Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (80 page)

And it was also a perfect place for making weapons of all kinds, especially bombs. From the great main cavern, hundreds of smaller caves budded off in clusters and chains, a labyrinth that only those who lived there could ever master. Working separately, the technicians and the people whom they had trained occupied small, dense-walled stone rooms in which they could work with deadly explosives and other dangerous technologies without being concerned about triggering a cataclysm. The whole group, totaling about five hundred people, had been down here for almost a year now. They had slipped away with their families and even their pets when the government had declared Ysail to be a “primary resource world.” Others, at a distance, might have been fooled about what this meant, but the Ysailsu knew all too well. The Empire had seized all the industry on their planet. Then, when there was bitter protest at this, they had sent ships from Grand Fleet, carrying troops from the army and intelligence, to round up the population of a couple of cities and send them off to work camps, expecting the rest to settle down and do as they were told.

It had not worked out that way, for over the centuries the Ysailsu had developed what the Empire considered an irrational attitude: they thought
they
owned their world. The small population of the planet rose in nearly simultaneous rebellion. Immediately after that, the Empire began bombing it—very selective bombing, of course, concentrating on the cities and taking care to do no harm to industrial resources. The Ysailsu, though, partaking in full of the legendary stubbornness of their parent species, had decided that if
they
could not profit from the industries they had spent hundreds of years building, then neither would the Empire. Led by a group of thoughtful and angry guerrillas, the Ysailsu took all the food, water, spare parts, power sources, and supplies of every kind that they could find, and went to ground in the caves en masse. They scattered themselves across the underside of their smaller continent, made themselves at home, and began blowing up their factories themselves.

All this, as well as the smoking cities and the ground shuddering with explosions, now seemed as distant to Mheven as a dream. The workers and fighters down here did not hear or feel the explosions. The caves were far too deep. There was no way the Empire could find them, and even if it did, no way it could reach them without dropping atomics on them, and since the Empire theoretically wanted to use the planet for something else later, even
they
would not have been that crazy.

Crazy…
thought Mheven, concerned, watching her mother make her way into the dim light of the main cavern, heading for the little makeshift workspace where Ddoya had his “office.” Ddoya tr’Shelhnae was as much of a leader as their group had, the one to whom everyone brought their problems, the one to whom the once-a-tenday gathering turned for suggestions and direction. He had been a doctor once, and he was one of the original group of guerrillas who had convinced the population to use the strength that the Element Earth had given them as they descended into it and sheltered in it. Earth—the quietest Element and maybe the most taken for granted, but possibly the most powerful. He had more than a little of that Element in his own makeup, Mheven thought. He was a quiet man, slow, thoughtful, but eloquent; as with the ground when it quaked, when Ddoya spoke, you paid attention.

Her mother headed across that big space toward him, where a little light shone in his workspace. Elements only knew when the man slept; Mheven sometimes suspected him of having a clone or two stashed in one of the caves. Now she could just make him out, small, burly, and dark, sitting in his workspace, bent over something, as she hurried along in her mother’s wake. Various other people were up and around, heading here and there in the cave, about their business. They watched Mheven heading after Rrolsh, and even in the dimness she caught some smiles from them. Living here was like living in the bosom of a large and unavoidable family, or a small town. Everybody knew everything about everybody soon enough, and everybody knew that Rrolsh had something rare: the visionary gift, which sometimes made her a little strange.

Mheven blushed but kept on going after her mother and finally caught up with her at the “door” of the workspace, which was just another blanket, one of four thrown over a cubical pipe-metal framework. It was fastened up at the moment, and Ddoya looked up at the two of them from the round, silvery thing he was holding in his hand.

“This isn’t your shift, as a rule,” he said. “Is there some problem?”

Mheven blushed again.

“Ddoya,” Rrolsh said, “I heard something. Something’s going to happen.”

“What?”

Rrolsh looked frustrated. “I don’t know for certain,” she said. “But it’s imminent.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I could wish,” Ddoya said, “that our distant ancestors had left us some instructions about what to do with such talents as yours when they crop up, for I’m sure I don’t know what questions to ask you to help you be more definite. Nonetheless, we’ll go on alert, if you feel the need, Rrolsh. I haven’t forgotten that last incident with the government courier.”

Rrolsh sighed and shook her head, looking suddenly weary. “It’s not that close,” she said. “Or…it’s not that serious. I can’t tell which. I only caught a feeling, a word…”

“Well, let it rest for the moment,” he said. He looked past her at Mheven. “Meanwhile,” he said to her, “we have another attack group going out in a few days. We should send some of these with them for testing. But I’d like you and your people to double-check these first.”

Mheven was one of the group’s engineers. Once her forte had been medical machinery, which was how Ddoya had recruited her. Now she had acquired a rather more destructive specialty, and what he held intrigued her. She held out her hand, and Ddoya passed the object to her. It was a flattened ovoid of silvery metal, about the thickness of her hand.

“Implosion charge?” Mheven said, turning it over.

“Combined implosion-disruption,” said Ddoya. “Remember the old dissolution fields that the warships used to use?”

“The ones that would unravel a metal’s crystalline structure.”

“That’s right. An overlooked technology, but surprisingly suitable to being packed down small, these days, with the new solid-phase circuitry. This one goes off in two stages. The dissolution field propagates first, and then the imploder collapses the deranged matter. One of these”—he took it back from her carefully—“will scoop out a spherical section from a building, or a bridge, or a ship, something like twenty
testai
in diameter.” He smiled grimly.

“How many do we have?”

“Five so far.”

“I want to go along,” Mheven said.

“Check with Ussi,” Ddoya said. “She’s coordinating. Was there anything else?”

Mheven shook her head.

“No,” her mother said. “Ddoya…thanks.”

“Don’t thank me. I know it’s difficult for you, and you bear this burden, and work as hard as any of us, as well.”

A few others, faces Mheven recognized but was too tired to greet, were drifting over. Mheven sketched a wave at them, linked her arm through her mother’s, and started back toward their rest-cave.

“I embarrass you,” said her mother.

“Not seriously.”

“I wonder what it was like, in the old days,” Rrolsh said, sounding wistful. “When there were talents in the ships, and telepaths, people for whom seeing more than one world, hearing more than spoken voices, was normal.”

“Maybe someday we’ll find out again,” Mheven said. Hope was good. Any distraction, sometimes, was good for turning one’s mind from the idea that one might be living in a cave making bombs only until something went wrong, everything was found out, and they were all hunted down and killed. “Maybe someday the Empire will just give up and—”

Her mother stopped and stood still. Mheven turned to her, and in the dimness she could just see her lips move. Then Rrolsh let go of her and turned back the way they had come. She went straight back to Ddoya, who, with the two people to whom he was talking, looked up at her, surprised.

“I heard it clearly this time,” her mother said. “I heard it! Just a whisper in the darkness. It said
lleiset.”

The others looked at each other, not knowing what to say.

Freedom…

Ddoya turned the new charge over and over in his hands, then looked up at her.

A soft
queep
from a small console on the floor beside his chair brought all their heads around. Eyes widened. Ddoya, in particular, looked at the thing as if he expected the little square console to stand up and bite him in the leg.

“Ddoya,” said one of the fighters standing nearby, a man named Terph, “they can’t be here yet. It’s too soon.”

“It could be a trick,” said Lais, the other.

Silence, and then another
queep.

The five of them looked at one another. No more sound was forthcoming, for the sound was the one realtime noise made by the narrow-bandwidth subspace transmitter-receiver until it was instructed to play. The receiver did not produce output in realtime. It took a coded digital squawk no longer than a millisecond, decompressed it, decoded it, and played it on command, recording and sending outgoing messages the same way. It was how their group kept in touch with the hundreds of others scattered through the caves, and they did not overuse it for fear of detection.

Ddoya got off his chair, knelt down beside the transmitter-receiver. He touched its controls in a coded sequence, and the transmitter’s decode lights went on.

“The ships are coming,”
whispered the voice from the narrow-bandwidth subspace transmitter.
“Repeat, the ships are coming. This is a multiple sighting, multiple confirmed. Relief will be with you within ten standard days. Events to follow will most likely cause the Fleet to withdraw. Prepare to emerge in force. More details are packed with this squirt. Unpacking now.”

Ddoya looked up at them his stolid face suddenly alight with excitement. For a few moments he was as speechless as the rest of them. “Well,” he said finally. “We’d better get everyone together to discuss this in the morning. Meanwhile, let’s get back to planning the next raid.”

They smiled at one another, a little more fiercely than usual. Mheven looked over at her mother and smiled. “So you were right,” she said. “We
are
going out. All of us. But meantime, let’s get caught up on our sleep.”

They walked off together. But this time, as they went, Mheven’s heart was pounding. Enough of her people had died waiting for this day when it would start, when they would not be fighting alone. Enough of them had died trying to bring it about. She herself might yet die in these next few days. But all the same, she smiled. And as she and her mother slipped back into the darkness of their sleeping place, Mheven wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t hear the same whisper.

Freedom…

In the rec room that evening, Ael looked up out of the great windows at the stars pouring past and let out a small sad breath. The time when she might freely enjoy this spectacular view was swiftly coming to an end.
Soon enough,
she thought,
I will be staring into a tactical display again, concentrating on objects moving in space much more slowly, relatively speaking, than the stars. I should enjoy this while I can…as far as possible.

She glanced around. All about her, various crewpeople sat and chatted, or gamed, as usual. Off in a small conversation pit nearby, Scotty and tr’Keirianh and K’s’t’lk were conversing with energy, occasionally waving hands or jointed glittering limbs in gestures strangely reminiscent of those which young Khiy and Mr. Sulu had been using the other day. Lieutenant Commander Uhura was leaning over the back of one of the settles that formed the back of the pit, asking K’s’t’lk something. The answer came back in a bright spill of music, but oddly, with no words that Ael could hear. Curious, Ael started strolling their way, and a discreet rumbling accompanied her, like a boulder trying to roll along without making too much of a racket.

Ael had to smile, though the smile was doubtless somewhat edged with irony for a perceptive viewer. “Mr. Naraht,” Ael said, “this duty must be a trial for you. Doubtless there are many more interesting things for you to be doing.”

“Not at all, Commander,” the Horta said, shuffling his fringes about a little as he came up alongside her. “Everything here is interesting.”

“Surely you are putting a brave face on it,” Ael said.

“Madam,” Naraht said, “if you’ve ever lived in the crust of a planet with nothing to do but eat rock, and nothing to do after that but listen to your ten thousand siblings eat rock, and then listen to them talking about
having
eaten rock—after a while,
anything
else is interesting.” His translator module emitted that rough, gravelly sound that seemed to be laughter, and his fringe tendrils shivered. “And when you notice that weird creatures who
don’t
eat rock, or even talk about it much, are wandering around the place, they and their affairs are likely to become, by comparison, very interesting indeed.”

Ael raised her eyebrows at that. Amid some human and Rihannsu laughter, she saw Uhura straighten up and head off purposefully, as if in search of something. “Might you not be overstating the case, Lieutenant? Most of us think our ordinary home life is boring. And your people, Mr. Spock tells me, are a most intelligent and complex species.”