by Diane Duane
The bundle contained three of the most priceless S’hariens on the planet, two of which had been thought to belong to kings, and one to the High Councillor, himself a bitter enemy of Surak’s. How Surak had come by the swords no one ever found out, though various Vulcan families have (conflicting) tales of a shadowy shape who came to them around that time and begged them for “their sword’s life.” There was argument about keeping the swords, at first—they had after all come from Surak, and there were sore hearts who wanted no gifts from him: gifts, they said, bind. But S’task said a few quiet words in the swords’ behalf in meeting, some nights before the ships left, and put the issue to rest. In time the travelers came to treasure the S’hariens greatly, as a gift from their most worthy adversary, and as beautiful things in their own right, but most of all as a symbol for the ancient glory they were leaving behind.
The S’hariens were, after all, “swords of the twilight,” made in the style of the swords of the ancient Vulcan empires, by methods that no one but S’harien had been able to reconstruct. But those empires were long gone, and the planet was even now a far calmer place than it had been in those times of enormous ferocity and splendor. If Surak’s teachings took hold, as all the travelers now felt sure they would, then Vulcan would become quieter still. They would take the swords with them to remember the old Vulcan by—the energetic, angry, beautiful, whole Vulcan, all blood-green passion and joy that dared death, laughing. They took the swords though it was their enemy who gave them, and though the man who made them would sooner have seen them destroyed than in Rihannsu hands (or indeed any other). The sword became both the cause and the symbol of the Sundering. It was the sword that parted Vulcan. It was the sword that would eventually draw the two sundered parts together over the years, though neither side was to know that as Rea’s Helm glided away from Vulcan and Charis, leaving its one stave behind it in the dark.
Perhaps those angry hearts in meeting were right. Perhaps gifts do bind. Or perhaps, despite millennia, blood is enough.
Chapter Five
Arrhae had never before been so happy to be dismissed. Her thoughts were still in a whirl as she pattered downstairs more quickly than was proper, wondering, What to do? What to do? in a sort of frantic litany. Her hands were shaking and she couldn’t make them stop, her heart was pounding far too fast, and for one horrible moment she thought that she was going to be sick right there and then.
The nausea passed without shaming her, and Arrhae leaned against the wall, pressing her head to the cool stone and feeling a droplet of sweat ooze clammily from her hairline. “Calm,” she said. “Control.” Then whimpered in sudden terror and clapped one of those shaking hands to her mouth, for the words had come out in Anglish.
This time she was sick, making it to the Elements-be-thanked ’fresher just in time. Arrhae sat for some minutes on the floor, shuddering and feeling wretched, before she felt capable of even turning on the disposal-sluices. Poor tr’Aimne. If this is what he felt like in the flitter…
That memory of ordinary everyday things, which seen now were neither, and never truly had been, helped to get her shocked mind back into some sort of coherent working order. Rinsing her face and her mouth with cold water, and feeling much better for it, Arrhae started to think of what had to be done. Not about McCoy the Federation officer—if that was truly what he was—but about Mak’khoi the prisoner, and where she was going to put him.
The storeroom, obviously—but had it been cleaned yet? Aired? Heated? She had a sneaking suspicion that none of those things had been done, and why? Because she, hru’hfe of House Khellian, had preferred to gape at visitors like the lowliest scullery-slave rather than be about her proper business.
There, that feels more like it.
Arrhae’s mouth quirked with annoyance. Half an hour ago she wouldn’t have needed to consciously review her thoughts like that—and wouldn’t have been thinking in Terran Anglish either! All of her acclimatization was ruined, and she had a feeling that she had already given herself away to the Terran—
—No, his name’s McCoy, and he’s not a “Terran,” he’s one of my people…!
—But I’m Arrhae ir-Mnaeha t’Khellian, and he’s one of the enemies of my people!
“O Fire and Air and Earth,” she moaned softly, sitting down again and wrapping her arms around the legs that were suddenly too weak to hold her up. Arrhae closed her eyes and rested her head on her knees, rocking backward and forward, backward and forward, no longer even sure of how to make her prayers. “Ohhh, God help me….”
When it came, as come it must, the brief storm of weeping was shocking in its intensity and for a time left her drained of all emotion. That at least was good, for it meant that she could be cold and rational for a while, before her mind began to churn again and the terrors came flooding back. Arrhae washed her face a second time, straightened her rumpled clothing, and eyed herself critically in the burnished metal mirror.
“Ihlla’hn, hru’hfe,” she told the reflection. You’ll do. For now, anyway.
She channeled all of that pent-up nervous energy into organizing a scouring-squad for the new “secure quarters.” The next half hour did nothing for Arrhae’s popularity among the servants, but a great deal for her reputation as a maniacally efficient slave driver. Not that she shouted, or struck anyone. There was no need for such crude methods when her tongue and vocabulary seemed to acquire fresh cutting edges, new depths of subtlety, and new heights of eloquence. Even while they cursed her name and ancestry under their breath, more than one of the house-folk laboring with mops and cleaning rags were making mental note of some superbly original insult for their own later use….
Arrhae had at first hoped she wouldn’t be able to think of private matters if she allowed the fine fury of cleaning-supervision take her over, but she was wrong. There was always a voice tickling at the back of her mind, demanding that she attend to everything it had to say. Finally she switched over to automatic, at least where the cleanup was concerned, and began to listen in the hope that once heard, the words from her subconscious would go away.
“…Please sit down, Lieutenant Commander Haleakala…”
“…fed in the program parameters, and yours was one of the first names to come out.”
Commodore Perry had been more than courteous in the hour or so since she’d been ushered into his office at Starfleet Intelligence Headquarters; the big man had been downright kindly, taking pains to disarm her nervousness—which had been more obvious than she liked to think—before starting to explain why she’d been pulled out of xenosociology aboard Excalibur at such short notice.
“Romulans,” she said. Just that. It was more than enough.
Perry nodded, touching the molecular fiche on the desk in front of him with one fingertip. It was tabbed with a data scrambler and the yellow/black/yellow-on-red of MOST SECRET, EYES ONLY information, almost the highest security level in Starfleet and certainly the highest that she’d ever shared a room with. “They call themselves Rihannsu. And that’s just about the only reliable information that we have. Everything else”—he flipped one hand dismissively at the air—“is educated speculation at best and wild guesses at worst. We need to know more. Much more.”
“‘Know your enemy.’ Is that it, sir?” Oh, very bold, Terise. Tell him you disapprove of the word “enemy” now, why don’t you?
“In one way, yes. But not in such simplistic terms as you seem to be implying, Commander.”
Ouch…! “Noted, sir.”
“There are a few agents already planted in the Romulan Empire; ninety-plus percent are Romulans themselves, and what information we glean from them is military—which would be all very well if we were planning war. If we were, say, Klingons. But what we want, and what the Federation needs, is a basis for understanding these people.”
Perry glanced at something that flickered across the readout at one side of his desk, punched a couple of buttons to acknowledge it, and lifted one of the data chips that sat i
n an impeccably straight line beside their scanning-slot. “Vaebn tr’Lhoell,” he said. “One of our Romulans, and a good, reliable agent. There’s just one problem. The Romulan agents are too—too Romulan. They were born to and brought up with aspects of their culture that we can’t begin to comprehend, and they can’t explain them to an outsider any more than a bird could explain the sky. Only a deep-cover agent can do it, and physiology restricts us to either Terran or Vulcan. Even then, Romulan physiology is Vulcan rather than Terran; that much has been learned already. So where necessary, there’ll have to be…” Perry’s voice trailed off as he hunted for an appropriate term.
“‘Cosmetic changes’?” Terise suggested. “And that’s why”—with a sudden flash of brilliance—“my name came up in the personnel scan.” Terise had a full name that sometimes felt yards long, a dusky complexion inherited from a Polynesian mother and an Italian father, and a facial bone-structure all her own that was sharp enough to split kindling. Several of her less lovable schoolfellows had called her “the Vulcan” because of it, although that had stopped once she graduated to Starfleet Academy and there were real Vulcans in the classes with her—as well as Andorians, Tellarites, and weirder species who departed from the bipedal hominid norm. Xenopathic screening of the student body also had something to do with it. Small use crewing a starship with half-a-dozen races and not making sure they wouldn’t be at what passed for one another’s throats before their first mission was a week old.
“Quite so. And you require fewer, er, changes than most. The ears, obviously, will need slight remodeling”—Perry cleared his throat noisily, now more ill at ease than she was, and Terise came very close to patting his hands in reassurance. “Hemoplasmic pigmentation tagging, primary craniofacial restructure…? Who the hell wrote this? We’re talking about people, not refitting a starship!”
“Commodore, I don’t mind; truly I don’t. If I’d been that thin-skinned, I’d never have survived high school. And sir, you’ve got at least one volunteer.” All the words came out in a rush, the comforting inconsequential ones and the ones that might end up killing her. When it was done, Terise sat up very straight in her chair and swallowed, hard. That was such a cliché, but there came a time in everyone’s life when only the tried and trusted gestures felt sufficiently adequate, and this was such a time right now.
“You do understand what you’re letting yourself in for, Ms. Haleakala? Or is that Ms. LoBrutto? I’ve been presuming you don’t use the hyphen, either. Excuse me….”
“Yes and no, Commodore. Yes, I know what I’ll be going into, and the prospect terrifies me—but I’m a sociologist by profession and nobody trained in that discipline would ever pass up an opportunity like this.” Terise hesitated over that sweeping statement, wondering if she should add except the ones who want to live and decided not to bother. Instead, she smiled wryly. “And no, it is hyphenated. You got it right first time.”
“Thank you. For that and other matters. But I’m not logging your acceptance until after you’ve been briefed on the setup.” Terise’s eyebrows must have shot up involuntarily, because the Commodore looked at the security-blazoned fiche and then grinned at her. “Don’t worry, Commander. What I’ll tell you isn’t anything like as confidential. Not at all. You won’t be asked to sign anything in blood.” He grinned again. “Not yet; not until it’s green.”
Terise made the sort of hollow laugh that would have sounded more genuine had she simply said “ha-ha” and been done with it.
“Quite so,” said Perry. “But keep your sense of humor—you’re going to need it.” He dropped one of the data chips into its slot and keyed a string of characters. There was a momentary mosquito-whine, and sparkles of color sleeted across his desk readout as the monomolecular scanner kicked in.
“Authorization?” it said.
“Perry, Stephen C., Commodore, UFP Starfleet Intelligence Corps, CEG-0703-1960MS.”
“Accepted. Data up and running.”
“Good.” Perry caught the “was that all?” look on Terise’s face and nodded. “Yes, Commander, that’s all—for this information at least. Getting at the other…Not so simple. Anyway, this is the game plan for this particular play, and I warn you right now, you won’t like it….”
“…like it?”
“Eh?” Arrhae jolted back to the bad dream that was real life, wondering who had been saying what. The who was S’anra, one of the scullery servants, and the what? had been repeated for Elements alone knew how many times.
“Hru’hfe, all here is finished—do you like it?”
She came back to awareness quickly enough after that, and glared around with the expression of someone expecting to find the work done poorly if at all. Instead, and to her unvoiced surprise, it had been done well. The floor, first brushed then scrubbed, had finally been polished brightly enough for Arrhae to see her quizzical face reflecting back from its tiled surface.
“Excellent,” she said, genuinely pleased. “All of you have done well—and by that, done honor to our lord. My word as hru’hfe on it, I shall name all your names to him, and speak highly of them. S’anra, Ekkhae, Hanaj, you three attend to the furnishings—and, by my order, commandeer as many strong backs as you need to carry things. The colors and the patterns”—Arrhae hesitated, and made her hesitation plain. Only her decision was made plainer—“I leave to you.” She smiled thinly at them, a lesser servant and two slaves entrusted with something she should attend to herself. “I may have to change things—but I would think well of you if I could leave all as I find it.”
She looked around the storeroom while the servants filed past, confused by the warmth of her words but giving her profound reverences because of them, and she thought of how soon it would be a prison cell, and suppressed a shudder. Hangings of fur and textile relieved the starkness of the room’s plain walls and gave a certain primitive splendor to the rough-hewn stones. Only the high-tech look of thermotropic heaters and incantube lighting made the place seem any different from the dungeons in the old tales of T’Eleijha and the Raven. Stories that Arrhae had loved to watch or hear, whenever she had the free time for either.
Stories that were no more than alien folklore to Lieutenant Commander Terise Haleakala-LoBrutto.
Commodore Perry had been right. She didn’t like it. Neither the plan, nor the execution of it. Had she not made a promise to herself before she volunteered that she wouldn’t back out no matter what, Terise would have put in for an immediate transfer back to the Excalibur right after Perry told her what would be expected of her. No matter that the M-5 combat exercise didn’t sound much fun, it didn’t sound dangerous either.
This did.
Starfleet’s basic plan was that she learn as much Romulan data and language as they had on file and then be seeded on one of their Romulan double agents as a sleeper, for fine-tuning before becoming an active deep-cover operative.
The realities behind the plan were less simple: for one thing, the language-tutoring would have to be a form of chemical-enhanced speed learning, and while that was highly efficient in its own small way, it was also the means to a three-day migraine headache that matched the Big Bang for intensity. Terise knew all about that, because to her lasting shame she had used it for illicit revision at college. Once…On all the other occasions she had done her assignments the way they were supposed to be done, and been thankful that any headaches earned had just been little ones.
But it was the prospect of sleeper-time that she really didn’t like. Starfleet’s knowledge of the Romulan language was restricted to what clipped military communications the Neutral Zone spy-satellites were able to monitor—and that wasn’t anything like enough.
So she was going to be a slave. The ancient sold-into-bondage, chain-on-the-neck—“I gather it’s been refined down to a sort of dog collar with the owner’s name and address on it,” Perry had told her in an attempt at comfort—sort of slave who was one degree up from the domestic animals because slaves usually didn’t need to b
e told things more than once….
Granted that her master was to be Vaebn tr’Lhoell or one of the other Romulans who would only pretend to treat her as property, the whole notion still made Terise feel twitchy. What if anything goes wrong? had been her first thought. After she had heard how she was to be “sold as unsatisfactory” to a more highly placed household once tr’Lhoell was certain that she could conduct herself as a native-born Rihanha, it had been her final thought as well.
How final that thought might turn out to be, Terise didn’t like to consider. Certainly matters had proceeded apace once she had insisted that her acceptance of the mission be placed on record; almost as if somewhere high up in Starfleet there was a fear that she would back out if given enough peace to reconsider what she had done.
Terise was just a little bit uneasy at the speed with which she assimilated Romulan. She knew of the dangers confronting deep-cover operatives in hostile territory, and those dangers were not always a result of being caught. Sometimes the greatest hazards lay in not being detected, and in adapting too well to the role of an alternate personality. There was the standard cautionary tale of the longterm prisoner who tried to escape from jail by simulating madness, and who succeeded so completely that when he was released, it was into the care of an insane asylum. Such risks were not usual during an ordinary tour of duty in the lab of a starship, but this was no tour, and nothing about it was ordinary.
The name they gave her soon replaced her own—for the simple reason that no one at the Intelligence facility ever called her anything other than Arrhae ir-Mnaeha. Terise/Arrhae found the supposedly cumbersome Romulan names easy enough to manage, because only a few of them seemed to have more syllables than her own…or the name which had been her own and which was now fading away like a dream after waking. And they all had a meaning, which made the actual understanding of them a relatively simple thing once the language structure was shoehorned into her brain. But the shift in mindset necessary for that understanding, and for the many, many other things that intelligence people had spent so long briefing her about?