The Bloodwing Voyages

by Diane Duane

  This one was suffering from all three. He knew not only what she had said, but all the substrata of meaning behind her simple declaration. That he was to be imprisoned; that a special place had been prepared for him; and that she was not going to reply to his signal. That, most of all, burned in his eyes as he stood up and Arrhae at last glanced toward him, knowing that not to do so would appear unnatural. Not a nei’rrh at all, she thought. A thrai, with all the memory for wrongs done him that thraiin were supposed to have. She tried to visualize Mak’khoi bearing such a grudge for years until the time was ripe for vengeance, like that old Klingon proverb people were so fond of quoting with a sneer, and found that she could not. There was a gentleness about the man that ran so deep it accorded ill with the hot rage he wore like a garment. As if he knew himself justified in his anger, but would as soon find reason to put it aside, even here, among his enemies.

  “Soon enough, Doctor,” she heard tr’Annhwi say. “When your trial is concluded and the sentence is in progress, think of my kinfolk as you howl.”

  Arrhae had heard threats uttered before; now and again, when in their cups, officers and other persons of sufficient rank to have had more sense would go so far as to make dueling challenges over H’daen tr’Khellian’s dinner table, but what tr’Annhwi said, and the coarse, brutal way in which he said it to a prisoner with no means to respond, made Arrhae’s hackles rise and her dislike of the subcommander increase to detestation. She had many reasons, of which his behavior toward her in the hallway of her master’s house was only the most personal. Arrhae ir-Mnaeha might have begun as a slave, but as her career advanced, so she associated with persons of good character and learned to comport herself in similar fashion. Such folk did not threaten the helpless, even when they were enemies; mnhei’sahe forbade it. Rather, they treated all, and especially their dearest enemies, as companions and equals worthy of respect and honor; mnhei’sahe required it.

  Except that mnhei’sahe seemed to have become an outmoded concept….

  Except among people like her master and Commander t’Radaik, both of whom glared at tr’Annhwi in a way that wished him ill. “You will stay here, Subcommander,” t’Radaik said. “And later, I think, we might discuss and clarify certain matters. The courtesy once considered part of Fleet rank, perhaps—or which rank is more appropriate to a lack of it? Sit down, and await me.”

  Tr’Annhwi stared at his superior for a few seconds, with the expression of a man not believing his own ears. Not that he had never been disciplined before—very few in the Romulan military could make that claim—but to have it happen before civilians and an enemy…

  He sat down with a jolt, mouth hanging open and eyes that had momentarily been wide with shock now narrowing with affront and fury. T’Radaik ignored his little performance, ignored him, as if he had ceased to exist. She turned instead, and pointedly, to Dr. McCoy, and gestured—Terranwise, with a crooking of all her fingers—that he should accompany her.

  “Not all the Empire is so lacking in manners, Doctor,” the commander said, speaking Standard and choosing the correctness of her words with care. “Only most of it.”

  That was a perilous statement, and one which she dared not make in Rihannsu before so many witnesses. Only tr’Annhwi understood and might have proven dangerous—except that after his justly corrected rudeness, heard by all, any accusation that he could make would be seen only as spite.

  Arrhae also understood, but was not so foolish as to make it known. She had very properly lowered her eyes while those of higher rank exchanged hard words; except in certain notorious Houses, servants were neither deaf nor expected to be, but they were expected to remain attentive while not obviously listening. At such times, her facial muscles relaxed to an almost-Vulcan impassivity so that no matter what was said, she would not react to it. But for all her control and all her training in the hard school of slave to manager-of-servants, Arrhae’s mouth still went dry at t’Radaik’s next words. She tried to watch the commander from under her brows while keeping her head bowed far enough to hide the expression which was surely plastered all over her face.

  “Arrhae t’Khellian is hru’hfe to this House, Dr. Mak’khoi. She will attend you here, with”—a swift and winning smile was directed at H’daen—“her master’s permission, of course.”

  H’daen gave his approval in the manner that he preferred over more modern things—such as saying yes and leaving it at that—with the elegant salute and half-bow that was so many years out-of-date. Even in the throes of early panic Arrhae wondered why the commander had made a request instead of issuing the direct order which was more right and proper. And McCoy gazed at her, seeming no more than mildly curious. Then he merely nodded and walked past her without another glance, smiling thinly as captives do when hope recedes.

  A gallows smile, like that which Vaebn tr’Lhoell had worn when they dragged him away with the food and the wine and the blood all smeared across his face and clothing. Arrhae shuddered and began to issue orders for the dining chamber to be cleared and cleaned.

  Vaebn, she thought somberly. Oh, Vaebn, what did you do wrong? And how do I avoid the same mistake…?

  “…if matters are well with you, Arrhae, then they are well with me also.”

  Though his verbal greeting was traditional, the handshake that followed it was not. Vaebn tr’Lhoell looked less like the Romulans of Terise’s enhanced imagination than did several Vulcans of her immediate acquaintance. He was of only medium height, around her own meter and a half, and very slender, with that cool serenity which so many people associated with pure Vulcans and which she had encountered in so few at intelligence center. Oh, they had been calm and logical enough, but there was always an underlying tension about them when she was present, especially after the hemochromic tagging and the augmentation surgery. This man, this Rihanha who was to be her protector and her mentor and her master—O-sensei, suggested the part of her mind that came up with an appropriate word or phrase now and then, usually too late for it to be witty and worth saying anymore—was more in control of himself than all of them together.

  Has to be, I guess, she thought in that garble of Romulan and Standard Anglish that her mind had been using of late, because one false move and he’s dead. And I’m dead with him! I wonder why he does it? Why any of them do it? Even me…?

  The start of the mission was as dangerous as the rest seemed likely to be. A cloaked scoutship had seemed like a good idea while Commodore Perry had been bandying it about like an ace up his sleeve, but Terise had learned later that the cloaking device had been “acquired” from the Romulans themselves, and so recently that it was still throwing the occasional tantrum when fitted to Federation vessels. The three small ships run by Starfleet Intelligence for their clandestine missions were prototypes; laden with new technology, each had several untraced bugs to make their flights more interesting.

  This particular scout had developed a small, irregularly recurring fault in—typically—its cloaking circuitry at a stage in the mission—also typically—where turnabout was out of the question. They had flipped out of cloak for two seconds while crossing the Neutral Zone perimeter, barely twenty thousand kilometers from the close-cordon patrol cruiser NCC-1843 Nelson, and those had been the longest two seconds of Terise’s life. Because they hadn’t been running an ID and had behaved—thanks to the malfunctioning cloaking device—like a Romulan vessel, they had been fired on, and had barely escaped with hull or hides intact.

  It had given Terise an interesting demonstration of just how the ostensibly peaceful Federation military regarded Romulans, and never mind what Perry had said about cross-cultural education. She required no effort at all to guess how a notoriously belligerent warrior people might feel about the Federation, its personnel…and its spies.

  She had been a “slave” in House Lhoell for fourteen standard months, and her “master” had tutored his stupidest possession exhaustively in the language, etiquette, and customs of the elevated society in which he
moved. What the other slaves saw, and snickered over, was the new arrival spending a great deal of time in her lord’s private chambers and seeming excessively tired as a consequence. Terise/Arrhae didn’t let the coarse teasing worry her; some of her school “friends” had been just as cruel to a child far less able to cope than the Command-conditioned adult she had become.

  She learned all the things that a native-born Rihanha was supposed to know, but the revelation of language came as she had been told it might: suddenly. Between one of Vaebn’s sentences and the next, familiar things went strange and then snapped back to being more familiar than they had ever been before. Only their names had changed. Or not changed, been remembered correctly for the first time. After that, everything seemed to happen faster and faster, like a ball rolling down a hill.

  A short time later Vaebn tr’Lhoell purchased himself a new slave. She was young and startlingly beautiful, and within days of her appearance—and nightly disappearances into Vaebn’s private chambers—wagers were being laid among the other servants concerning how long Arrhae ir-Mnaeha would tolerate the situation. The staged fight when her patience “broke at last” surely provided gossip for months thereafter. Arrhae heard none of it. Her name, three-view image, listed abilities, and price were in the area computer’s database before nightfall, and she was away from House Lhoell by late afternoon of the next day, as if Vaebn had sold her to the first bidder of a reasonable sum.

  She knew differently. House Khellian had no connections to Starfleet Intelligence, Vaebn had warned her of that much, or indeed any connections to anywhere much. But it was an ideal base for an operative on such a mission as hers. Arrhae wondered, sometimes, just how the sale had been arranged….

  A House of good lineage fallen on hard times, Khellian was poorly served for the simple reason that its lord could afford to buy or employ no better than the dull slaves and sullen servants who misran the place. But Arrhae was aware of what Vaebn had told H’daen tr’Khellian about her capabilities and the true reason for her sudden sale. She had heard them laughing about it in H’daen’s meeting room while she knelt on the floor outside in the proper submissive posture. Coarse masculine laughter at first, and then a softer, more thoughtful chuckling. H’daen had bidden his guest farewell, brought her to his study, struck a key on his personal computerpad, and then shown her what was on the screen. Her manumission, and her right to use his House-style as her own third name.

  She had earned that freedom a hundred times over in the years that she had served House Khellian, scrabbling her way up the ladder of service until only Nnerhin tr’Hwersuil, hru’hfe of the household, held a higher rank. Nnerhin’s death in that appalling traffic accident had left the way clear, and she was the obvious, indeed only, choice. But sometimes, lying awake in the darkness, Arrhae had wondered: was that arranged as well…?

  If there was an answer, she didn’t want to know.

  For a man who had just been verbally chastised by a senior officer, Subcommander tr’Annhwi looked improbably cheerful. He watched her as she bustled about, supervising the other servants and trying to keep herself so busy that she wouldn’t have to think. She had labeled him as the sort of touchy, prideful man who balanced perpetually on the edge of anger, and who wouldn’t tolerate any slight to his honor, and yet here he was, quite self-contained, sipping wine and smiling slightly at her every time their eyes met. That, most of all, made Arrhae uneasy.

  He drained the winecup and waved away the servant who would have refilled it, pushed himself upright with only the slightest hint of sway in his posture, and made a quick military salute in her direction. “Too much wine already, hru’hfe. I should have drunk less at dinner. Then I wouldn’t have…said what I did.” He tugged at his uniform, straightening its half-cloak at his shoulder. “I shall make my apologies, and leave this house.”

  If a hnoiyika looked contrite after it killed something, thought Arrhae, it would look something like you do now.

  “You think badly of me, too, don’t you?”

  “I…no, sir. Of course not. A gentleman may take wine with his fellows and—”

  “That makes me glad.” His smile widened and grew warmer. “Then I can visit you again?”

  Arrhae felt as though someone had dropped a pound of ice into her guts. She had an overwhelming sense of having been maneuvered into a corner, because no matter what she said now would be either a self-contradiction or an insult—and she had no wish to insult this man. “You want to…visit me?” she managed at last, wondering what had prompted this and hoping that it was the wine.

  “I do, and it would please me if you said yes. I was rude to you at first, but that was before I saw you properly.”

  Small excuse! And he talks like someone from a cheap play! There was only one problem; she had heard front-line Fleet officers, tough military men with only the merest veneer of culture, use exactly that sort of second-hand romantic speech to their ladies. It scared her. First Mak’khoi on her hands, with all that meant, and now this. She wasn’t even sure what scared her most about it, that tr’Annhwi might need an ulterior motive to bring him back—or that he might be sincere.

  “Uh, sir,” she said, hunting for a way out that wouldn’t sound like one, “I can make no such agreement without my lord’s word on it.”

  “Then have no fear, lady, for I shall speak at once to H’daen tr’Khellian on this matter.”

  Lady…? she thought wildly.

  “And make”—for just an instant his smile became predatory—“suitably contrite apologies. Until we meet again, my lady.” He bowed low with an easy play-actor’s grace and left Arrhae to her work and her confusion.

  Oh, Elements, let H’daen be as angry as he seemed…. She blinked several times, and glared at the other servants who were staring at her and plainly on the point of tittering behind their hands. “This place,” she said softly, “had better be clean when I come back. Or we’ll see who’ll be laughing then.”

  Chapter Six

  FLIGHT

  Rea’s Helm was the first ship to leave Vulcan, on 12 Ahhahr 140005. She spent three leisurely months accelerating out of Vulcan’s solar system at nonrelativistic speeds, sending back close-flyby data from the nearby planets as she passed them. Behind her, in twos and threes, came the names still preserved in the Rihannsu fleets, both merchant and military, and never allowed to lie idle: Warbird, Starcatcher, T’Hie, Pennon, Bloodwing and Corona, Lance and Gorget, Sunheart, Forge and Lost Road and Blacklight, Firestorm and Vengeance and Memory and Shield. The ships stayed in communication via tightbeam laser and psilink. At first they tended not to stay too close to one another, in case some disaster might take several ships out at once. But the first ten years of the journey broke them of this habit, as the sixteen ships forged outward and found interstellar space singularly uneventful, and close company a necessity.

  There were numerous minor malfunctions aboard all the ships, as might be expected when technology has been custom-built for the first time and tested only as far as logic requires by a people both cautious and extremely impatient. But for those first ten years very few lives were lost: mostly results of maintenance-people’s accidents while in vacuum, falls in high-gravity areas while ships were in acceleration phase, and so forth. There were several crop failures, mostly of non-survival-required crops like flatroot. When the wiltleaf blight struck the graminiformes on Vengeance and Gorget, the other ships were still able to supply them with surpluses of their own root production. (It is amusing to note that to this day, Rihannsu hailing from the south-continent areas settled from the populations of Gorget and Vengeance will tend to refuse to eat flatroot: those unfamiliar with finer points of their history will put this down to “religious tradition.” But diary entries of that time are full of condemnation of “the wretched root,” which was about all the two ships’ people had to eat for nearly two years.) The travelers were encouraged—if such minor problems were the worst they would have to contend with, they would do well indeed. It o
nly remained to see what the universe itself had waiting for them in the way of planets.

  The first star the ships reached, 88 Eri, was as we presently know it: a type K star with fifteen planets, all barren and too hot for even a Vulcan to appreciate them—there were lakes of molten lead on the closest planets. The ones farther out had long had their atmospheres burned off, and the travelers had neither the equipment nor the patience for extended Vulcaniforming. They looped around 88 Eri and headed for 198 Eri, another of the K-type stars that had looked equally promising.

  The cost of relativistic travel first began to be felt here, though the travelers had long been anticipating it. Their exploration of this first of many stars—acceleration, deceleration, in-system exploration, and assessment of planet viability—had taken them three years by ship time: on Vulcan, thirty years had passed.

  The reestablishment of communication came as a shock for everyone involved. To begin with, while the travelers were accelerating, and for most of the deceleration stage, psilink communication had naturally been disabled. To a sending mind on Vulcan, the thoughts of a mind moving at relativistic speeds were an unintelligibly slow growl; a receiving mind on one of the ships, when listening to a Vulcan mind, would hear nothing but another person living (it seemed) impossibly fast, too fast to make sense of. And even when the travelers were nonrelativistic, there were other problems. Some of the linking groups, specially trained to be attuned to one another, had had deaths; some planetside teams had lost interest in the travelers, being more concerned with occurrences on Vulcan. And indeed there was reason. Surak’s teachings were spreading swiftly: there was some (carefully masked) dissatisfaction, even discontent, that energy should be wasted communicating with people who had disagreed violently enough with them to leave the planet. And Surak was no longer there to speak on their behalf in the planet’s councils. He was dead, murdered by the Yhri faction with whom he had been dealing peace on behalf of those already united.