by Diane Duane
He glanced away from her for several seconds. When he looked back, he was smiling slightly. “Do the job, Terise. Do the job and do it well.” He took a moment to stick his head up and snap off two quick shots, then ducked behind the bench again, staring expectantly at the Senate Chamber ceiling. “We’ll have to find another outside contact,” he said. “There’s no one to pass your reports through anymore.”
“I’ll work something out. A hru’hfe has a little pull.” And she evidently had a thought, for her eyebrows went up in the Rihannsu version of a suppressed smile. “Maybe in goods shipments,” she said. “There is some clandestine trade across the Neutral Zone. You could order some ale….”
“I already have,” McCoy said, and laughed under his breath. “Listen. You take the phaser and make a break for it, I’ll go after you and grab you. You throw me and go for Naraht. I have a confession to make—” He cocked an eye at her, feeling slightly sheepish. “I second-guessed you and told Naraht you’d probably want to stay. He won’t hurt you too much. Keep your eyes closed. The acid is pretty strong up close when he’s busy. Your people’ll be convinced whose side you’re on.”
She took his hand, neither squeezing nor shaking it but simply holding it. “Leaving my adopted family would hurt more,” she said softly.
“Prosper, then,” McCoy said as quietly. “Stick with them. And if you can, if they’ll listen…tell them that the rest of the family is waiting for them to come home and join the rest of us.”
Arrhae nodded. Then her grip tightened and the balance of her crouch changed, and McCoy yelped as she bit him in the hand he was trying to keep over her mouth. The phaser was ripped out of his hand, and he was slammed sideways into the bench so hard his head spun….
Arrhae ir-Mnaeha tr’Khellian broke free of her captor in the sight of many present, stole the phaser right out of his fingers, and fled before he could seize her again. If there had been more phasers in the chamber, or if she hadn’t been so frightened that she forgot to use it, he could have easily been killed or struck down by a stun-charge so that the various penalties could have been executed after all. Instead, she ran from him and was attacked at once by the Earth-monster that had ravaged the Senate, injuring or killing many. Senators and Praetors, people of note and substance, saw Arrhae stand her ground as many of military Houses had not, and shoot her phaser at the monster while it bore down on her and brushed her aside as if she did not exist….
Arrhae sprawled on the ground, gasping with the pain of a collarbone that had snapped like a stick when Naraht’s fast-moving bulk had slammed into her braced shooting-arm. Her entire left side throbbed and tingled both with the impact and the heavy-sunburn sensation of mild acid burns. McCoy had been right, it did hurt. But she had been right too…and sometimes that fact could make a marvelous painkiller.
Home. Home by choice. At last.
Arrhae took that thought with her to the shadows….
Someone was yelling for more guards—none of whom had yet answered the summons—and was adding demands for heavy weapons. Come on, what are you waiting for? he thought…and as if on cue, a fine plume of dust started spiraling down out of nowhere, adding its powdery texture to the cocktail of suspended solids in the air. Other plumes joined it quickly, and a wedge of stucco popped out of the frieze that ran between walls and ceiling proper.
Then the whole roof and ceiling structure shuddered as some vast weight settled on them, and moaned with intolerable anguish at the strain. It was a horrifying thing to hear a stone building seem to groan with pain, and inside the Senate Chamber all had become as quiet as when they saw the first crack in the floor. Someone went to the great double doors and pulled them open, looked out—and refused to cross the threshold. He turned very slowly and walked back to his place on the veto side of the house with his face the color of new cheese and his eyes seeming sunk back into his head. Only when he was seated again did he look his fellows in the face. “The building is ringed with soldiers,” he said to all and none of them. “They are not Rihannsu. And there is a starship on the roof.”
Nobody laughed.
A column of crimson sparkle came alive in the middle of the floor as somebody beamed in from the “starship on the roof,” and still nobody spoke or moved. As the transporter-dazzle faded, McCoy got off the floor, dusted himself down, and endeavored without much success to put right the ravages of the past few minutes’ activity. The cavalry’s arrived, he thought. But he didn’t say it aloud.
Ael i-Mhiessan t’Rllaillieu stood there surveying the Senate Chamber of Ra’tleihfi on ch’Rihan, and said nothing. She looked much as she had when McCoy had seen her last: a little, straight, slender woman who came about up to his collarbone, with long dark hair neatly braided and coiled around her head—a woman whose face looked fierce even when it was quiet, a lady whose eyes were always alert and intelligent, sometimes wicked, often merry.
Right now the eyes were very alert indeed, but not so merry. To McCoy she had the look of a woman briefly possessed by memories. She had a right to be. From what she had told him, the last time she had stood here she had seen her niece, the young “Romulan” commander whom McCoy and Kirk had known, formally stripped of House-name and exiled. It had been a little death for everyone involved, McCoy thought. And Rihannsu rarely leave death unavenged. She not only has them where she wants them, she has you there, too, Leonard, my boy. What if she decided on a whim to get rid of you as well? In her eyes, way back when, when we first met, you were as culpable for the commander’s trial and exile as Jim Kirk was.…
He brushed the thought aside as a result of all this physical exertion. The tension of it made him a little paranoid sometimes. Ael was simply standing and looking around the place, not so much at people but at the building itself. Many of the ancient sigils hanging here and there now had blastholes in them, and the white marble of the place was all burn-scorched and spattered with the viridian of blood.
She moved at last. Her boots crunched on broken stone and other, grimmer remnants as she walked slowly forward, her eyes moving, always moving, from face to face, from floor to walls to ceiling. Their gaze rested a moment on the smashed body of one of McCoy’s guards, a phaser still clutched in one hand even though the arm lay feet from where it should have been. “Weapons,” she said softly. “Indeed.” The silence in the room became profound. The holster at her own belt was conspicuously empty.
Ael picked her way carefully across the torn paving. “Bloodwing roosts on the roof,” she said conversationally, “and her phasers have stunned all for a kilometer around this building. No use in waiting for your guards. Or for any small patrol-craft foolish enough to try anything. The phasers are no longer set to merely stun.”
She came to stand beside the Empty Chair, looking thoughtfully at what lay in it. “Poor thing,” she said to the Sword. “For a millennium and a half no other weapon less noble has been permitted under this roof for any cause, not even for blood feud. Now they bring in blasters wholesale to guard one poor weak Terran. Or simply to terrify him for their pleasure.”
People shifted where they stood. She ignored them, smiling a terrible smile at the Sword. “It seems nobility is gone from this place…among other things. The kept word…the paid debt. Honor.”
“Traitress!” someone shouted. “You, to speak of honor!”
She turned slowly, and McCoy was glad the look in her eyes was not turned on him. “When I helped the Federation attack and destroy Levaeri V,” she said clearly, “the only thing I betrayed was a government that would have used the technology being developed there to destroy the last nobilities and freedoms of the people it was sworn to guard. I would do the same again. Beware, for if you give me reason, I shall do so again. Only respect for this old place that S’task built keeps me from putting a photon torpedo into it to keep you all company.” She grinned, and that wicked look was back. “I have always wondered how one of those would go off in atmosphere.”
She turned again to the Chair.
“This is no place for you,” she said. The Sword lay there, a long silent curve of black metal sheath, black jade hilt, so perfectly made that there was no telling where one began and the other left off except for the slight difference in the quality of their sheen. Ael put out her hand and picked up the Sword by its sheath.
The silence that fell was profound. “You have sold honor for power,” she said to the Senate and the Praetors. “You have sold what a Rihannsu used to be, to what a Klingon thinks a Rihannsu ought to. You have sold your names, you have sold everything that mattered about this world—the nobility, the striving to be something right—for the sake of being feared in nearby spaces. You have sold the open dealing of your noble ancestors for plots and intrigues that cannot stand the light of day, and sold your courage for expediency. Your foremothers would put their burned bones back together and come haunting you if they could. But they cannot. So I have.”
She hefted the Sword in her hand. “I have come paying a debt, to show you how it is done…in case you have forgotten. And meanwhile, my worthies, I shall take the Sword, and if you want it back, well, perhaps you might ask your friends the Klingons to send a fleet to find me. Or perhaps they would laugh and show you how to truly run this Empire as they run theirs, by sending that fleet here instead. They half-own you as it is. You might still change that…but I see little chance of it. Cowardice is a habit hard to break. Still, I wish that you might…and I will gladly serve the Empire again, when it is an Empire again…the one our fathers and mothers of long ago crossed the night to build.”
And Ael turned her back disdainfully on the entire Tricameron of the Romulan Empire, and looked at McCoy.
“Doctor,” she said very calmly, as if they had met under more peaceful circumstances, “my business here is done. Are there other matters needing your attention, or shall we take our leave?”
“I’m done here,” he said. “And so’s Naraht.”
“Ensign Rock—or Lieutenant now, I see.” McCoy had a definite feeling that Ael was deliberately “not noticing” things unless they were of some importance to her at a given moment. Passing Naraht by unnoticed was all very well in a garden rock arrangement, but on what had been a flat, bare floor—and which was still reasonably clean, so far as skirmish sites went—he was hard to miss. “You’ve grown, sir.”
Naraht shuffled and rumbled a bit before replying, the Hortan equivalent of a blush. “Madam,” he said, “you are more beautiful than I remembered.”
McCoy put an eyebrow up in mild surprise, then smiled slightly. “Must be the ears,” he said to Ael. “His mother always did have a soft spot for them.”
“Soft spot?” said Naraht. “My mother?”
Ael smiled, and bowed slightly to Naraht. “I make no judgment as to that,” she said. “But as regards beauty, if that is your perception, may I remain so. May we all.” She glanced back at the others in the chamber, and her amusement diluted somewhat as she flipped open a communicator. “In any case, I would as soon not overstay my welcome here, and I suspect I did that within the first second of my standing on the floor. Bloodwing, three to beam up. These coordinates. Energize….”
Arrhae drifted in and out of consciousness as she lay on the floor, aching. She had seen moments of Ael t’Rllailleu’s visit to the Senate Chamber, but each of those moments had faded to black before anything of interest happened. She opened her eyes again just as Ael, McCoy, and Naraht dissolved in a whirl of transporter effect, and heard Ael’s final words before the beam whisked words and speaker both away. “Bloodwing is the only ship of any size here, so we—”
As the darkness rose around her mind again, Arrhae thought she heard the chirp of another communicator opening, unless it was just a memory of the first. The voice that spoke into it was no more than a susurrant mumble, like waves on the seashore, and she wasn’t able to concentrate on who it was or what they said. Her arm hurt, and she was so tired.
“Avenger, this is tr’Annhwi…”
So tired…
“Beam me up! Emergency alert…!”
So…
“Go to battle stations….”
…tired…
Chapter Fifteen
McCoy had been aboard a Rihannsu warship before, but that had been a Klingon-built Akif-class battlecruiser, and it had at least been roomy. Bloodwing was nothing of the sort. None of his kinesic-analysis studies of viewscreen recordings that showed warbird bridges had prepared him for the reality of just how cramped the rest of the ship might be. Not that it caused him to stoop or anything so obvious; there was just a lot less free space than he was used to on the Enterprise, and if Naraht had indulged his appetite any further, the Horta would have been in real trouble.
He recognized familiar faces among the small group waiting for them in the transporter room. With the implant running, they would have been as well known to him as the crew of the Enterprise, and even now their names came back like those of old friends: Khoal and Ejiul and T’maekh, big Dhiemn and little N’alae, and his fellow protoplaser-wielder, Chief Surgeon t’Hrienteh. She at least looked pleased to see him there, but the rest had eyes only for their commander, and for what she carried cradled like a child in the crook of one arm. Not a one of them spoke as Ael stepped down from the transporter platform, looking for all the world like a queen—or the Ruling Queen herself.
“Now there is a tale for the evenings,” said someone softly and reverently.
Ael smiled a bit and reversed the Sword so that its scabbard-chape grounded with a small, neat click against the deck. “A long tale for many evenings, my children. But not just now. Are the landing party up and safe?”
“All up, Commander,” Ejiul said, checking a readout for confirmation. “They came up by cargo elevator through the rear hangar-bay. Since we had landed, more or less, it was quicker than using the transporter.”
“Excellent.” Ael toggled the wall-mounted intercom and said, “Bridge, all secure. Lift ship.”
“Vectors on line, up and running.”
McCoy recognized the voice as that of Aidoann t’Khnialmnae, and wondered with a little shudder whether Nniol tr’AAnikh was aboard as well. There were thanks he had to make at second hand, and not waste too much time about doing it.
Then Aidoann’s voice came back sounding more concerned than before. “Commander, we have detected another beam-up from the Senate Chambers. This wasn’t anything to do with us.”
“Tr’Annhwi,” said McCoy to the air. He suddenly remembered that despite not wearing a weapon with his uniform—tr’Annhwi respected that tradition at least—the subcommander had been wearing an equipment belt. That meant a communicator. And that meant he could get back to Avenger, which if its captain was on-planet, had to be in orbit waiting for him.
“You know one of House s’Annhwi, Doctor?” asked Ael as she made for the door and the turbolift beyond. “Then my compliments on the quality of your enemies.”
If he had thought the transporter room was cramped, that was nothing to being inside a turbolift with a Rihannsu commander and a noticeably oversized Horta. Getting out onto Bloodwing’s little bridge was almost a relief—though once Naraht rumbled after them, the situation became much as before. Nobody looked up to stare, even though the news of their arrival with the Sword had probably run through the ship in the few seconds that they were in the lift, and nobody moved from their seat while their commander was on the bridge. Or almost nobody.
None of Ael’s people wore Rihannsu Fleet uniform now, even though they were still dressed in a distinctly military style, but the young man who kick-swiveled his station chair around and then left it in a single springy bounce wore neither Romulan nor makeshift. He was Terran-human, in a Federation Starfleet command uniform, and he was grinning as he reached out to shake the doctor’s hand.
“Well, Dr. McCoy!” he said, shaking as vigorously as someone priming an old-style water pump, “I’m glad to see you’re not dead yet!” And grinned even wider as McCoy gaped in confusion. This was a
n elaboration he hadn’t expected. “Luks, sir. Ensign Ron Luks, of Starfleet Intelligence.”
“Ah.” Everything became suddenly clear. “So Admiral Perry sent you to hold the old man’s hand. On the wrist, or off it?”
Luks stopping shaking hands and went a little pink. Then he grinned again. “I acted as courier for the access codes on our side of the Neutral Zone, sir—and I was hoping to see some action,” he said, “but so far it’s just been a flitter-ride.”
“A very long flitter-ride,” said Ael, sitting down in her Command chair. “Or perhaps it only seemed that way. Starfleet’s ensigns, Doctor, seem to vie with one another in the display of enthusiasm. But I think we’ve found the action that you wanted so badly. Tactical.” Schematics came up on the main screen, showing their position near the surface of ch’Rihan and that of Avenger in a high geosynchronous orbit.
“This is more like it,” said Ensign Luks, pointing at the screen. The blue triangle representing the frigate was underscored by a rapidly scrolling column of data, and McCoy suspected he knew what it meant.
Aidoann confirmed it. “Avenger was in orbital shutdown until a matter of seconds ago, Commander,” she said, enhancing the image so that more information filled it. “They’ve just gone over to active status, while we are lifting clear…now.”
The ship jolted somewhat under McCoy’s feet and the viewer image reformatted, putting the schematic display up into a screen window overlaid on an exterior scan of Ra’tleihfi as the city dropped away beneath them. There were several columns of smoke crawling skyward, last traces presumably of those patrol-craft Ael had mentioned so scornfully. For all that he had to admire the courage of anybody who would attack something the size of a warbird with no more than a lightly armed atmosphere shuttle. It was very much more the traditional image of Romulan behavior than that which he had learned in the past days, and he wondered if it was typical because of the tradition, or traditional because it was a typical character trait. Whichever, it seemed entirely in accordance with the old custom of honorable suicide….
