by Diane Duane
The pictures under study weren’t at first familiar, and seeing them only by inverted glimpses didn’t help. Where did they get…? McCoy started to wonder, then recognized the background details and guessed right. They had been taken from the deck-monitor system of the only—so far—Romulan vessel he had ever boarded (and even that had been a Klingon-built Akif-class D7 battlecruiser). Hers…. Ael’s sister’s-daughter’s ship, Talon. “She’s your niece?” He could remember his own voice quite clearly, and its near-squeak of astonishment. Somehow one never thought of enemies with families; brothers or sisters, fathers or daughters. It made keeping them distanced, keeping them enemies that much easier.
And then all of a sudden there was one enemy who was commander of a warbird and at the same time an aunt—and a mother. A mother who killed her own son in the name of honor and justice. Mnhei’sahe, they call it. I call it murder. And yet I stood by, knowing what she was about and pretending not to know, and not wanting to know. And I took her thanks afterward and said nothing.
“Close enough,” said tr’Annhwi grudgingly. There was a cheated air about him, as if having started violence he would as soon have gained his answers after more of it. “Take him.” Two disruptors nudged McCoy, in chest and spine.
He looked down at the weapons with disdain—there was no longer any point in being scared, or at least obviously so—and glanced in the subcommander’s direction. “Are you expecting me to pull a phaser out of somewhere, sir? Or run? I’ve had ample time for both—yet here I am.” He pushed the nearer, more aggressive rifle to one side and smiled just a bit at the helmeted young trooper who carried it. “Put that away, son, before somebody gets hurt. Subcommander tr’Annhwi, now that you’ve got what you came for, let these people”—his wave took in the bridge crew and by inference everyone else aboard Vega—“be about their business.”
“No.” The Romulan shook his head in a very Terran gesture of denial. “Dr. Mak’khoi, even without you I find this ship fascinating. Worth a closer look, especially—” His communicator squawked a summons, and when he opened a channel, the voice on the other end sounded very urgent.
“Subcommander, we have a long-range contact. ID is NCC-2252, Federation light cruiser Valiant. Closing speed is warp seven. May I recommend immediate—”
Tr’Annhwi made an irritable noise and his officer went silent. “Yes, another look indeed,” he muttered, “but not here.” The orders he snapped back at Centurion tr’Hheinha were too fast for McCoy’s translator to make sense of all the words, but “rig for high-speed towing” came through quite plainly. As did “battle stations.”
“This is an active shipping lane, Captain.” Tr’Annhwi turned to Reaves, using Anglish again and plainly proud of his ability to speak it. “Avenger has made her presence known to three other vessels, but yours has taken up more time than my schedule allowed.” He smiled, that thin and far from pleasant smile of a man with all the aces in his pocket. “Mine, and that of the Starfleet local-patrol ship. Normally we would have had some hours in hand, but our earlier acquaintances seem to have cried wolf-in-the-fold. We are therefore returning to more friendly space. With you and your ship as our guests.”
“I won’t let you—”
“By doing what?” This time tr’Annhwi didn’t bother with anything so overt as pointing his phaser at the outraged captain. He just let the situation speak for itself; and it did so, very clearly.
Reaves tugged in a halfhearted way at his uniform tunic, more for something to do with his hands than through any hope of making the ripped and filthy garment anything like presentable. It was obvious that those hands wanted to reach out and take the smile clean off tr’Annhwi’s face, together with his more prominent features. The Romulan could see it as clearly as everyone else on the bridge. But he—all of them—knew that it stopped at wanting. With holes already blown in his ship, Reaves wasn’t about to take any further chances.
“Not to worry, Captain h’Reeviss.” Tr’Annhwi made the placatory gesture of holstering his phaser, although he didn’t order the other Romulans to follow suit. “Your crew and passengers have nothing to fear. After our experts on ch’Rihan have checked your ship properly, it will be repaired and all of you released to go your way.” He looked a little sideways, at the only person on the bridge still held at ostentatious gunpoint. “All but the war criminal Mak’khoi.” The communicator, still activated and in his hand, squeaked several worried noises involving approach vectors. Tr’Annhwi raised one eyebrow. “And he comes with me now. Aihr erei’Riov. Ra’kholh, hteij ’rhae.”
“Hteij ’rhae. Lhhwoi-sdei.”
“Hna’h….”
As the Avenger’s transporter beam engulfed him in scarlet shimmer, the last thing that McCoy saw was tr’Annhwi’s smile—
—an unpleasant smile, that survived quite unscathed and if anything had grown wider during the transition.
“Welcome aboard, Doctor.” The courtesy was decidedly mocking now, delivered by someone in an even greater position of strength than before. “This is Avenger. Neither so large nor so impressive as Enterprise, but bearer of a worthy name. And an apt name, Dr. Mak’khoi”—the smile was fading fast—“because it is best you know that I had close kin serving on both Rea’s Helm and Battlequeen, which your Enterprise destroyed. It would be joy and mnhei’sahe for me to take their death-vengeance upon you. Take him out of my sight.”
McCoy doubted that it would do him any good to tell the Romulan that Battlequeen had been destroyed by Captain Rihaul’s Inaieu and not by the Enterprise at all. Whatever was said would be the wrong thing to say, and in tr’Annhwi’s present mercurial mood, saying anything at all was downright dangerous. He let two helmeted security troopers hustle him off toward what he presumed would be the brig, and was silently grateful that tr’Annhwi’s orders required him alive, unharmed, and in one piece. McCoy had a feeling that without such orders, his time aboard the Avenger would be notably unpleasant….
As he lay back on the thin, hard bunk, he could feel jolts running through the Romulan frigate as it engaged tractor beams and locked them on Vega, but the lurch as its warpfield was extended around the damaged vessel knocked him off the bunk and onto the deck beneath it. McCoy swore viciously, rubbed at two fresh and three renewed bruises, considered lying down again, and did. But until the warship was well under way and the subharmonic drone of her main drive was making his teeth shake in their sockets, he lay on the floor.
They entered Rihannsu homespace in ship’s night. McCoy hadn’t been asleep, just leaning back with his crossed arms behind his head, looking up into the darkness and thinking the sort of convoluted thoughts men think when they can’t sleep. And then the darkness became bright, and tr’Annhwi stepped through the afterimage glow that was all that remained of the force-shielded door, and he was smiling again. McCoy was growing very tired of that smile.
“Well, here you are,” the Romulan said.
There was something nauseating about an enemy commander trying to be avuncular, and McCoy’s glare and nonStandard suggestion both escaped before he thought of what effect they might have on his continued health.
Tr’Annhwi’s smile only widened even further. “Oh, not me, Doctor,” he said. “Not for some while yet. But you, quite possibly—and certainly quite soon. They are capital charges, after all. Now get up. You do want to see your ultimate destination, don’t you?”
McCoy did; he wanted to see anything, anywhere, just so long as it was different from the four walls of the cell where he had been for almost three days. “Which is?” he said, swinging his feet to the deck.
“Ch’Rihan,” said tr’Annhwi. He said it again as the planet rotated slowly on the Avenger’s main screen, while he lounged in his center seat and McCoy stood uncomfortably flanked by armed guards right behind it. “We are now in a geosynchronous parking orbit above the city of i’Ramnau. The place where you will spend your last few days before going to Ariennye—the hell you wished on me with such feeling, Dr. Mak’kho
i—by whatever painful route your judges decide. After they have done with you and the news is known, perhaps the Federation will be more respectful of Rihannsu space, and lives, and secrets.”
“Subcommander”—one of the crewmen on the cramped little bridge swung his seat around and took a translator from his ear—“Fleet Intelligence personnel and a scanning team are en route from the surface. Commander t’Radaik requests that the prisoner be made ready for immediate transfer to her shuttle. You are invited to accompany him. I have readied Hangar Bay Three for immediate turnaround and—what in the Elements’ name!”
The whole ship vibrated and alarms warbled briefly, but died as damage control reported in. “External visual—there.” The Vega, locked into the same orbit as her captor, was wreathed in a swirling mist of liquid and letters that billowed from the rip in her belly and danced a Brownian-motion polka around the liner’s hull.
“Captain h’Reeviss, what happened?” Tr’Annhwi sounded more embarrassed that an intelligence officer should have seen this mess than concerned for the safety of his prize.
“You blew a hole in my bloody ship and then dragged her half across the galaxy, that’s what happened!” crackled Reaves’s voice. “I’m only surprised the alcohol-cargo tanks lasted this long before—”
“What losses, Captain? Was anyone hurt?”
“No—but no thanks to you, you—”
“Then what else? I see papers and liquid vapor—was that all?”
“Some of the artwork blew out—explosive decompression sent it into atmosphere—lost items worth more than you’ll earn in a—”
“Good. No harm done.” Tr’Annhwi didn’t bother hiding his relief. “Now, Dr. Mak’khoi, if you would follow me…?”
McCoy felt that the politeness of the request was rather offset by the vigor with which someone prodded a phaser into his back, but he followed anyway. It was better than being pushed the whole way to ch’Rihan.
None of them had said anything after tr’Annhwi’s brief introduction, neither the subcommander nor the cool-eyed female commander who was uncomfortably like two other Romulan women officers in her quiet self-assurance, and certainly not the six soldiers who had accompanied her up to Avenger and back down, and who had sat stolidly gazing at McCoy the whole day long. Though to tell the truth, he hadn’t felt inclined to open a conversation himself. Odds were that the soldiers didn’t wear translators, and there wasn’t much to talk about. He hadn’t seen a great deal of ch’Rihan after landing, and before that—well, one M-class planet seen from orbit looked very much like another.
They had been sitting in the back of an armored military flitter for what felt like hours now, and McCoy had become very glad of the little ’freshbooth built into the vehicle’s tail-section. Once in a while he wondered simple things: Is it day or night outside? Will there be food soon? What does a Romulan city look like…? because his mind wouldn’t go blank no matter how he tried to force it, and unless he thought of ordinary needs, the doubts and terrors kept creeping back to harry him. Of course, that was what they wanted, and why they had left him like this, but knowing it and being able to do something about it were two entirely different things.
The mouse-squeak of a Romulan communicator was so sudden and unusual that for a moment McCoy couldn’t place it. But the guards stood up, and two opened the rear hatch of the flitter to admit a blessed breath of nonrecirculated air, while the remaining four escorted him out. If “escorting” actually described being seized by the upper arms and manhandled like a parcel.
It was night outside indeed, and alien constellations burned above him in a clear, clean sky. The dwelling toward which he was being “escorted,” for the two larger guards had not yet released their grip on him, was a low, rambling place that was itself star-spotted with light, some harsh and artificial but the rest a warm amber glow of live-flame torchères.
The soldiers let him go at the foot of a short flight of stairs, and shifted to a parade march-step as they advanced up the steps alongside him. McCoy looked up at the building’s open doorway and smiled briefly despite the untidy mixture of emotions that were filling him. Wonderful, he thought wryly, a familiar, friendly face to welcome me.
Tr’Annhwi was standing in the doorway wearing an expression fit to curdle milk, and the tall shape of Commander t’Radaik was right beside him. They were both armed, and not with phasers but with brutal-looking issue blasters. McCoy was simultaneously angry and amused. Are they expecting trouble at this stage? he thought. Not from me, no sir!
The hall inside was full of people, all Rihannsu, all staring hard, and McCoy felt uncomfortably like an animal put on show. He felt quite within his rights to stare back, at the soldiers and the officers, at the old man with wine on his chin, and at what had to be servants—
And suddenly, intently, at one in particular. A woman in servant’s clothing, but with an elaborate garment over it that made him think of a fleet officer’s half-cloak. But it wasn’t her clothing. She had moved…strangely was the only way to describe it, and McCoy wondered something that was far from simple. Is this the one? Am I in the right House after all? His hands moved together in a recognition gesture, one that any Federation agent would spot immediately; its response was simple enough that she could reply at once, in plain sight….
Except that she didn’t. Oh, there was a fluttering of sorts as her fingers moved, but it wasn’t the right movement. It wasn’t any sort of gesture, just a twitch of nervousness. McCoy felt his guts give a little acid heave as the realization came home to him. Worst scenario. Very worst. Either this agent had gone the way Starfleet Command suspected, spent so long in deep cover that she’d gone native and literally forgotten who and what she really was, or—or maybe there’d been some horrible mistake and he’d been brought to the wrong House, wishful thinking had misread her body kinesics, and she wasn’t an agent at all.
His mouth moved as he spoke bold words, bolder than he’d dared to utter yet, because there was a feeling that he had nothing to lose by them anymore. Maybe he was alone there after all.
Maybe he was going to die.
Chapter Four
PREFLIGHT
Naturally one does not just say good-bye to one’s planet, build a fleet of starships, and take off in them…though this is often the image of what happened on Vulcan during the Reformation.
S’task showed some canniness about handling Vulcan psychology when he slipped the concept of a massive off-planet migration quietly into the Vulcan communications nets and mindtrees rather than making an open, hard declaration right off the bat. “When people think an idea is theirs,” he said later in his writings aboard Rea’s Helm, “they take it so much the more to heart than if they think they got it from someone else, or worse, followed a great public trend. There is nothing people want to do more than to follow great trends, and nothing they want less to seem to be doing.”
The declaration itself, the document to be known much later as the Statement of Intention of Flight, appeared first in the journal of the Vulcan Academy of Sciences—then an infant body of the Universities—under a title that translates approximately into Terran academic-journalistic idiom as “A Study of Socioeconomic Influences on Vulcan Space Exploration.” It was a sober and scholarly investigation into the economic trends that had moved the various Vulcan space programs over a thousand years, and it discussed in depth one recurring trend with disquieting correlations to the aggressiveness taking place on the planet at a specific place and time. When a given part of the planet grew too crowded to adequately support its population with water, food, and shelter, said this theory, then wars broke out there as the neighboring tribes or nations fought for resources. When wars broke out, technology, both physical and nonphysical, flourished during the “war efforts” of the various sides. And after the war in question was over, the technology was spun off into the private sector, with a subsequent substantial increase in the ability of a given part of the planet to support its population…until t
he next peak in the cycle.
S’task was therefore the first Vulcan to manage to introduce into Vulcan mass consciousness a statement of what on Earth has come to be known as Heinlein’s Law. The idea had, of course, occurred to many people at many times over Vulcan’s history, but S’task was the first to spread the concept so widely, into that “threshold number” of minds necessary for a culture to begin working change on itself. And, whether on purpose or accidentally, S’task framed the concept as the conclusion of an exercise in logic—asking, at the end of the article, whether it would not be more logical simply to have the increase in technology and subsequent spinoff and omit the war.
Many who read this saw in the article a potential reconciliation between S’task and Surak, but the old teacher knew better. He is said to have wept after he first saw the presentation of it, knowing that his student, whether in spite or cunning, was using logic, Surak’s great love and tool, as a weapon against him.
It is sometimes hard for humans to understand that logic as a way of life did not instantly descend upon the whole Vulcan people immediately after Surak announced that it would be a good thing. Very quickly, by historical standards, yes: but not overnight. There were many false starts, renunciations, debunkings, persecutions, and periods of what seemed massive inertia; and the idea of the logical life went through many of the stages that other, less sweeping popular phenomena do. Around the time of the Statement of Intent, “reality-truth” was still truly only a fad among Vulcans, an “up-and-coming trend.” This is something else that people, particularly humans, find hard to grasp. The difficulty is understandable, susceptible as we are to our own blindnesses to fads like the scientific method, and the various ways in which each new generation tends to twist the sciences to fit its own zeitgeist. Surak could see the time when reason would be truly internalized in the behavior of a whole population, and would guide the whole planet. But despite its validity as a tool, at the moment logic was only an easy gateway into people’s minds because of its novelty status—and S’task was not ashamed to use it as such.