by Diane Duane
In the present dim nighttime lighting of the cabin, what lay across the arms of the chair seemed barely more than a sliver of shadow; pure unrevealing darkness, absorbing whatever light fell upon it. Not quite straight, but very faintly curved, the sheath and the hilt seeming to fade seamlessly into one another by the skill of the ancient swordsmith, the Sword occupied another empty chair much different from its former one, and the thoughts of the woman whose cabin it now shared.
Occupation… She smiled faintly. It was as good a word as any for the hold which this object had had over her since she put her hand out in the Senate chamber, two months and a lifetime ago, to take it. In her people’s traditions there had always been tales of creatures or objects which expressed the Elements unusually perfectly. These tended to bend the universe out of shape around them, as intense gravity fields bend light, and equally they bent awry the intentions of those mortals who had close dealings with them.
She had little thought to find herself, ever, so used. It had simply come to her, in that moment’s impulse in the Senate chambers, that she would willingly take possible disaster on herself in order to save the most sacred part of her people’s heritage from further dishonor. Now she wondered, sometimes, exactly whose impulse that had been; exactly who was the Sword, and whose were the hand and will wielding it.
In the weeks following that day, when she and her crew had returned to these spaces where the Federation had allowed them to take refuge, she had spent a number of hours in what was little better than shock—amazement at her own temerity, worry over what would follow it, fear for her crew. Then pragmatism set in, as always, which was as well; for within only a few days more, the messages began to arrive. Her act had swiftly begun to bear fruit in the form of consequences, and the fruit was ripening fast, faster than even she could have imagined.
And soon, now, if she was any judge of events, the first fruit would fall.
The comm signal sounded, and the suddenness of it made her start. She had to laugh at herself, then, though there was no one here to hear except that dark and silent listener lying across the arms of the chair, it wearing its eternal slight uncommunicative smile.
She reached out and touched the control on her desk. “Ie?”
“T’Hrienteh says a message has arrived for you in the last comm packet, llhei….”
Aidoann’s voice had a slight tinge of eagerness to it, and Ael knew whence that eagerness came. All her crew had been infected by it since she came back to Bloodwing carrying what now lay on the chair across from her.
“Send it along to my computer,” Ael said. “I will read it here. And Aidoann, for the Elements’ sake there is little point in you ‘madam’ing me. The crew will think we have fallen out.”
A pause, then a chuckle. “Very well, ll—Ael.”
“Not in private, anyway,” Ael said, hearing her antecenturion’s old slight discomfort with amusement, and wondering idly how many years yet it would take her to lose it. “We can afford a little ease among ourselves these days, as long as our performance in action is not impaired. Which I think unlikely to happen. In any case, it is not as if some superior officer is going to come along and reprimand us for a breakdown in discipline.”
That image made Aidoann laugh outright. “So,” Ael said. “What has tr’Keirianh had to say about the engine tests this morning?”
“He said little, madam, but smiled a great deal.”
Ael’s mouth quirked up a little at that. Her chief engineer might be sparse of speech, but he had no skill at concealing his feelings. “Dangerous to make assumptions,” she said, “but that would seem to bode well. Ta’khoi…”
As she cut the voice connection, her terminal showed her the herald for an incoming message, encrypted. “Decrypt,” she said, and sat back, watching the terminal go black, then fill with amber characters that shimmered into meaning from meaninglessness.
About half the screenful was comm routing information, interesting only insofar as one chose to be endlessly fascinated by the means her correspondents found to evade the ever-increasing interest of the security services on ch’Rihan and ch’Havran. Some of the messages were relayed numerous times among the subject worlds of the Empire and right out to the fringes of Rihannsu-dominated space before making their way out into the spaces beyond. This one, she saw, had gone clear out into the Klingon communications networks—which in itself was amusing, considering what one of these messages might eventually mean to the Klingon Empire if things went the way she thought they might—and from there had passed to one of the commercial subspace relay networks in the “nonaligned” worlds buffering between the Klingons and the Federation, before making its way to her ship. The long way around…she thought, and touched the screen, stroking the routing information away and bringing up the message.
Under the origin and destination fields, both forged, the message itself was brief. The body of it said only:
THE PART YOU HAVE REQUESTED (NTCS 55726935–7745–9267–93677) IS PRESENTLY UNAVAILABLE. NEAREST ESTIMATE OF AVAILABILITY IS BETWEEN THREE TO FIVE MONTHS. IT IS SUGGESTED YOU SUBSTITUTE PART NTCS 55726935–7456–8344–86009 AS AN INTERIM SOLUTION. CONTACT US AGAIN IN THREE STANDARD MONTHS REGARDING ORIGINAL PART.
There was, of course, no signature. She sat back and looked thoughtfully at the two long “parts numbers,” carefully rearranging their digits in her mind according to the usual method…then held very still for a few moments, digesting what those two sets of numbers together meant. So quickly…
She folded her hands again, leaned her chin on them once more, calculating. They are furious, indeed, for their innate inertia to be so quickly overcome. Yet I cannot believe their consensus is genuine. I have merely given them cause for a show of unity. Beneath that, no question but that their divisions remain.
Yet will those still run deep enough to serve my turn?
She shifted her eyes back toward the dark, slight curve of the Sword, and felt it looking at her. Impossible, of course… But the feeling persisted, and others had reported it as well. How something so inanimate could yet seem to have awareness of its surroundings, and an intent that looked out at the world through that awareness, Ael could not tell. Yet for many long years this potent artifact had lain in that chair in the Senate, untouched, unmolested by even the most violent and powerful of the personalities who passed through—and that fact argued some indwelling power of the Sword’s more dangerous, in its way, than Ael much liked to think of.
She got up, then, came around her desk, and stood before that chair, looking down at the slice of darkness that lay there defeating the dim light of her cabin. “Well,” she said softly. “Now is the time, if ever. Shall we serve each other’s turn? I am willing…”
She reached out slowly, hesitant; her fingers dropped to the hilt, brushed it…. Nothing happened; no jolt of power, no arcane or silent voice shouting agreement down her bones. She expected none, well knowing the difference between a symbol and the powers it stood for. Nonetheless, the answer to her question was plain.
She turned away and waved the cabin lights up, then went back to the desk, reached down for the comm control again. “Bridge.”
It was young antecenturion Khiy’s voice. “Yes, khre’Riov—?”
She had to smile that so many of her people still called her that, though none of them belonged to the service any longer, and the service indeed would be the instrument of all their deaths were they ever caught. “The message which has just come in tells me what I thought it would,” she said. “They are finally coming for us…” She could not hold back a somewhat feral smile. “We have much to do to prepare.”
“Khre’Riov—” Khiy’s voice held a most unaccustomed nervousness. “Are we going back with them?”
Ael laughed softly. “Did you truly think it?” she said. “Aye, going back…but never in the way they think, or the company. Is Aidoann still there?”
“Here, llhei.”
“Shortly I will have some more messages
to send, and we must take care with the routing of some of them, lest they come too soon where they are wanted. T’Hrienteh and I will confer about this at length. But first you should call the crew together. There are things to be discussed in detail before we go forward.”
“Yes, khre’Riov!” Aidoann said, and the comm went dead.
Ael t’Rllaillieu gave the Sword in the Empty Chair one last glance, and smiled briefly; then waved her cabin door open, and went out to battle.
There would be those who said she had started this war. Ael was not so sure about that. But beyond doubt, she thought, I shall be the one to finish it….
In the heart of Paris, just off to one side of the Palais de Chaillot, between the great reflecting pool and the Avenue Albert de Mun, stands the tall and handsome spire of the “troisième Empire” edifice built late in the twenty-second century to house the offices on Earth of the president of the United Federation of Planets. It was November now, though, and half the spire was hidden in the chilly fog which had come down on the city the night before and shrouded all its lights. The mist had risen a hundred feet or so, but no more. Now the view from the terrace outside the room where the president was meeting privately with the chief of staff of Starfleet Command was mostly indistinct, with only a glimpse or two of distant buildings showing here and there as flitters and little ion-driven shuttles passed, and the mist swirled with their passing.
The room was very still even though the door to the terrace was open, the mist muting the sounds of the city outside; and the thin pale light fell cheerlessly on the dark-paneled walls and the Shaashin, Kandinsky, and T’Kelan oils hanging there. In the middle of the room hovered a large oval sapphire-glass desk on paired pressors, and behind it next to a matching cobalt-blue chair the president stood, his tall dark bearlike bulk slightly stooped as he looked down at the desk, reading from the display embedded in it. He had been up all night, and looked it.
“When did you receive the message, sir?” Fleet Admiral Mehkan said. He was a smaller man, considerably slenderer than the president, and very fair, as a lot of people from Centaurus are.
“It must have been about midnight,” said the president, touching the display to bring the report up again. “The Strat-Tac people,” he said, “are very thorough in their briefings. I’d thought this would have arrived a little sooner—but apparently her enemies back home have been making sure they have everything they need in place before they move.”
“And now,” said the chief of staff, “we have to start working out what to do…”
“Sit down, Dai, please,” the president said. Mehkan sat down on a chair like the president’s on the other side of the desk.
The president lowered himself into his own chair, leaning on the desk while he finished rereading the report. “She’ll have received the same message, I assume,” he said.
“At about the same time, yes, sir. Her sources supply us as well, rather more directly.”
“And you’re sure that the source of the information is completely reliable.”
“It’s not just a source, Mr. President. It’s our source.”
The president nodded slowly. “I had wondered…. Well, the interesting part of all this,” he said, “is going to be anticipating what she does.”
“She has to have known they would come right after her,” said the chief of staff.
The president nodded. “Unquestionably. If I understand the relative importance of the artifact she took with her, to produce the same result on Earth she would have had to have stolen the Articles of Federation, or the old Constitution, or the Magna Carta….”
“Combined with the Crown Jewels, the Black Stone, and the Holy Grail,” said Mehkan. “The Romulan government will do anything they have to, to get that thing back…or to make sure it doesn’t fall into unfriendly hands.”
“Such as ours,” said the president.
Mehkan nodded.
“But it’s still just an excuse,” the president said. “They’ve been waiting for a chance like this for a long time. There are elements in the Senate which have been looking for a cause célèbre, something to push their relationship with the Federation out of the rut it’s been stuck in for all these years. The Neutral Zone chafes them, limits their trading opportunities, annoys their expansionist and nationalist lobbies…”
“An excuse for them to push outward,” said Fleet Admiral Mehkan, “would certainly be welcomed.”
“Well, it’s not as if there aren’t also elements in Fleet which would welcome the resolution of a persistent tactical problem on one of our borders,” the president said. “Massive resources are spent policing and patrolling the Neutral Zone every year. Everyone would find it an improvement if suddenly that necessity went away…wouldn’t they?”
The Fleet Admiral twitched a little. The president noticed, and said nothing about it. “Yet at the same time,” the president said, “no one has wanted the situation to resolve itself in an uncontrolled manner. Sometimes, unfortunately, you just don’t have a choice. We’ve known for a while that there would be a war involving the Romulan Empire within the next five to ten years. Political tensions, economic pressures, even personal issues at high levels in the Empire have been bringing it closer and closer. Now here it comes: a little sooner than expected, maybe. But hardly unexpected.”
He got up and came out from behind the desk, pausing in front of his terrace door and gazing out for a moment. Across the Seine, the lower half of the Eiffel Tower was now visible; the rest was lost in fog, producing an effect suggesting that someone had come along and sliced its top off with a knife. “That being the case…what matters is to protect our own people, naturally; but also to try to steer events so that they do the most people the most good over time, both on their side of the Neutral Zone and on ours.”
“The altruistic approach…” said Fleet Admiral Mehkan.
“I know that tone of voice, Dai,” said the president, beginning to pace slowly in front of that window. “I did Strat-Tac only a year after you did at the Academy, and I remember old Dickinson’s lectures as well as you do. My job simply requires that I approach the problem from a slightly different angle. A wider one, maybe. War…” The president paused. “Any war is undesirable, Dai. A war that benefits one of your opponents at the expense of the other, and weakens both…that’s also undesirable, but less so. However, a war that leaves you with, instead of two opponents who keep each other busy, only one opponent, now much stronger due to the defeat of the other…that is very undesirable indeed.”
Mehkan said, “And things have been trending that way for some time, Mr. President.”
“Yes. Well, events seem to be giving the forces in the Romulan Empire a different focus to ‘crystallize out’ around. We have two main concerns. Tactics, and readiness.” He looked up at the chief of staff of Starfleet. “And two questions. If we go to war with the Romulan Empire, can we defeat them?”
Fleet Admiral Mehkan was very slow to answer. “Strat-Tac says yes,” he said. “But it would be a long, bloody exercise. There would be hundreds of millions of casualties, maybe billions, on both sides. And it would take both sides decades, if not a century or more, to completely recover.”
“And if the Klingons come in on their side at the beginning?”
This time there was no pause in Mehkan’s answer. He shook his head immediately. “A shorter exercise. A much higher death toll. The modern version of what they once called ‘mutual assured destruction’…the possible loss of starflight capability to all three cultures, if things went on long enough.”
“An unacceptable outcome, obviously. But I suspect Strat-Tac thinks the Klingons would wait to see how things went…then come in and attack the weaker of the two combatant parties at an opportune moment.”
Mehkan nodded. “Their own Empire is slightly overstretched at the moment in terms of supply lines,” he said, “and I think they’re sensitive to the possibility that the Romulans, once hostilities were well enough under
way, might attack the further-flung Klingon worlds with an eye to cutting off the trade routes to the inner planets.”
The president leaned against the terrace door, gazing out. “Well,” he said, “it’s going to start. So our job is to keep this war from killing any more of us, and any more of them, than is absolutely necessary; and to manage it in such a way that the powers left standing at the end of it are unlikely to go to war again for a long time.”
“And if we can’t?”
“We have to,” said the president. “By whatever means. And one fairly straightforward means to the end is lying ready to our hand…if we use it intelligently.”
Fleet Admiral Mehkan looked profoundly unhappy. “I wish we knew for sure that we could trust her,” he said.
“We can trust her to be Romulan,” said the president.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“And we don’t so much have to trust her,” said the president, “as to anticipate her. In that regard…we have at least one resource who does that fairly well.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” said Mehkan. He got up and went to stand by the terrace door as well. “Mr. President…there are people high in Command who are going to resist this suggestion strenuously.”
“You among them,” said the president.
“Kirk is increasingly difficult to predict as time goes by. If he—”
“If we selected starship captains just for predictability,” said the president, “most of them would be dead within the first year of their first five-year mission. Lateral thinking, creativity, the ability to outflank the dangers that face them…that, I would think, is the set of characteristics Fleet sorts for. Or have the criteria changed since we last did a review?”
“No, but—”
“You know what the problem is as well as I do,” the president said. “It is not a question of predictability, in the case of the captain of the Enterprise; it is a question of loyalty…in this particular case.”