by Diane Duane
“Only,” said the chief of staff, “a question of where that loyalty lies.”
“I have no doubts, in this case,” said the president. “By the time things come to a head, neither will you. In the meantime, Enterprise herself has significant symbolic value to all sides involved in the argument which is about to break out…and that value would be much lessened with a change in her command.”
He took one last look out the window, then turned back toward the desk. “So take care of it,” said the president. “Get Enterprise out there. Cut Kirk orders that will protect Fleet if…action has to be taken.” His face set grim. “But leave him the latitude he needs to get the job done. Our job, meantime, is to put together the assets she will need after the trouble starts. I want a meeting with the chiefs of services tomorrow at the latest. It’ll take at least a few days, possibly as long as a week, for the Romulan force to materialize where we have to take official notice of them. We need to start putting our assets in place immediately, before it can possibly be seen as a reaction to what’s about to start happening. And then…”
“Then we wait,” said the chief of staff of Starfleet.
“The worst part,” said the president, “as always. Get caught up on your sleep this week. I sure will, because once things start happening, we’re both likely to lose plenty.”
Fleet Admiral Mehkan nodded and headed toward the office door. Halfway through it, he paused and looked over his shoulder.
“There really is no way to avert this, is there?” he said, very softly indeed.
The president shook his head. “This time, unfortunately,” he said, “we’re right. We’re just going to have to pray we’re not as right as we’re afraid we are.”
Mehkan went out. The president of the Federation let out a long breath and looked out the window again at the mist lying over the city, softening and obscuring everything in a veil of increasingly radiant obscurities as the sun now tried to come out above it all. The soft view would not last long. Soon enough would come the awful clarity of phaser fire in the darkness, ships bursting in vacuum, the screams of the committed and the innocent together. At times like this, he hated his job more than anything.
Nevertheless, he turned back to his desk and set about doing it.
On ch’Rihan, in the planetary capital city Ra’tleihfi, stands an old edifice built with the elegant classical proportions of the “Ehsadai” period—that time when the Rihannsu were new to their planets from the depths of space, and just beginning the business of taming the Two Worlds to their will. The building itself was much newer than the Ehsadai era, having actually been built after the fall of that terrible woman Vriha t’Rehu, the so-called Ruling Queen. The Rihannsu who built it were, like many of their people, looking back with both relief and longing to a time when the arts of peace and war in the Two Worlds had seemed to be at their height. By building again in that style, and incorporating what remained of the older structure on the same site, the architects hoped to remind Rihannsu everywhere of what they had so nearly lost to the tyrant—freedom, honor, the rule of ch’Rihan and ch’Havran by the millions descended from those who had crossed space to live there, as opposed to rule by the whim of any one Rihanha, however well-intentioned.
But memory is such a fleeting thing. Soon enough, within ten years, twenty, fifty, the tyrant’s awful depredations were happily enough forgotten by people busy rebuilding their lives and countries after the wars that Vriha t’Rehu’s ambition triggered. Soon enough, as the Senate and Praetorate resumed their ancient powers, the old jockeying for power began, as the few fought for influence among the many; and the people scattered across the worlds accepted this, once again, as part of the normal conduct of life…some few Senators or Praetors overawing their many co-gubernals by virtue of family connections or wealth rather than drawing them into agreement by common sense. The Rihannsu forgot, and the Senate and Praetorate were content not to remind them, that the Two Worlds are rarely in such danger as when only a few hold rule; and they forgot what the building meant, except that it was old and beautiful.
Now, on this morning of the thirty-fifth of Awhn, that building was still old; but its beauty was marred. There was a great crack running right across the massive low dome that was the central chamber’s ceiling, roof, and another straight across and through the mighty slab of marble which had floored the great chamber under the dome, big enough to hold the whole Tricameron in session at once. Now formal sessions of both Senate and Praetorate were being held elsewhere while workers labored among the ugly pillars and struts of emergency scaffolding inside the building; and outside, tractor beams and pressors were supplementing the normal stresses that had formerly held the dome unsupported over the chamber. The architects had planned superbly, but they had not anticipated that the chamber would ever have a starship sitting on its roof.
The three men who stood there now, under the scaffolding, looked across the blaster-scarred and acid-stained marble of the chamber and said nothing. The workers, for the time being masters of this domain, paid no attention to them. The three men in their somber dark uniforms of state, sashed in black, not gold, were themselves paying little attention to the workers. The gazes of all three were directed toward the far side of the room, where there sat an old, old chair. One of the workers had thrown a couple ells’ length of protective sheeting over it, but this did not disguise the fact that the chair was empty.
“Come on,” said one of the men, the tallest of them, a big, fair, broad-shouldered man with a long, somber face. The three turned away and walked toward the entrance, which once had been perhaps the noblest part of the building, with its great bronze doors all cast and carved with episodes from the Empire’s history. But the doors had sprung out of their sills when the ship came down, and were now off being repaired, leaving nothing but protective sheeting hanging down and crackling noisily in the hot fierce wind that ran down the streets of Ra’tleihfi in this season.
They stepped out into the day, a fair green day under that windy sky, and stood a little to one side at the top of the great flight of steps leading down into the city’s central plaza, all surrounded and walled about with the close-packed spires and towers of the capital. A constant stream of workers came and went past them, and also many city people, coming up the steps as far as they were allowed to see the damage done, and going away again, muttering. Tr’Anierh, the tallest of the three, looked at these casual observers coming and going, and said under his breath, “Perhaps we should seal this off.”
“Why?” said the second man, the one in the middle; a short roundish man with a broad, cheerful face, bushy eyebrows, and hair beginning, perhaps prematurely, to be streaked with gray. “It’s good for them to see what the damned traitress did. And what their taxes are going to have to pay to repair. Anything that brings that home to them is worthwhile.”
Tr’Anierh looked over at the third of them—a Rihanha of medium height, medium build, medium skin tone, dark hair, a man almost resolutely ordinary-looking even to his customary bland expression—and wondered, as always, what he was thinking. “Well, Urellh?” he said. “Does Ahrm’n have the right of it here?”
Urellh tr’Maehhlie let out a breath as if he grudged it. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s not the people whose opinion will matter when we bring her back. It’s the Senate, and the Praetorate. They’re the ones who have to be reminded how she slighted them, denigrated their power, took the oldest symbol of it into her own thieving hands and ran off with it. When we go fetch her back, we must make sure that no distractions from outside keep them from killing her at last. More, though: we must make sure that they do not mistake her capture, and the Sword’s return, as all that’s necessary to bring this episode to an end.”
“There’s more to revenge, then,” said Ahrm’n tr’Kiell, “than just her…”
Tr’Anierh looked back at where the doors should have been, glanced over toward the side-flight of steps leading out and down to the plaza, and
moved slowly that way. The other two came with him.
“It’s time we faced the realities,” tr’Anierh said. “Things have been the same now for too long. We sit trapped here between two powerful enemies…one which has been kept from acting against us only by weakness caused by its empire being too far-flung for its forces to hold securely; the other by weakness at its root, a chronic unwillingness to fight unless forced to it by circumstances. And the first, as we now see, is shaking off its inactivity. The other is all too likely to do the same. Time we stopped acting the hlai trapped between two hnoiyikar, afraid to move one way or another lest one of the predators turn and bite its head off.” And ideally, tr’Anierh thought, time we found a way to get them to turn their attention to each other and leave us alone.
“You sound,” said tr’Kiell, “like the Senate yesterday.”
“And the day before,” said Urellh, “and the day before that, and for many days before. Endless cries of ‘Revenge!’ and ‘Blood or honor’—but no one willing to lead the first ship out, against either side, for fear of being blamed for the bloodshed to follow.” His voice had acquired an edge of disgust.
“And would you, then, Urellh?” said tr’Anierh, trying to seem casual. But he turned away a little, not anxious to see Urellh see him holding his breath, or seeming in any way overinterested in the answer. He has become entirely too sensitive to opposition, for whatever reason. If anything should make him realize how I detest his politics, everything I’ve been planning could be imperiled….
There was a long pause. “Aye, indeed I would,” said Urellh. “The blow to our reputations, even eventually to our sovereignty, is a massive one. The insult grows harder to bear by the day. And others are watching. Not the Federation.” His smile grew suddenly bitter here. “We see now what the Klingons think of a neighboring Empire that cannot stop one ship from coming in through our system defenses and taking the most sacred possession of our people.”
“But that was treason. The defenses were taken down from the inside—”
“And what does that matter? The Klingons will say to themselves, ‘Where once treachery’s rank weed sprang up, it can be sown again.’ No matter that it was chopped down once; they will see the ground as being favorable. They have always been willing to use such means if tactics required. And if treason does not work, they will use main force with joy. Any system that can be compromised by so few people, so quickly, has revealed a fatal flaw…and has revealed itself as easily broken by any who apply enough brute force to it.”
“That flaw has been mended,” said tr’Anierh. “Those people are dead now, or fled.”
“Happy the dead,” Urellh growled, “for they’re beyond what will happen to those who fled, once we catch them.” He looked over at Ahrm’n tr’Kiell.
Tr’Kiell shrugged. “If you expect news of new arrests, I have none. The Two Worlds are not a small place, and there are endless boltholes and empty places on both worlds where criminals and traitors can go to ground…especially on ch’Havran, which has never been as unified in its loyalties as it should have been. And then there are the client worlds…” He sighed. “Our intelligence services are doing what they can to find them, day by day…. But it’s a live traitor’s nature to come out and take up his treason again when he thinks it will be safe. And those who helped the cursed t’Rllaillieu take the Sword will find that it will never be safe for them, no matter how long they wait.”
“In any case,” tr’Anierh said, “the matter is now, as you say, beyond choice. The Klingons have spotted what looks like a weakness at the very heart of our empire. They are already moving to exploit it. And it’s when an enemy is moving that he is at his most vulnerable.”
“We hardly have the forces to strike at them directly,” said tr’Kiell, “with any hope of success.”
“Not if we are the only combatant,” said Urellh.
The others looked at him. “Communications are always subject to misunderstanding,” Urellh said, “and misdirection. Even in peacetime. Most certainly in wartime. And in the time just before a war, communications are more easily lost, misread or misconstrued than at any other time whatever. The Klingons are moving? The sooner, the better, for their movement will give the Federation pause. If word came to the Federation that the Klingons had struck—say, one of their outpost worlds—that news would serve to turn their attention away from us. With the result that we are left free to act—”
“They would not be so foolish as to become involved in a two-front war,” tr’Kiell said. “It would be suicidal, even for them.”
“They will become involved in whatever we present them with,” said Urellh, “as always. They are not a proactive people, the Federation. Indeed, they are not a people at all, but a confused mass of hundreds of bizarre species with hundreds of agendas, all conflicting; they cannot act boldly or straightforwardly, by virtue of their very structure. It is a fact we have been slow to exploit. But now we will make up for some lost time, Elements willing; we will show them what a united people can do…and what real boldness looks like. Information, meanwhile, can be twisted into many strange and unusual shapes in transit between worlds. We will see what can be done in this regard in the very near future.”
He fell silent, gazing out into the morning as some workers moving slabs of white marble on hovercarries went by. Tr’Anierh was glad of the few moments’ respite, for this unusually communicative mood of Urellh’s had begun to cause him concern. What trap does he set for us here? tr’Anierh wondered. After a few moments, though, he put the thought away. The three of them, by virtue of long careful manipulation of the economic, dynastic, and political assets that chance and ancient House affiliations had cast in front of them, had over the past several years risen to the position of aierh te’nuhwir, “first among equals” in the Praetorate. Each of them, by virtue of sheer personal power, now swung behind him a considerable bloc of the votes in both Senate and Praetorate. Each of them knew too many of the others’ secrets to be afraid of what the others might do. Tr’Anierh knew his fear, therefore, to be foolish, yet he knew the others had it too…and it kept them cautious.
“As for the Klingons,” Urellh said after the workers had passed, “they may come to see that the Federation is not invulnerable, either. There are members of their own High Council who would not be averse to sending their fleets in that direction, as much for the sake of changes in their own status quo as for revenge, battle, or booty.”
“An interesting concept,” said tr’Anierh. “But the main problem remains. The woman, and her cursed renegade confederates aboard our stolen cruiser Bloodwing…and the Sword.”
He looked closely at tr’Kiell. “The Senate is ready to act,” tr’Keill said. “If you think I have been acting to delay the matter, you think wrongly.”
“But you have a personal connection,” said Urellh, “and who could doubt that you would have mixed feelings about the situation?”
“I think the source of my mixed feelings is better dead,” tr’Kiell said, “and enough said about that. With luck, the Elements being with us, it will soon be so.” He fell silent for a moment, and then added, “And our other assets on Bloodwing, it would seem, are still in place; that confirmation was long in coming, and there was some uncertainty, but it came at last. So now we can give our increasingly noisy Senate something to do before it so completely loses its patience or its wits that it starts attempting to press the thorny chaplet of blame onto one of our heads.” His smile was wintry. “They may safely be turned loose to enact the legislation which we will propose them tomorrow.”
“Who did the wording?” Urellh said.
“I did,” said tr’Anierh. “It needed some delicacy of shading. But the meaning will be clear enough even for the Senate, and our fellow Praetors will of course ratify it without discussion. The task force to be sent out on this foray will number six ships: more than enough both to handle the business of entering Federation space on a diplomatic mission, and to be able to pur
sue our own interests even if they attempt to block us. Most particular attention has been paid to the newer aspects of the ships’ weaponry.” He smiled slightly. This was his own area of expertise. “We will go to them, seemingly with our hands open, and demand the return of a war criminal for trial on her homeworld. If they turn her and the Sword over to us, that will be well. If they merely allow us to pursue her, that also will be well. She cannot long elude pursuit, and we will track her down and bring her and the Sword home—or just the Sword. And if they do not assist us by allowing pursuit, or turning her over to us—”
“Then war,” tr’Kiell said.
“They will have forced us to it,” said Urellh, in a tone meant to simulate regret. “We will have no choice but to do what is necessary to recover our property…and our honor. An evil chance, but some good will yet come of it. At best we will push them some ways back from the spaces they occupy on the other side of the Neutral Zone; there are some choice planets there. At worst we will do the Federation great and memorable damage along the border—destroying as many of the monitoring stations along the Zone as we can, and forcing them to spend vast sums restoring and restaffing them and installing new infrastructure.”
“Hurting not only them,” said tr’Kiell, “but various others who will realize that they have misperceived our weakness.”
“Oh yes,” said Urellh. “And meanwhile, in the first hours or days of that war, the first-in task force will locate the woman, whether she shelters behind the Federation’s kilts or not, and destroy her and the Sword both, if need be. They shall not have her, or it; and she shall not live to keep it in our despite. Better it should be destroyed than fall into alien hands…if indeed she is not more than half alien herself already, in heart. Likely enough, bearing in mind who bore her company at Levaeri V.”
“And while we resolve the issue that started the war,” said tr’Anierh, “the war itself will yield its own rewards….”
