by Diane Duane
Another brief silence, but the dalwhin outside sang no more. “You said nothing of these misgivings before we stood up before the Senate and proposed the mission,” Urellh said. “I question whether they are not rather recently assumed…possibly in the wake of the failure of this ‘rogue element.’ The actions of which are themselves an act of war, in contravention of the treaty—so that any protection we might have had from that tattered rag of a document is lost to us now. I think it only right that your creatures in the diplomatic mission should be allowed to assume the responsibility for explaining it to the Federation negotiators. You are to count yourself fortunate that the fools will most likely accept the explanation, since they know so little of what passes among our worlds…the Elements be praised. Equally it will be fortunate for you, in the long run, that they know nothing of the package that will soon be on its way to them; for this nasty little business has at last decided that destination. That only will save your skin, when all the reckoning is done after the battle is complete. And meanwhile—” He got up, walked around the table, and put his face quite close to tr’Anierh’s, nearly close enough to be an insult—though not quite. “It was an act of the most utter folly, meant to make me look a fool,” said Urellh, “and I will not forget it.”
He stormed out, and slammed the door behind him.
Tr’Anierh stood there until he heard the outer door close again. Then he breathed out a long breath, and went back over to the bookshelf and chose another pile of bound codices to reorganize.
Honor, tr’Anierh thought. Urellh had not said mnhei’sahe; he had used the lesser word, omien. Tr’Anierh considered that. It came to him that very few people seemed to say mnhei’sahe anymore. It was as if the word hurt them somehow. Even he himself avoided using it; perhaps not to be seen distinguishing himself too obviously from others, as one championing virtue—that was a sure way to cause your enemies to go tunneling like kllhei for proof that your virtue was a sham.
But then the word always did have edges. And held incorrectly…it cuts….
He started making, in his mind, a list of the people he would need to call in the morning. Urellh was a bad and sore-tempered enemy when he had been crossed. Sometimes these moods passed off him quickly; sometimes they did not do so at all, or took long months to abate. At the moment, that could be a problem. Tr’Anierh thought about what to do…
…and about the seven ships.
Jim sat up in one of the briefing rooms for a long while, late that night, after leaving the rec deck and seeing Ael down to the transporters and back to Bloodwing. He was looking at the maps of the Federation, the Klingon Empire, and the Romulan Empire, and he was thinking hard.
The room was one of those with a big holographic display in the middle of the table. There Jim had sketched out for himself in the display, in red, a five-parsec sphere around the spot where the Rihannsu were scheduled to cross the border tomorrow. The larger portion of the task force that had been sent to do escort duty would meet them there and bring them into Federation space, to the spot selected for the rendezvous. Then the extra ships would depart, leaving the numbers equal at the rendezvous point, and talks would begin.
Jim looked at that red sphere now and thought, Why here? The Romulans had specified where they intended to cross the Zone for these talks. The Federation had made no counteroffer.
And why not? Jim thought. That by itself struck him as a failure. Your opponent wants to do something—you force him to do something else. Partly to see how he reacts. Partly to make sure you stay in control of the game. But for some reason, Starfleet had not reacted to that particular move. It was as if they had conceded something early, something they didn’t see as particularly valuable, in a larger strategy.
For his own part, Jim had played too much chess with Spock—2D, 3D, and 4D—to much like the idea of conceding moves to anyone, especially first moves. They were strategically as important to him as later ones. And any move that did not advance your game, push you into your opponent’s territory and threaten him somehow, was a wasted move. Wasting moves was criminal.
There was nothing terribly interesting about this part of space. It was largely barren. But a lot of Triangulum space is like that, Jim thought, until you get in further. There were richer spaces, better provided with planets with suns, and developed planets at that, in the Aries direction. But that whole area was also much better provided with Federation infrastructure. There were two starbases there, 18 at Hamal and 20 at gamma Arietis / Mesarthim; each was well provided with weaponry of its own and a large complement of starships, and Starbase 20 and its starship complement had the additional advantage of being staffed by the Mesarth, probably one of the most aggressive species in the Federation (“except for humans,” Spock had once commented rather ruefully). If I were a Romulan, Jim thought, I wouldn’t waste my time going that way. Too much resistance….
But it still left him with the question: Why here?
Jim looked at the map for a while more. Leaving aside the issue of the “diplomatic mission,” which he thought was as likely to be the spearhead of an invasion force as anything else, Jim was also thinking about the seven ships that Enterprise and Bloodwing had met at 15 Trianguli. Someone was willing to take the chance of throwing away seven capital ships, he thought, for something. And not just for Ael. Redoubtable as her reputation was, seven ships just for Bloodwing made no sense. They were even too much for Bloodwing and Enterprise together.
Someone wanted to test our preparedness, he thought. If they got her, too…fine. But something else is going on. They wanted to test this area, not just the area over by the rendezvous point.
Jim leaned his chin on his fist and looked at the hologram, telling it to rotate so that he could see the way the Klingon and Romulan Empires interpenetrated one another. The only “regular” boundary in the area was the Neutral Zone, which was a one-light-year-thick section of an ovoid “shell” with Federation space on one side and Romulan space on the other. Elsewhere, bumps and warts of Klingon and Romulan territory stuck into and out of the main volumes of the two Empires with great irregularity where they bounded one another. The contact surfaces suggested many years of the two players playing put-and-take in that part of space.
Jim stopped the hologram and instructed the viewing program to zoom in on the Neutral Zone. As he did, the monitoring satellites became visible, scattered fairly evenly along and across the Zone’s curvature. Now, were those ships detected coming across the Zone? Jim thought. And if not, why not? What’s the matter with the monitoring satellites and stations?
Is it possible one or more of them have been knocked out, or sabotaged? By whom? And why wouldn’t we have heard?
He pulled his padd over and made a note on it, one of many he had made while studying the map. And if the ships were detected crossing, he thought, why weren’t we alerted by Starfleet?
Jim tossed the stylus to the table and looked at the map again. The satellites were much on his mind. If we have here some program of sabotage that has been in preparation for a while and is now ready to be tested…was this possibly the first test?
If it was…what will their reaction be when their seven ships don’t come home again?
He kept looking at the map. Could it be that what we’re looking at here, Jim thought, is an intended breakout in two different places? One in the area where the “diplomatic mission” will be—and one over here by 15 Tri? It will, after all, have the “New Battle” cachet…. One of his Strat-Tac instructors, years ago, had mentioned to him some strategists’ tendency to overlook a possible location for conflict because there had just been one there, the idea apparently being that an enemy was as unlikely to immediately fight twice on the same battlefield as lightning was to strike twice. This was, of course, a fallacy. A smart enemy, if he had the resources to waste and the brains to pull it off, might stage an unsuccessful battle on likely ground in order to tempt an unwary adversary onto it for a second and more murderous passage at arms. Y
ou’d have to wonder why they were bothering with this one spot, though, Jim thought. Either because they’ve been assembling matériel close to it, or because it’s convenient to something else.
The Klingons, maybe? 15 Tri was convenient enough to the area where the Neutral Zone, the Klingon Empire, and the un-Zoned part of the Romulan Empire drew close together. A lot of scope for confusion there, Jim thought. Suppose the Romulans break out there—and instead of coming for us, swing around and attack the Klingons from our direction. Then duck back into the Zone in the confusion of the war that’s already going on elsewhere, near the rendezvous point, say, and maybe somewhere else along the Zone as well.
The hair stood up on the back of Jim’s neck. Two-front war, he thought. Bad. Very bad.
So that’s one possibility, he thought, sitting back in his chair. And there’s another. One of these two breakouts is a feint, to distract us from something more important happening somewhere else.
He sat looking up at the map. You must assume that they are preparing some great stroke against you, Ael had said. Revenge…
And they’ll have more reason for it than ever, now, Jim thought. Seven more of their ships, we’ve written off…with their own weapon, too. He touched the tabletop and started the map rotating again, more slowly this time. I need information we probably aren’t going to be able to get, he thought. I need to know what Rihannsu resources are sited over here at the moment. He looked over at the area where the two Empires ran together near the Neutral Zone. And what’s been moved into that area recently…
Again, information he probably wasn’t going to get, certainly not over an open channel from Starfleet. Not that he didn’t want to talk to them anyway about the status of the monitoring satellites, and those seven ships.
Those ships…
The idea that there should be a leak to the Rihannsu from Starfleet upset him profoundly. But at the same time, such leaks could be used to the advantage of a commander in the field…if you fed the correct information into them. You might be able to track the leak by where the information came out, in what shape. And even if you couldn’t, your opponent would be misled…with results that you could turn to your own advantage.
Jim sat there a long while. Ael will be back in the morning, he thought, to look in on that conference with Scotty and K’s’t’lk. This is the last chance we’re going to have to confab before we have half of Starfleet looking over our shoulders.
Time to make our plans….
“Jim,” said McCoy’s voice behind him.
“I thought you’d turned in,” Jim said.
“No,” McCoy said. “Just off having a talk with Spock.”
Jim raised his eyebrows. “Anything I need to know about?”
“Ael.”
“What else,” Jim said, and yawned, and rubbed his eyes.
McCoy came to sit down by him, and looked up at the map. “Yes,” he said. “I thought so.”
“And what’s your tactical assessment, Doctor?”
“That you’re about to head straight up the creek without a paddle.”
Jim would have phrased it a little more strongly. “Bones,” he said, “thank you. I’ll call the Strat-Tac department at Starfleet and tell them you said so.”
McCoy’s look was unusually gentle. “Jim, listen to me. The way you’re heading, you are shortly going to be caught in between Bloodwing and Starfleet again. It’s not like you to make the same mistake twice.”
“Well,” Jim said, “you can put your mind at rest on that account, Bones, because this time I wasn’t the one who made it.” He looked up at the map. “They did.”
“Starfleet?”
“They did not send Enterprise to meet Bloodwing here just because they know she and I are…” He was about to say “friends,” but the word suddenly seemed both likely to be completely misunderstood, even by Bones, and completely inaccurate, for reasons he could barely describe to himself. He looked up to find McCoy looking closely at him. “Associates,” Jim said.
“And in some ways,” Bones said, “very much alike.”
“That may be so,” Jim said. “But they expect me to find out what she’s going to do—or worse still, to anticipate it—and to act on what I discover, in Starfleet’s best interests.”
“And can you do that?” McCoy said.
“It’s not a ‘can,’” Jim said, “as you know very well. It’s a ‘must.’ My oaths to Starfleet are intact, Bones, and I intend to keep them that way.”
“But at the same time…”
“She has her own priorities, Bones,” Jim said, settling back in the chair. “She wants peace…but she knows the only way that’s going to happen, on the Romulan side of things, is war, and sooner, rather than later.” He was quiet for a few moments. “I’m short of less slanted data at the moment, and I’d welcome some. But right now there isn’t any.”
“There may be some,” McCoy said, “when the Romulans arrive.”
Jim raised his eyebrows at that. “Oh?”
“Just a guess,” McCoy said, “but I would be very surprised if at least one of the sources Starfleet’s been gettin’ its data from was not on that mission when it turns up.”
Jim eyed McCoy thoughtfully. “Medicine is a creative art,” Bones said, “just like command…and doctors get hunches the same way starship captains do.”
“I hope you’re right,” Jim said. “Anyway…” He looked up at the map again. “Ael is a realist, if nothing else. I think she knows as well as I do that the situation, as it’s presently shaping up, will result in war, no matter what she does. Equally from the realist’s point of view, she has decided to play the active role, not the passive; to take control of the forces that are looking toward her now, as a catalyst, and to use them.”
Jim slumped in the chair and rubbed his eyes again. “Yup. She’s a catalyst, all right,” he said.
“Nuhirrien…” McCoy, very softly.
“What?”
“You said people there were looking toward her. That’s nuhirrien, almost literally,” Bones said. “It’s Rihannsu. Charisma, we would say…the quality of attracting people, of being followed by them.” He let out a long breath.
“I keep forgetting, you did that chemical-learning course for the language.”
“Sometimes I still wish I hadn’t. I can’t even look at a bowl of soup anymore.”
Jim thought about that, and resolved firmly not to ask why. “Anyway,” Bones said, “nuhirrien is a dangerous characteristic, for Rihannsu. Dangerous for Ael, too, if it seems she’s got it.”
“Why?”
“It’s more associational than anything else,” McCoy said. “The Ruling Queen had nuhirrien, they say. People would follow her, the way they once followed Hitler, centuries ago.”
“Into tremendous evil,” Jim said softly.
“Sometimes. It can blind people to the realities.”
“We’d better hope it doesn’t come to that,” he said. “Bones, was there anything else? I’m about done here.”
“Just so you know,” McCoy said, “that, despite the imponderables…we’re with you.”
Jim stood up. “It’s worth knowing,” he said.
He killed the display and made for the door, with McCoy in tow. “You know,” Jim said, “you’re the one who should be talking to her. You’ve got the language, now.”
“She’s been avoiding me,” McCoy said as they went down the corridor, “or so it seems.”
There was data, and a piece that Jim wasn’t sure what to do with. “Well,” he said, “see what you can do about it. Choices are going to have to be made thick and fast around here in a couple of days, and I don’t have all the information I need as yet.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Bones said as Jim paused outside the turbolift, and its doors opened for him. “Meanwhile, you should get some sleep. Early meeting in the morning.”
“Yes. Good night, Bones.”
“Night, Jim,” McCoy said, and the turbolift doors sh
ut on him.
“Deck twelve,” Jim said. The lift hummed upward.
The big end of a court-martial, Jim thought, and shivered.
Chapter Five
If there was one thing Arrhae had not been expecting about going to space, it was having very much room to do it in. Long long ago, in another life (or so it felt), she had been used to fairly cramped quarters on starships; not unpleasantly so, but you wouldn’t have room in your quarters for a game of nha’rei, either. Since then, in all her life as hru’hfe in House Khellian, the sense of her personal life as something lived in a fairly tight, small space had been reinforced to the point where she simply forgot about the possibility of things being any other way. On becoming Senator, and more senior in House Khellian than any servant, things had changed…though again, not to extremes, the house was richer in honor than in space.