Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (79 page)

“Behind me.”

“Behind your back, you mean.” The grin went a little more sober. “But that way, with me and
Teverresh
there, maybe no one will stab you in it. It’s not a safe place we’re going, Teleb. Artaleirh has gone quiet.”

“Oh?”

She shook her head. “The time limit on the ultimatum expired two hours ago. They made no answer to the Senate’s last warning. We will have to implement our orders to the full.”

Teleb sighed. “Are they all gone mad? With the Klingons running about savaging everything they can, this is no time to renounce the Empire’s protection.”

“Mad or not, we will call them back to their proper loyalty,” Jisit said, “…or relieve them of it and take it on ourselves.”

“And win glory…”

“I don’t know about the glory,” Jisit said, “but we’ll carry out our orders, make our frontiers safe, and uphold the rule of law. That’s good enough for me. Maybe pick up a few points toward my next promotion.” She poked him none too gently in the shoulder. “And as for you,
you
stay out of trouble when we get there. It would be embarrassing for me to have to save you again, now that they’ve finally trusted you with
Calaf
without old Mirrstul looking over your shoulder.”

“What do you mean, save me
again?
” But Teleb’s chrono chirped softly. “That’s it,” he said, glancing over at the loading tubes. The Sunside-based loading crews were leaving, pushing the last of the floater pallets in front of them. “I should go.”

“Go on,” Jisit said, “and I’ll resume reminding you of the Elements’ own truth, which you are pleased to refuse to see, after this operation’s over. Mind your crew now, Captain!”

“You mind yours, Captain,” he said. She turned, but he caught her by the hand and she paused. He bowed over that hand, low enough to breathe softly on the back of it.

She smiled, gripped the hand as he straightened. “Message me tonight, after we make warp.”

“I will.”

She turned and headed away across the loading bay, and Teleb hurried across to
Calaf
’s loading tube to make one final check on the condition of the weapons hold before going up to his bridge. He was humming the first line of “The High Queen’s Bastard Daughter” as he went up the tube ramp into
Calaf
’s belly, and away to his first real war.

Jim was still thinking about
Sempach
’s weapons when he got back. The thought led to the idea that he’d like to look over her warp engines at some point, and that thought reminded him of something else. He paused in the corridor and hit a comm button. “Bridge.”

“Bridge. Chekov here.”

“Mr. Chekov, is Mr. Spock on the bridge?”

“He is on a scheduled break, Captain. I believe he has gone down to the main mess.”

“Very well,” Jim said. “Coordinate with the helm officer on
Sempach;
then notify
Bloodwing
we’re setting course for RV Trianguli and implementing immediately.”

“Aye, aye, sir,”
Chekov’s voice came back.

“Kirk out.”

Jim headed off down the corridor, caught a turbolift, and made his way down to the mess. There he found not only Spock but also McCoy, both finishing their lunches at one of the tables nearest the wall, both reading from electronic clipboard-padds as they did. Spock glanced up. “Captain—” he said.

“Finish your lunch, Mr. Spock, there’s no rush about anything.” Jim went over to the hatch and got himself a chicken sandwich and a cup of coffee, then sat down with them.

“How was your meeting with the commodore?” McCoy said, pushing his clipboard away.

Jim made a rather wry face. “Affable enough. But Fleet is antsy, as I expected, about our association with
Bloodwing
…even though they suggested we renew it. Suspicions rear their ugly heads.” He sighed, shook his head, and bit into his sandwich.

McCoy snorted. “Invisible cat syndrome.”

It took a moment of dealing with the sandwich before Jim could respond. “What?”

“As regards the commander, anyway.”

Spock glanced over at McCoy. “If I remember correctly, the paradigm was first used by a religious apologist on Earth in the early twentieth century.”

“That’s right. Say somebody comes along,” McCoy said, “and points at a chair and says to you, ‘There’s an invisible cat in that chair.’ Now,
you
know the person’s nuts. You say to them, ‘But there’s nothing there. The chair’s empty.’ Their response is, ‘And isn’t that exactly how it
would
look if there were an invisible cat in the chair? See, you’ve proved my point.’”

“Argumentum ex fallacio,”
Spock said.

“In your case, Jim—” McCoy had the grace to look just slightly abashed. “Well, come on. The source of all this trouble is that your opposite number’s female. Bearing in mind some of your past behavior—not that I’m casting any aspersions, mind you—what
are
they supposed to think?”

Jim made a wry face. “This is just another way of saying it’s all my own fault, isn’t it?”

Spock addressed himself with renewed interest to his salad. “Jim,” McCoy said, “they’ll think what they think. You’re not going to be able to change it, so you may as well just get on with what you were going to do anyway. How was the rest of your meeting?”

“Troubling,” Jim said. He paused as a group of six or seven crewmen came into the mess and took a table, then headed for the food dispensers. “I think they’re expecting the balloon to go up with a bang sometime after the talks with the Romulans, but no one seems to be clear about just when, or what will trigger it.”

“I bet half of them are just hoping it doesn’t happen, somehow,” Bones said. “That the Romulans will just back down.”

That thought had occurred to Jim, and it was making him nervous. He drank some coffee. “This time, I think that would be a serious miscalculation,” he said. “Spock, I know perfectly well we run frequent readiness checks on all the weapons systems and the engines, but I want Scotty to use this next day or so to go over absolutely everything defense-oriented with a fine-tooth comb. Tell him to co-opt as much assistance from less busy departments aboard ship as he feels he needs to make sure that everything—
everything
—is in working order.”

“Yes, Captain.”

Jim finished his coffee and put the cup aside. “We also have some new cryptographic equipment or routines, or both, to be installed in the comm system and the main computer; they’ll be coming over from
Sempach.
Which reminds me. Those automations Ael wanted you to have a look at? You never did report on those.”

“It was not a very pressing matter, Captain. I wrote you a report, which you may not yet have seen.”

Jim did his best to look unconcerned, but he knew he had been letting his paperwork slip a little lately. “Um. Well, what’s the verdict?”

Spock put aside his empty bowl of salad and steepled his fingers. “I was able to assist them in several areas where newer programming and hardware needed to be restructured to interleave correctly with other, older control programs and routines,” Spock said. “
Bloodwing
’s personnel have been most ingenious, and I should also say innovative, in compensating for their present lack of manpower. But here and there conflicts had occurred, since some of the newer programming was done by crewmen with less expertise than might have been desired, and the automation reprogramming had extended to almost every system aboard the ship.”

“Almost?”

“There was one notable exception,” Spock said. “The ship’s engines did not appear on the list of augmented systems which I was asked to examine.”

Jim thought about that for a moment. “Well, they didn’t lose too many people from their engineering department during the trouble, as I remember. And tr’Keirianh is a fairly hands-on sort, from what I can make of him. Maybe he’s uneasy about allowing such a crucial system to be automated.”

“It could be, Captain,” Spock said. “It could also be that there was something involving
Bloodwing
’s engine systems that the commander or the master engineer did not care to have me see.”

Jim took another swig of coffee, considering that briefly. “Any evidence to support such a conjecture?”

“Little, and that circumstantial,” Spock said. “Should another opportunity arise to investigate this, however, I confess I might attempt to do so.”

“Curiosity, Mr. Spock?” Jim said.

Spock raised an eyebrow.

“Well, never mind it for now,” Jim said. “Though if the opportunity arises this evening to do a little discreet inquiry, feel free.” He sighed. “I won’t be down in rec for long. I’ve got to start getting caught up on my paperwork. Meanwhile, when Ael and her people come by this evening to meet the commodore, see to it that each of them has an escort permanently within eyeshot. Security is going to become more of an issue now.”

“I will see to it, Captain,” Spock said. “Have you any preferences as to who should be assigned to the commander?”

Jim considered for a moment. “Now that you mention it…”

The darkness of the caverns, when the lights were turned down to their lowest, often seemed to amplify every sound, every breath. So it seemed very loud to Mheven when her mother spoke up suddenly out of what ought to have been her sleep.

“I hear,” said Rrolsh. “I’m going out.”

Mheven was at first not sure she hadn’t been dreaming the words, for she had been thinking them, on and off, for nearly the past twenty days, since she came back from a mission.
Is it really that long,
she thought,
that we have been down in this darkness? It seems like a thousand years.
The sun—she dreamed about that too, golden in an emerald sky, but she knew she was not going to see it anytime soon. Up there, in the light and the air, more light than just the sun’s was raining down on the fertile land. The sky was still filled with ships raining down fire. The crops were all surely burned now, the forest blanketing these hills all charred, if what had happened to the city had been any indication.

“Mother,” Mheven said to the unseen presence across the room, “you’re half asleep. You know they’ve been scanning the surface constantly. Anyone who goes out will be caught and interrogated, and they’ll discover where we are. Then all this will be for nothing.”

A faint sound of bedding being discarded drifted across the darkness of the cavern. Mheven sighed and fumbled for the little battery lamp.

At her touch it glowed up to its preset level: low. No one down here wasted power. Since the destruction of the concealed solar arrays in the last spate of bombing, there had been none to spare. Mheven looked across the low-ceilinged little rest-cave and saw what she expected: the water trickling down its dank walls, the supplies of food and water and materiel stacked up in their crates at the back of the cave, and the beautiful, drawn, tired, aging face of her mother popping suddenly out of the cold-tunic she was hurriedly pulling over her head. That grim face looked at her; those eyes, fierce and eager, looked into hers.

“You can’t hear it?” she asked.

“Hear what?”

“I’m going out!”

Her mother scrambled up out of the bedroll and headed for the sleeping cave’s entrance, which had someone’s blanket hung up over it as a screen against the lights always burning on the other side. Mheven sighed and pulled on her own tunic. Kicking her bedroll aside, she went after her mother.

The main cavern, even with the tiny lights that were all the group now allowed itself, was still spectacularly beautiful. There had been a time when people had come from all over this part of the Empire to see these caverns, a natural wonder as astonishing in their way as the fire-falls at Gal Gath’thonng on ch’Rihan; possibly the biggest natural caverns in all the Empire’s worlds, but no one knew for sure, because no one had ever completely explored them in all the time the planet Ysail had been colonized, a matter of several hundred years. The caverns stretched beneath the smaller of the planet’s two continents, Saijja, from the cliffs of Eilmajen in the east nearly to Veweil in the west, and they were so deep and complex that they had never even been completely mapped. Scanners could not reach so deep, not even the powerful ones used from space.

The refugees had picked this spot for their labors because it was one of the deepest caverns and because it was unknown to outsiders. Though in more peaceful times tourists had constantly been passing through one part or another of the Saijja Caverns, there had always been parts of the cavern complex that no tourist had ever been shown: the spelunkers’ secrets, the private delights of those inhabitants of the planet who made it their business to come here every chance they got in leisure time, exploring a frontier that was not infinite but that would certainly take thousands of years to discover fully.

This one, the greatest cavern to be found for several hundred miles in any direction, was called Bheirsenn—“bright in the night,” in the local dialect. When the lights were on, it was bright indeed; a vast bubble of air trapped in the depths of the planet, roughly a mile and a half in diameter, ceilinged in terrifyingly huge and glittering stalactite chandeliers of limestone, calcite, and quartz crystal. That impossibly distant ceiling shone bright as a hazy sky when the great high-intensity lights were on. They were not on much lately, what with the power crisis, but even with the lights dimmed, the distant pendant crystalline stalactites glittered faintly like faraway galaxies, like the points of stars. It was a space difficult for even the most ground-shy Rihannsu to feel claustrophobic in, one of awe-inspiring beauty.