by Diane Duane
Somewhere distant in the great house, voices were lifted in song. Cups could be heard clanking, at that feast to which Kelg had not been invited. But that will change. Soon the feasts of triumph will begin, and I shall be foremost at them all—and Kurvad’s skull will be bound in steel and used as a spittoon. “What else have you to report, then?” said K’hemren.
“Nothing else,” said Kelg. “When must we return?”
“I don’t know,” said K’hemren. “I must first speak with the chancellor. Go back to your fleets and get them ready for battle. I will contact you when he has orders for you.”
“Will it be war?”
“I think that will probably be unavoidable,” said K’hemren, with a smile.
Kelg and Kurvad did the only thing they could conceivably have done together: they leapt up from their chairs and shouted for victory. K’hemren stayed seated, stroking the bat’leth’s pattern-welded steel. “Yes,” he said, “you will have your chance at both the Romulans and the Federation, I make no doubt. But beware lest some unhappy fate throws you in the path of Kirk and that bitch-traitress of his.”
“It would be no unhappy fate for me,” said Kelg. “My brother served with Kang, and came to grief at Kirk’s hands.” The images of what revenge he might take if the man ever crossed his path had long been the delight of his idle moments. Now, there was at least a chance that they might come true.
“And my cousin,” said Kurvad, “when he served with Koloth: the same.”
K’hemren said nothing. “Go back to your ships,” he said, “and wait.”
Kelg glared at K’hemren for just a second or so, for he had not declared their errand complete: they could not try to kill each other, as they had been longing to do. But there’ll be another day, Kelg thought. Is not war full of unfortunate accidents? He headed out of the room with only a single angry glance at Kurvad.
Behind him, as the door shut, he caught a last glimpse of K’hemren, not hurrying out to his interrupted feast, but sitting quietly in the chair, in the dimness, stroking the bat’leth, thinking.
That evening there were a lot of people in the rec deck. There was no special event arranged—nothing but the usual scatter of games, conversation, occasional music or song, and people moving around and eating and drinking casually. Still, Jim could, after long experience, feel the tension in the air—the sense of there having been a very close call—and could also feel it discharging itself. But this was what rec was for, at its best; this was one of the reasons why the recreation department was classified as part of medicine, and reported directly to McCoy. McCoy was in fact here as well, as much for his own discharge of tension as to keep an eye on everyone else—though which reason was more important to him, Jim thought he knew.
There were, as Jim had intended, a fair number of Rihannsu in attendance—though for Starfleet’s peace of mind, and indeed Jim’s, they were all in here, and not wandering around his ship without supervision. The food processors were proving extremely popular, and when Jim came down from the balcony where he had been keeping an eye on things to greet Ael shortly after she entered, he found her standing with a disappointed look next to one of them. To K’s’t’lk, beside her, Ael was saying, “It is rather unfortunate. I have something of a savory tooth, and kheia is very choice…and something we could not normally afford to have on Bloodwing, I can tell you that.”
“Problems?” Jim said.
“My crew, the greedy hlai, have eaten all the kheia,” Ael said. She glanced over at Aidoann, who was standing nearby with a pair of tongs and a plate that was very nearly empty. “Is this mnhei’sahe, then? To starve your commander?”
Aidoann shot Jim an amused look, and then held out her plate, and her tongs, handles first, to Ael. “We exist to serve,” she said. Laughter came from the various other crew around her, Khiy and tr’Keirianh the master engineer, who were eating just as fast as they could and seemed in no rush to make gestures of self-sacrifice.
“Oh, away with you,” Ael said, laughing. “There are more than enough other dainties. Just look here; see the size of this llsathis! Here, I will have a slice of that, and just a cup of ale, and leave the kheia to my poor starving children.” Her people laughed at her lofty tone, apparently not at all fooled by it.
“Allow me,” Jim said, and cut her a slice of what appeared to be a giant blue gelatin ring. “Ael, why is so much of your food blue?”
She blinked as she took the plate and a spoon. They strolled away from the table, K’s’t’lk coming with them with a plate held up on two of her back legs. “Why should it not be?”
“It’s not a very usual color for us.”
“Perhaps. But one person’s usual is another man’s odd, I should think. Surely it would not be usual for you to eat…Forgive me, madam, but what is that?”
“Graphite,” K’s’t’lk said, picking up another chunk of it as they walked, and bringing it close to her body. Jim didn’t see where it went—he never had, where solid foods were concerned—and he had given up staring to try to find out. “I am off duty now, and may permit myself to indulge a little.”
“It is an intoxicant?”
“For us, yes.” She gave Jim a look out of what was currently the frontmost cluster of eyes. “And all too often present company has encouraged me to indulge, when we were in private.”
“You’re interesting when you start getting atonal,” Jim said, “that’s all.”
K’s’t’lk chimed at him in major ninths, a sarcastic but still good-natured sound. “You two are old intimates, then,” Ael said, “and do not merely work together.”
“Oh yes. Many a long quiet talk the captain and I have had in his quarters,” K’s’t’lk said, “about life and the universe. But that cabin is famous across the quadrant, Commander. Beware how you go!”
“Why,” Ael said calmly, “what should happen to me there?”
Jim looked at K’s’t’lk with mock outrage. “You’re a fine one to talk,” he said, “after what you did in my quarters!”
“What did she do?” Ael said.
Jim opened his mouth, shut it again, then laughed. “I’m not sure exactly how to describe it,” he said.
“H’t’r’tk’tv’mtk,” K’s’t’lk said, or sang. “The term has no close equivalent among hominid species, Commander. I reproduced myself.”
“What,” Ael said, “right there?”
Those blue-burning eyes, full of their shifting fires, dwelt on Jim again with some amusement. “Certainly it’s not something one would do just anyplace,” K’s’t’lk said. “It needs a secure environment. A certain amount of intellectual and emotional engagement…. And shelves.”
“Oh, well, thank you very much,” Jim said, nonplussed. “‘Shelves.’” Then he laughed. “You two really should get together sometime and discuss it further. Meanwhile, T’l—what about 15 Trianguli?”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t mention that.”
“Somebody has to,” Jim said. “That star didn’t behave as advertised.”
“In a manner of speaking it did,” K’s’t’lk said, sounding even more embarrassed. “The only reason the technique didn’t work correctly was that, as Mr. Chekov mentioned at the time, the star is only marginally a candidate for being seeded. If it had been just a very little more massive, or a touch hotter, say a K6, we would have gotten a smooth propagation of the ion-storm effect into subspace, instead of a coronal mass ejection, which was not what I had in mind. A thing like that could kill you.”
Jim and Ael exchanged a look over her back. “But certainly,” Ael said, “this experience will have provided you with valuable data for more accurately establishing your baselines in the future.”
“Commander,” K’s’t’lk said, “you are a gracious lady, and I thank you for trying to make me feel better. But, J’m, I apologize to you. Once more I have put your ship in danger by not adequately predicting all the variables in a situation.”
“Oh, come on, T’l…” Jim said. “Y
ou did what you could with what you had; it wasn’t as if you could have sent that star back and got a better one. And we all came out of it well enough; consider this a minor setback. What did work brilliantly was the shields.”
“Yes, they did function nicely, didn’t they?” K’s’t’lk said. She sounded slightly more cheerful. “The only problem was the way we had to keep retuning them separately on both ships.”
Ael’s expression became puzzled. “I am not sure how that could be avoided. The ships are after all discrete entities, each with its own warp signature and structure, requiring different tuning for each warp field’s shape.”
“Oh, of course,” K’s’t’lk said, “but for joint operations like this it would be more elegant to have only one mechanism handling both sets of tuning.” She chimed softly for a moment. “You know,” she said then, “if you…No.”
“No?” Ael said.
“No, it would just bring in the equivalence heresy,” K’s’t’lk said, “and hard on the heels of that come all kinds of quantum uncertainties as well. Unresolved energy-state phyla, subspace phase-shift intransigences. There are enough of those already.” She sighed, a sound like minor-chord windchimes.
“T’l,” Jim said, “you were supposed to be enjoying yourself a little, here. And look, you’ve run out of graphite.”
“Don’t tempt me. Now, intransigences…” K’s’t’lk said, in a rather different tone of voice. “Now there’s an interesting thought. I should go talk to Sc’tty. Captain, Commander, if you’d excuse me—”
K’s’t’lk went jangling off across the room at speed. “Now you’ve done it,” Jim said, watching her go.
“I have done it?”
Jim chuckled as they walked away. “I take it,” Ael said, “you are well used to not being clear about what she is discussing.”
“You have no idea. The things she’s done to my ship—” He smiled. “Well, I’ll forgive her a great deal; the results have sometimes been spectacular. Come on, Ael, let’s sit down and relax.”
He led her up to the balcony at the top of the recreation deck, nearest the great windows, where a few chairs and tables had been set out. Bloodwing had little in the way of ports, Jim knew; and he knew the impulse to bring her up here had been the correct one as she stood there and looked out the huge clearsteel windows, silently, her food momentarily forgotten.
“There’s an observation deck above this one,” Jim said. “Quieter, if you prefer it—”
“No,” Ael said, “this suits me well enough. I have had enough quiet and solitude over the last couple of months; this makes a pleasant change…even if the voices breaking the silence, some of them, are strange.”
They sat down and watched the mingling crews beneath them for a while, during which time Ael demolished the blue gelatin-stuff on her plate, and Jim sat cradling the old port which McCoy, now down there talking to tr’Hrienteh, had handed him on his way over to greet Ael. Finally the two of them were left sipping their respective drinks, while beneath them people chatted and sang and laughed and played quiet games, and the evening slipped by.
Jim wasn’t sure how long they had been up there, discussing this and that, before Harb Tanzer was coming up the steps toward them. “Captain,” he said, “Commander, can I get you anything?”
“Ael?” Jim said.
She shook her head. “I am in comfort,” she said. “It has been a pleasure to be here, for a change, when hostilities were not in progress.” Her voice was a touch sad. Jim could practically hear her thinking, As they are about to be again.
Harb only nodded. “Yes,” he said. “The last time you were here, there wasn’t much time for recreation as such. This place…” He looked around, plainly seeing it as it had been once when the corridors outside had been full of Romulans suddenly turned treacherous, and the inside was full of Enterprise crew and Romulans friendly to them, but unarmed. “This place,” Harb said finally, “got to be a mess.” He looked around it now, gazing at the crewpeople, human and Rihannsu and many others, who were milling around eating and drinking and talking. “It’s much improved now.”
There was a faint rumbling through the floor, and Harb looked up as Mr. Naraht came in. “Aha,” Harb said. “Captain, Commander, would you excuse me? I want to go see what he thinks of the new batch of granite.”
“Go on, Mr. Tanzer,” Jim said. “I’ll be pleased to hear.”
He went on down into the crowd on the main floor, which was thinning somewhat now as the evening went on. The day had taken its toll on everyone. “Ael,” Jim said after a few moments. “We can’t leave it much longer. They’re going to be here tomorrow.”
“I know,” she said softly.
“So tell me now. What are you going to do?”
Ael sighed, a heavy sound; and it came to Jim that he had never heard her sigh before, or at least couldn’t remember it. “Only this,” she said. “I think I must lead a force of ships and ground troops back to ch’Rihan and ch’Havran, and meet the forces of my homeworlds in battle…with an eye to unseating the government.”
“Oh,” Jim said.
She gave him a look. “Aye, I hear you thinking: ‘Where is she keeping this force? I have not seen it.’ Well, nor have I. But it is there, and growing…if my sources tell me true. And I believe they do.”
“If they don’t,” Jim said, “you’re going to be in for a very interesting time.”
“I am in for that regardless,” Ael said.
“Your government’s been in place a long while,” Jim said. “I doubt it’s just going to let you walk in and topple it.” And what if she thinks it will?…We may be in big trouble….
She sat back and folded her arms. “In the older days,” Ael said, “what you say would unquestionably have been true. Its strength was better distributed, then. But now it grows top-heavy, and therein lies both the source of some of our troubles as a people, and their solution.”
She got a brooding look. “It is not so much the Senate with which I quarrel,” Ael said. “It works well enough. But the Praetorate has acquired far more power than it used to have in the days when it was mostly our high judiciary, ruling on finer points of the law which the Senate had passed and the Expunging Body could not muster enough of a majority to remove. Now, for various reasons of expediency and habit, the Praetorate has begun to sway the Senate itself, pushing the power blocs which compose it into what directions they please. In some cases I suspect it—as do others—of encouraging the formation of those blocs itself, to make the Senate as a whole easier to manipulate. ‘Independent’ Senators are few and far between, these days, and those who choose to remain so for long are either blind to the forces moving around them, or stubborn enough not to care. A Senator unaligned with one of the major power blocs is all too likely to become suspect, attracting the attention of intelligence or other unfriendly organizations subject to the Praetorate’s dictates. All too soon Senators who realize this tend to fall into line.”
Jim turned that over in his mind. What a mess…. But he had not missed her annoyed tone. This was plainly something Ael would very much like to do something about. “I get the sense from what you’re saying that the Praetorate itself has its own blocs.”
Ael nodded. “And therein lies the problem. There are only twelve Praetors, and when so much power is concentrated in so few hands, trouble inevitably starts. Once upon a time all Praetors came of houses of great power and wealth, so much so—it was thought—that they would not need to strive one against another in the political realm. But too little of Rihannsu nature the lawmakers knew who believed that. Over time a tendency has manifested itself for two or three or four of the Twelve to dominate the others, either by straightforward means such as kinship-alliance, or by secret guile or the threat of force.” That brooding look got darker. “We are not at our best, as a people, when rule is concentrated in the hands of just a few…and just one would be far worse. The memory of Vriha t’Rehu, that bloody and terrible woman, the Ruling Queen
as she called herself, is too much with us still. Close enough she came to destroying both our worlds.”
Ael shuddered. “For our people, as regards government, safety lies in numbers…the more, the better. But at present, though the outer forms of a representative democracy, as you would call it, may yet remain, the reality is otherwise. Our Empire has become a tyranny. There have been times when luck or the Elements have sent us tyrants who were benevolent, as there were such times in your own world. But such times are rare, and this is not one of them. The Three who rule the Twelve, right now, are a force under whom mnhei’sahe as we used to understand it has become a scarcity, too precious either to spend on ourselves or to waste on our enemies. For them, expediency has become all. And the Empire, in their hands, has become a tool used not as originally intended, to feed its people and further their lives and aspirations, but to keep power concentrated as it is now, in the hands of those who have long possessed it, and prefer to keep it that way.”
She took a long drink of her ale, then sat for a few moments turning and turning the cup around in her hands. “The Three have ascended relatively young to power, and delight in using it; indeed their use of it has molded all the doings of Federation and Empire, one with the other, for the last half decade. They it was who started to send our ships across the Neutral Zone, spending the lives of brave officers to test the peace which had held so long and which so irked them. Theirs was the force behind the vote of the Senate which stripped my sister-daughter of her ship and her title and her name, after you stole the cloaking device from her, and sent her into exile, the Elements only know where. They it was who, when I began to speak out openly against them, sent me away to the Outmarches on Cuirass for that tour of duty intended at the least to punish me, and at best to bring about my death. And they were the ones who, before they ascended to power, started the researches that terminated in the work done at Levaeri V; the ones who ordered Intrepid captured and all its Vulcan crew to be put to death for the sake of the power which chemical mastery of Vulcan mind-control and mind-reading disciplines would give them and their creatures on ch’Rihan and ch’Havran.”
