by Diane Duane
S’task knew perfectly well about this growing tradition, for he himself was one of the contributors, though a rare one. He watched with some amusement, during the late part of his life, as these traditions settled into “the way things have always been,” and other older religions and beliefs slipped away, gently, without alarums or excursions. For his own part he was what an Earth person would consider an agnostic. “I am unsure of everything,” he remarked in one message, “except of the fact that I am certain to remain unsure.” But to the “Elemental” school of thought—especially the part about treating the universe kindly—he gave a certain grudging acceptance. He would not admit publicly, of course, that this had anything to do with Surak, and the voice saying to him long ago, “The universe is concerned with means, not ends….”
“Surely there is no harm in taking care of the universe,” wrote S’task in the contribution, “for parts of it certainly seem to need it. If it craves order, so do human beings, and we have common cause; if (as it appears) it delights in diversity, we should cast out fear and help it be diverse, and learn to do so ourselves. If we must move through the worlds and change things, let us then be kindly caretakers: let us be toward matter as we would have the forces that move our own lives be toward us. It is no guarantee of preferential treatment by Things. But we will at least know we acted with magnanimity and honor, and if the universe sometimes seems insensible to this, let us keep acting that way until it notices.”
Some people listened to him, some did not. Ch’Rihan and ch’Havran were never united about anything, and they would have been bored with life, one suspects, if they had been. The Two Worlds spent a relatively happy fifteen hundred years taming their worlds, living in them, enjoying them, untroubled by anything but their own wars and (sometimes) their own peace. But the end of the Golden Age came at last, too soon, the day the failing defense net woke up and reported something approaching the system, decelerating rapidly from the speed of light. All that happened after that, in the past hundred years, makes a terrible tale, but most terrible to the Rihannsu, who feel that their tranquil “childhood” as a people was stolen from them when two of the most driven species in the galaxy stumbled over their paradise. “Perhaps,” said one rueful commentator of the time, “we have not been as kind to the Elements as we thought….”
Chapter Eleven
McCoy sat down on the hard bed and cursed under his breath. The business in the garden had been a near-perfect chance to open proper communications with Terise Haleakala-LoBrutto, and like a fool he had let it slip. Well, maybe not quite so badly as all that; they had reached a certain understanding now. At least he was certain that this “Arrhae”—damn Starfleet Intelligence for picking such a common name!—was the deep-cover operative who was at the center of this clandestine mission. The beginning of the mission, just as he was the end of it. How final that end might be depended on so many variables that his head began to pound just in anticipation, and he had to lie back with his eyes shut for some minutes until the throbbing receded back to its usual dull ache in his temples.
“All right,” he muttered, “tomorrow. Like it or not.” Despite all his experience in medical and psychiatric practice, he had never been comfortable with this sort of thing. How do you tell a woman who’s spent eight years doing a job you couldn’t handle for a week that Starfleet isn’t sure about her mental health anymore? Come straight out and ask her? “Excuse the question, Lieutenant Commander, but we haven’t had a report from you in two years. So tell us—are you still a Terran agent, or would you prefer to be a Romulan…?” Not the sort of subtle approach that might be expected from a man who was “the best we’ve got.”
That was what Steve Perry had called him, anyway. Except that if being bait for a Romulan frigate and its rabidly xenophobic subcommander was what compliments from Starfleet’s chief of intelligence led to, then he’d stick to Spock’s insults and be glad of them, thanks very much. Except that chief medical officers—even when they were “the best”—didn’t talk that way to admirals. They took what was said to them with the best grace that they could muster, and when they were asked to jump, their only question was supposed to be “how high?”
Or “where to…?”
He had sat on the far side of Perry’s desk, flanked by Jim Kirk and Spock, listening while the admiral outlined a plan as complex and dangerous as the cloaking-device theft of eight years ago. There were only two advantages: he knew more about Romulans now than he had done then, and—most important of all—he was being told about it in advance. That was where being “the best” came in.
Specializations in xenopsychology and -psychiatry, and longterm experience as CMO of the Enterprise—thus an acquaintance with what amounted to a gestalt life-form, for that defined the multi-racial, multispecies environment aboard the starship more accurately than simply crew. All of it added up to why he had been selected and then approached for this mission over the heads of other, perhaps equally talented, officers. It had been an unnerving hour for McCoy, sitting there watching his future being measured out in very small doses. For although the intricacies of the plot had been laid long and deep, using sleepers and double agents on both sides of the Neutral Zone, still, when it came to the crunch, his life or death was going to depend on timing.
And he had volunteered for it. Not at first, but after several refusals that nobody, particularly Kirk and Spock, had seen for other than his habitual grumbling. There had never been any question of conscription, not for him, not for anybody—not for a mission like this one. As soon conscript a spy and then expect the reports to be other than cautious, shallow, and lacking in any form of detail, if any reports ever came back at all. That was another thing: the spy—Perry preferred the term “deep-cover agent” to the older, more traditional word, but McCoy knew a spy when one was described to him—who had provided such excellent data for six years and then fallen silent in the past two. Last reports had shown her as a high-ranked servant in a poor but respectable Romulan noble house, and there had been nothing to indicate her activities—acquiring sociological background information rather than military or governmental secrets—had attracted anyone’s attention.
McCoy had been given a chance to read through the nonclassified sections of her dossier, and after what amounted to a high-level intercession at Command level—Admiral Perry looked after his own, even when they only worked for him part-time—he was cleared to see all of it. The MOST SECRET stuff made fascinating reading….
But that was all by the way; he had already made his feelings known on various matters, including the leaking of his (prearranged, naturally) traveling plans to Romulan agents, both those who were already known and, as a form of test, to several suspects. That same data, accurately provided by Federation double agents in the Empire, would serve to improve the reputation of any whose past reports had been of dubious quality, and hopefully make their future survival more secure.
Except for one problem: that the Romulans might not fall in with the theory behind all the other machinations, that if opportunity arose, they would want to capture a member of the Enterprise command crew—notorious war criminals all—and bring them back to ch’Rihan for trial. Their outrage over the Levaeri V debacle might run so high, even after the passage of a standard year, that instead of taking the offered bait as a prisoner, they might send a hunter-killer ship to blow the proposed captive into plasma….
That was a risk they had all debated, and finally set aside as unlikely. So many highly placed Romulans had grudges to settle with the U.S.S. Enterprise that an anonymous, impersonal photon torpedo wouldn’t satisfy them. The Romulan psyche was such that any punishment would have to be protracted, degrading, and painful—and administered after due process of their elaborate legal codes.
Listening to that particular part of the discussion had given McCoy a nasty crawling feeling at the nape of his neck, but at least the plan had worked. So far.
The storage-access doors at the back of his room ra
ttled a bit, and he sat up. There was a small click as one door opened, revealing a vertical slice of the rainy Romulan night, and a vague, low outline entered the room, closing the door neatly—if a little awkwardly—behind it.
McCoy put his eyebrows up…and smiled
“If mere money is all you want for him, then name your price.” Subcommander tr’Annhwi gazed equably at the man across the table, reading him like an open book. He knew avarice when he saw it; but he could also recognize hope, and in this instance that was something he could play on to even better effect. “As I told that”—his narrow eyes flicked briefly toward Arrhae and then away again—“I am a generous man. But I can offer you much more than that: privileges, and the recognition of your House as a power in the Senate. I can offer you the restoration of everything that you have seen slip away from s’Khellian in these past years. H’daen, I can give you back your honor.”
“In exchange for this one man?” Tr’Khellian plainly couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and equally, wanted to believe it as much as anything he had ever heard in his life. “But why so much for so little—for a single Federation prisoner?”
“I told you before.” Impatience and a hint of what lay beneath his bland exterior lent an ugly edge to tr’Annhwi’s words before he recovered himself and twisted his mouth into an expression that approximated a smile. “There are too many factors, but most concern mnhei’sahe, my personal honor and that of my own House. That one represents a tiny portion of the blood-debt owed the Imperium by the Federation, which policy”—tr’Annhwi sneered the word—“forbids us to collect. But mnhei’sahe transcends policy, as you well know, and McCoy is a Command officer of the ship which owes blood-debt to many Houses. All will gain a morsel of contentment when sentence is executed on him, but I want all of it, for the honor of House Annhwi—and for my own satisfaction.”
“What will you…?” H’daen didn’t complete his question. There was no need for it, or an answer, and he was a squeamish man at best.
“Cause him pain in whatever fashion pleases me,” said tr’Annhwi. “For as long as pleases me. And then—eventually—I shall kill him.”
“But Commander t’Radaik left him with me,” H’daen said, as if reminding himself rather than the uncaring man across the table. “How will you explain the”—he swallowed, looking unwell—“the state of his body?”
“What body?” Tr’Annhwi drew the sidearm he wore as part of his uniform and laid it with a dull metallic clank beside his winecup. “A phaser set to disrupt doesn’t leave one. At least”—he favored H’daen with an ugly, feral grin—“not one with enough molecular integrity to show what it looked like before it died. And you need have no worries about t’Radaik blaming you; prisoners are always being shot while escaping, and she’ll never know it didn’t happen this time….” He picked up the phaser again and bounced it once or twice on the palm of his hand as if it were a toy, smiling indulgently.
H’daen stared at it with the horrified fascination of a man unfamiliar with weapons and uneasy in their presence. He was visibly relieved when tr’Annhwi tucked the phaser back into its holster and instead withdrew a small rectangle of plastic from the pouch on his belt. It wasn’t quite so noisy as the phaser when he flipped it onto the table, but it carried just as much impact in H’daen’s eyes.
“Prime-transfer authority,” tr’Annhwi said—unnecessarily, because H’daen knew perfectly well what it was.
And what it meant. His guest might have come to the house with some romantic notion in the back of his mind, but the appearance of this thing made it clear that romance was not the subcommander’s first concern. Nobody carried transfer authorities for any longer than their business required, because each card represented enormous wealth in cash or securities, deposited somewhere for exchange once the card itself was exchanged and a deal completed. Even upside down, H’daen could see the amount of data with which it was imprinted. This one small card could buy half the city of i’Ramnau—and the half worth buying, at that.
He sat quite still for a moment, just looking at it, then held out the winecup in his hand toward the empty air. Arrhae, commanded to clean the anteroom and not daring to stop until the order was countermanded, darted immediately to fill it, met her lord’s eyes, and saw not the greed that tr’Annhwi had read there, but a terrible confused indecision. It was as if all that H’daen had thought was right and proper about his world had suddenly been dashed to fragments about his feet. Arrhae recognized that expression more readily than most, for something much the same had stared out of her mirror on several mornings since McCoy arrived to complicate the house.
“My lord,” she said, “there is a matter from i’Ramnau that needs your attention.”
“Not now, Arrhae….”
There was no certainty in the way he said it, or she would never have dared to persist; not with tr’Annhwi’s suspicious eyes on her. “It would be best dealt with at once, hru’hfirh; then you can return to your other business without further interruptions.”
“Get about your duties, servant!” snapped tr’Annhwi, and his glare should have killed her on the spot.
He knows—or at least guesses—what I might say, she thought, flinching from the promise of pain in the subcommander’s cold face. O Elements, let H’daen hear me!
He heard something at least, the same thing that had caused no reaction less than a quarter-hour before. Before certain things about his guest had come to light. But now…
“Subcommander, Arrhae ir-Mnaeha is hru’hfe to this house, and no mere servant for all and any to command.” There was a strength and dignity about H’daen’s voice that Arrhae had not heard for many months; it came from an awareness of the Naming of his House, which if it had fallen into poverty and insignificance was at least decent and worthy of the fair-speaking that many higher Houses had forfeited these past few years.
Tr’Annhwi opened his mouth to say something—insulting, by the twist of his lips—then remembered where he was and shut it again without uttering a sound. No matter how wealthy or how powerful he might be elsewhere, right now he was only a Fleet subcommander guesting under the roof of an Imperial Praetor, and not merely courtesy but caution dictated his behavior.
“Arrhae,” said H’daen, getting to his feet, “come with me.” He turned from the table, not without a long, thoughtful look at the prime-transfer card, and walked out of the room with Arrhae at his heels. Once the door was shut behind them, with tr’Annhwi on the far side of it, he turned on her. “You had best have a fine explanation for this, girl, or I shall—”
“My lord, your worst punishment would be better than the kindnesses of that one,” she said, and looked him in the eye as she said it. “I am hru’hfe to the house, and you were pleased to call me your conscience. These are not moral scruples now, but my own fears for your honor. You know me. You know I speak what I perceive as truth,” Arrhae paused, watching him, and smiled quickly, “so far as manners permit.”
“This also is truth. Speak more of it, Arrhae. I will hear you.”
“There is little more, lord, and I speak as a servant ignorant of the policies within a noble House—but how can the Elements favor any House, when honor is set aside and the brief regard of men can be only attained by breaking trust and selling a helpless man as though he were a beast? There is guest-right on Mak’khoi, and your word on that right. Only your word can betray it….”
H’daen stood where he was for a brief time, very still, looking with blank eyes at something only he could see. Then that dull gaze focused on Arrhae. “Have you no duties of your own, that you must interfere in my private affairs? Go—do something of use to earn your keep, and leave me be!” He turned away from her and went back inside the antechamber, and the sound of its door closing was like the lid of a coffin coming down. She took three slow steps in the direction of McCoy’s room, hoping against hope that H’daen would summon her back with a change of mind, but there was no other sound.
On her four
th step, Arrhae began to run.
McCoy heard the footsteps pattering along the corridor a bare two seconds before someone began to fumble with the lock. He glanced around his room and at the companion who had slipped into it half an hour before, and realized that there was nowhere and no time to hide.
No time at all. The door burst open, slammed shut as quickly—and Arrhae, his jailer, went sprawling as she tripped over something that hadn’t been there before. He picked her up, brushed her down, muttered softly when he saw the grazes running from knee to ankle along both shins, and waited for the questions to start.
He didn’t have to wait long, only enough for the woman to recover the breath that the fall had knocked out of her. There was a very brief wince as skinned legs made their presence felt, and then a mental hiccup that reflected clearly in her eyes, as everything she had been intending to say when she came through the door was suddenly replaced by a lot of things she hadn’t expected to say at all. The first one was fairly obvious.
“What’s this rock doing in here?”
Less obvious, at least to Arrhae, was the possibility of an answer from the rock itself. She got one all the same.
“I was speaking to Dr. McCoy, ma’am,” it said in a courteous if rather grating voice that came from an unmistakable Starfleet voder on its back, marked with equally unmistakable lieutenant’s stripes. “I hope you didn’t hurt yourself.”
