The Hand of Kahless

by John M. Ford

  “Well done, Tirian,” Kethas said. “The war continues, on every space of the board.” He nodded to Vrenn, and went out of the transporter pavilion, toward the house.

  Tirian began locking up the console. Vrenn thought of what he had wanted to ask the servitor, for a long time now: suddenly, perhaps because of the quiet of the mood, or their distance from the life of the house, it seemed the right time to ask. “Tirian, do you believe in the Black Fleet?”

  “My people mostly believe in a next life,” Tirian said, without looking from his work, “though there are not starships in it. But we evolved separately, and if one world’s idea is true, I suppose all must be.”

  It was much more answer than Vrenn had expected, but he took it as affirmation. “When my father has gone to command there…will you then be his Transporteer?”

  “What,” Tirian said quietly, “does the Empire’s hold extend so far as that?”

  “Any race may reach—”

  “I know. Kethas has told me. I will have a place on his Black Ship. Even if I do not want it.”

  “You are Withiki,” Vrenn said. “You would have wings again.”

  Tirian turned. His skull face was drawn, pure white. “So my younger master is a strategist as well,” he said flatly. “The Thought Admiral will be pleased.

  “But I wonder if you are right, Master Vrenn. I had fine wings once, blue-feathered, if you know what that means, and of spread twice my height. But such broad wings are awkward in the corridors of a starship. So a Force Leader of Imperial Race told me, when he had his Marines pull my wings from their sockets. Do you think that officer is also in the Black Fleet, waiting to maim me a thousand times? Laughing?

  “Kuvesa tokhesa. Your father. While I live.” Tirian walked out of the room, toward the flier hangars, not the house.

  After a little while, Vrenn went back to the house, thinking that he had in fact won a victory, gotten the information he wanted. But it did not have the taste of victory.

  The female Rogaine was seated among the web ferns of the indoor garden, playing her harp. There was no light from above, and she was no more than a dark shape outlined in light, almost one with the reflections on the pool beyond. Thick mist floated, glowing, diffuse.

  Rogaine turned, playing a complex chord, and Vrenn could see that the mist was all that covered her. He felt a stitch in his side, as if his air was short. It was not quite pain, and then it was something worse than any pain Vrenn had ever known. Rogaine’s long nails stroked the strings, and Vrenn heard himself groan.

  Then a cold hand touched him, and all his nerves cried out at once.

  Vrenn lay on his back, in his bed. Above him, touching Vrenn’s shoulder, was Kethas, wearing his dress uniform. Only the bedside lamp was on; it seemed to be still the middle of the night, when Kethas slept.

  “Get up, and dress,” the Thought Admiral said. “It is a night for decisions. Meet me in the garden outside.” He went away.

  Vrenn lay still a moment longer, not entirely certain he had not simply slipped from one dream into another. But his senses told him otherwise; surely, he thought, the relics he felt of his last dream would not carry over to this one. So he rose, and put on his adoption-day clothes that were like a Cadet’s, and went outside.

  The night air was very cold, and Vrenn’s breath misted. The sky was very dark….

  The sky, Vrenn saw, was cloudless. Overhead were stars, hard and white, all the thousand stars of the world’s sky standing naked, as they did on less than one night in a hundred.

  So whatever Vrenn and Kethas said here, whatever they did, would be remembered for all time to come.

  “Shortly you will be ten years old,” Kethas said, a figure of gold and darkness—but no dream, Vrenn knew. “It will be time for you to choose what you will be. Have you thought on this?”

  “The Navy,” Vrenn said instantly.

  Kethas did not smile. “You know that I do not require this of you? That you may, as you wish, be a scientist, or an administrator—or even a Marine?”

  “I know, Father. And I would not be anything else.”

  Then the Thought Admiral smiled. “And so you should not. You captain the machine like you were made for it. I am pleased to find you wise as well as skillful.”

  Vrenn said, “Was my father sutai-Rustazh a great captain?”

  Kethas tilted his head. “You have no father but myself.” After a moment he added, “Though it is true I once knew one called sutai-Rustazh, who was great.”

  Vrenn bowed his head, ashamed at the stupidity of the question. And still Kethas—indeed his only father, his whole line—had answered it; Vrenn wondered what this strategy was.

  Kethas said, “There are assistances I can provide. You will be assigned directly to the Academy, of course, and the Path of Command. A cruise can be arranged at the earliest—”

  “I would make my own path, Father.”

  Kethas’s hand slashed crosswise. “Don’t talk like a Romulan! What, do you think you are the only son of an Admiral who will attend the Academy? Half your mates will be Admirals’ sons; and some of them will be kuvekhestat unfit to serve aboard a ship, and those especially will use every advantage their lines can win them. You are still not a good enough player to give your enemies odds.” He paused, said more gently, “And surely you do not deny the Perpetual Game?”

  Vrenn stood entirely still, feeling his jaw clench, his lips pulling apart. He knew then that he must have a ship, a command, and he would have them, and he would never know shame again. He looked at the stars, stark burning naked, and knew the oath was sealed.

  “Let’s go inside,” Kethas said, his manner easy again. “We’ll play klin zha.”

  They went into the house. The fire was uncommonly welcome after the cold of the night. Vrenn sat at the game table, reached to turn it on.

  “Not that set,” Kethas said. “The one in your room. The one beneath your bed.”

  Vrenn felt his eyes twitch with staring. Kethas’s look was bland. Vrenn went to his room, brought back the envelope with the set of wood and card.

  “There is never time to teach everything, so the important things must take precedence,” Kethas said, as they played through a standard opening. “And example works quickest…you do know the proverb: If you do not wish a thing heard—”

  “Do not say it.”

  “Yes. This will always be true; it will be so if you are a Captain, or an Admiral, or the Emperor. You will be watched, so live as if you are watched. Beds are a terrible place for secrets…you are about to lose your Vanguard.” And Kethas moved, killing it. He picked up the dead piece, turned the disc over in his fingers. “You know that there is a form of klin zha we have not yet played.”

  “What is that, Father?”

  “It is the form least often taught, less even than the Reflective, but in a way it is the most important of all to a Captain. I think we should play it now.” Kethas flicked his fingers, and the wooden Vanguard sailed through the air, into the fireplace, where the flames absorbed it with the smallest of whispers.

  It had happened faster than Vrenn could think, and now he did not know what to think. He wondered if Kethas had flipped the piece through the fire, and out the other side, but he did not believe that.

  Finally the Thought Admiral said, “Your move.”

  Vrenn looked around the room, and the gameboards along the walls. He started to rise. “And which set will the Thought Admiral risk?”

  Kethas waved a finger at Vrenn’s seat cushion. It looked like a casual gesture. It was not. Vrenn sat.

  Kethas said, “You are not ready to count your enemy’s losses until you have learned to count your own. And remember that some enemies will never have learned to count.”

  Vrenn looked at the board and pieces that he had made so carefully, kept so long; he tried to see them as nothing but scraps of fiber, bits of waste saved from the bin, and he could not. “What happens, then, when I kill a piece of your side?”

&nb
sp; “Keep it,” Kethas said. “Eventually there will be only one set left. And then we will play the Reflective Game.”

  Vrenn moved his Fencer and Goal, feeling the wood very warm and fragile against his fingers, like a living thing.

  Three: Gambits

  Romulan plasma hit Klingon shields: power leaked through in second and third harmonics, and the target cruiser shook.

  “Damage?” said the officer in the command chair.

  Vrenn Khemara ran his finger down a screen, bright in the red-lit Bridge; a schematic of the cruiser Blue Fire flashed into view, yellow blocks marking areas hit. Vrenn read off the reports in a few short phrases of Battle Language.

  Below Vrenn, the Commander spat an acknowledgment and turned back to the main display. Vrenn looked up: across the Bridge, another Cadet flashed a hand at him, fingers spread. The gesture symbolized a Captain’s starburst of rank: in words it would come out approximately as “You’ll have a command by morning!”

  Blue Fire rolled to starboard. She was pulling Warp 3, and the floor-plates whined and the bulkheads groaned; a Cadet grabbed a strut to steady himself under the shifting gravity. The Commander caught sight of it. “Environmental?” he said, tone deadly even, eyes like disruptors.

  The unbalanced Cadet strained toward his board. “Point eight six two, nominal,” he said.

  The Commander acknowledged, turned back to the main view. All the Cadets understood very well: fall down, fall asleep, do as you like, as long as you’ve got the Captain’s answers when he wants them.

  It was not the Captain of Blue Fire in the Chair. Squadron Leader Kodon was five decks above, in the Primary Bridge. Commander Kev, the Executive Officer, sat with the Cadets in the Auxiliary Bridge, calling for situation reports and helm responses exactly as if he were Kodon, and the Cadets worked their locked-off consoles just as if they controlled the ship.

  Only the data were real.

  There was a flash in the corner of the display as the cruiser rolled; Vrenn’s instruments picked up the wave of energy as a plasma bolt passed less than forty meters below their ship’s port wing. It had not been fired when Kodon started the maneuver: he had somehow foreseen the enemy action. Vrenn watched, and tried to learn.

  The Klingons were outnumbered, five to three; but the Klingon D-4 cruisers were individually much more powerful than the Romulan Warbirds. “So we win, on numbers,” Kodon had told them, before the raid began, “but there’s a few things the numbers don’t count.”

  Two Fingers, the portside ship of Kodon’s Squadron, had picked up three of the Warbirds, which swarmed around it, firing plasma in continuous cycle, two ships’ tubes cooling while one blazed, trying to batter their victim’s shields down from all directions at once.

  “One thing,” Kodon said, “is that ships move. Tactics are real, and if you don’t move right, you die.”

  Blue Fire was now turned perpendicular to Two Fingers. Commander Kev gave a firing order, and the Cadets on Weapons followed just as the officers above them. Six disruptors fired, making two pyramids of blue light whose points were Romulan ships. Romulan hulls buckled, as the forces holding their molecules together were suppressed and restored ninety times a second. That was disruption: or, as the big ships’ batteries were nicknamed, the Sound of Destruction.

  Two Warbirds lurched out of their loops, and Two Fingers went to work on the third. Blue Fire came about again, to find a prey of its own.

  There was a sudden swelling spot of white light in the forward display: the screen darkened, and it was still too bright to look at. Then the flash faded, and was gone. Stars came back on in the display. Ahead, the other ship of the squadron, Death Hand, had turned into the blast, to take it against her strong forward shields.

  “The other thing,” the Squadron Leader had told them all, “Is that Roms have some pretty odd ideas about dying.”

  Kev said, “Communications, signal Code KATEN to Squadron. Helm, when KATEN is acknowledged executed, I want Warp 4 at once.”

  The Cadets tensed, almost as a unit. There would be no boarding this time, no prizes, not even a creditable kill they could stripe on their sashes. But this was only the first skirmish of the raid, as Kodon had outlined it to them all. Their goal was farther into the Romulan sphere. Vrenn certainly understood; it was not an elaborate strategy, even for the frontier squadrons.

  Still, he wanted a kill as much as the rest of them.

  Perhaps more.

  Both enemy squadrons were trying to regroup, to disentangle from each other’s ships. The Klingon cruisers had more power, which counted most in large-ship maneuvers; Death Hand was able to bounce a Rom off its shields like a small animal off a groundcar’s fender.

  Formation lights flared on displays, drifting toward marked target positions: the three D-4s moved, silently as all things in space, into a triskele formation, port engines inward. A Rom fired, the bolt glancing from Blue Fire’s shields.

  “You may give him one for vengeance, zan Tatell,” Kev said, and as helm counted toward formation lock-on Weapons trued his crosshairs and his firing keys. Blue light reached out to the Rom, to the bronze raptor painted on its belly.

  The bird was cut open from wing to drumstick.

  Lights met their targets. “Warp 4,” the Helmsman remembered to say, and the Romulans—what was left of them—streaked by and were gone, as Kodon’s squadron pierced yet deeper into the space the Roms claimed as theirs, three times faster than their ships could follow.

  Commander Kev stood, inspected the Cadets. He touched the phone in his ear that had sent him all of the actual Captain’s orders. “A good engagement,” he said, “damage done, no ships lost, only minor injuries to crewmen and none to officers…” Kev looked at Zhoka, the Cadet who had almost lost more than just his balance.

  Kev paused, eyes narrowed, apparently getting some message through his earphone. “I am instructed to tell you that, by consensus of the Squadron Captains, Blue Fire is to be credited with one Romulan kill. May this be a favorable sign.”

  Kev stood silent then, watching. The Cadets did not move. Vrenn thought the collar of his blue tunic must surely be contracting, but kept his hands firmly on his console.

  Finally the Commander decided they had had enough. “Alert over. Stand down to cruise stations.” And he saluted. “Blue Fire, the victory!”

  “The victory!”

  Vrenn and his roommate, an engineering cadet named Ruzhe Avell, were playing Open klin zha in quarters. Vrenn had not played klin zha against a live opponent since halfway through his Academy year; until Ruzhe, everyone had too much minded losing.

  Maybe Ruzhe didn’t mind because he didn’t pay attention anyway. “I still say it’s better in Engineering. We get to work on the real ship, not dead controls.”

  “If something happened to the main Bridge, it’d be real enough.”

  “And you know how long we’d last after that? You know, you can still get off that Command Path, and do something with honest metal and current.”

  Vrenn felt a little annoyance at the word “honest,” but only a little. It was only another game between them, and he could hardly fault Ruzhe for being better at it than at klin zha. “I think I’ll stay up front in the pod. Away from the radiation.”

  “There’s no radiation back there! We just keep the Drell design because it works!”

  “All right, up front away from the Marines.”

  Ruzhe growled, stared at the board. “You’re going to win again.”

  It was true enough. Vrenn said, “Maybe you’ll get lucky, and the Roms will attack.” He moved a Flier. “After all, we got lucky enough to get assigned to a raid, on our first full cruise.”

  Ruzhe said, “I heard one of the Lieutenants say everyone gets assigned to a raid, unless they’re just so hopeless they have to put ’em on garbage scows or runs to Vulcan.”

  “Why?” Vrenn said. He had heard rumors like that, but only from superior-sounding Cadets. Never officers.

  “Same rea
son all the frontier captains go privateer: if you khest it, it’s your fault, not the Academy’s.”

  Vrenn knew that was true. “So I guess we better not khest it?”

  Ruzhe laughed. “Sure you don’t want to work aft?” He bumped the board. Pieces tipped over. “Gday’t, I lose.”

  “Well, you khest’t it.” Vrenn picked up a fallen piece. “Want to khest it again?”

  “I’d like to khest just once on this trip,” Ruzhe said. “Got an Orion female in your closet?”

  The piece slipped out of Vrenn’s fingers, bounced on the floor.

  Kodon’s Squadron had been inside Romulan claims for seventy-eight days. There had been two more skirmishes, early on, and a kill for Death Hand and another for Blue Fire, but nothing, not even a contact, for over fifty days now. They were eating salvage from the third battle, Romulan rations, solid enough food but dull on the tongue. Vrenn at last understood his father’s story about Human kafei, and found it actually made the alien stuff more edible; but the trick didn’t work for the other Cadets. Some of those from old Navy lines had been given sealed parcels of food, with vague warnings about not opening them too soon; now anyone who had obeyed the warning had power, of a sort. Vrenn rather quickly saw the limitations of a fruitcake-based economy, and knew why Kethas had not so supplied him.

  Still, it could be hard to be a strategist.

  Vrenn was in the Junior Officers’ Mess, chewing determinedly at a piece of vacuum-dried sausage, when the sounds of a discussion floated in his direction. There were three Ensigns at a table across the room, and they had gotten on the subject of Orions, and (inevitably) Orion females. One of them, the Helmsman Kotkhe, was insisting he had actually been with one, prize of a Cadet cruise. “I admit I was lucky—”

  “Nobody gets that lucky on a Cadet cruise,” said an Ensign with Medical insignia.

  “I suppose you two think I care if you believe me.”

  “Suppose we do.” That was Merzhan, the youngest Security officer on the ship. He kept to himself less than the other Security crew, and he showed a nasty sense ot humor on all occasions. “You wouldn’t have some evidence? A lock of her hair, tied up with a green ribbon?”