Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (6 page)

The space around sigma-285 Trianguli was, to put it baldly, dull. Not one of the stars in the area had a name; and hardly any of them seemed worth naming anyway. They were, generally speaking, a weary association of cooling red dwarfs—little Jupiter-sized stars of types N and R, and here and there a sputtering S-type “carbon” star with water-vapor in its atmosphere. (“Running out of steam,” Uhura remarked, looking over Spock’s shoulder at the data-breakdown on one of them.) Some of the stars had planets, but those were dull too—bare rocks, where life might have been, millennia ago, but certainly wasn’t now. There was nothing on those worlds that anyone wanted. Which was just as well; right next door to the border with the Neutral Zone would have been an uncomfortable place to live.

It was dark space to fly in—a bad place for seeing who was getting close to you, but a good spot for a quiet rendezvous with people whose looks you already knew. So
Enterprise
found it when she came out of warp and coasted down into 285’s feeble little gravity well, settling into a long elliptical orbit around the star. Other shapes, barely illuminated, broke their orbits and gathered slowly in around her. Two of them kept to the usual five-kilometer traffic limit:
Constellation
and
Intrepid,
ships of
Enterprise
’s own class. The third ship held itself ten kilometers away, but for all the extra distance, it looked the same size as
Intrepid
and
Constellation
did. This was even more of an illusion than the dim space alone could have caused, for the third ship was
Inaieu.

Inaieu,
as one of the destroyer-class starships, had been built large; built to carry a lot of people on very long hauls, and built to carry more power and more armament than any three starships—just in case. Her upper-hull disk was three times the size of
Enterprise
’s; her engine nacelles twice as long, and there were four of them—one above, two on the sides, one below. Her central engineering hull was a quarter-mile in diameter, and a mile long. Having been built at the Starfleet shipyards at Deneb, she flew under Denebian registry, and had been named for the old High King of Deneb V who, as the song said, “rose up and smote her enemies.” Jim watched her now on the bridge screen—massive, menacing and graceful, a great, glowing, blood-red shape in 285’s simmering light—and felt glad to have her along on this business, in case some heavy-duty smiting should be necessary.

“How long, Mr. Spock?” he said.

Spock glanced up from his station. “The meeting is not scheduled to begin for another twenty-five point six minutes, sir. Captain Rihaul is obviously already aboard
Inaieu;
Captain Walsh is in transit via shuttlecraft; Captain Suvuk has not yet beamed over.”

McCoy, standing behind the helm and watching everything as usual, looked surprised. “Shuttlecraft? Why doesn’t Captain Walsh just beam over like everybody else?”

Jim looked with wry amusement at McCoy. “That’s right, you don’t know Mike Walsh, do you? You two are going to get along just fine. Mike hates the transporter. Remind him to tell you about the time on Earth when he was heading for the Sydney Opera House and wound up instead in Baltimore Harbor. Or on second thought, don’t remind him. He’ll tell you anyway.”

McCoy humphed. “Two sensible men in this crazy Fleet, anyway—Jim, do I have to go to this silliness? This is supposedly a strategy and tactics meeting. Why should I scramble up my stomach and my brain-waves in that thing to sit and listen to—”

“Sorry, Bones. All the section chiefs have to be there. Regulations.”

“—bloody battle plans on one side and a whole horde of overlogical Vulcans on the other—”

Jim started to laugh. “Oh, Bones! The truth will out, I see….”

“Indeed,” Spock said, without looking up from his work. “The thought of a whole starship full of Vulcans, all doing perfectly well without one single human to leaven the deadly weight of their logic, intellection and sobriety, obviously has shocked the good doctor into the unwelcome thought that he might possibly not be necessary—”

“Careful, Spock,” McCoy grumbled. “You’re up for a physical in a couple weeks….”

Spock merely raised an amused eyebrow at McCoy, letting the expression say what he thought of such a déclassé retort. Jim sat back, looking past
Inaieu
on the screen to where
Intrepid
hung, glowing like a coal. It was several years now since the first
Intrepid
had run afoul of the spacegoing amoebalike creature that
Enterprise,
with a lot of help from Spock, had managed to destroy. The Vulcans had naturally gone into the expected restrained mourning for their many dead; but the monument that they found most fitting was another Vulcan starship.

She was built along the usual heavy-cruiser design, but with details of construction so much improved that Fleet had decided to use the Vulcans’ design, later, to refit all the heavy cruisers. Years ago, Jim had looked at the plans and pictures of
Intrepid,
and had found the design surprisingly pleasant—not only more logical than the original starship design, but very often more pleasant to look at, and sometimes downright beautiful. McCoy had looked over the plans mostly in silence, only commenting at the end of his perusal that the Vulcans had at least made the bathrooms larger. But Jim had noticed that all through, McCoy had been making the “hmp” noises that meant he approved even if he didn’t want to admit it. At any rate, there hung
Intrepid
herself, and whether it was logical or not, Jim was glad to see her. Her captain, Suvuk, was a briefly retired admiral whom Jim was looking forward to meeting—a veteran of decades of cruises, and the kind of man Terrans would call a hero, though the Vulcans insisted that he was just doing his job.

“Pretty ship,” he said. “Look how they’ve trimmed her nacelles down…. Spock, did they sacrifice any power for the weight they dropped there?”

“They improved power generation fifty-three percent before they made the alteration,” Spock said; “so those engines run at a hundred thirty-three percent of the best level the
Enterprise
could manage. I fear Mr. Scott is probably deep in that ugliest of emotions, envy….”

McCoy groaned softly. “Can we get on with this?” he said under his breath. “I’ve got a sickbay to tend to.”

“Momentarily, Doctor,” Spock said. “I am waiting for a final piece of data for this research of mine. While we are off on
Inaieu,
the computer will process it and provide us with a solution—”

“That ion-storm business?”

“Affirmative.”

The bridge doors hissed open, and Ensign Naraht shuffled in with a sound like someone dragging concrete blocks over the carpet. Jim smiled. He always smiled when he saw Naraht; he couldn’t help it.

Naraht was one of the thirty thousand children born of the last hatching of the Horta, that now-famous silicon-based creature native to Janus VI. The
Enterprise,
early in her five-year mission, had been called to Janus VI to exterminate a “monster,” and instead had wound up first injuring, then saving, the single surviving Horta who was about to become the “mother” of her whole eggbound race. Once out of the egg, the hatchlings grew with the usual speed; they were tunneling rock within minutes of their birth, and all the thirty thousand who hatched reached latency, and high intelligence, within standard days.

Any race so strange, and yet so adaptable to “bizarre” creatures like hominids, was naturally of immediate interest to the Federated Worlds. And the Hortas—curious creatures that they were—returned the interest with interest. Nothing could have kept them out of the Federation; and as for the political formalities, a creature used to moving easily through solid rock will be only slightly slowed down by red tape. It took no more (and in some cases much less) than the four years in which a Starfleet Academy class graduates for Hortas to start appearing on starships.

Naraht had come to the
Enterprise
highly qualified, with an Academy standing in the top tenth of his class. (“He” was an approximation; his official Fleet “arbitrary gender designation” was “orthomale type B-4A,” which McCoy usually described as “close enough for jazz.”) The Horta had chosen to specialize in biomaths, that peculiar science claimed by both psychiatry and interactional mesophysics. This put him, at least nominally, in McCoy’s department. But engineering and analytical chemistry both wanted to get their hands, fins or tentacles on him; not surprising, since Hortas eat rock, deriving both nutrition and flavor from the metallic elements and silicates found in it. Naraht could take a bite of any metal or mineral you pleased, and seconds later give you a readout of its constituent elements, with the expert precision of a gourmet reporting on the ingredients and balance of a wine sauce.

Jim had watched the intradepartmental squabbling over Naraht with amusement, and hadn’t allowed himself to be swayed by it; the
Enterprise
was made for the entities who rode in her, not the other way around. He left Naraht happy in biomaths, and simply kept an eye on his progress. Meantime, Spock apparently found it illogical to waste his talents, and had been calling him up to the bridge for consultations now and then. Jim didn’t mind this at all; he had long since confessed to himself that he never got tired of being earnestly “Yes, Captain” ed by someone who looked like a giant pan pizza (sausage, extra cheese).

“I have the data you wanted on the meteoric debris, sir,” Naraht said to Spock, drawing himself up to his full height in an approximation of “attention.” Behind him, Jim heard McCoy most carefully preventing his own laughter; Naraht was basically a horizontal creature, and his “full height” was about half a meter at best.

“Report, Mr. Naraht,” Spock said, beginning to key data into his library computer.

“Yes, sir. In order of greatest concentration—iron-55 forty-five point eight zero percent, nickel-58 twelve point six one percent, lead-82 nine point eight eight percent, mercury-201 nine point four six percent, gallium-69 nine point three zero percent, gold-198 eight point one one percent, samarium-151 three point one zero percent, rhodium-101 one point two three percent, palladium-106 zero point two zero percent, iridium-193 zero point three zero, and trace amounts of neodymium, yttrium, strontium and tantalum making up zero point zero one percent.”

Spock was staring at his station with great interest. “Mr. Naraht,” he said, “are you quite certain of that figure for the iridium?”

“To six decimal places, sir! Zero point three zero four one four one two two.”

“That is
eight
decimal places, Ensign,” Spock said; but he said it so mildly that McCoy looked at him very oddly indeed.

“Oh,” Naraht said. “I’m sorry, sir! I thought you might like some more.”

“‘Liking’ is one of the humanities’ emotions to which Vulcans are not generally prone,” Spock said, in that same mild voice. Jim held his own smile out of sight, particularly noticing that Spock hadn’t said at all that
he
might not occasionally like something. “Nevertheless I am inclined to overlook the error—just this once.”

McCoy looked down at Jim, who had swiveled his chair around to look at the screen—and to have something to do besides laugh. Bones’s look said, very plainly,
Is it just me, or is Spock teasing that boy!
Jim shrugged and took Bones’s clipboard away from him, pretending to study it while the lecture went on behind him. “Enthusiasm about science is to be commended,” Spock was saying, “but enthusiasm
in
science is to be avoided at all costs; it biases the judgment and may blind one to valuable observations. Guard against it.”

“I’ll remember, sir,” said Naraht. “Will there be anything else?”

“Not at the moment, Ensign. You may go.”

Naraht went shuffling off toward the bridge doors.

“Mr. Naraht,” Spock said, just as Jim thought it might be safe to turn around again. Behind him he heard Naraht pause.

“Sir?”

“That was well done, Mr. Naraht. Keep working and we will make a scientist of you yet.”

“Sir!”

“You are dismissed.”

Off went Naraht, rumbling and shuffling, into the lift. Spock went back to his work at his station, ignoring Uhura’s quizzical look at him, as well as Jim’s and McCoy’s. Bones couldn’t stand it. “Mr. Spock,” he said, deadpan, and somehow sounding only slightly interested, “did I hear you compliment that lad?”

Spock was still touching pads and switches on his library computer, so that he didn’t look up. “I accurately assessed his performance, Doctor. Feedback is most important for continuation of optimum performance, as even you must know.”

“I take it then,” Jim said, equally nonchalant, “that you find his performance generally satisfactory?”

“Oh, quite satisfactory, Captain. In fact, he exhibits many of the most positive traits of a young member of
your
branch of humanity—being by turns, or all at once, cheerful, conscientious, obedient almost to a fault, courteous, enthusiastic, respectful of superiors—”

“And he’s probably thrifty, brave, clean and reverent, too,” McCoy said. “In other words, Mr. Spock, we’ve got a genuine ‘space cadet’ on our hands.”

“Bless ’em all,” Jim said. “Where would Fleet be without them?”

“But the point is, Jim, that Spock approves of him! Can I stand the strain!”