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

by Diane Duane

  Sam put his eyebrows up. “I’ve done better than that,” he said. “I did opening submissions earlier today.”

  “What?”

  Sam smiled slightly and steered Jim and Spock toward one of the great windows. “There’s already been an initial session,” Cogley said, very quietly. “It’s usually the case in proceedings like this. The diplomats involved, the real ones or their representatives rather than the negotiators of title, try to get together and do a little sorting out before the official sessions start. Fox sent an assistant in early with instructions; the Romulans did the same. Establishing ground rules, feeling out the sentiments of the other party…the usual.”

  “Without telling us?” Jim muttered.

  “It’s how business gets done,” Sam said.

  Jim let out a long breath. “Well, we’re just here as enforcement, really,” he said. “I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that we hear about things a little late.”

  “That’s true. But I’ll keep you posted as best I can,” Sam said. “Though we don’t want to spend too much time together in public, so let’s keep this brief. Anyway, things are already going moderately well. I was able to throw a few procedural sabots into the machinery earlier. Though apparently that suits Fox’s intentions at the moment.”

  “Diplomacy,” Spock said, “is after all the art of prolonging a conflict.”

  “Prolonging it at the jaw-flapping stage, instead of the photon torpedo and phaser stage,” Sam said, “yes, indeed. If today’s been anything to go by, we’re doing well in that regard. We spent the better part of an hour just attempting to settle whether Commander-General t’Rllaillieu was extraditable.”

  Jim was slightly surprised. “I would have thought she was.”

  “Oh, that wouldn’t be at all certain.” Sam smiled with pure enjoyment. “See, the concept of extradition requires ab initio that the two jurisdictions agree in recognizing the action in question as a crime. Not the action as a class, mind you, the Federation side rejected that out of hand.”

  “You mean you rejected it and they jumped on the bandwagon.”

  “When the band’s playing the right tune,” Cogley said, “sometimes it’s hard to resist. But the Federation’s reaction to what happened at Levaeri V, when the Romulans started complaining to them about the destruction of their ships and their space station and its personnel, was fairly straightforward. Their immediate counterquestion was: ‘Well, what were you doing with all that Vulcan brain tissue? Oh, and now that we think of it, exactly what were you doing with the Starship Intrepid?’” Sam grinned. “From the Starfleet point of view, there wasn’t any crime committed. Enterprise and Inaieu and the other ships went in to recover our hijacked personnel and materials. Then the Romulans said, ‘But this woman has stolen one of our starships. We want it back.’ ‘Ah,’ Starfleet says, through Fox and his cronies, ‘but she’s applied for political asylum here, stating that what she did was an act of resistance against a corrupt government, and that she used no more than reasonable force to allow her and her crew to escape. And naturally all her crew have filed for asylum as well, and are backing her up in their testimony.’”

  Jim said nothing for the moment. The reality was a little more hazy, for Ael had applied for nothing, as he understood it. Starfleet’s agreement with her that she could take refuge in Federation space had been an informal one. They wanted to pump her for information about the Imperium, Jim thought, and didn’t find her terribly forthcoming at that point, so they never went any further in formally confirming the privilege. It was a matter that had made Ael, as Jim understood it, somewhat uncomfortable—not that she would ever reveal that discomfort to Starfleet. But now apparently someone had produced documentation to suggest that a request for asylum had been formally made and accepted. Or else someone had implied that such documentation existed.

  Very, very interesting…

  “Look, Sam,” Jim said, “stay in touch. We’re not going anywhere, and I’ll really be wanting to hear your slant on this thing as it unfolds.”

  Sam nodded, glancing sideways to see Commodore Danilov rather stiffly and quietly greeting Hloal t’Illialhlae, who herself seemed to be concentrating on keeping her face an absolute mask as she spoke. She might as well not have bothered; the way she was holding the rest of her body suggested her loathing and fury all too clearly. “I can understand that,” he said. “I’ll do what I can for you, and for her. But one thing, Jim. If there are going to be any sudden moves, let me know.”

  Jim nodded. “Do my best.”

  Sam took himself away toward Fox’s group. Jim looked after him as he went, and said to Spock, “I didn’t see what the book was.”

  Spock’s expression was difficult to read. “It was The Lives of the Martyrs.”

  Jim let out a breath. “Huh,” he said. “Well, come on, Mr. Spock. Let’s eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow—”

  Spock favored him with a look suggesting that he found the quote profoundly inappropriate.

  They headed for the buffet tables nonetheless. Jim was aware that it would probably be unwise for him to make a first move toward the Romulans. Like the other captains, he was aware that he was here on sufferance—for the rest of the negotiations he and the others would be aboard their ships, since their presence at the proceedings would certainly have been seen as potentially provocative by one side or the other. For the moment, Jim busied himself briefly with making a small tidy sandwich with some grilled and “pulled” stayf—heaven only knew where the Lalairu were getting stayf; for all Jim knew, they were cloning it themselves—and watching what McCoy would have referred to as “the group dynamic.”

  It was uncomfortable. At first the two groups did not have much to do with each other; each stayed mostly gathered to itself, looking at the others and making no overt move toward them. Caution, or xenophobia, under the guise of nonintrusiveness, Jim thought. Or a desire to have a more structured environment in which to meet than this… But the Lalairu were making no attempt whatever to bring the two sides together. Possibly they might have thought it a violation of their neutral role. Or perhaps they were simply wise enough to realize that sooner or later, curiosity would do for both sides what amity would have done in a less loaded situation.

  Fox, for his own part, was talking to a small, slender man in Romulan ground-forces uniform whom Jim did not recognize. He committed the man’s face to memory for the moment—dossiers with pictures and vids would doubtless be making the rounds shortly—and turned his attention elsewhere, to that tall, striking woman t’Illialhlae, again. It was truly astonishing how hostile she could look, how deadly. If she bit me, I’d want shots right then, he thought, trying to remember whether Ael had said anything about her. He couldn’t remember offhand, but the thought of shots suddenly made him wonder what McCoy was up to. And come to think of it, where was Spock? He had drifted off while Jim was assembling his second sandwich.

  Before he got started looking around, Jim moved over to one of the tables where drinks were laid out, picked up a decanter, and was pouring himself a small tot of Romulan ale when he felt a shadow fall over him. He looked up.

  Blocking the starlight was one of the tallest Romulans he had ever seen, a big bear of a man in an older-style military uniform with a sort of floor-length dark green tabard over it. The man had short bristly hair and a craggy, fierce, broken-nosed face. He was looking at Jim with an expression that, while hostile, seemed to embody an amiable kind of hostility, like that of one who admired the handsome colors of a bug prior to stepping on it.

  Jim straightened up and reacted to the look the only way he could, holding up the crystal decanter from which he had been pouring. “Ale, sir?”

  Those dark, angry eyes widened a little, and then the man bowed to him a little and said, “I take that very kindly.” He held out his glass.

  “Say when.”

  The man looked at him oddly. “Why?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I mean, tell me how much of this y
ou’d like.”

  The rough face split in a grin. “More than it would be wise for me to drink, at the moment. Half the glass, if you would.”

  Jim poured, privately considering that the day he drank that much of the blue stuff at one sitting would only be the day on which McCoy finally worked out the bugs in the removable-brain routine for humans. He briefly considered topping up his own glass and ditching it after he and this man parted company, then shrugged and put the decanter down.

  Jim raised his glass. “Your health,” he said.

  The Romulan studied him. “That’s something it surprises me that you would wish for.”

  “Common courtesy,” Jim said, “would seem to suggest it. Other healths used by officers of previous services”—he smiled—“would seem to be inappropriate here.”

  “And what healths would those be?”

  “Well, a typical one, in armed services where the officers did not usually advance much in position in peacetime, would be, ‘To a sudden plague or a bloody war.’”

  There was a pause, and then a great guffaw of laughter. It startled Jim, for he had never heard such a sound from a Romulan before. He had to laugh too, just at the sound of it; it was infectious.

  “Maybe,” the Romulan said, “maybe I see what the damned traitress sees in you.”

  “You have the advantage of me, sir,” Jim said, borrowing Bones’s phrase. “I don’t know your name.”

  “Gurrhim tr’Siedhri, they call me.”

  Aha, Jim thought, for that was a name he had heard in passing from Ael. The dossier on him would make interesting rereading, later, in view of this meeting. He looked thoughtfully at the Praetor’s uniform. “Space services, perhaps?”

  “Only long ago,” tr’Siedhri said, “when they were differently constituted than they are now.” Was that a breath of anger behind the nostalgia? “Now I am just a farmer.”

  Jim had to grin at that. “With all due respect, sir, I don’t think it was talk about farm subsidies that brought you here.”

  Tr’Siedhri’s eyes widened, and he produced that roaring laugh again. Heads turned around the room, and astonished eyes were fixed on them from here and there. Jim, looking past tr’Siedhri for a second, caught a glance from the t’Illialhlae woman. For once she had forgotten to keep her face still. Her glance at tr’Siedhri’s back suggested she would like to see some edged implement buried in it—deep. “Why, here’s fine news,” said tr’Siedhri, “that you know our local business, my local business, so well. The Praetorate must after all be as riddled with spies as they’ve been claiming. Indeed the odds are short that there’s anyone here who’s not a spy of some kind.”

  The phrase “guilty as charged,” used as a joke, occurred to Jim, but he decided it would be unwise to use it at the moment. “There must be someone normal here,” he said instead.

  “Au, the odds are still short,” said tr’Siedhri. “Has anyone here not in the military ever held an honest job? No, it’s just me, I fear, and little what’s-her-name there, the housekeeper-as-was: Arrhae i-Khellian as she is now.”

  “Meaning that she ‘was’ something else?”

  “Perspicacious,” Gurrhim said. “But we won’t speak of it. No, she’s noble now, that’s all that counts. They can’t take that from her, not even if they kill her. Once a Senator in ch’Rihan, always one—while you breathe, anyway.”

  “Breath,” Spock said from behind the captain, “can be as precious a commodity for a Senator, then, as votes?”

  The Praetor looked at Spock with another of those what-a-shiny-bug expressions. “Now here’s a wonder,” he said, “for who would have thought a Vulcan had any tittle of wit about him? But you too are slightly out of the ordinary as we reckon things. Votes, yes, Commander. The Senate depends on them. On our level of the House, we’re Praetor-blood as soon as we’re born. A sad state of affairs. No need or reason to prove oneself worthy of the position…just heredity on your side, and that as fickle and unpredictable an ally as it is for everyone else. Time passes, inbreeding sets in, the vigor of noble old houses runs out of their descendants like blood from a slit vein…” He shook his head. “Nothing is as it was when we were young.”

  It was a complaint Jim had heard often enough before, but rarely with such a clear sense that the person voicing it was grandstanding, and to some purpose. He wondered what the purpose might be, for this man, who as he understood it had a fearsome reputation as a warrior in the ground forces when he was young, and later made the difficult transition to the Fleet with distinction, reaching Ael’s rank before being called to the Praetorate and resigning all but a reserve commission. “Time, then, for the Elements to move toward reunion?” he asked.

  The look tr’Siedhri gave Jim was amusing. “Not just yet,” he said. “A few things to do before then…about which we will no doubt be speaking shortly.”

  “Not ‘we,’ I think,” Jim said. “I am far less senior than some of the people here, Praetor. One of our poets better described my present role, I fear: ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’”

  A small smile, a subdued expression, was the response, and it looked odd on this man, who seemed constructed for the big gesture and the exercise of power on a large scale. “Somehow,” Gurrhim tr’Siedhri said, “I do not think you will be kept waiting long.”

  He lifted his glass. “Live well,” he said, and tossed the ale back in one gulp. Jim blinked.

  The Praetor assumed a thoughtful expression. “Not a bad week, that,” he said, and picked up the decanter. “May I top you up?”

  Jim let him do it, aware of Spock’s look resting on him and on the glass, and considered that prolonging this exchange would probably be worth the headache later. Anyway, McCoy could always slip him something to detoxify him a little; if anyone knew how to treat a Romulan ale overdose, considering recent history, it was McCoy.

  “I should ask my friend to join me,” Jim said, attempting to put off for a few seconds at least the prospect of doing to this glassful what tr’Siedhri had just done.

  “Oh,” tr’Siedhri said, “surely a Vulcan would not—”

  “Surely,” Spock said, “not.”

  “It was my other friend I was looking for,” Jim said, turning away a little desperately. He was just going to have to drink the stuff down; there was no way out of it.

  “Indeed?” tr’Siedhri said, looking past Jim.

  Jim turned and saw McCoy. And someone else.

  The doctor was not ten meters away, looking absently at the stars through the nearby wall. In front of him, making her way from one group of Romulans toward another, as calm and unconcerned as a cloud passing in front of the moon, a handsome, dark-haired Rihannsu woman passed him by in a drift of robes that shimmered like midnight silk. The long, dark, delicate scarf trailing sashwise over her shoulder and floating gently behind her now slipped lazily down her back and whispered to the shining white floor, pooling there as still as a shadow gone truant.

  “Our other ‘normal’ one,” tr’Siedhri said, too softly for anyone but Jim to hear.

  McCoy heard the susurrus of the falling scarf, reacted with slight surprise, bent down, and picked it up. He strolled after her, and the sound of his footsteps brought her around.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” McCoy said, “you dropped this.”

  All this was happening, relatively speaking, away at the edge of things, but Jim, stealing a glance around the room, saw that some other eyes were now turned that way. One tall, thin woman by the door, in a long, relatively simple dark robe that would have passed for a very stylish evening dress in Earth society at the moment, was watching Senator i-Khellian very closely from behind a small knot of Rihannsu who were talking energetically about something else, oblivious to McCoy and the Senator.

  McCoy slipped the delicate silk through his hands once and then presented it to the lady, as if it were more a weapon than an ornament of dress. The Senator looked quizzically from it to McCoy, and her expression took on an air of faint dis
taste as she looked him up and down. “It is not as if I don’t have enough of them to be able to afford to lose one now and then,” she said to him, very coolly, “and do not need to ask you to bring them back to me. Indeed, the last time we met you were more eager to throttle me than to be of any assistance. This is a pleasant change. May it be the herald of other unexpected civilities.”

  She reached out and took the scarf from him, draping it over one forearm and giving him a nod of dismissal. McCoy’s bow was exactly that of a Southern gentleman being correctly polite to a lady who is being very correct with him. “At your service, ma’am,” he said, and waited for her to turn away before doing so himself.

  Off she went in her cloud of dark silk, and McCoy turned back toward the buffet table, seeing Jim and Spock there, and their sudden companion. He ambled over toward them, nodded to the Praetor, and picked up a glass. “Captain,” he said, “Mr. Spock.”

  “And so this is the other criminal,” said tr’Siedhri mildly. “Now my evening is complete, at least unless t’Rllaillieu should put in an appearance. Gentlemen, live well.” He raised his glass and drained it again.

  Jim did the same, only hoping that this time his eyes wouldn’t water. As usual, the hope was in vain.

  “Doctor?” said the Praetor, as McCoy filled his own glass.

  “Here’s mud in your eye, sir,” McCoy said, and knocked his straight back without having to be coached. A moment later he took a long breath and said, “You people are masochists.”

  “Au, no. Sadism, more usually, is our people’s vice,” said the Praetor. “This is merely self-abuse. Gentlemen.”

  He gave the three of them just the slightest bow and went off toward the middle of the room, where various Rihannsu were talking quietly with Ambassador Fox. Jim glanced around and could see nothing of the tall woman who had been watching Senator i-Khellian; everyone else seemed to be looking everywhere else.

  McCoy, meanwhile, was watching him with some slight concern. “You,” he said, “are going to have a head on you the size of a Rigelian’s in about an hour if you don’t get back to the ship and have a dose of Old Doc McCoy’s Famous Patent Nostrum for Overindulgence by the Diplomatically Minded.”