by Diane Duane
“Ready, Mr. Chekov?”
“Ready, Captain—”
Wildfire swelled on the screen, coming right down their throats, and now that the Romulan ship could see what was happening, it was too late—“Now!”
Mr. Chekov pounced on his board. Enterprise’s deadly forward phasers lashed out where Wildfire had expected only the lesser rear ones, or photon torpedoes. And suddenly, Wildfire was gone in a bloom of light—
—Javelin, following behind, vanished.
“Cloaking device,” Spock said.
“Defeat it, Mr. Spock—”
“The cloaking countermeasure is not functional, Captain, it’s a function of subspace communication.”
Oh no! Jim stared at the empty screen, in which there was nothing but Bloodwing now, soaring in toward them faster than she had been. He’ll go off in some other direction—
He stared at Bloodwing, and it hit him. “Mr. Chekov, fire! Everything we’ve got, right at her!”
“Captain!” That was Aidoann, a child’s cry for a betrayed mother.
Chekov fired, photon torpedoes and phasers both at once. “Sulu, hard about!” And at the same moment Bloodwing’s phasers lashed out at the Enterprise—
—and their combined armament hit what lay directly between them, what Jim had somehow known would be using Bloodwing as cover, only from in front. “Spock, the shields!” he cried, but Spock had already reinforced them. Nothing else saved Enterprise from the point-blank explosion of another starship right in front of her. She screamed through the wreckage and the swiftly dying fire, while Bloodwing, plunging toward them at warp five, angled up and over them, deforming her own warpfield in a crazed, congratulatory victory roll.
“They do that too….” Jim said, slumping back in his seat.
“Local traffic, Captain,” Spock said sharply, looking down his scanner. “A small ship, bearing—Too late. It’s cloaked.”
“Our friend the ‘crawling slime,’” Jim said “LLunih.”
“I would say so. Evidently he suspected Bloodwing of complicity with us—and sacrificed his ship to test the theory.”
“A wonderful person,” Jim said. “Hail Bloodwing.”
The screen lit up. There was that cramped little control room, and in it, Ael, sweating rivers and looking haggard. “Captain,” she said, “is your ship all right?”
“We’re fine. Ael, you know more about ‘the better part of valor’ than anyone I’ve ever met.”
“Probably. Why do you think I went to dinner with LLunih the other night? I wanted to see what he had hidden in his engineering room—and I got him to show me. It was an Imperial courier: that little creature in which he just saved his skin. Some day I shall have it for a pot-scouring rag.”
“His courier ship?”
“That too. What could I do, until you deployed your jammer and I knew it was working, save increase my efforts to hold on to you as if your escape was genuinely a surprise? He will report to the Senate in doubt now—knowing that you apparently willingly fired on me to kill—and thus keep us both clear of the suspicion of complicity. They will argue—and the ship that might have gotten here from Romulus in four hours will perhaps not come for ten, or twenty.”
“I have a question for you.”
“Ask.”
“What the devil took you so long to figure out that the damn buoy was working?!”
“Captain, our sensors are not as good as yours, especially in the high ranges, you know that…. I could know nothing until my subspace communication with one of the other ships failed.”
Jim sighed and said a bad word in his head, for that was true. “All right, Commander. We’d better get started for Levaeri V….”
“I agree. I’ll be over in Hsaaja in a few moments.”
Jim looked at her, not liking what he was thinking. “What do you need Hsaaja for?”
“I don’t need it,” Ael said, “but you will. One of your warpdrive generators is destroyed. Your second one will be needed to power its companion along the ‘least expected’ course out of the Levaeri system. Another will be dropped in the system itself. The last one we’ll install in Hsaaja and send on LLunih’s trail—thereby slowing down his report to the High Command a bit more. Even minutes may be precious later.”
Jim nodded. “Ael,” he said regretfully, “that’s a sweet little ship….”
“If I’m dead,” she said drily, “I won’t be able to fly him anyway.”
And suddenly the light dawned, and Jim sat straight up in his chair and said, “Ael—that was five warpdrive generators—”
“So it was,” she said. “Wasn’t that how many you ordered made?” She smiled at him wickedly, and closed the channel down.
Damn the woman!!
Chapter Thirteen
“Captain, would you kindly hand me that little silver spanner there?—no, the other one.”
“Commander,” said the captain, “is it going to be ‘Captain’ all the way back from Levaeri, too?”
Ael looked up from the hatch in the floor of Hsaaja’s cockpit, pushed a strand of sweaty hair out of the eye into which it had fallen, and said, “Oh. You think we are going to make it back then?”
“Commander—”
“You may call me ‘Ael.’ The Doctor does. Even Mr. Spock does.” She bowed her head again, reaching down into the guts of the autopilot and starting the last of the connections to the jamming apparatus.
“Well…I wasn’t quite sure I’d been given permission. You ‘gave’ us your name. But it’s not the same. And permission to the doctor, and Spock, is not necessarily permission to me.”
That was perceptive of him, an insight she wouldn’t have expected him to reach. “You’re quite right,” she said. “I was withholding it.”
He started to ask why, then stopped. That, too, was something she wouldn’t have expected; restraint. Just as well; she wasn’t certain of the reasons herself. “As for you,” she said slowly, touching a connection open, reading the charge on it, and closing it again, “I can’t quite pronounce the name after ‘Captain.’ And it’s unwise to mishandle names.”
“You said that before….” He looked thoughtful. “Can you say ‘Jim’?”
She gasped and started to laugh, so hard that she almost dropped the spanner. And when she was sure she still had it, and looked up again, the captain looked so bewildered that it just made her laugh harder. “Oh, Elements,” she finally managed to say, sitting back against the seat cushion of the pilot’s chair, “is that truly your self-name?”
“James, actually. ‘Jim’ is a contraction….”
“Oh, oh my.” Ael started laughing again, still harder, so that all she could do was sag back against the seat and wave the spanner weakly at him. Reaction, she thought clinically, in some remote part of her. Wouldn’t t’Hrienteh look askance at this? Or even the doctor…. And indeed the poor captain was looking rather askance himself. “No, no,” Ael finally managed to gasp, when he showed signs of getting up and leaving. “Oh, Captain. ‘Jim.’ Jim, I will call you that gladly, but I beg you…”
He made a questioning look at her.
“Don’t ask me what it means!…”
“Well, all right. Ael, then.”
“Jim,” Ael said, and studied to keep her face straight. “Well enough. Let me finish this, we don’t have all day.” She busied herself with the spanner again, sealing the last connections. “The other name, the long form: what does it mean?”
“Nothing embarrassing, thank heaven.” He cocked an eyebrow at her, and Ael wondered fleetingly whether he had stolen the expression from Spock, or Spock from him? “I looked it up once—it means ‘supplanter,’ or something like that.”
“The translator didn’t render that word.”
“Someone who takes other people’s rights or positions away from them.”
That made her put an eyebrow up. “You had best be careful with a name like that,” Ael said. “It could lead you into trouble…. But then what ot
her position than this one could you possibly want?”
He shook his head. There was no other, and he knew it as well as she did. “And what mighty ‘enterprise’ was this ship named after?” she said.
“Not one particular one. Just the spirit of enterprise in general. And there were many other ships with the same name, an old tradition….”
He trailed off when he saw that she was staring at him again. “Oh, no wonder,” she said softly, more to herself than to him. “All of ch’Rihan has wondered why this ship has been through so much trouble, so much glory….”
“Do enlighten me.”
It was sarcasm, but gentle; he genuinely didn’t seem to know what she was talking about. “Ca—Jim, it’s dangerous to name anything, a person, a vessel, after an entire unmitigated virtue. The whole power of it gets into the named one, makes it go places, do things too great for man…. Glory follows; but sorrow too….”
“That’s usually the way with people, no matter what the ship’s named.” Still, he looked thoughtful.
“Tell me your thought.”
“Funny, actually…There were other ships called Intrepid, you know. A lot of them got in trouble all the time. One of the most famous of them, the one in mothballs in New York Harbor—”
“This translator is having problems. You have little round flying insects on Earth that are eating a ship named Intrepid? And you ask me about the danger of names?”
“The ship,” Jim said with careful dignity, giving Ael a dirty look that needed no translation, “is in honorable retirement. Preserved as a museum for many, many years. But she had a reputation among her crew for being a bad-luck ship. Gallant—but unlucky. They called her the ‘Evil I.’ Probably that won’t translate; ‘i’ is both the name of the letter Intrepid’s name starts with, and a sound-alike for the Anglish word for this.” He pointed at his eye.
“Evil eye, yes; I see the pun. We have a sign you make against it.”
“Yes. This old ship kept getting torpedoed, running aground—it was a wet-navy ship. All kinds of annoying things like that. Well, then comes our Intrepid, the first starship by that name, and it serves hardly more than a few years before being attacked and destroyed by a spacegoing creature, a kind of giant amoeba. And then the new Intrepid is built, and this happens to it….” He waved vaguely in the general direction of Levaeri.
Ael nodded. “You see the problem. Name a ship for the spirit of fearlessness, and it forgets to fear. A bad trait. Worse when the ship is full of Vulcans…” She checked the last connection, pulled the autopilot’s door down over the opening again, and sealed it. Her glance up at Jim showed her a face that looked rather skeptical.
“Not your belief, I see,” she said, standing up carefully, both to keep from banging her head on the canopy and because of the ache in her back. “No matter. Let’s send this poor creature on his way.” She flicked switches on the consoles, looking with sorrowful longing at the familiar arrays, the screen that made her eyes hurt, the place where she had dropped the wrench once and scratched the flawless, shiny black front panel. It was a shame to send this ship out into the cold nowhere, to run alone, finally to run out of fuel and drift alone forever. But there was nothing else for it; the Enterprise’s shuttlecraft, which Jim had offered, didn’t have Hsaaja’s range or speed. And both would be needed.
“You always were good at throwing things away when you had to,” Jim said from behind her. “I remember once—it was the Battle of alpha Trianguli, wasn’t it?—you emptied out two whole Romulan cruisers and left them drifting there crewless in space—doubled up their crews with those of two other ships and ran away, while poor Captain Rihaul went crazy over two empty ships rigged on automatic and firing at her. You didn’t even have to hurry to get away….”
There was rueful admiration in the tone, and something more; compassion, consolation. It sounded as if he understood what she felt.
Bizarre idea. “Yes,” she said, “I remember that. Come on, Jim, he’s on the timer. Let’s get out of here.”
They did, and on a screen in a briefing room near the hangar deck watched the sleek black ship rise up on its thrusters and glide out into the starry night. The hangar deck’s doors closed, then, and Ael, standing there watching them, felt cold enough to shudder. It might have been a piece of her going away.
It is. Why must I love things so? They pass away, one and all….
She straightened up. “We have another meeting, don’t we, Jim?”
“Preattack briefing,” he said. “The chief of security, the department heads, some other people. We’ll keep it short…everybody needs rest, and we’ve only got about six more hours before we hit Levaeri sensor range.”
She nodded, and they left the little briefing room together, heading for the lift. “This business of names…” Jim said.
“It’s not names specifically. Just words. Even in your world, people have died for words. Sometimes they’ve died of them. One learns to be careful what one says in such a world. And like anything so powerful, like any weapon, words cut both ways. They redeem and betray—sometimes both at once. The attribute we name as a virtue may also turn out to be our bane. So we watch what we call things—in case we should turn out to be right.”
Jim looked thoughtful at that too, but this time Ael left the thought behind the look alone. “We treasure names,” she said. “They’re the most powerful words, and our favorites. After all, what makes you respond more immediately than your name being called?…As long as a Rihannsu has someone to speak his name, or even if it’s written, or remembered, that person is real. Afterward…nothing. The shadows, some say. The place where the Elements are unmixed, more real than here, say others.” She shrugged. “But either way, names are life….”
Jim appeared to be considering that for a moment as the lift doors closed in front of them. “You never did tell me what a ‘bloodwing’ is,” he said at last.
Ael laughed softly. “The name is hardly as noble as Enterprise’s, I’m afraid…but then it’s not as perilous, either. It’s a flying creature we have on ch’Rhian, and my House’s sigil-beast. A big, slow, ugly scavenger, so big that it can’t fly without a long takeoff run, and you can keep one captive just by putting a small fence around it. But once it’s in the air, nothing can match it for speed or power of flight.”
The lift opened, and they walked out together toward main briefing. Coming down the hall toward them, there were Spock and McCoy. “Gentlemen,” Jim said to them as they all headed into the briefing room, “you’re early.”
“Spock and I wanted to take our time going over the roster for the strike force,” McCoy said. He sat down at the table, Spock beside him, and began sorting through a pile of cassettes he had been carrying. Ael sat down opposite, so as to see their faces better; Jim sat beside her. For the same reason? she wondered briefly.
“This is the best of the group,” McCoy was saying as he dropped a cassette into one of the table’s readout slots. “Low stress factors, good with weapons or with hand-to-hand. A lot of security people there—”
“Bones,” Jim said, “let’s not be too picky. What we need here is numbers.”
“Numbers will not help us,” Spock said, “unless they are the right ones. There is going to be very little margin for error in this operation, Captain; but we are nevertheless taking care not to understaff you. Go on, Doctor.”
“Here’s the recommended list, then. Abernathy, Ahrens, Athendë, Austin, Bischoff, Brand, Brassard, Burke, Canfield, Carver, Claremont….”
It went on for quite some time, a long list of unfamiliar names, and Ael leaned one elbow on the table and rested her head on her hand, bored. Not bored, exactly. What she had just done was beginning to catch up with her, as she had known it would…but this was no time for reaction. Nevertheless, it claimed her. How many more lives have I spilled to prevent those phantom billion deaths? she thought unhappily. How many Rihannsu went back to the Elements today, cursing my name, and Bloodwing’s? Sooner or
later this will be paid for. Sooner, I fear….
A horrible thought intruded itself on her slowly, and refused to go away. Suppose something has gone wrong with the researches at Levaeri—and instead of the Intrepid’s disappearance being a sign of their readiness, it was instead a signal of a failure—something the Levaeri people did to cover their tracks in some manner, buy themselves time, hide the fact that there’s something wrong? Suppose the mind-techniques never actually come to fruition…then what am I? A murderer, a traitor, many times over—and for nothing, not even in a good cause—not that the ends ever extenuate the means, at least as far as the Elements are concerned. What one does is what one does, and one answers for it….
“—Khalifa, Korren, Krejci, Langsam, Lee, Litt, London; Maass, Donald; Maass, Diane—”
“I didn’t hear ‘Kirk’ in there,” Jim said rather sharply, bringing Ael back to the moment.
Spock and McCoy looked at each other, all innocence. Ael saw that there was more teasing going on. “Mr. Spock, how did we miss that?”
Spock looked mildly surprised. “Habit, no doubt. The captain never goes anywhere….”
“…but just this once…”
“…considering that the armed escort will be ample….”
“Gentlemen!”
“Gotcha, Jim,” McCoy said.
Jim’s smile took awhile about appearing, but finally managed it. “All right,” he said. “I consider myself warned. But if you two are going to play ‘mother hen,’ don’t either of you be surprised if you find me holding your hand.”
“Fine by me,” McCoy said. “But watch it with Spock. People start the damndest rumors about this ship’s crew, even without provocation….”
“Doctor, how does one hold hands with a mother hen?” Spock asked innocently.
“Gentlemen!!”
Ael kept her laughter to herself. “…Malkson, Matlock—”
The door opened, and the Elements were apparently joking with them all, for in came Colin Matlock, the security chief, whom Ael remembered from the briefing on Inaieu. He was a tall, good-looking, dark-visaged young man, half frowning all the time, even when he smiled. At the moment he chiefly looked embarrassed. “Sorry, Captain, I’ll come back later—”
