our property…and our honor. An evil chance, but some good will yet come of it. At best we will push them some ways back from the spaces they occupy on the other side of the Neutral Zone; there are some choice planets there. At worst we will do the Federation great and memorable damage along the border—destroying as many of the monitoring stations along the Zone as we can, and forcing them to spend vast sums restoring and restaffing them and installing new infrastructure.”

“Hurting not only them,” said tr’Kiell, “but various others who will realize that they have misperceived our weakness.”

“Oh yes,” said Urellh. “And meanwhile, in the first hours or days of that war, the first-in task force will locate the woman, whether she shelters behind the Federation’s kilts or not, and destroy her and the Sword both, if need be. They shall not have her, or it; and she shall not live to keep it in our despite. Better it should be destroyed than fall into alien hands…if indeed she is not more than half alien herself already, in heart. Likely enough, bearing in mind who bore her company at Levaeri V.”

“And while we resolve the issue that started the war,” said tr’Anierh, “the war itself will yield its own rewards….”

“Perhaps more than anyone expects,” Urellh said. “Ahrm’n, have you ever had an infestation of
ehlfa?”

Tr’Kiell blinked. “I have little leisure to notice such things. If
ehlfa
should become a problem around my property, I would have the
hru’hfe
of my house call the exterminator.”

“Ah, but if you watched the exterminator, you would see something worth your while. He puts down bait and tempts the creatures to leave their nest. Out they march in their little columns. They find the prize. They tell each other the news with their body chemistry. Wholesale they race to the bait, falling upon it, busying themselves with worrying it into little pieces to take to their home. And while they do so, the exterminator comes to their home, all empty but for the king-
ehlfa
and his courtiers, and burns it. With their home destroyed, their king murdered, nowhere to go, the
ehlfa
are left distraught and witless; they wander away in every direction, and are eaten by predators, and the infestation is shortly merely a memory….”

Urellh smiled. It was not a smile that tr’Anierh would have liked to have turned on him. “You are very bold,” he said softly, “to speak of this under the open sky.”

“In this company the news is safe,” Urellh said. “But no other. After the way Sunseed was betrayed, and the DNA acquisition project with it, some harsh lessons about the need to know have been learned. Not least by me.” He got a grim look.

“Can you actually be telling us,” said tr’Kiell, “that the package is ready?”

“Nearly,” said Urellh.

It was this news that tr’Anierh had hoped against hope to hear…even though it also frightened him. “So you are now suggesting,” tr’Kiell said, “that we could seriously contemplate its delivery to one of the possible recipients…”

“Or the other,” Urellh said. “It is a matter of seeing which homeworld would be the most likely to endure such a delivery with most of its assets intact. If the answer is similar in both cases…well, let both systems receive such a gift…. But for now there is only one package. The single prototype has not been tested, but testing it would reveal its provenance, and alert our enemies to a need to protect against it. So its first test must be its first use.”

Tr’Anierh actually shivered, hoping that neither of the others saw. “So many billions of lives…” he said. “Even against
them…
even if it is only used against the Federation, Urellh, there will be questions among our own people. What do we say to them, afterward, when they come to us and ask us about the billions?…”

Urellh gave him a bland look. “A thousand dead,” he said, “are a tragedy—a thousand million, merely a statistic. And anyway…they are only aliens. What about our people, and
their
welfare? Think of how it could be for the Two Worlds and the client planets, to live in a universe where there was
no
Federation…
no
Klingon Empire…not anymore. No more striving to keep every
ell
of space or every Elements-forsaken dustbowl of a planet on which some few pitiful scraps of food can be grown. Freedom to be what we are, no longer fenced in, hemmed in, oppressed. Freedom to grow, to extend our boundaries and our culture right through the galaxy, taking what is ours to take…”