by Diane Duane
“About an hour. Less if you don’t squirm when it itches.”
“Captain,” Ael said, “who was Murphy, and what was his Law?”
“One I should have learned the last time,” said the captain. “Never eat at a place called ‘Mom’s’; never play cards with a man called ‘Doc’; and don’t start fights with Romulan commanders.”
That was when the punch came that the captain did not telegraph; and it slammed Ael back against the nearest wall so hard that the effect was the same as being hit twice, once in front and once from behind. She rebounded from the wall, tried to stand, staggered. Things spun.
“But if you do start one,” the captain said with an absolutely feral grin, “always finish it.”
The room would not stop rotating; and Ael’s mind was in such a whirl of rage, relief and merriment that she scarcely knew what to do. “Captain, your hand,” she said, holding hers out and considering—just briefly—showing him that trick of N’alae’s that he had so admired. But there would be no honor in doing it to an injured man…. He took her hand, and then grinned.
“Yours sweat too, huh?” he said.
“Captain,” she said, “what a pity you’re not Rihannsu….”
“I bet you say that to all your prisoners. Let’s get back up to the bridge.”
Chapter Twelve
Jim sat in his center seat and wondered at the strangeness of the world.
Here he was, deep into Romulan space, surrounded by Romulan ships; not even under way, his engines only producing enough power to run ship’s systems and keep themselves alive. Another eighteen hours would see the Enterprise towed into a Romulan starbase. Yet he sat in his chair, and turning to one side, he could see Scotty leaning back in his station’s chair, grumpily eyeing the nonexistent power conversion levels in the not-really-blown-up port nacelle, while delivering a rapid-fire lecture on the difficulties of the restart procedure to the slim dark Romulan man looking over his shoulder. Hvaid, that one was. Turning the other way, there were Mr. Spock and Lieutenant Kerasus and young Aidoann, Ael’s third-in-command, deep in conversation about Old High Vulcan linguistic roots and their manifestations in modern Vulcan and Romulan. And Uhura would be—
She wasn’t, though. Jim’s train of thought was temporarily derailed. “Mr. Spock, where’s Lieutenant Uhura?”
“She went down to recreation, Captain,” Spock said. “I did not catch the entire conversation, but there was some communications problem to which she felt Mr. Freeman from life sciences had the answer.”
“Fine. Where’s the commander?”
“I believe she is also down in recreation, Captain. Lieutenant Commander Uhura requested the commander’s presence there shortly after she left.”
Jim got up, stretched—and stopped the gesture abruptly; his neck muscles still ached from the backhand the commander had given him. “All right, Mr. Spock, mind the store till I get back.”
“Acknowledged,” Spock said. He moved down to the center seat, and Kerasus and Aidoann moved with him, the analysis of Vulcan phonemes missing hardly a beat.
“Sickbay,” Jim said to the lift, and off it went. He leaned against the wall, rubbing his neck.
There was something bothering him about the whole business. Not a feeling that Ael or her people might betray him—not that specifically. But the whole matter of where the Enterprise was, of both capture and escape being out of his hands…Out of his control. That was it.
The old problem, Jim thought, with some chagrin. He remembered all too vividly that little incident back on Triacus with Gorgan the soi-disant “Friendly Angel,” in which that fear, his worst one, had been inflamed to paralyzing proportions. This isn’t nearly that bad, he told himself severely. And I did choose to do this. It was my decision. But all the same, it had been Ael who came to him with the idea all ready-made; and even when he had been ready to refuse her, damned if circumstances didn’t force him to accept her plan.
Circumstances. Very convenient circumstances, too…
Oh, stop that! That’s paranoia!
Still, it was difficult not to be paranoid about this woman. A Romulan, to begin with…Well, that by itself wasn’t reason to mistrust her. But she had admitted to Jim that she had rigged most of the circumstances that had brought the Enterprise here—even to the point of paying a considerable amount in bribes to have the information about “something going on in Romulan space” smuggled out to Starfleet Command, planted where they would hear it. She had angled specifically and with great precision for Enterprise to be sent here—and she had managed it. And now his bridge was full of her officers, and his rec deck was full of her crew…and his neck ached.
She had him right where she wanted him…wherever that was. It was the not knowing that made him crazy.
Loss of control…
The lift slid to a stop. Jim stalked out of its open doors and down the hall toward sickbay, brooding. It might have been slightly easier to handle if the woman were at least likeable…if she weren’t so relentlessly manipulative, as sharp and cold as the sword she had been admiring in Spock’s quarters. If only she didn’t constantly seem to be maneuvering events with the same cool virtuosity that Spock exhibited while maneuvering pieces in the chesscubic. Though not quite the same. Spock’s terrible expertise was always tempered, at least with Jim, by that elusive, almost mischievous compassion.
Then again, he couldn’t set aside that wicked, merry, understanding flash of Ael’s eyes at him, just after he had punched her out….
He breathed out in disgust, gave the problem up as something he couldn’t do anything about but would be pleased to see ended, and swung into sickbay. And there it all was again, for here was Ael’s chief surgeon, t’Whatever-her-name-was, those Romulan words were pretty to hear but impossible to remember—with Lia Burke beside her, showing the Romulan woman how to use an anabolic protoplaser in regenerative mode. They were working on the Romulan’s own arm, apparently removing and regenerating the tissue of an old scar a little bit at a time, so that the Romulan surgeon could get a feel for the instrument’s settings. “No, watch that, you’ll involve the fascia and get the cells all confused,” Lia was saying, her dark curly head bent down close together with the Romulan’s bronze-dark, straight-haired one. “Try it a little shallower. One millimeter is deep enough where the skin is this thin. Good afternoon, Captain; how’s the neck?”
“I have a pain in it,” Jim said, thinking more of the figurative truth than of the literal one. “Where’s Dr. McCoy?”
“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 respect, 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 i
ntent’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 hardy 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 string of 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 the throat. Spock gets busy doing move-sculpture—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 piece, 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 demonstratio
n 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 by-products 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.