by Diane Duane
“This is more like it,” said Ensign Luks, pointing at the screen. The blue triangle representing the frigate was underscored by a rapidly scrolling column of data, and McCoy suspected he knew what it meant.
Aidoann confirmed it. “Avenger was in orbital shutdown until a matter of seconds ago, Commander,” she said, enhancing the image so that more information filled it. “They’ve just gone over to active status, while we are lifting clear…now.”
The ship jolted somewhat under McCoy’s feet and the viewer image reformatted, putting the schematic display up into a screen window overlaid on an exterior scan of Ra’tleihfi as the city dropped away beneath them. There were several columns of smoke crawling skyward, last traces presumably of those patrol-craft Ael had mentioned so scornfully. For all that he had to admire the courage of anybody who would attack something the size of a warbird with no more than a lightly armed atmosphere shuttle. It was very much more the traditional image of Romulan behavior than that which he had learned in the past days, and he wondered if it was typical because of the tradition, or traditional because it was a typical character trait. Whichever, it seemed entirely in accordance with the old custom of honorable suicide….
Bloodwing’s people began bustling about in the way that McCoy had seen so many times on the Enterprise, with the same quiet determination—and the same pre-combat nerves that were more or less well hidden.
“This could be fun,” said Luks, grinning again. McCoy snorted. He sat down at an empty station, closed the antiroll arms across his thighs in anticipation of a rough ride, and waited for the “fun” to start. Luks watched him for a second or two, then decided that there might be something to the precaution after all and followed suit.
“Power availability?” Ael said quietly.
“Minimal, Commander. Maneuvering on thrusters, no more. We can’t use impulse power in atmosphere, and the lift tubes—”
“Noted—but hurry it up. Photon torpedoes?”
“Armed. All tubes charged and ready.”
“Phaser banks…?”
“Locked on target. Standing by.”
“Shields?”
“Raised.”
“Screens?”
“Maximum deflection.”
“Bloodwing, this is Ael. Battle stations, battle stations. Secure for combat maneuvers. Success to you, and mnhei’sahe. Ael out.” She turned around and gazed with dry amusement at Ensign Luks, who had followed everything with the expression of someone whose dreams were coming true. “This is the ‘fun’ part, Ensign,” she said, lecturing him gently. “We are down here. Avenger, a more modern and more powerful ship, is up there, blocking our escape route. We must therefore dodge and feint until an opening presents itself, without getting blown up in the process, and without taking too long about it in case somebody recodes or overrides the defensive-satellite chain so that they’ll be waiting for us too. Enough fun for you?”
Luks had gone a little pale during Ael’s recitation, but he recovered fast. “You’ll run?” he said, plainly not expecting such behavior from Rihannsu, even renegade ones.
“Of course. Starting now.” Ael returned her attention to the tactical display, where Avenger was running at nominal capability. McCoy watched her, and saw irritation in every line of her body as she sat bolt-upright in her command chair, refusing to make use of its comfortably padded back.
The two ships were engaged in a slow-motion race for viable in-atmosphere power, and the first to get it would win. Normally starships with a landing capability could ascend from or descend to their landing fields only out of parking orbit, but the maneuvering thrusters for attitude control in zero-G dock could be adapted from normal configuration. Ael seemed to be silently cursing herself for not having it done earlier—or perhaps for not firing on Avenger when she first had the chance.
Except that doing so was not the Romulan way. Or, at least, not Ael’s way…
“Master Engineer tr’Keirianh, Commander: We have power…!”
McCoy saw Ael’s left hand relax from its fist as Bloodwing’s engineer made his jubilant report, then saw it clench tight an instant later as she looked at the screen and realized that Avenger’s engineer was probably saying exactly the same words. The schematic flipped out to fill the screen again, and more figures began to flicker across it in pursuit of the tiny ship-silhouettes. Then Bloodwing jolted as if she had hit something—or something had hit her.
“Phaser fire, atmosphere attenuated.” Aidoann, at the helm station, transferred the screen to visual again; below was a gray-green-brown blur of land, and above, in the gray sky, were the fading bluestreak traces of hard radiation sleeting from the track of Avenger’s phaser beams. “Returning fire—”
“No!” Ael was most decisive, and although a lesser captain might in very truth have struck fist against seat arm, she allowed her voice to do that work. “Not until we reach space,” she said. “I will not take that responsibility—”
This time Bloodwing bucked like a high-spirited horse with spurs struck into its flanks, and McCoy felt the familiar sensation of being pitched in three dimensions at once. For just one instant he thought that he could hear the thunderclap roar of some huge explosion, although that might have been the tinnitus brought on by the implant in his brain. Or he might indeed have heard the sound of a photon torpedo detonating in sound-bearing atmosphere.
“Tr’Annhwi’s mad,” said Ael flatly. “O Elements, to use a torpedo so close to ch’Rihan…” She glanced back at McCoy and Ensign Luks, spared a smile for Naraht, and tightened the smile to a ferocious grin. “Enough. If he was obeying the rules of war, it might be worthwhile to keep running, but he’s thrown out the rules of common sense as well. Take us up!”
Bloodwing leaped for space with Aidoann and Hvaid performing a two-part chant of countdown before cutting in the impulse drive. It was a fine-spun line they traveled, for using impulse power in atmosphere would not only shatter windows over hundreds of hectares, it would probably cause widespread molecular disruption of the planet’s ozone layer. That was the sort of thing which tr’Annhwi’s casual use of heavy weapons might have caused already—there was no way to be certain, and only one sure way to stop it from happening again.
“Confirming: phasers locked. Firing.”
Needles of fire spat from the warbird as Avenger’s vulture shape swelled ever larger on the screen—superimposed now with gunnery and targeting data—and the long, lean, wide-winged shape vanished behind expanding globes of incandescent energy before slashing through them with her shields barely affected and delivering not one but a salvo of photon torpedoes straight at Bloodwing.
“Evasive,” snapped Ael. It was already engaged, if speed of response was anything to go by, and McCoy felt the gravity grids flutter along a 3-G variant curve during the maneuver stresses, and then cut out completely for a long half-second when the volley of proximity-fused torpedoes exploded beneath and behind them, flinging out enough wild energy for the screen to black out completely as it filtered the glare. Bloodwing’s phasers opened up again as Avenger twisted past at .25c less than eight klicks away, an impossible point-blank full-deflection shot that still succeeded in bracketing the other ship.
Avenger flipped over, belly-up like a dead shark, and for an instant it seemed that she was beginning the long tumble that would end only when a scratch of brilliant light flared and faded across the Romulan night sky. Then she completed the roll and corrected the plunge planet-ward, skipping across the outer envelope of atmosphere with a flare of friction-heated particles dragging in her wake, opened momentarily to full impulse power, and came back at Bloodwing yet again.
“These damned Klingon gunnery augmentation circuits should be—” Ael said fiercely, and didn’t bother completing the curse.
McCoy watched from his seat, listening and trying to remain as detached about this as he had been about the death sentence in the Senate Chamber. It was difficult; space battles, even this unfamiliar dogfighting at low impulse
speeds, were situations in which familiarity did not breed contempt so much as terror. Evidently some Klingon-built improvement to Bloodwing’s phasers was proving ineffective against Avenger, a latest-generation warship built by those same Klingons.
For an instant the high-mag image of tr’Annhwi’s ship ran head-on toward Bloodwing, wingtip phaser conduits glaring intolerably bright as they spat destructive energy. The screen became a Bosch vision of Hell seen through a stained-glass window in the nanosecond before it filtered down to impenetrable black, and Bloodwing shuddered under the flail of sequential direct hits.
“Commander,” said Aidoann calmly, “shields four and five are now reduced to sixty-five percent efficiency, and the progression curve indicates failure after three more strikes.”
Ael nodded. “What about Avenger’s present status?”
“Sensors indicate a shift in energy consumption; they’re channeling more power through the weapons systems. Shields are holding at…eighty percent of standard.”
“Oh. I see. Typical of him. And in that Klingon scow too. Well, let’s see it catch us when we go into warp and—”
A communicator whistle interrupted her. “Engineering, this is tr’Keirianh. Can you give me seven standard minutes to put this mess back together?”
Ael looked at the speaker/mike with an offended, betrayed expression, and McCoy looked at her. She was not a lady who liked her words suddenly made hollow before they were fully spoken, even by a chief engineer whose problems and requests sounded very familiar.
“Do what you can, Giellun,” she said after a glance at the tactical repeaters, “but I can’t promise you so much as seven seconds….” And then she turned right around, as did McCoy, to stare at movement where right now no movement should have been.
Ensign Luks was standing by his chair, looking confident, eager, determined—and scared stiff. Oh, God, thought McCoy, another space cadet! “Sit down, son,” he said aloud. “This isn’t your affair any more than it’s mine.” Luks stayed where he was, and gave no sign of even having heard McCoy. All his attention was directed at Ael.
“If you need seven minutes, then you also need a diversion,” he said. “Clear the cutter for takeoff.”
There might have been surprise in Ael’s mind, or confusion, or disbelief, or scorn. “You’re going to die,” she said matter-of-factly.
Luks shrugged at that, then grinned broadly. “Maybe—most everyone I know will too. But not right now. Not me. I’m the best you’ve got.”
“Son,” said McCoy, “did you take the Kobayashi Maru test?”
“Yeah, I did, sir.” Another grin. “Tried it once, and didn’t like it. It’s such a downer.”
“But worth remembering.”
“Not for me—I like something a bit more cheerful. Catch you in ten minutes or so, Doc. You can buy me a drink.” Luks grinned some more, until McCoy wondered whether some muscle rictus was at work. “But don’t leave without me on that account.”
He headed off with Hvaid, whistling some catchy tune or other that McCoy couldn’t place. Bloodwing shuddered again, and orange warning lights began to flash on the ship’s-schematic board. Evidently tr’Annhwi’s scanner officer, that overly keen Subcenturion tr’Hwaehrai, had noticed the weakness in Bloodwing’s shields, because those last shots had hit fair and square on the damaged sectors and reduced them to barely forty percent effective.
“He’s away!”
Bloodwing’s screen flickered to a new image as Luks’s cutter shot from the rearmost hangar-bay and darted straight at Avenger like a mouse attacking a lion. Avenger sheered off with enough violence to threaten her nacelle integrity, though whether it was because of the incongruity, or the unexpectedness, or the ferocious salvo of fire from the cutter’s single phaser mounting—or because it was so very definitely a Federation cutter—nobody on Bloodwing knew.
Luks was the best, McCoy decided—or if he wasn’t, he would do until the best arrived. He flung his little vessel about the combat area, raking Avenger with insignificant but probably infuriating blasts, and then disobligingly evading the response. And he was having fun, which was more than McCoy could say about his own part of the mission. Well, that’s what he wanted, isn’t it?
“Engineering, report. How go the repairs?” Despite her coolness while he was here, Ael watched Luks’s gadfly attacks on the screen and nipped the tip of one finger between her teeth. Since the cutter was launched, Bloodwing had gone unscathed as her opponent concentrated planet-cracking firepower against a ship no bigger than one of its warpdrive nacelles. “Engineering…?”
“Two more minutes—maybe less.”
“One. That’s all. This…performance…can’t last much longer.”
There was a silence at the other end of the channel, but it still had the unmistakable hiss of an open carrier. Ael stared at it, her finger poised over the recall button on her personal comm board. Then tr’Keirianh came back, coughing and breathless but sounding very pleased with himself.
“The mains are back on line, Commander. Up to warp four at your discretion.”
“Not enough—but it’ll have to do. Bring that young fool back in here and—” Her words stopped short when a phaser beam as thick as the cutter’s hull clipped Luks’s ship and split it open. “Oh, no!”
McCoy was on his feet, fingers gripping the padded arms of the station chair so tightly that they had sunk through the skinning and into the foam beneath, watching fragments of metal and plastic sparkle in the light of Eisn. Avenger cruised disdainfully through the cloud of glittering slivers, and swung with ominous deliberation back on Bloodwing’s trail. He knew the risks. That was the only coherent thought his mind could form right now, and it was totally inadequate for—
“Bloodwing…?” Luks’s voice was weak, and not just because of a poor transmission signal. McCoy had heard too many mortally injured men not to recognize one now. “Bloodwing, you still there…?”
“This is Ael, Ensign. Yes, we’re still here. We shall use a tractor beam and—”
“—and nothing! Get out of here before that…” His voice trailed off and there was silence for so long that Ael leaned forward to cut the connection. Avenger was forgotten just for these few seconds. By Bloodwing’s people, anyway. Not by Luks. “I’d as soon not…be their guest,” he managed to say. “And you folks deserve some peace….”
There was a click as he cut the connection, and everyone’s eyes went to the main viewscreen, dominated by the predatory outline of tr’Annhwi’s Avenger. The brief flash of an attitude thruster was noticeable only because it took place in the warship’s shadow, but the consequence of Ensign Luks’s decision was going to be enough to cast shadows of its own as far away as ch’Rihan.
His crippled cutter drove like a piloted torpedo straight into the nearest of Avenger’s nacelle pods and cracked it wide open, letting in space. The matter and antimatter of two warp-capable ships combined, uncontrolled. A blink later there was nothing but a single globular spasm of destruction as furiously radiant as a nova. It expanded, pure white light, impossible to look at. It would not fade for hours.
On board Bloodwing the main viewscreen swung away from the blinding light to the cool starfields that surrounded 128 Trianguli. Nobody said a word to McCoy for what felt to him like a very long time, until Ael touched her communicator gently. “Damage reports?” she said.
“The shields took all of it—whatever it was, Commander.”
“Good. Prepare for warpspeed. Aidoann, you know the course, through the Federation Neutral Zone, and…and he left his codes programmed into the navigator’s station. Implement warp four on my command.” Ael sat back and closed her eyes, looking very tired. When she opened them again, it was to gaze steadily at McCoy, who gazed as steadily back.
“Well,” he said.
“Or ill. But his choice. Our peoples have more in common than either of them choose to see. You’re the doctor. Tell me, how long to cure the blindness?”
“I don’t have
that answer for you, Ael,” he said softly.
“I thought not. Too long for my lifetime, at least. Or if they listen to your little Arrhae, maybe not so long after all. Aidoann, Hvaid, warp four. Take us away home.”
Epilogue
“They will be convinced, Doctor,” said Ael. “Rest assured of that. I saw what Lieutenant Rock left of two or three who stood up to him”—Naraht shuffled and rumbled, plainly not proud of himself—“and any who faced him with that knowledge in mind would surely be either heroic or insane. From what you say, Arrhae ir-Mnaeha is a most self-possessed young woman. She will have them dueling for the privilege of lacing up her sandals.”
“Um.” McCoy rolled neat ale around in a chunky crystal glass, staring at its color and feeling pretty blue himself. “I keep thinking about her. And about Luks…”
The postmortem on the day’s events had run on long into ship’s night, without really getting anywhere but back to the beginning again. Food had been prepared, toyed with, and nibbled at, but for the most part ignored in favor of wine and ale. Lots of both.
“He was all fire, that one,” Ael said quietly, “they burn bright, and burn out. He knew what he did, and he did well. Leave him his brightness. The Elements did not mind doing so.”
The Sword lay on Ael’s side of the wardroom table, a reminder of events past and events yet to come, but more cutting even than the Sword’s edge was another empty chair where Ensign Luks was meant to sit. “Turn down an empty glass,” McCoy said, drained his, and did.
“Knowing that one, he would rather you filled it and drank,” she said, “but you’ve done enough of that for any three Terrans. I think”—and she pulled the ale bottle and the winejug across the table and out of his reach—“that these belong where you can’t get at them. This is not medical advice. This is the owner of the drinks-cabinet speaking.”