by Diane Duane
Ael smiled at the letter, a smile it was well that none of Cuirass’s crew could see. Such a bland and uncommunicative missive was hardly in Tafv’s style. But it indicated that he knew as well as Ael what would happen to the letter when Ael’s ship received it. It would be read by tr’Khaell in communications, passed on to Security Officer t’Liun, who had tr’Khaell so firmly under her thumb, and avidly read for any possible sign of secret messages or disaffection—then put through cryptanalysis as well by t’Liun’s tool tr’Iawaain down in data processing. Much good it would do them; Tafv was not fool enough to put what he had to say in any code they would be able to break.
Oh, t’Liun would find something in cryptanalysis, to be sure. A stiff and elegant multiple-variable code, just complex enough to be realistic and careless enough to be breakable after a goodly period of head-beating. She would find a message that said, PLAN FAILED, APPEALS TO PRAETORATE UNSUCCESSFUL; FURTHER ATTEMPTS REFUSED. Which, being exactly what t’Liun (and the High Command people who paid her) wanted to hear, would quiet them for a little while. Until it was too late, at least.
Ael leaned back and stretched. Tafv’s mention of repairs to the warp drive told her that he and Giellun tr’Keirianh, Elements bless both their twisty minds, had finally succeeded in attaching those stealthily-acquired Klingon gunnery augmentation circuits to Bloodwing’s phasers—an addition that would give the valiant old ship three times a warbird’s usual firepower. Ael did not care for the Klingon ships that the Empire had been buying lately; their graceless design was offensive to her, and their workmanship was usually hasty and shoddy. But though Klingons might be abysmal shipwrights, they did know how to build guns. And though the adaptation to Bloodwing’s phasers had bid fair to take forever, it had also been absolutely necessary for the success of their plan.
As for the rest of the letter, Tafv had made it plain to Ael that he was close, and ready, and waiting on her word. He had also told her plainly, by saying nothing, that his communications were being monitored too; that Command had refused to allow him details on Ael’s present location, which he evidently knew only by virtue of the new family spies still buried in Command Communications; that there was some expectation of the enemy in the quadrant to which Ael had been sent; and that her old crew was willing and ready to enact the plan which she and Tafv had been quietly concocting since the “honor guard” had come to escort Ael off Bloodwing to her new command on Cuirass.
Ael was quite satisfied. There was only one more thing she lacked, one element missing. She had spent a good deal of money during that last trip to ch’Rihan, attempting to encourage its presence. Now she had merely to wait, and keep good hope, until time or Federation policy produced it. And once it did…
The screen chimed quietly. “Ta’rhae,” she said, turning toward it from the port.
Tr’Khaell appeared on the screen again, his sweat still in evidence. “Khre’Riov, na’hwi, reh eliu arredhau’ven—”
Four and a half minutes, Ael thought, amused. T’Liun’s reading speed is improving. Or tr’Khaell’s shouting is. “Hnafiv ’rau, Erein.”
The man had no control of his face at all; the flicker of his eyes told Ael that there was something worth hearing in this message indeed, something he had been hoping she would order him to read aloud. “Hilain na nfaaistur ll’ efwrohin galae—”
“Ie, ie,” Ael said, sitting down at her desk again, and waving a hand at him to go on. News of the rather belated arrival in this quadrant of her fleet, such as it was, interested her hardly at all. Wretched used Klingon ships that they are, they should only have been eaten by a black hole on the way in. “Hre va?”
“Lai hra’galae na hilain, khre’Riov. Mrei kha rhaaukhir Lloannen’galae…te ssiun bhveinu hir’ Enterprise khina.”
Ael carefully did not stir in her chair and kept most strict guard over her face…slowly permitting one eyebrow to go up, no more. “Rhe’ve,” she said, nodding casually and calmly as if this news was something she might have expected—as if her whole mind was not one great blaze of angry, frightened delight. So soon! So soon! “Rhe’. Khru va, Erein?”
“Au’e, khre’Riov. Irh’ hvannen nio essaea Lloann’mrahel virrir—”
She waved the hand at tr’Khaell again; the details and the names of the other ships in the new Federation patrol group could wait for her in the computer until her “morning” shift. “Lhiu hrao na awaenndraevha, Erein. Ta’khoi.” And the screen went out.
Then, only then, did Ael allow herself to rock back in the chair, and take a good long breath, and let it out again…and smile once more, a small tight smile that would have disquieted anyone who saw it. So soon, she thought. But I’m glad…. O my enemy, see how well the Elements have dealt with both of us. For here at last may be an opportunity for us to settle an old, old score….
Ael sat up straight and pulled the keypad of her terminal toward her. She got rid of Tafv’s letter, then said the several passwords that separated her small cabin computer from the ship’s large one for independent work, and started calling up various private files—maps of this quadrant, and neighboring ones. “Ie rha,” she said as she set to work—speaking aloud in sheer angry relish, and (for the moment) with utter disregard to what t’Liun might hear. “Rha’siu hlun vr’Enterprise, irrhaimehn rha’sien Kirk….”
Chapter Two
CAPTAIN’S PERSONAL LOG, Stardate 7504.6:
“Nothing to report but still more hydrogen ion-flux measurements in the phi Trianguli corridor. Entirely too many ion-flux measurements, according to Mr. Chekov, who has declared to the bridge at large that his mother didn’t raise him to compile weather reports. (Must remember to ask him why not, since meteorology has to have been invented in Russia, like everything else.)
“Mr. Spock is ‘fascinated’ (so what else is new?) by the gradual increase in the number and severity of ion storms in this part of the galaxy. He will lecture comprehensively and at a moment’s notice on the importance of our findings as they relate to the problem—the implications of a shift in the stellar wind for the sector’s interstellar ‘ecology,’ the potentially disastrous effects of such a shift on interplanetary shipping and on the economies of worlds situated along the shipping lanes, etc., etc., etc. However, even Spock has admitted to me privately that he looks forward to solving this problem and moving on to something a little more challenging. His captain agrees with him. His captain is bored stiff. My mother didn’t raise me to compile weather reports, either.
“However, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good…or however that goes. At least things have been quiet around here.
“Now why is it that, when I say that, my hands begin to sweat?…”
“Jim?”
“Now now, Bones.”
“Medical matter, Captain.”
James T. Kirk looked up from the 4D chesscubic at his chief surgeon. “What is it?”
“If you make that move,” said Dr. McCoy, “you’ll live to regret it.”
“Doctor,” said the calm voice from across the chesscubic, “kibitzing is as annoying to the victims in chess as it is in medicine…which is doubtless why you practice it so assiduously.”
“Oh, stick it in your ear, Spock,” said McCoy, peering over Jim’s shoulder to get a better view of the cubic. “No, I take that back: in your case it would only make matters worse.”
“Doctor—”
“No, Spock, it’s all right,” Jim said. “This’ll be a lesson to me, Bones. Look at this mess.”
Bones looked, and Jim took the opportunity to stretch and gaze around the great recreation deck of the Enterprise. The place was lively as usual with crewpeople eating and drinking and talking and playing games and socializing and generally goofing off. There was a merrily homicidal game of water polo taking place in the main pool: amphibians against drylanders, Jim judged, as he saw Amekentra from dietary break surface in a glittering, green-scaled arc, tackle poor Ensign London amidships, and drag Robbie under with her in a flash and splash
of water. Closer to Jim, in the middle of the room, a quieter but equally deadly game of contract bridge was going on: a Terran-looking male and a short, round Tellarite lady sat frowning at their cards, while the broad-shouldered Elaasian member of the foursome peered at his hand, and his partner, a gossamer-haired Andorian, watched him with cool interest and waited for him to bid. Nearest to Jim, some forty or fifty yards away, a Sulamid crewman leaned against the baby grand, with a drink held coiled in one violet tentacle, and most of his other tendrils and tentacles draped gracefully over the Steinway. Various of those tentacles wreathed gently, keeping time, and the Sulamid’s eight stalked eyes gazed off into various distances, as the pianist—someone in Fleet nursing whites—wove her way through the sweetly melancholy complexities of a Chopin nocturne. That was appropriate enough, for it was “evening” for Jim, and for about a fourth of the Enterprise’s crew; delta shift was about to go on duty, alpha shift’s day was drawing to a quiet close, and all was right with the world.
Except here, Jim thought, glancing at the chesscubic again, and then, with wry resignation, back up at Spock. The Vulcan sat in his characteristic chess-pose, leaning on his elbows, hands folded, the first two fingers steepled—gazing back at Jim with an expression of carefully veiled compassion, and with what Jim’s practiced eye identified as the slightest trace of mischievous enjoyment.
Jim became aware of another presence at his side, to the left. He looked up and found Harb Tanzer, the chief of recreation, standing there—a short, stocky, silver-haired man with eyes that usually crinkled at the corners with laughter…as, at the sight of the chesscubic, they were beginning to do now. Jim was not amused. “Mister,” he said to Harb, “you are in deep trouble.”
“Why, Captain? Something wrong with the cube?”
With some difficulty Jim restrained himself from groaning out loud, for the whole thing was his own fault. He had mentioned to Harb some time back that 3D chess, much as he loved it, had been getting a little boring. Harb had gone quietly away to talk to Moira, the master games computer, and shortly thereafter had presented the ship’s company with something new—4D chess. Spock had objected mildly to the name, for hyperspace, not time, was the true forth dimension. But the Vulcan’s objections were swiftly lost in fascination with the new variant.
Harb had completely done away with the form of the old triple-level chessboard, replacing it with a hologram-style stack of force-field cubes, eight on a side, in which the pieces were “embedded” during play. The cubic was fully rotatable in yaw, pitch and roll; if desired, parts of it could be enlarged for closer examination, or for tournament play. The pieces themselves (the only physical element of the set) were handled by an exquisitely precise transporter system, with a set of controls on each player’s side of the gametable. This innovation effectively eliminated “you-touched-it, you-have-to-move-it” arguments, illegal “behind-the-back” moving, and other such minor excitements. Not that either of the Enterprise’s premier chess players would ever have had recourse to cheating. But the new design opened up possibilities as well as removing them: and it was one of these newer variations that Spock was presently inflicting on the captain.
Harb had programmed the table’s games computer so that a player could vanish desired pieces from the cubic, for a period of his own determination, and have them reappear later—if desired, in any other spot made possible by a legal move. Pieces “timed out” in this fashion could appear behind the other player’s lines and wreak havoc there. But this innovation had not merely expanded the usual course of play. It had also completely changed the paradigm in which chess was usually played. Suddenly the game was no longer about anticipating the opponent’s moves and thwarting them—or not merely about that. It was now also a matter of anticipating a whole strategy from the very start: a matter of estimating with great accuracy where an opponent would be in fifteen or twenty moves, and getting one’s pieces there to ambush him—while also fooling the opponent as to where one’s own weak and strong areas would be at that time.
As a result, Jim now found himself playing with a deadly seriousness he hadn’t been able to bring to the game in a long while…for everything was changed. All the strategies he had laboriously worked out over the years for play against Spock—strategies that had finally begun working—were now suddenly useless. And worse than that, Spock was still walking all over Jim in the game—which said uncomfortable things to the captain of the Enterprise about his ability to tell what his first officer was thinking. Once again Jim found himself wondering whether Spock’s dual heritage was giving him an unfair advantage…whether the Vulcan half of him, so coolly analytical, was better at understanding his own human half, and thereby, the actions of the full humans around him.
Though Jim remembered McCoy, some time back, warning him against such generalizations: “As if you could chop a mind in half like an apple,” Bones had said, derisive and amused. “He’s one whole being—a Spock—and the sooner you armchair shrinks get that through your heads, the better you’ll be able to deal with him.” Still…Jim thought. But it was late for theorizing, and at any rate no amount of it was going to get him out of this one. He tilted his head back to look at Harb Tanzer. “Couldn’t you have stuck to shuffleboard?” he said.
“I can see where it might have been wiser,” said Harb, looking down at the cubic.
Regretfully, Jim had to agree with him. He had tried one of his favorite offenses from 3D chess—an all-out, “scream-and-leap” offensive opening that in the past had occasionally succeeded in rattling Spock slightly with its sheer bloody-minded enthusiasm. Unfortunately, mere howling aggressiveness was of no use in this game, not even briefly. Spock had merely sat in calm interest, watching Jim’s game unfold, responding calmly to Jim’s screams and leaps. Spock had moved rather conservatively, moving first one queen and then his second into mildly threatening mid-level positions, counterbalancing Jim’s double-queen pin on the king’s level (four, at the time) from levels three and eight. Jim had run merrily amok for a while, inexorably pushing Spock into what looked like a wholly defensive position in the center-cubic upper levels, then timing out both his rooks, one of his knights, and several pawns in rapid succession, in what was meant to be a nettling display of security.
That was when Spock had lifted his head from a long scowl at the board, and very, very slowly put that one eyebrow up. Jim had stared back at Spock, entirely cheerful, not saying anything but mentally daring him to do his worst.
He had. Jim’s half of the cubic now looked like the Klingon half of the Battle of Organia at the end of the fourth quarter…not that his pieces even held as much as half the cubic anymore. Spock had not even needed to wait for his own timed-out pieces to return. Not that there were many of them; Jim now suspected that Spock had purposely restrained himself there, to keep Jim from feeling too bad—or perhaps to keep the win from looking too much like mindreading. Jim, looking in great annoyance at his poor king penned up in the upper levels with queens above and below him—in Spock’s silent demonstration of his own brand of poetic justice—considered that he would have preferred mindreading to the implication that Spock could anticipate him this completely without it. The situation elsewhere was no better. Spock’s king was redoubtably fenced around by knights and rooks; his bishops were so perfectly positioned in the center cubic that they controlled it practically by themselves. And Jim had nothing available with which to attack them even if they had been more poorly positioned. Both his queens were gone now, and almost everything else was timed out in preparation for what was supposed to have been the closing of a cunning and totally unpredictable trap….
When will I learn, Jim thought. He looked up over his shoulder. “What do you think?” he said to Harb.
“Sir,” said the chief of recreation, “I think you’ve got a problem.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. Tanzer. I think that as soon as I finish this, you’re being transferred to hydroponics. Head first. Bones?”
McCoy looked down at the cubic. “As it stands now, mate in six.”
“Five,” Spock said, in that cool dry voice in which no one was meant to hear arrogance, or kindness either.
Jim stared calmly into the cubic, trying to look deeply thoughtful. He was actually hoping for a broken glass somewhere in the room, a call from the Bridge, a red alert—any distraction that would get him out of this mess before it proceeded to its inevitable conclusion. But nothing happened. Finally he sighed, and looked up at Spock with as much good grace as he could muster, reaching for the “resign” touch-pad. “I have to admit, Mr. Spock—”
Bones laid a hand on Jim’s arm, stopping his gesture. “Wait a minute, Jim. Would you mind if I played this one out for practice? Would you, Spock?”
Jim looked up at McCoy in mild surprise, then across at his first officer. Spock’s eyes widened in carefully simulated concern. “I would think,” he said to Jim, “that such a sudden impulse toward masochism would be the symptom of some deeper disorder—”
