The Bloodwing Voyages

by Diane Duane

  She fell silent a moment. Jim watched with some admiration for the coolness with which she spoke of these people who had tried to destroy her. His own frustration at how badly she had been treated by the Empire she served was severe enough. Would I be able to be that levelheaded about them, I wonder? And will she be able to stay this way…? “If I am bitter against them in my own regard,” Ael said, “perhaps you will agree I have reason. But all my trouble began with an attempt to see the Three moved out of power by working within our own system. That attempt, and those that followed it, failed. That being the case, I came to you—for as I said at the time, when one’s friends are helpless to make a difference, one turns even to one’s enemies; especially the honorable ones. But it has not been enough, Jim. The work we have done together, while useful, yet falls short of what will cure the illness of which Levaeri V was only the symptom. Now I must raise what forces will answer me when I call, and move against my own world and people, though they call me traitor for it, and burn my name while I am still living, and curse it when I am dead.”

  Ael bowed her head.

  Jim sat and considered, for the details of his sealed orders were on his mind. There had been a time when his own ancestors had been involved in a revolution like this, and he was proud now of that involvement. But five centuries’ distance and the settled verdict of history now lent an aspect of comfortable respectability to that old war. Seen up close, as contemporaries, coups were not such comfortable companions. At this end of time it’s easy to say, yes, I would have been a patriot, I would have helped! But hindsight inevitably contaminates the vision. And being involved in a coup at its beginning, helping to hold the match to the fuse… For that was the kind of help Ael was seeking from him.

  He looked out at the stars. On the other hand…sealed orders aside, if you see an injustice, and don’t move to right it when you have a chance, history won’t forget that, either.

  Jim turned back to her. “All right,” he said. “So let’s assume that your supporting force materializes as scheduled, and you sweep into the Eisn system, fight your way down to the surfaces of both planets, against whatever odds, put a significant number of troops on the ground, and carry the day. Then what?”

  She leaned back and gave him a droll look. “Why, then that very day we have the Three and their minions dragged in chains down the Avenue of Processions in Ra’tleihfi, and put to the sword: and then from the ranks of the Senate, where here and there some old praetorial blood yet remains, we cause the elevation of twelve new Praetors…and then we go to our noonmeal.”

  Jim snorted. “Yes,” Ael said, “it would be rather less simple than that, and I make no doubt there will be complications that neither of us could foresee. But one must start somewhere. Right now the Praetorate is too united under the Three’s domination, and the Senate is too divided, for them to bring about a change in the status quo by the normal method. A credible threat to the Empire—or at the very least to the power structure at the top of it, and the armed forces which support that structure—will give them reason to change their thinking, especially when I make my cause known, and when it becomes obvious that I have power to back it.”

  “It may also give them reason to unite,” Jim said, “and try to crush you.”

  “If the forces brought against them are sufficiently strong,” Ael said, “I do not look for that. And additionally…”

  She got that brooding look again. “Things are shifting,” Ael said. “Increasingly there are signs that people around the Empire, not just on ch’Rihan and ch’Havran where the government’s grip is tightest, are beginning to recall times when honor meant something—when we were content with what we had; when our people’s history, painful and tragic as it has sometimes been, was a part of us, and not something we had to forget, or get over.” Ael’s look grew fierce. “If I must lead a force against my own world to rouse my people to take back their heritage, the power rightfully theirs, the thing worth fighting for…then so be it. There are, it seems, many who will follow me. For one thing, news of Levaeri V got out, and many people could see for themselves what that technology would make of our worlds if widely used. For another thing, the outworlds in particular, the colony planets and client systems in those spaces which march with the Klingon side of the Empire, have been suffering terribly of late. They are not all unarmed; indeed some of our oldest and most honored families, the great old Ship-Clans descended from the generation-ship captains, pilots, and engineers who brought us to the Two Worlds, are settled out there in force. Once they were proud, and their voices were great in the Empire. But in recent years the government has sought to reduce their power, either by oppressing them directly, or by ignoring them, refusing to support their worlds. And now they are growing weary of this treatment…and growing restive.”

  “Restiveness is useful as an indicator,” Jim said, “and early indications are always nice. But what happens if you raise the banner…and no one falls in behind you?”

  Ael lifted her eyes to his. “Then I go over the hill by myself,” she said, “and take the consequences. I have done it before. If I die in so doing…” She raised her eyebrows. “Is it so bad a way to die? Even if no one answers the call to arms, if all the Empire from Eisn outward ignores me, and I must go down into ch’Rihan’s gravity well alone…then alone I shall go.”

  The two of them sat quiet for some moments. Around them and behind them the lights of the rec deck were dimming as it slipped into gamma-shift mode, ship’s night. The stars outside did not move, but hung there, still as watching eyes.

  Then, very softly, Jim said:

  “Like hell you will.”

  It was late again in Eveh tr’Anierh’s study, and he had taken a moment away from the desk to try to stabilize some of the least stable of the piles of books on one of the shelves. With his arms full of books, he paused for a moment as he heard the front door open. Now at this hour, he thought, who—

  He knew within two guesses. Not many people dare to come uninvited to a Praetor’s house after couch-time but another Praetor; and of the other eleven of those—

  The study door swung open. There was Urellh, and behind him, there was also poor Firh the door-opener, scandalized because he had been unable to stop this guest from interrupting his master, and terrified because of who the guest was. “Urellh,” said tr’Anierh immediately, “come in; make yourself welcome. Firh, why are you yet up so late? Where is Serinn?” He was the night door-opener.

  “He was away, Lord—”

  “Well, no matter. To your couch, man. We have an early day tomorrow, you and I.”

  Firh bowed and closed the door, looking vaguely relieved. Urellh had already seated himself in the chair opposite the one that tr’Anierh had left pulled out. He was already pouring himself herbdraft from the pitcher waiting there on the tray, and the spicy scent of it wafted to tr’Anierh’s nostrils as he turned his back on Urellh and went back to restacking the books on the shelves. “Well,” he said, “you did not come here just to drink my draft, however fine the imported herbs might be.”

  “You have been too busy in your little glade of knowledge here, then,” Urellh said, “to see the news tonight.”

  “I saw the sunset news,” tr’Anierh said. “Once a day is enough for me. We normally get what else we need to see in session during the day. Or plenty enough of it for me, at any rate. What’s amiss?”

  “Ch’Havran,” Urellh said, and said it as a curse. “The damned insurrectionists are out in the streets. Who would have thought they would have dared, so soon after the lesson they were taught three months ago? Or that we thought they had been taught. And whose damned name do you think they were shouting?”

  Tr’Anierh could guess this, too, within a half a guess; but he said nothing for the moment, finishing with one stack of books and beginning to dismantle the next. Outside the windows in one of the trees, a dalwhin tried a single piping note, then another, with the uncertainty of summer, when nesting was done and
the immediacy had gone out of the defense of its territory. “If it is who I think,” tr’Anierh said, “what matter? She is light-years away, soon to be a prisoner…or dead in battle.”

  “Oh indeed,” Urellh said, “so you think, do you.” He drank his cup of draft and slammed the cup down on the inlaid table. “What I want to know is what the news service thinks it’s playing at, showing such things at all. If they’d just let well enough alone, such little local ructions would pass off without comment. But no, both worlds have to see it, and half the Empire, in a day or three. Out there where there’s no control anymore, such ideas start to achieve common currency—”

  “Which ideas?”

  “Aah, the usual idiocy about our high history and how we’ve squandered it, and how our honor is in shreds and our Empire’s wealth all bought with treachery—” He snorted. “Take the bread and the meat off their plates and the ale from their cups, and we’d see how soon they’d care a scrap for honor. But her name always gets worked into it somehow. As if any of them would shed a drop of green for her if it came to fighting.” His look was sour. “Before this they did not dare put their heads up over the wall, for fear the intelligence services would deal with them. And their agendas were always so different, anyway, that their own divisions and squabbling did for us what the intelligence people failed to do. But now all of a sudden they’ve found a new name to cry. I wouldn’t have thought them capable.”

  The dalwhin outside sang a long sweet phrase, about a breath’s worth, in a minor key, then fell silent. Tr’Anierh raised his eyebrows at Urellh. “You know as well as I do,” he said, “that the harder you try to keep these little groups’ demonstrations from happening, the more attention they draw. Ignore them and they do pass off, eventually. People’s memories are short. And as for the news services—” He shrugged, turned away from the shelf. “Let such things be shown commonly, and soon people stop paying attention to them; they become background noise.”

  Urellh did not answer him immediately. “There has been more news than only that,” Urellh said after a few moments, softly. “Not on the news services, but it has been coming through, this past halfmonth, anyway. Ainleith. Mahalast. Orinwen. Taish. Relhinder.” Tr’Anierh raised his eyebrows. They were all colony worlds of the so-called second class, worlds founded directly on emigration from the Two Worlds instead of by “second intention,” not conquered client worlds, or “overspill” colonies of colonies.

  “There have been demonstrations there as well,” Urellh said. “All very proper, very polite. Petitions passed in to the local governments, with thousands of names.” He paused for a few long moments. “Treason,” he said.

  “For what do these petitions ask?” tr’Anierh said, though he knew.

  “Treason,” Urellh said again. “‘Freedom.’” It was a growl. “Why, what else have we given them all these years but freedom to be safe, to be provided for, to have safe trade with the Hearthworlds and defense against those whom we know to be their enemies. Now let there be a slight change in policy, strictly temporary of course, but necessary, and you see quickly enough where their loyalties lie—” He broke off. “Damned Ship-Clan families,” Urellh said softly, after a pause. “They have never really been one with us, not when we were in the ships, and not afterward when our people came down out of the wretched things to live on real worlds again. There is no getting the steel out of their blood, or the vacuum out of their brains. Their time is done, you would think they would have the sense to see it by now. The ships are fallen, the computers are dust, their time as the great ‘guardians of our destiny’ is over! But no, they cling to this ‘nobility’ that no one can see but them. History, heritage…” He snorted. “Anachronism! Time to look forward now, not back. The future is waiting for us, and all they can think of is division and backsliding when we should be united, looking to the future—”

  “I would think,” said tr’Anierh carefully, glancing over at the table where Urellh had slammed his cup down and then reaching for a dusting cloth from the bottom shelf of one of the bookshelves, “that they too are a passing force, nearly spent. There are few enough of those old families left anymore. And were they ever so numerous, the thing that gave them their power base is now gone. Without the great ships, what are they?”

  Once again Urellh was silent for some moments. As tr’Anierh came around toward his desk, pausing by the table to mop up the spilled herbdraft, the other Praetor looked up at tr’Anierh from under those dark eyebrows of his. In the subdued lighting of the room, tr’Anierh was suddenly stricken by how very dark and fierce the man looked.

  “Everything is a light thing to you, is it not?” Urellh said. “At least, when one asks you about it to your face.”

  Tr’Anierh was opening his mouth to answer, but Urellh did not wait for him. “You have tried to forestall me,” Urellh whispered, and the whisper was very cold. “Why did you try to forestall me?”

  Tr’Anierh flushed first hot, then cold, and prayed that in this lighting, neither of them showed. For the moment he concentrated on folding up the dusting cloth.

  “You have no taste for war,” said Urellh. “That is your problem. Do you not see, are you too stupid to see, that our people do have one, if you do not?…and if you do not give them a war, every now and then, they will have one in your despite? You may play the fool with your own hide, tr’Anierh, and those of your creatures in Fleet that see fit to obey your orders. But not with my hide, and not with the lives of the people I rule.”

  The turn of phrase was one that tr’Anierh filed away carefully for future study…but right now he had little time to waste on it. “Our people,” he said, putting the cloth aside, “would be better served if all this were finished quickly, rather than dragged out into war over one woman—”

  “It is not merely over one woman! There is much more at stake, and the act was idiocy! Now we will go to this meeting, and the cursed Federation will say, ‘Why should we believe anything you say? Here we have evidence of you crossing the Zone illegally after the woman and attacking her in our space.’ Besides losing us seven ships—seven ships!—you have forfeited the moral high ground to the Federation! What can you have been thinking of!”

  Tr’Anierh swallowed. In the quiet, the dalwhin in the tree outside sang another timid little phrase, a few piped notes, and fell silent again. “Rogue elements can easily enough be blamed,” he said. “The Federation know as well as we do that there are divisions among our people, Urellh. They have as many spies among us as we have among them; do you think I do not know?”

  “I know that your heart is going cold in your side,” said Urellh, “and I don’t intend to permit that to ruin our plans. You are growing too like the indecisive ones in the Senate: you put out your hand to the sword and then snatch it back when you smell the blood on the blade.” His eyes narrowed. “There are some, even in the Praetorate, who so fear a just war that they would even leak information to the enemy to prevent it. Just how,” Urellh said, much more softly, “did the Federation get word about the mind-control project, for example? And do not tell me the despicable t’Rllaillieu told them. She got that information from somewhere. And it would not have been from one of the sottish wind-talkers in the Senate; the information was not disseminated that widely. It would have been from among the Twelve, from one of the very Praetorate, tr’Anierh! Some one of us, maybe even more than one of us, is a traitor.”

  He looked long and hard at tr’Anierh. “You will not lay that at my House’s gate, Urellh,” said tr’Anierh, as steadily as he could. “And certainly not publicly; not unless you wish to find out exactly how quickly I ‘snatch my hand back’ when accused with such a calumny, and how ‘lightly’ I take everything. I would not trouble to take the matter to the judiciars. I would have you meet me in the Park.”

  Urellh’s face stilled a little at that. “And as for this latest matter,” said tr’Anierh, “if I knew of it, what of it? If it had succeeded, the Sword would either be safely destroy
ed, forever out of the hands of our enemies, or else it would now be on the way back to where it belongs. Our people’s pride would to a great extent have been restored, and we would not now need to put our head into the thrai’s mouth to find out whether it has any teeth left or not. Has it ever occurred to you that it might have grown new ones faster than the old ones were pulled, and might bite indeed? What if the Federation suspects the diplomatic mission for exactly what it is, the prelude to war, and decides to strike first? And on the other hand, our own sources in Starfleet tell us how divided that organization has been of late. Very nearly they did not agree to meet the mission at all. What would we have done then? We would have been left with no t’Rllaillieu, no Sword, and no recourse except to invade in the routine manner, with the result being a full mobilization on Starfleet’s side instead of the partial, uncertain, halfhearted one we see now. The Klingons would fall on our outworlds in force, in numbers, without a second thought. It is we who would be forced into a two-front war, not they. And what remained of the Empire after that—after the Klingons’ brutality and the Federation’s cruel mercy—would be a pitiful thing indeed, not worthy of the name. You are to count yourself most fortunate that they accepted, and that matters stand even now as well as they do.”

  Another brief silence, but the dalwhin outside sang no more. “You said nothing of these misgivings before we stood up before the Senate and proposed the mission,” Urellh said. “I question whether they are not rather recently assumed…possibly in the wake of the failure of this ‘rogue element.’ The actions of which are themselves an act of war, in contravention of the treaty—so that any protection we might have had from that tattered rag of a document is lost to us now. I think it only right that your creatures in the diplomatic mission should be allowed to assume the responsibility for explaining it to the Federation negotiators. You are to count yourself fortunate that the fools will most likely accept the explanation, since they know so little of what passes among our worlds…the Elements be praised. Equally it will be fortunate for you, in the long run, that they know nothing of the package that will soon be on its way to them; for this nasty little business has at last decided that destination. That only will save your skin, when all the reckoning is done after the battle is complete. And meanwhile—” He got up, walked around the table, and put his face quite close to tr’Anierh’s, nearly close enough to be an insult—though not quite. “It was an act of the most utter folly, meant to make me look a fool,” said Urellh, “and I will not forget it.”