Star Trek: The Original series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages

by Diane Duane

“Little enough, though they make such a great noise about his value as a starship officer. But there are indications that some in Starfleet are becoming weary of Enterprise’s officers in general, not just her captain, and wish they could be rid of them.” T’Radaik smiled. “Possibly the only goal we share. Mak’khoi’s being sent on this mission of espionage may have been a way to reduce the number of those officers by one. In any case, at least one of the Federation spies on ch’Rihan was instructed to try to make contact with Mak’khoi while he was here, passing him certain information about the Empire. He failed to make that contact. But he also failed to sufficiently cover the tracks of his attempt to make it. We caught him, and he gave us the information he had been preparing for Mak’khoi. Now, having examined it, we desire the data to reach Mak’khoi…suitably altered. That information will come by him to Bloodwing…and once there, will do its best work.” Her smile was that of a woman enjoying this prospect entirely too much.

  “For all this trouble,” Arrhae said, “I hope you may be sure of that.”

  “Oh, we will be informed promptly enough when the information has come where it needs to be.”

  Will you really? “Well,” Arrhae said, trying to sound offhanded about it as she put down the cup, “this sounds as if it will not unduly affect my honor. I will find a way to pass the chip to Mak’khoi, should he present himself.”

  “We are sure he will,” t’Radaik said. “The first night of the meeting with the Federation starships, tomorrow night, there will be a social occasion—” Her look was sardonic. “As if one can be social with such vile creatures, half aliens, half animals. Nonetheless, we will go along with the charade, and at this meeting you will certainly have the opportunity to speak with Mak’khoi, and to pass him the material in question.”

  A soft chime came from the office: the alarm that Arrhae had set in her computer. She reached for the lap-cloth by her plate, dusted her hands with it, and stood up. “Very well,” she said, and very rudely turned her back on t’Radaik, going off to fetch her carryall for the meeting she was about to attend. “See to the package’s delivery, then. You may go.”

  The door hissed open. Arrhae turned and just caught sight of t’Radaik’s back going out. As the door closed again, Arrhae permitted herself just the slightest smile. She detested that woman, and she suspected t’Radaik had known as much before Arrhae ever opened her mouth. No harm in letting her know she is right, Arrhae thought.

  At least, she hoped there would be none….

  It was summer in that hemisphere of Samnethe, and the weather had been holding fair for some while: hot and sunny, the sky piled high with good-weather cloud. In and out of that cloud, the rakish and deadly shapes of Grand Fleet shuttles could be seen all day, ferrying troops and equipment up to the birds-of-prey, the great starships presently in orbit. Now it was sunset, the heat of the day cooling. Mijne t’Ethien leaned against the fiberplas surface next to the door of the group shelter where she and fifty others, men and women, slept together since the government warnings of imminent attack had gone out, and the ingathering to the secure site at the planet’s main spaceport, Tharawe. The hum of the place that one heard all day, from the habitués of the other five thousand houses of fifty, always began to hush down as dusk crept in. Now, in that peace, with her washing done and the daymeal inside her, Mijne leaned there and looked past the security fence toward the spaceport field, and was filled with wonder. Early that morning the sky had been full of the ugly swooping shapes of Klingon vessels, of phaserfire and the shriek of impulse engines. Now it was empty and peaceful again, and only the occasional shuttle going about its business broke the silence.

  “They beat them,” Mijne said to herself. “It is a miracle.”

  Behind her, a rough old voice said, “It is the dawn of a disaster; one which will start tomorrow.”

  Mijne turned to look at her grandfather with a mixture of annoyance and fondness. He had been predicting disasters since the two of them had been brought here. “Resettlement,” the government had called it, “due to a state of emergency.” “Internment,” Amyn tr’Ethien had muttered when the message came down the terminal on that rainy morning, “as a matter of expediency.”

  “Don’t be silly, Grandsire,” Mijne had said then, and she said it again now. She had been annoyed at having to shut up the summerhouse just after it had been opened, but it seemed foolish to rail against the government’s attempts to keep them all safe, and there was no protecting a population scattered as thinly across a planet as Samnethe’s was. The growing Grand Fleet presence stationed at the planet would have had to fly all over the place, patrolling living area and wasting its resources and manpower. It made much more sense to gather them all together where some security could be found. “The Klingons, it seems, hit our defenses as hard as they could, and couldn’t break through except to destroy a few hangars and small ships on the ground, not even anything important.”

  “You believe that, do you,” her grandsire said. Mijne rolled her eyes. She did not mind being the last member of her family alive to take care of him; one had, after all, a duty to one’s House. But he could be annoying sometimes, and since they came here he had embarrassed Mijne with his outspoken opinions and his doomsaying a goodly number of times.

  “Why shouldn’t I believe it?” Mijne said, walking away from the common house.

  He walked away with her, linking his arm through hers, plainly knowing her intention—to get him away from there before he embarrassed her further in front of those with whom they were currently rooming—and clearly amused by it. “Granddaughter,” he said, “when was the last time you were near a news terminal? Not that those are to be entirely trusted, either.”

  She laughed. “Grandsire, you’re so paranoid.”

  He laughed at her too, shaking that head of shaggy silver-shot hair. “Consider it one of the side effects of venerable old age. But what have you to base the statement on, except rumor?”

  She rolled her eyes again. He was in one of his pedantic moods tonight. “It’s all we’ve got, at the moment.”

  “But not necessarily better than nothing,” he said. “I have lived a long time, Granddaughter, and I—”

  “—have seen many things,” she said in unison with him: mockery, though not entirely unkind. “All right, then, you old fortune-teller, you old stargazer. Tell me how the Elements have decreed that events shall fall for the next day or so.”

  They had walked a short distance away from the common houses over the beaten-down, dusty ground; he looked at her, smiling slightly, and wouldn’t answer. They kept walking into the cool of the growing dusk, in the general direction of the security fence.

  He stopped, and she did too, and together they looked toward the low, dimly seen line of the hills twenty miles away. “What a lovely evening,” she said, “even down here in the heat.”

  “Yes, it is,” he said. His eyes were raised higher, to where a bright-burning point of light hung over the hills: Erivin, the only other planet in the system besides Samnethe, closer to the primary than Samnethe was, and its evening star at this time of year. “The last evening, for me.”

  She looked at him, wondering what he meant. “Oh, Grandfather! Don’t tell me your heart has been paining you again.”

  “Not at all.”

  “And the Klingons aren’t going to come back! They’ve been beaten. Everything is going to be all right now.”

  “Is it.”

  She looked into his face, confused.

  “Granddaughter,” he said, “tomorrow everything changes. Tomorrow is the day our status shifts. And I do not know if I will survive it.”

  “What?”

  He patted the hand which lay over his, and walked her on a little ways. “When I was in Grand Fleet, on outworld patrol, in the ancient days,” Mijne’s grandfather said, “I saw how our ground ancillaries behaved when things needed to be repaired in a hurry. I grant you, it’s hard to see the port well from here, especially the way they keep
opaquing the fence during the day. But they have the fence on automatic timing now, and they’ve misjudged the time of twilight, which is why we can see that as well as we can. Just look at it.”

  They gazed out toward the port facilities. The landing surface was all pockmarked with holes and craters and huge long gashes gouged out by phaser blasts.

  “Tomorrow,” Mijne’s grandsire said, “we’ll be told to go out there and start repairing that. Or else we’ll wind up as ‘replacements’ for other automatics around the base that were damaged and cannot be repaired. We will prove our loyalty by faithfully serving those who have oppressed us.”

  He grinned. The grin was feral. Mijne thought she had never seen such a ferocious look on anyone, and she was certainly at a loss to see it on her old grandsire, who had spent her childhood spoiling her and giving her treats, and whose voice she had never heard raised.

  “Oppressed us?” she said. “Grandfather, you’re—” She wouldn’t quite say “mad.”

  “Oh, come, Granddaughter, surely you don’t believe they rounded us all up and brought us here to protect us!”

  “But they said—”

  “Of course they did. Free, though, and in our homes, we can’t be controlled. With the planet going about its business as usual, there are too many ways we threaten this base’s security. For we’re mostly Ship-Clan folk, aren’t we?—not really to be trusted, different from other Rihannsu, as they like to think, another breed, possibly disloyal. So they distrust us from the start. But also, our world’s in a bad spot. We are a long way from the hearth of the Empire, and the Empire would hate to see Samnethe’s privately owned shipbuilding facilities falling into the Klingons’ hands, while the employees are running around free in the neighborhood, available to be simply swept up and put to work for the Empire’s enemies. So instead, the government rounds us all up, the whole workforce of this planet which really has no other industry worth speaking of, and puts us where it can keep an eye on us, while this attack is handled, and the government thinks about what it wants us to build for them…never mind what our industry cooperative thinks. Should it look as if the Klingons might somehow get the upper hand here, well…someone can make sure that this particular highly skilled workforce is never taken by them as slave labor.”

  “And a good thing, too! I would die rather than be a Klingon’s slave, or any being’s!”

  “Quite right,” her grandfather said. “Quite right. But wouldn’t you rather be free to make that choice for yourself, Granddaughter…rather than have it made for you?”

  She stared at him.

  He kept walking gently along. “Well, if we are lucky, it may not come to that. The military may be telling the truth for once, or some of it. Though I doubt it. Sooner or later, though, we’ll come to the real reason they’ve put us here. We will be forced to start work at the base. After that, they will find other work for us to do—either shipbuilding again, on their terms and pay—if any pay at all—or something less pleasant, maybe not even on this planet. And our durance will not end until this not-yet-declared war ends…and maybe not even then.” He raised his eyebrows.

  He was so calm and matter-of-fact about all this that, to Mijne’s horror, she was beginning to believe him. “But—I don’t see what we can do,” she said at last. “They are the government.”

  “We are Rihannsu,” her grandfather said. “We can refuse!”

  She stared at him, fearful. “But our duty—”

  “Is not to follow stupid orders blindly,” her grandfather said fiercely. “Or orders that blithely destroy the freedom our long-ago ancestors brought us here to enjoy at such cost to themselves, after they in turn refused to be other than they were. How should we have become so craven as to acquiesce to our own enslavement? Our government has no such rights over us, of internment, of forced labor. And yes, they will say, now and afterward, it was an emergency, we are fighting for our lives, we will make it up to you later, all your rights will be restored to you!” He gave her an ironic look. “Do you believe that?”

  To her horror, Mijne found she didn’t. In the last few years she had become troubled by some of the things she saw on the news channels, reports from the outworlds of mass arrests, “security problems,” purges of local governments. Then, over the last year, she had seen few such reports, almost none. At first she had thought, Good, things are quieting down. But then a small voice had started to say, in the back of her mind, Are they really? Or are the news services simply not telling these stories anymore? And if not, why not?

  “This system and others like it will shortly be the front line of a war,” her grandfather said softly. “And we can only hope that those in the other colony worlds have not yet forgotten how to die for what they believe in.” He let out a long breath. “For that is what we will have to do now.”

  “‘We’—”

  “I am a grandson and a twice-and three-times great-grandson of engineers,” her grandfather said, stopping now, looking up at that evening star as it slid toward its setting. “Our ancestors and their families left safety, in the ancient days, to bring the rest of our people here. We risked our lives to do it. We died with the ships that died, and in some of the ships that didn’t. Now it looks like some of us will have to die again.”

  His voice was curiously calm. Now it even began to sound amused. “But not in vain, I think, for the Empire’s own greed has sown the seeds of what will now begin to happen. It wasn’t enough for them to tax us for the privilege, when we desired to spread out into the new worlds discovered after ch’Rihan and ch’Havran were settled. They sited the shipbuilding facilities on the new outworlds, and made us pay for those too. They made us staff them locally, and pay the staff ourselves.” He smiled. “And then, when the exploration ships our more recent ancestors built in turn found new, livable worlds, they taxed us for landing and living on those as well, and those colonists in turn had to pay for and run the new shipbuilding facilities established on the second-and third-generation worlds. Did they never think what they were doing?”

  “Grandsire—”

  “Mijne, listen, just this once. Greed blinded them—or else the Elements did. The Empire forced the tools of our future independence into our hands…and then made them all the more precious to us by forcing us to pay for them, yet withholding true ownership.” That feral grin appeared again. “What people need to see at all costs is that we are not powerless…for we are still holding the tools.”

  “To do what?”

  “We will have to ask our people, and find out,” her grandfather said. “Meanwhile…”

  He stood still and silent for a few moments more, while Mijne shook in the growing cold.

  “One can always say no,” he said, as the evening star winked out behind the hills, and the fence went opaque again.

  The next morning they were all called together for the usual morning mass meeting in which duties and details were announced. The base commander himself was there. “Considerable damage has been done by yesterday’s Klingon attack to base facilities,” the commander said. “Immediate repairs must be begun on the landing pans, repair cradles, and cranes if we are to carry the attack to them effectively, or repulse the next one.” People looked at each other dubiously. “Next one”? The word had gone out that this had been a victory, that the invaders had been driven off, and the rumors had gone on to add that within a few days everyone would be able to go home and pick up their lives where they had left off. “To facilitate this goal, by order of the Empire, work crews will now be formed from the camp’s population, consisting of everyone between ages sixteen and one hundred fifty. You are required to form up in groups of one hundred, by registration numbers. Officers will be detailed to each group to describe your duties and work hours. When a project is finished, your officer will inform you of the next project to be begun. Starting with these numbers—”

  There was some muttering among the great crowd, but it was muted. The officer seemed not to pay any attention to
it, merely kept reading his numbers. The crowd, like a live thing, hesitated, then started to drift apart, fragmenting itself.

  One fragment, though, moved through it, in a straightforward direction very unlike the uncertain motion of everyone else. He made his way out of the crowd, clear of the other people, and stepped out onto the bare concrete, stepped out of it, toward the officer. The officer, looking up and seeing him, stopped, puzzled.

  The old man drew himself up quite straight, quite tall. In a voice sharp and carrying as the report of a disruptor bolt, he said:

  “I will not serve!”

  The crowd fell deadly silent.

  Mijne blanched as the officer lowered his padd and stared at her grandsire. He’s a hundred and ninety, he doesn’t have to serve, Grandsire, what are you— “Grandsire!”

  The officer looked at her grandfather in apparent bemusement. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said,” her grandsire said courteously, as if anyone within a half mile could have failed to hear him, “I will not serve!”

  The officer looked at him. Then he looked at one of the security people off to one side, and muttered something.

  The security man lifted his disruptor and fired.

  The scream of sound hit Mijne’s grandsire, and he went down like a felled tree.

  She ran to him, fell to her knees beside him. Between neck and knees he was one great welter of blood and blasted flesh. Her grandsire looked at her with eyes clear with shock. “Did he hear me?” he said.

  “He heard you,” she said, weeping.

  Her grandsire stopped breathing. Unbelieving, Mijne looked up, looked around. All that great crowd looked at what had happened…then slowly, slowly began to drift apart again, into groups.

  Mijne got up and walked back among them, only very slowly getting control of the sobs that were tearing at her. After a while she managed it. She went to the group she was supposed to be with, and did the work they were given, filling blast craters with rubble; and that night they all went back to their common houses, and a great silence fell with the dark.