by Diane Duane
“Klingons, perhaps,” Urellh said.
Armh’n shook his head. “There were no signs of combat. The cities were simply abandoned wholesale, and not in a hurry; residences were empty of possessions, industries had been stripped of all but the biggest equipment. If the missing Kavethssu should be in one of those ships…”
The three of them looked at one another in considerable concern. “There could be thousands of them,” tr’Anierh said.
“Tens of thousands,” said Armh’n.
“Or more,” said Urellh.
“We cannot let them get near either ch’Rihan or ch’Havran,” said Armh’n. “Ships we could have handled. But that many troops? Never.”
“Ch’Rihan is more easily defended,” Urellh said. “There are plenty of troops here, and using the orbital mass-transport facilities at Grand Fleet headquarters, we can put them anywhere on the planet we require within a single rotation period. If we need extra warm bodies to throw at the invaders while we deal with their ships, the civilian population can be mobilized. But as regards the Havrannssu, their mobilization had better start now—both as defense and preventive measure, should rumors of Gurrhim’s status start to spread. Send as many army units over as possible and round up the city populations, issue them weapons, prepare them to resist the landings.”
“They will not be willing,” Armh’n said.
“They will be willing enough with the ground forces’ disruptors pointed at their heads, and their children in safekeeping to guarantee their enthusiasm,” said Urellh. “So let us get that matter in train. There then remains only the question of what to do with that wretched woman when we do get our hands on her at last.”
“Kill her and be done,” tr’Anierh said.
“Certainly that’s too easy a fate for her now,” said Armh’n. “For look how far she’s come. Even if we recover the Sword now, and put it back where it belongs, everyone who looks at it is going to immediately think, ‘Once upon a time someone stole that, and then returned with it to the very heart of the Empire, trying to make it all her own. Someone could do that again.’ We need to make certain that any image of the Sword has that woman’s shed blood associated with it. Her death must be public, prolonged, excruciating, and shameful. And with that in mind, our fleet’s main priority must be to take whatever ship she’s in, extract her from it, and get her offside somewhere until we can deal with the invading vessels. Once she’s known to be in chains in Ra’tleihfi, the rebels on both worlds will realize that the only way to buy their own lives back from us is to repulse the invaders. Without her, Kirk and Enterprise will depart. Without her, the crews of the rebel ships will have nothing left to follow. They—”
Urellh’s communicator went off in his pocket.
He frowned furiously, and tr’Anierh began to suspect that he had been too quick to judge the other’s inability to work himself into one more rage. Urellh pulled the communicator out of his pocket, keyed it awake.
“Have I not told you never to—” he said to the air, but then he broke off. “They have what?”
The other two looked at him curiously.
“That cannot be the case. It is probably another software failure like that little one we had last—”
He broke off again. Tr’Anierh and Armh’n looked at each other with surprise as they saw sweat start to pop out on Urellh’s forehead.
“How long until they are operational again?”
A silence.
“Well, what about the satellites on the other side? We should still be able to—”
He held still, looking out through the window at the night. “That’s very interesting,” Urellh said, quite low. “Yes. Yes, well, see what else you can—All right, go on. I am done.”
Urellh slowly put away the communicator and just looked sightlessly out into the night for some moments. Then he turned to Armh’n and tr’Anierh.
“The monitoring satellites in the Outmarches have ceased to answer,” he said.
Tr’Anierh looked at Urellh and started feeling something like panic crawling at the bottom of his gut. It made no sense. The news that there were about to be enemy ships, alien ships, in Eisn homespace tomorrow, should theoretically have affected him far more direly. But those satellites had always been a promise of a kind of security—a physical reaffirmation that, even at their least understandable, other species could be dealt with to a certain extent, successfully held at arm’s length. Now even that old certainty was starting to crumble.
“Good Elements all about us,” Armh’n said, getting up from his bench. “Who has done such a thing? The Federation? The Klingons?”
Tr’Anierh shook his head, starting to go colder still. “The Klingons would seem the more likely culprits. Why would the Federation be involved? They insisted on those satellites, they were an integral part of the treaty, so long ago. They would hardly—”
“I would tend to agree with you,” Urellh said, deadly quiet, “since apparently the satellites on the Federation side have gone silent as well.”
The three of them stared at each other. Tr’Anierh’s mouth was going dry.
“Klingons,” he said. “And to think we had such plans of playing them off against the Federation. Now we see what their intentions are. They will let these damned rebels reduce what’s left of Grand Fleet to scrap, and when that’s done, they will descend on us right here in our own homespace and take the Empire for their own.”
But Armh’n was shaking his head. “No,” he said. “Don’t you see it? The Federation satellites are gone too. Don’t you realize what this means?”
The other two looked at him, uncomprehending. “Have you already forgotten the Starfleet vessels at Augo?” Armh’n cried. “They’ve destroyed the satellites themselves, to make sure neither we nor anyone in the nonmilitary parts of the Federation is able to tell what’s going on in this part of space—and now they’re on their way here! The task force they sent to Augo was simply there to test our ability to defend ourselves against an incursion by enemy forces. They found that ability poor. Now, with oversight from their soft-minded civilian populations cut off, with no way for evidence of what’s about to happen to reach the Federation worlds, Starfleet is coming here in force to deal with us once and for all. Perhaps with the Klingons as well. And perhaps…” He trailed off. “Perhaps this is because they have found out about the device.”
“They have not,” tr’Anierh said. “If they had, they would right now be spending every available resource to destroy it, and they have not. Our own spies in Starfleet have told us so. It remains hidden, as it must until it is activated just before its strike. You must keep your nerve, Armh’n. This is ill news, but hardly the worst.”
There was silence in the room for a few minutes as each man contemplated his own vision of what “the worst” looked like. “This is all moons’-shine until we have better data that is not three-quarters subjective evaluation,” tr’Anierh said. “Meantime, Grand Fleet is mobilized. The admirals will be meeting with us in the morning. The defense satellites are primed and fully manned. There is nothing we can do now, except wait our time.”
“And consider our options for leaving here when the enemy—”
“No,” tr’Anierh said. “That is something I will not do. Nor, by the way, will you be permitted to do.”
Tr’Anierh saw the looks of shock, of anger, on the others’ faces, and had a brief moment of wicked pleasure as he watched those faces work and change. “After the business at Augo,” he said, “I thought perhaps I had been paying too little attention, not only to my own security, but to the question of our joint accountability. So I asked some of my own staff to ‘exceed their instructions’ and ‘get carried away’ regarding the way the control codes are handled for the final activation of the nova bomb.” He smiled. “You will find that they can no longer be independently activated. All three controls must be activated within a second of one another, all three must be no more than two arms’ length from one another, and
all three must be activated from within ten miles of the city limits of Ra’tleihfi.”
The other Two of the Three stared at him, aghast. “If you had been a little less intent on saving your own skins at the expense of mine,” tr’Anierh said, “and a little more intent on saving this Empire rather than abandoning it until it was bombed into a shape you better liked, who knows, you might have anticipated and prevented this. But now the culpability, if nothing else, will be a little more evenly distributed. Now you will be more intent on the preservation of the heart of the Empire than you have been, if you are at all concerned about the ‘last great blow’ truly striking home. And if in the process you have been paid in your own coin for your duplicity…” Tr’Anierh shrugged. “I, too, get carried away sometimes. But it will not be happening to me this time—or not me alone. Should it finally happen, believe me, you two will be carried away along with me, one way or another.”
Neither Urellh nor Armh’n had a word to say. “So,” tr’Anierh said. “Let us consider how and where best to meet the attack.”
Through the long night of inner Rihannsu space the armada made its way, slowly growing as it went. It had met no resistance since Augo, and that worried Jim.
It also worried him that he had an armada, though theoretically it should have been a delight. And indeed, at this point, the night before their engagement, everything was worrying him. To be one of the movers of so massive a chunk of history would possibly be more enjoyable after the fact—if he survived it, and if he didn’t screw up. But the night before the engagement, as Jim studied the battle plan, and revised it and revised it again, there seemed to be so many ways to screw up that he found himself increasingly willing to be relegated to footnote status.
Jim sat at his desk and paged back and forth through the display on a padd, revising, adding a thought here, changing a troop disposition there, consolidating a couple of movements in another spot. There should have been another attack, he kept thinking, as he corrected and altered and shifted minor puzzle-pieces around in his master plan. This would have been a great time to hit us, just to keep us off balance, to give us something extra to think about. Why haven’t they even sent some light craft out this way, some skirmishers?
He rested his chin on one hand, studying the screen. Do they really just not have the equipment to spare? Or are they suckering us again somehow? The paranoia was biting him hard, now. All these people on all these ships…some of them have to be Rihannsu agents. After all, if, on as little a ship as Ael’s, the crewman who was almost her best friend could be an agent, a person well known, absolutely trusted…
He sighed and put the thought aside one more time. There were many more things to deal with. Jim told the padd to send the latest copy of the plan over to Kaveth and Tyrava and Bloodwing, and then pushed back and stared at his desk, the viewer, the padd. He hardly saw them. What he was seeing was the space around Eisn. The positions of the twin worlds this time of year in relationship to the other uninhabited planets in the system, the orbit of Grand Fleet’s headquarters around ch’Rihan, the defense satellites, the ships that would be awaiting them, their dispositions…
He closed his eyes and rubbed his face wearily.
The comm beeped. Jim reached out and hit the button. “Kirk here.”
“Jim,” McCoy’s voice said. “I have a message for you from Tyrava.”
“What?”
“Veilt says, ‘Tell your vhai’d Captain to stop obsessing and leave us be for the night!’”
Jim sighed. “It’s all very well for him—”
“Yes,” McCoy said, “it is. And he’s right. So shut up and let it lie for a while. Come on down to rec and I’ll give you some of Old Doc McCoy’s Overwork Remedy.”
“I don’t feel like drinking, Bones.”
“Of course you don’t. But it was a kick in the pants I had in mind. Just get down here before I send security for you.”
There was no arguing with McCoy in this mode. “Ten minutes,” he said. “Out.” He got up.
His door buzzed. “Come,” he said.
Spock was standing there. “Captain,” he said.
Jim grinned ruefully. “The doctor—”
“—is, as the idiom would have it, ‘throwing his weight around,’ yes,” Spock said. “We can do little but comply at such times.” He looked at the captain’s padd. “Before he spoke to me, I was about to contact you about your last draft of the plan.”
“Was there something missing?”
“Captain,” Spock said, “reading it, I was reminded of the ancient Vulcan proverb about the masterpiece. It says that a minimum of two entities are required to create one: one to hold the brush, and the other to hit the first on the head with a hammer when it’s finished, because the holder of the brush so rarely can tell that it is long since time to stop.”
Jim’s grin widened. “You two are ganging up on me again. All right. But before you ask,” he said, only losing a little of the grin, “the answer to the question you haven’t asked is: Scared. Scared to death.”
Spock tilted his head a little to one side. “If you are planning to become a telepath, Captain, there may have to be changes in our watch-standing schedules. It can be most disconcerting hearing another being think on a regular basis.”
Now Jim’s grin went wry. “Have you been to see Scotty and K’s’t’lk yet?”
“I have.”
“And how are they doing?” Jim went over to the closet to get out one more uniform tunic. It was astonishing the kind of sweat you could work up with nothing but a padd and a stylus.
“As regards the transporter interdiction,” Spock said, “very well indeed. Mr. Scott’s staff have installed his equipment on both of the Great Ships, and Mr. Scott has tested the field-generation system out to about fourteen thousand kilometers. It does not focus particularly well, but it does not need to. Even a small transporter malfunction is sufficient to render those working with a transporter most unwilling to use it until the malfunction vanishes.”
Jim pulled the new tunic on. “Good. How about the jamming?”
“The modalities the Free Rihannsu forces were using at Artaleirh should serve us again,” Spock said. “I have been working with some of the technical staff on Tyrava to improve the volume of space that can be affected. While it is possible that the ch’Rihan-based Rihannsu will have jamming of their own that will be as effective, we have been equipping every party of the mobile forces with at least one of the low-tech comm pods you set Mr. Scott to construct.”
“Just hope they don’t figure out in time how to jam them too.”
“Captain, as technologically advanced a people as the Rihannsu are not only unlikely to immediately recognize the technology we will be using, but unlikely to be able to come up with a quick answer to the problem. Their sciences have been deeply affected by their mindset, and by and large they have been increasingly directed, not toward exploration or analysis of the new, but management and control of situations already extant.”
“All right,” Kirk said. He headed for the door, taking a deep breath and almost wishing he didn’t have to ask the question the answer to which was going to scare him the most. “And about the nova bomb?”
Spock shook his head. “I have heard nothing from my father as yet,” he said as they left Jim’s quarters, “but then I would not expect to. The return message would have to come directly, rather than by boosted relay as it went out, and there would be a considerable delay. We can only hope that Sarek has been able to reach the President in time.”
Jim sighed. “And then he’ll do…what?” He shook his head. “You can’t destroy what you can’t see. And they won’t uncloak that thing until the last minute, I’m sure of it.”
Spock nodded. “However, as regards getting that news to Earth, Mr. Scott and K’s’t’lk have begun testing the new settings for the resonance inducer, but with an additional purpose in mind, not just the disruption of a star’s seeding or of the detonation of the nov
a bomb, though they are still concentrating on that as well. They feel that they may be able to use the equivalence-induction technique on a star to transmit a message directly to Earth’s solar system, via the sun itself.”
Jim raised his eyebrows at that as they paused outside the turbolift’s doors. “Do they seriously think they might get some results with that?”
“They do,” Spock said. “The main difficulty is that there are no suitable stars along our present course on which they might safely test the technique.”
Jim shook his head again. “We’re getting short of time, Mr. Spock. Assuming we would have time to divert long enough for a test—which I’m not sure we would—what’s the nearest star that would be suitable?”
“Eisn,” Spock said.
Kirk groaned softly. “That wouldn’t be optimal.”
“No,” Spock said. “I would say not.”
The lift’s doors opened; they got in. “Main recreation,” Spock said, and the lift doors closed.
They rode in silence for a few moments. “Spock,” Jim said, “you’ll be pleased to hear that I’m learning something from this experience.”
“What are you learning, Captain?”
“That I may be an admiral, but I still don’t feel like one.”
Spock put up one eyebrow. “I gather that you find this an inopportune time to have come to that particular conclusion.”
“You have no idea.” Jim rubbed his eyes.
“Captain,” Spock said, “I have the fullest confidence in your ability for this task.”
“Yes, I’m sure you do,” Jim said, “and the problem is, so does everybody else but me!”
Spock looked at him, and the expression was serious, but not somber. “Jim,” he said after a moment, “that uncertainty is a weapon in your hand. You will use it, I am sure, as effectively as the others with which chance and the moment have provided you. And all of us, who are equally part of that weapon, will do what we must to fulfill the mission that Starfleet has assigned you. On that you can depend.”
