My Enemy My Ally

by Diane Duane

  "In his office, sir. Paperwork, I think. Can I be of assistance?"

  "Possibly. Would you excuse yourself, Lieutenant?" Jim walked on through Sickbay to Bones's office in the back; Lia came after him.

  "Bones?"

  McCoy looked up from a desk cluttered with cassettes and computer pads. "Come on in, Jim. What can I do for you?"

  "Close the door after you, Lieutenant. Would you mind," Jim said to the nurse, "telling me what was going on out there? My orders were that our 'guests' were not to be given any nonessential information. We are still going to have to answer to Fleet after we get out of this mess—always providing we do."

  Bones opened his mouth to say something, but Lia beat him to it. "Captain, with all due respects, complete healing of the wounded, no matter how old the wound is, hardly strikes me as 'nonessential.' And in this area at least, my oaths to Starfleet—and other authorities—are intact."

  "'Other authorities'?"

  "'I shall teach my Art without fee or stipulation to other disciples also bound to it by oath, should they desire to learn it,'" Lia said, that dry, merry voice of hers going soft and sober for the moment.

  "'… and this I swear by Apollo the Physician, and Aesculapius, and Health and Allheal His daughters, and by all the other Gods and Goddesses, and the One above Them Whose Name we do not know. . . .'" Bones said, just as quietly. "The Romulan version turns out to be a lot shorter—but the intent's the same. Some things transcend even the discipline of the service, Jim."

  Jim's neck throbbed worse, and he opened his mouth—then closed it again. Gently. Gently. Loss of control … "Sorry, Lieutenant," he said. "You're quite right. Bones, my apologies."

  McCoy raised both eyebrows. "For what? Nothin's normal around here just now—no reason for us to be. Lia, get the Captain ten mils of Aerosal, all right?"

  "Better make it twenty," Jim said.

  Lia looked from McCoy to Kirk and back again—then, significantly, up at the ceiling. She nodded. "Fifteen it is," she said, and went out.

  McCoy looked after her with rueful amusement. "They don't make nurses like that anymore," he said. Jim sat down and laughed at him. "Just as well, huh Bones?"

  "Well," McCoy said, "I was about to say fifteen. I think that woman's been taking lessons from Spock—though I don't want to know in what. Don't get comfortable, Jim; I was just going down to Recreation."

  "Isn't everybody?" Jim said. "Can't keep the crew away from the Romulans. . . ."

  "I didn't think you would want to. We're going to be working pretty closely with those people over the next twenty-four hours or so, on some pretty crucial business. The more comfortable the crew gets with them, the better."

  "Theoretically, at least …"

  "Misgivings?" The small transporter pad on McCoy's desk sang and sparkled briefly, and a spray hypo and an ampule of amber liquid appeared on it. McCoy picked it up, checked the label on the ampule three times, almost ceremonially, slipped it into the hypo and came around the desk to Jim. "Stop twitching."

  "The arm still itches."

  The hypo hissed, and McCoy tossed it onto the desk. "If I were anything but an old country doctor, I would suspect your itch of being elsewhere."

  The throbbing in Jim's neck went away. "I'm nervous," he said.

  "See, the truth will out after all. Guess what? So am I."

  "And who do you tell about it?"

  "Christine. Or maybe Lia. Then they tell Spock, see, and Spock tells the ceiling. A carefully arranged chain of confidences. The nurses talk only to Vulcans, and the Vulcans talk only to God. . . ."

  Jim snorted. It was a lot harder to be paranoid when he wasn't in pain. "That explains where he gets his chess strategies, anyway. . . .Bones, there's a question I wanted to ask you. Where'd you learn to play like that?"

  "Watching Spock, mostly. And watching you."

  "With a talent like that, you should be in tournament play."

  McCoy started to laugh quietly as the two of them left his office, heading down the hall to the lift for Recreation. "Jim, you haven't looked at my record since I was assigned, have you? … My F.I.D.E. rating is in the 700's somewhere."

  Jim stared at McCoy as they got into the lift. 'The F.I.D.E.' was the Federation Intergalactique des Échecs; its members got their ratings only through Federation-sanctioned tournament play, and the 700's, while hardly a master's level, were a respectable neighborhood. "No kidding. Why don't you play more often?"

  "I'm a voyeur.—Oh, stop that. A chess voyeur. I use it mostly as a diagnostic tool."

  "Come again?"

  "Jim, chess isn't just good for the brain. It's a wonderful way to get a feeling for someone's attitude toward life and games and other people. Their response to stress, their ability to plan, what they do when plans are foiled. Their attack on life—sneaky, bold, straightforward, subtle, careless, what have you. Humor or the lack of it, compassion, enthusiasm, the 'poker face,' all the different things that go toward 'psyching' an opponent out … A sting or five or six chess games can make a marvelous précis of a personality and the ways it reacts in its different moods."

  "An intelligence test?"

  The lift stopped and they got out. "Lord, no," McCoy said. "On this ship intelligence is a foregone conclusion … and in any case, it's hardly everything. It's hardly even anything, from some psychiatrists' point of view. You want to get a feeling for where someone's personal style lies, their 'flair.' Spock, for example. Why do you think he gets so many requests for standard 3D tournament play when we're close to home space? It's not because he's brilliant. There are enough brilliant chess masters floating around the Federation to carpet a small planet with. But Spock's games have elegance. My guess would be that it comes partly of his expertise in the sciences—the delight in the perfect solution, the most logical and economical one. But if you look at his games, you also see elegance—exquisitely laid traps that close with such precision, it looks like he micrometered them. There's a great love of the precision itself: not just of its logic and economy, but of its beauty. Though Spock'd sooner die than admit it. Our cool, 'unemotional' Vulcan, Captain, is a closet aesthete. But you knew that."

  "I did? Of course I did."

  "I should make you figure this out yourself," Bones said. "Still, none of this is anything you haven't already noticed from long observation of him in other areas. That aestheticism is a virtue; it shows up in his other work too. But it's also a hint at where one of his weak spots might be. He will scorn blunter or more brutal moves or setups that might produce a faster win. Why do you think he has that sword on his wall? But this is where you get lucky sometimes, because you tend to go straight for me throat. Spock gets busy doing movesculpture—and enjoying himself; he loves watching people's minds work too, yours especially—and he gets lost in the fun. And then you come in with an ax and hack his artwork to pieces with good old human-brand unsubtle craziness. Note, of course, that he keeps coming back. The win is obviously not the purpose of the game for him."

  "Obviously. Bones, is this something I can take a correspondence course in?"

  McCoy grinned. "Psychology by mail, huh? You might have trouble. Not that many med schools teach diagnostic chess, and they wouldn't be able to help you with 4D anyway. In fact, Lia is one of the few people I know who's managed to find a course in even 3D diagnostic. She routinely plays at least a game or two with her patients whenever she can. She's not much of a tactician, but she says she doesn't mind losing … she's more interested in finding out about other people."

  Bones chuckled as they stepped into Recreation together. "You should have seen her playing with Jerry Freeman the other week … poor Lia found out a little more about him than she wanted to. Jerry wasn't paying attention to the game at the beginning, and Lia put him in a bad position pretty quickly. So he bided his time and fought a holding action until she got up to answer a page, and while she was gone, he quietly programmed the cubic for 'catastrophic dump.' When she got back, she tried to move a pie
ce, and the cubic blew up. Pieces flying everywhere … I wish you could have seen her face."

  Jim wished he could have too. "And what did she deduce from that?"

  "If she's smart, the same thing I did after I played with him a couple of times; that Mr. Freeman is quite bright, and knows it, and occasionally gets incautious. What is not occasional about him, though, is his extreme dislike of looking dumb in front of people—and he will sometimes resort to very unorthodox solutions to save his game."

  "You call that a save?"

  "It was for him. The next game he played with Lia—"

  "There was a next game? I would have killed him."

  "They used to call them 'the gentler sex,' didn't they once? Let's wait and see if Freeman can still walk after his yearly injections next week. Anyway, next game, he wiped the Rec deck up with her. Then he fetched her a drink and was the picture of gallantry. He's a very good winner."

  Jim chuckled. "Bones, do me a favor, will you?"

  "What?"

  "Play 4D with Ael."

  At that Bones looked somber, and pulled Jim a bit off to one side, well away from the freestyle demonstration of Romulan hand-to-hand combat that seemed to have resumed over in the far left corner of the room. McCoy eased himself down into one of a pair of chairs in a conversation niche, and said, "I already did, a few hours ago."

  Jim had a sudden sinking feeling that that line of Ael's about learning the game in "a few minutes" had not been mere casual braggadocio. Damn the woman! "And?"

  "She blew me to plasma."

  "She beat you!"

  "Don't look so shocked. Don't go all sorry for me, either! I learned lots more from the loss than I would have from the win. But it wasn't a pretty picture."

  "What did she do?"

  "Oh, no, Jim. I leave that as an exercise for the student. You'll find a recording of the game in my office running files under the password 'Trojan Horse.' She knew I was recording it, by the way."

  "And?"

  "She didn't care. She knew what I was up to and just didn't care. Chew on that one, Jim."

  "Later. There's Uhura and your demolitions expert; I was looking for them."

  "Not for Ael, of course."

  "Of course. Come on, Bones."

  "One thing, Jim, before we go over there."

  "What?"

  "Get some sleep this afternoon. You're looking a bit raw … and besides, a brain full of lactic acid byproducts and short on REM sleep makes for poor command performance."

  "Noted. . . ."

  They walked together over to the massive control console for the holography stage. Very little seemed to have changed since several days ago. There was Uhura, working at the controls on top of the console; and there was the lower half of Lieutenant Freeman, sitting cross-legged between the pedestal-legs of the console. The upper half of him was inside the works of the console; as Jim and McCoy came up, one arm came out from inside, felt around for one of the tools littered about, grabbed a circuit spanner, and went back inside again. The only addition to the scene was Ael, looking over Uhura's shoulder with an interested expression.

  "Got it, Nyota," said the muffled voice from inside. "Try it now."

  "Right." Uhura looked up at Jim, grinned happily, and said, "Say something, Captain."

  "Certainly. Aren't you supposed to be on the Bridge?"

  "HEUOIPK EEIRWOINVSY SHTENIX GFAK HU MMHNINAAWAH!" the console said, or at least that was what it sounded like.

  "What the devil was that?" said McCoy. "Sounds like you've got a problem there, Lieutenant. A malfunction that shouts."

  "No, Doctor. It's taken us the last half hour to get it to do that." Uhura beamed at Jim. "Captain, I'm on my break at the moment. But this is the answer to that little poser you handed me the other day. And also the antidote, incidentally, to the trouble we had with signal leakage while Ael's people were running communications."

  "I'm all ears," Jim said. "One moment, though. Mr.

  Freeman, are you just shy, or did Lieutenant Burke finally lose her temper and do a hemicorporectomy on you?"

  The half-a-person whooped with that very distinctive laugh of his—an even funnier sound than usual, smothered as it was inside the console—and carefully came out from under, brushing himself off as he stood. Regardless of his age (in the mid-thirties), his six-foot height, and his silver-shot hair (now somewhat disarranged from being inside the console), Jerry Freeman always struck Jim as one of the youngest of his crew. The man was eternally excited about something—for example, right now, those old sterries—but though the subject of the enthusiasm might change without notice, his total commitment to the subject of the moment never did. "What are, you two up to?" Jim said.

  "Words of one syllable, please," said McCoy.

  "Oh, come on, Bones. You have to learn some big words sooner or later. E-lec-tron. Can you say that? Sure you can. . . ."

  Freeman took a moment to smooth his hair back in place. "We're confusing the intercom system, Doctor," he said. "Among other things. But what the Captain needed was a more effective jamming system for subspace communications than Fleet has bothered to design for wide-area use. Mostly they've tried to handle the 'beam-tapping' problem in deepspace communications by avoiding it … defeating it at sending and receiving ends with 'unbreakable' codes, hypercoherent wavicle packets, all that silliness. But what technology can produce, technology can sooner or later decode or unravel."

  Uhura was leaning on one elbow beside Ael with a humorous look on her face, watching her protégé ecture. "You can't solve a problem that way," she said. 'Fleet has been ignoring the medium through which the messages travel, considering deepspace too big and unmanageable to handle. And it's true that 'broadcast' jamming of the sort done in a planet's ionosphere is impossible out here; while the relatively small-scale jamming already available to us is useless for our present purposes. So what Jerry and I have been doing is finding a way to make space itself more amenable to being jammed … a method that's an outgrowth of the way Jerry's been making digital documents more amenable to being rechanneled."

  "Mr. Scott helped," Jerry said. "We used material from the parts bank to build a very small warpfield generator of the kind used in warp-capable shuttlecraft. We attached that to one of the little message buoys that the ship jettisons in jeopardy situations. Then we adjusted the warpfield generator so that it would twist 186 space just slightly over a large cubic area, causing the contours of surrounding subspace to favor randomly directed tachyon flow along certain 'tunnels' at a certain packet frequency—"

  "Good-bye," McCoy said. "I'm off to do something simple. A hemicorporectomy, possibly."

  "It makes subspace much easier to jam," Mr. Freeman said, sounding rather desperate. "That's all."

  "Why didn't you say that?" McCoy muttered.

  "I did."

  "It also takes a lot of power," Jim said thoughtfully. "Even a hefty warpfield generator would only have a limited life expectancy."

  "Yes, sir. Four hours is our predicted upper limit. But for those four hours, nobody trying to use subspace communication is going to hear anything but what sounds like a lot of 'black noise'—stellar wind and so forth. And whatever they try to send will be perverted into the same noise."

  "Range?"

  "Presently about a thousand cubic light-years, Captain. If you want more, you can have it, but the life of the generator becomes inversely shorter in proportion to the extension of the jamming buoy's range."

  Jim nodded—he had rather expected that. "All right. How many of them can you put together for me in the next four hours?"

  Uhura and Freeman looked at each other. "We'll need more people—"

  "Get Scotty and the Engineering staff on it."

  "We don't dare overdrain the parts bank, sir," Freeman said. "Will three more be enough?"

  "They'll have to be. Ael, how about it? How fast are your people likely to understand this if they come up against it?"

  The Commander looked dubious
. "Hard to tell, Captain. They are not all idiots like LLunih, or as complacent as t'Kaenmie and tr'Arriufvi, who're pacing us in Helm and Wildfire. I would delay as long as possible before deploying such a device; that would give any interested observer less time to become suspicious and start deducing what was going on."

  Yes, Jim thought, you would say that, wouldn't you? No matter what you were up to. But he put the thought aside for the moment. "Agreed," he said. "At our present rate we should be hitting the 'breakaway' point, where we drop our pursuit, in about five hours, correct?"

  "That's so, Captain."

  "Fine. We'll drop one of those buoys there as we begin the engagement, to keep your three friends from yelling for help. One we'll drop in the area of Levaeri when we reach it. To the third one I want the fourth warp generator attached so that it has starflight capability as well as the subspace alteration function. We'll send it off past Levaeri, along the likeliest vector of approach for an unexpected ship. Think about that, Commander, and let me know."

  Ael blinked at Jim. "But if the ship is unexpected—" Then she smiled. "Ah, Hilaefve's Paradox, eh Captain? Very well. I will think about it for you."

  "Good. Uhura, Mr. Freeman, take what people you need and get on it. One thing before you go: why have you taught the holography console to shout gibberish?"

  Uhura chuckled. "Captain, it takes months of practice and skill to handle a ship's communications board so that there's no signal leakage through the shields. The problem is, after working with a board for awhile, a comm officer does that without thinking of it—and I didn't think to warn poor Aidoann. Not that she would have known what to do about it—I haven't had time to teach her all the board's little tricks. So Jerry took the same random number generator he used in the jamming buoy's tachyon-switching protocols and adapted it to the multi-use programmable logic solid that every intercom in the ship has inside it. The solids will now encode and decode voices and data at their sending and receiving ends; signal along the circuitry, which is where the leakage comes from, will now only manifest as that gibberish you heard—so that even while Ael's people are handling our intercoms, we can say anything we have to without worrying about being overheard, or needing people to run around with notes. . . ."