by Diane Duane
Spock looked mildly surprised. “Habit, no doubt. The captain never goes anywhere….”
“…but just this once…”
“…considering that the armed escort will be ample….”
“Gentlemen!”
“Gotcha, Jim,” McCoy said.
Jim’s smile took awhile about appearing, but finally managed it. “All right,” he said. “I consider myself warned. But if you two are going to play ‘mother hen,’ don’t either of you be surprised if you find me holding your hand.”
“Fine by me,” McCoy said. “But watch it with Spock. People start the damndest rumors about this ship’s crew, even without provocation….”
“Doctor, how does one hold hands with a mother hen?” Spock asked innocently.
“Gentlemen!!”
Ael kept her laughter to herself. “…Malkson, Matlock—”
The door opened, and the Elements were apparently joking with them all, for in came Colin Matlock, the security chief, whom Ael remembered from the briefing on Inaieu. He was a tall, good-looking, dark-visaged young man, half frowning all the time, even when he smiled. At the moment he chiefly looked embarrassed. “Sorry, Captain, I’ll come back later—”
“No, take a seat, Mr. Matlock. We were going over the strike group. Go on, Bones.”
“Where was I?”
“Matlock,” Jim said, and then paused, looking slightly surprised. He glanced at Ael.
She glanced back, keeping her face quite straight, and let him wonder. “…McCoy, Miñambrés, Morris, Mosley, Muller, Naraht—”
“Too young,” Jim said.
“Jim, he’s got to go out sometime,” McCoy said. “And he’s got an incredibly low anxiety level. As low as a Vulcan’s, nearly.”
“But not enough experience—”
Ael straightened. “Jim, is this that young Ensign Rock of yours?”
Jim stared at her, then laughed. “Yes.”
“Of your courtesy, take him. I ask it.”
“Reasons?”
“I have none that I can explain to you.” Knowing what you would probably think about the Elements, from how little you think about names.
“Hunch, Commander?” Spock said.
“Yes,” she said.
“Well, I had one too,” McCoy said. “Jim, ride with us on this one.”
Jim waved his hand. “All right. Go on.”
“Norton, Oranjeboom, Paul…”
On and on it went. At last McCoy stopped, and he and Spock looked at Jim for his final reaction.
“That’s almost all of security,” Jim said, “and easily half the crew….”
“Captain,” Spock said, “you were quite right about needing numbers.”
He looked over at Ael. “And Levaeri has about a hundred and fifty staff, you said.”
“Yes, Jim. But they have the advantage of the ground. They will know how to hold the place against us—how to set up ambushes, seal whole sections. The more people, and with the more expertise and firepower, the better. Our chief advantage lies in this, that the station is far inside Rihannsu space and will not be long on armaments.”
“How do they protect it, then, if the installation’s such a high-security business?”
“High-intensity deflector screens,” Mr. Matlock said. “The specs the commander’s given us indicate shields of much higher power than any mobile facility, such as a starship, can support. We’ll have our work cut out for us getting those down.”
“It will have to be subterfuge again, Captain,” Ael said to him. “And there’s worse to come; for as I told you, this is Battlequeen’s patrol area. There is no telling when Lyirru t’Illialhae might turn up—all Elements preserve us from the happenstance. I much fear that LLunih will try to find Battlequeen and bring her here. In any case, we must not linger in this neighborhood, or stop to sample the wine.”
The door hissed open again. “The Rihannsu make wine?” someone said. It was Mr. Scott; and much to Ael’s surprise, the scowl with which he traditionally favored her was only about half there.
“Yes,” she said, slightly puzzled. “It’s not quite as ruinous to the throat as our ale is…but it’s considerably stronger.”
“Stronger?”
“We have some on Bloodwing,” Ael said, still puzzled, but the look of anticipation on the man’s face was impossible to miss. “Perhaps I might make you a gift of some to atone for what I did to your port nacelle. A hectoliter or so?…”
Scott looked at Spock incredulously. “Why, that would be…”
“Twenty-six point four one eight gallons,” Spock said, with the slightest trace of amusement showing. “Or six thousand one hundred and two point four cubic inches at—what is your wine’s specific gravity, Commander?”
“Gentlemen…” Jim said wearily.
“We can handle this later, Mr. Scott,” said Ael.
“Oh, aye!”
More people began coming in—Sulu, Chekov, then Harb Tanzer and Uhura, until finally all the department heads were present. “Captain,” said Mr. Matlock, “one thing before we start…”
“Certainly.”
“Commander,” the dark young man said to Ael, “what color are the halls in that station going to be?”
“White, mostly, or bare-metal silver.”
“Captain,” Matlock said to Jim, with a faintly ironic expression, “I don’t think it would be wise for us to attempt a board-and-storm operation dressed in bright blue and black, or gold and black, or green and black—or especially orange and black. Everyone in the party would stand out like zebras in the snow; and as for my people, they might as well have targets painted on them.”
“Noted, Mr. Matlock. Order light gray battle fatigues for everybody.”
“Already done, sir,” said Matlock, just a little sheepishly. “Quartermaster’s working on it now.”
“Colin,” Jim said, “I have great hopes for you. Just be careful.”
“What are these fatigues, Captain?” said Ael.
“Light-colored coveralls and overboots.”
“Would you give orders that they also be provided for all of my people who will be going along?”
Spock looked up from some report-pad he had been studying. “Captain, that is an excellent idea. It could very well confuse the station’s complement of Rihannsu into thinking that our allies are not Rihannsu at all, but Vulcans attached to Starfleet…perhaps even Intrepid crew, escaped from confinement, or previously concealed.”
“They won’t think that for long, Spock,” McCoy said. “Remember, Rihannsu and Vulcan culture have been diverging for thousands of years…and most of the subconscious cues buried in their respective kinesics, their ‘body languages,’ will also now be very different. A Rihannsu would know you weren’t one, if he looked long enough, not from any physical divergence—but just from a wrong ‘feel.’”
“But none of them will be getting ‘long looks,’ Doctor, not if this works correctly,” said Spock. “They will look, be briefly confused, be surprised—thinking that they are seeing Rihannsu. They will hesitate; possibly hold their fire briefly, in many cases. That will give our people an extra second to act. We cannot afford to be so proud that we throw away the advantage of surprise. Captain, I would recommend that every one of our different striking parties have at least one or two of Ael’s people with it.”
“That’s an excellent idea. So ordered. Ladies and gentlebeings, let’s get this started, shall we? Commander, please begin.”
She hunted among the switches before her on the table, made her connection to the ship’s computer and brought up a three-dimensional graphic above the holography pad in the center of the table. There it hung before them all in spidery lines of light, the Levaeri V station: a big rectangular prism, about twice as long as it was wide, like a brick hanging in space. “This is the research facility,” she said. “You can see that it is large and complex—about two miles long and a mile wide. Not all of it is in use at this time, to the best of my knowledge—the structur
e you see here is a standard Rihannsu design, purposely built larger than it needs to be, to make later additions simpler. There are potentially eighteen levels, each one much divided by corridors, as you can see. At present I believe only the ‘outer’ six levels to be staffed; much of the inner is empty, or occupied by computer core and therefore airless.”
“Commander,” Scotty said, “how’d you come by this information?”
“I was there about two years ago, your time,” she said. “A VIP inspection tour, before the mind-technique research was moved there. The rest of the data comes from both the Praetorate and my family’s spies in High Command. This project, for all its ‘secrecy,’ has been as leak-ridden as any other.”
Scotty nodded.
“Most of the laboratory space where I believe the actual work is being done is on the inmost level, near the computer core and the computer control rooms. This project has been most prodigal of computer hardware, since most of the actual gene-splitting and other microsurgery used to correct the ‘drifted’ linkages of the DNA is performed by the computers. They are in fact all that makes it possible—for each cell of genetic and neural material must be individually corrected, and thousands of years’ worth of human labor would be needed to make even a gram of the stuff. The computers are the heart of the business. Put them out of operation, and part of the danger is done.”
She folded her hands, staring at the schematic as it rotated. “But only part. The surgical computers are innocent enough by themselves; but the computer banks containing the actual locations of the linkages that are corrected, and the nature of the corrections, must also be destroyed. I have reason to believe that this data is extant only here, reproduced nowhere else in the Empire—partly due to the wonderful paranoia of the Praetorate, which is terrified that some other party they don’t approve of might get hold of it. Destroy this information, all this data, and then you have truly destroyed the menace. It would take them years to reproduce their results—if that’s even possible, for there are literally thousands of linkages in each molecule of Vulcan DNA that are corrected in the operation. No one could remember them all.”
“Pity we can’t just blow the place up,” Mr. Chekov said.
“I agree,” Jim said. “Unfortunately, I don’t think the crew of Intrepid would appreciate it…. Ael, where do you think they will be?”
“My guess would be here,” she said, reaching into the hologram to indicate a large area off to one side of the labs. “It is convenient to the laboratories, large enough to hold several hundred people without too much trouble—and sealed off on three sides by structural bulkheads too strong for even the massed strength of Vulcans to damage.” She looked somber. “If they are able to manage anything at this point. I would hypothesize that their captors, not wanting to take chances with such a dangerous resource, have them constantly drugged, or mind-controlled, or both.”
“The mind control is likeliest,” Spock said, looking grim. “It would do less harm, chemically speaking, to the brain and neural tissue that the researchers are after. Which raises another problem, Commander. Do you have any idea where the already corrected tissue would be kept?”
“None.”
“Why, Spock?” Jim said.
“Because it, too, is alive,” Spock said, “and we must find it. It would be not only immoral but illogical to rescue the crew of the Intrepid and leave other living Vulcan material behind.”
Ael watched Jim open his mouth, then close it. “Spock,” he said, “I want you to know I’m no happier about the killing that has happened—and may soon happen—than you are. But this is just…I don’t know…just meat….”
“It’s alive, Jim,” McCoy said, very quietly. “He’s right. If there’s any chance, we can’t leave the stockpiled material there. Not only for ethical reasons; for tactical ones as well. Any remaining material can be used to work backward and recreate the research. If we can’t take it with us, it must at least be destroyed. But it must be found.”
Jim looked at McCoy and Spock, then nodded. “All right,” he said. “That makes things even more complicated, but what’re a few more complications among friends? Mr. Matlock, let’s talk about the actual plan of attack.”
“Yes, sir.” Matlock stood up with a small control-pad in one hand and began setting markers, small dots of light, into the hologram. “We will be dividing our attack force into four parts, and hitting the base in four different areas. Here, in what the commander has identified as staff and crew quarters, to secure those station personnel who aren’t on duty; here, in two different places near the labs, flanking the area where the most resistance is likely to occur immediately on our arrival; and here, where the commander suspects the Intrepid’s crew to be held prisoner.”
Matlock eyed the station schematic with what looked to Ael like genuine relish. “The four groups, once the station’s screens have been reduced, will beam down simultaneously and each secure its assigned area, while also sealing off the unoccupied parts of the station to prevent our being attacked from several different ‘rears.’ Additionally, each of these two groups”—he pointed at the attack forces near the labs—“will secure the transporters to prevent any of the station people from utilizing in-station beaming. Just in case, once we leave, the Enterprise will have her screens up to prevent any counterattack from the station should our hold on the transporters be broken at any time.”
“That is well thought of,” Ael said. “Captain, gentlefolk, a Rihannsu is at her most dangerous when her territory is threatened…we are rather atavistic that way. Even scientists will be able to fight with terrible ferocity; and remember that at the moment this is still partly a military facility. Not starship personnel—but soldiers nonetheless, people with a deadly hatred of the Federation. And a worse hatred of you, if they find out who you are: my sister-daughter had many friends.” She looked across at Spock. “Do not hesitate to kill. They will not hesitate to kill you after that first second’s confusion.”
Spock lowered his eyes, said nothing. “The ship will be scanning constantly,” Mr. Matlock said, “monitoring the situation on the station and advising the attack parties via scrambled communications of developments. Once the indicated areas are secure, the computer attack group—Mr. Spock and the people he’ll name for you shortly—will assemble, locate the computers, and begin that part of the operation. Sir?”
Spock looked up. “Along with the commander, Lieutenant Kerasus, Mr. Athendë, and several others from the commander’s staff and from security, we will tap into the computers and either remove or destroy all pertinent information concerning the mind-technique researches. In the case that complete removal of the information proves to be impossible, I have with the commander’s assistance developed a ‘virus’ program that will infect the computers the next time they are brought into operational mode, dumping and wiping their total memories. Once the ‘infection’ is successfully accomplished, we will attempt to activate the computers and obtain the location of the already manufactured genetic material. In the case that either of these objectives proves unattainable, we will destroy the computer installation and rejoin the main attack group.”
“Which, as soon as the transporters are secured, will be locating and freeing the Vulcans,” Mr. Matlock said. “Our sensors are sufficiently accurate at close range to tell the difference between Vulcan and Rihannsu life-readings—unlike the Rihannsu instruments. Once the Vulcans are freed, we will call the ship and begin beaming them back aboard the Enterprise via cargo transporters.”
“Gonna be crowded up there,” McCoy said softly. “What about Intrepid?”
Ael shook her head at him. “That’s an unknown, Doctor. My guess would be that they will have her inside the screens, held by tractors; and it’s likely they will have shut her engines down. Mr. Scott, how long does a restart cycle take?”
“That depends on how long the engines have been cold,” Scott said. “Postulatin’ worst case, and the Intrepid’s refitted engines, fifteen
minutes.”
“The best estimated in-and-out time for this operation is forty minutes, Mr. Scott,” Matlock said.
“Well, let’s hope we can get at her early, then, if her engines are down. A cold matter-antimatter mix can’t be hurried.”
“And if for some reason we have to get out of there before she’s restarted,” Jim said sadly, “we can’t leave her there to be taken apart and analyzed. We’ll have to blow her up.”
There was silence all around the table at that, except for Scott. “Ach, the poor lass,” he said.
“That’s all, Captain,” Mr. Matlock said. “After we beam back with the Intrepid crew and the genetic material, there’ll be nothing to stop us from heading out of Rihannsu space with Bloodwing at warp eight.”
McCoy was going through his cassettes again. “That’s all, he says.”
“Very well,” Jim said. “Any questions?”
“Only one,” Ael said quietly.
“Commander?”
“Why did you let me talk you into this?…”
Jim gave her a cockeyed look. There were chuckles around the table, but Ael noticed that he did not join in them, and neither did Spock or McCoy. “We’ll go into that after we’ve successfully completed the operation, Commander,” he said. “As for the rest of you—brief your departments, get your timings from Mr. Matlock, and get into your battle grays. We assemble in recreation in two hours. Dismissed.”
Out they went, obedient and quick and looking eager. Ael turned to glance at Jim, who said, “Cold feet, Ael?”
She stared at him. “My boots are fine.”
“I mean, are you—” He stopped. “What a stupid question. I beg your pardon. Come with me and I’ll take you down to the quartermaster’s department to be fitted and armed—”
“I have my own weaponry, Captain,” she said, “and I’ll do best with it, I think. But as for your uniform—I shall be proud to wear it.”
“Why, thank you.”
“…Just this once.”
“We wouldn’t want to keep you in it a moment longer than necessary,” Jim said, getting up with an utterly indecipherable expression.