by Diane Duane
He looked at Fox.
“It seems we’re fated to be on the wrong side of these arguments, Captain,” Fox said. “My instructions from the Federation Council are very clear, and they give me little latitude for improvisation in some regards, no matter what my personal feelings on the subject might be.”
There it was, as clear as his position would let him say it: I don’t approve either, but I have my job to do. Jim breathed out.
“Ambassador,” said Captain Helgasdottir, “allow me to say a word here.”
All heads turned to her. Birga Helgasdottir pursed her lips and folded her hands together.
“I agree with Captain Kirk,” she said. “If this matter of the incursion at 15 Trianguli is not pressed with the Romulans now, and vigorously, we are all going to suffer for it later.”
Danilov gave Captain Helgasdottir a look not quite as annoyed as the one he had given Jim. “I’m sorry to find opinion so divided,” he said, “when for the time being, the execution of policy must continue to go the way it’s presently going. We must wait the forty or so hours left us, let this move of the game play itself out, and see how the Romulans react. There have been some early indications of a softening in their position; we’ll see what further ones turn up tomorrow, after subspace messages have had time to make their way home to the Empire and back here again. But the whole situation is riding on a knife-edge at the moment, and if any evidence of divisions among us reaches the other side, it could wreck everything. I expect you all”—he glanced around the table—“to conduct yourselves accordingly.”
Helgasdottir was wearing a tight look that suggested clearly enough to Jim how little she liked this, but she nodded. The other starship captains—the tall blond Centauri, Finn Winter of Lake Champlain, and the slender dark-maned Caitian, Hressth ssha-Aurrffesh of Hemalat—nodded too. They kept their faces neutral, but Jim got the strong feeling that neither of them felt any happier about this than he and Helgasdottir did. They know, Jim thought, it could be them all alone out in the dark the next time…
The meeting went on for a little while more, mostly dealing with administrative business and the movement of various supplies and resources among the gathered ships; it was unusual enough for so many Starfleet vessels to meet away from a starbase or between scheduled resupply or careening stops. Finally, Danilov stood up and said, “That’s all for now, ladies and gentlemen. Dismissed.” As the group rose with him, he glanced at Jim. “Captain Kirk, would you stay a moment?”
Jim stayed where he was; the room emptied.
When the door finally shut, Danilov sat down again. “Jim,” he said, “I need a favor from you.”
“Permission to speak freely?” Jim said.
“Granted.”
Jim took a long breath, then let it out again. “Forget it,” he said. “What is it you need, Dan?”
“I need you to send a message to the commander,” he said, “telling her at all costs to stay where she is for the moment.”
I wondered how long she was going to maintain her position. Now, is this one of her sudden hunches…or something more concrete? “What’s the story at your end, Dan?” Jim said. “Not the cover story—the real one. I have to know.”
“Things are moving, Jim. We may be able to defuse this war without any major concessions. But if, as you say, one nose is already in the tent, two is going to be just one too many.”
“Have you heard from Starfleet about her status?”
“No. But the Romulans are already arguing about their own position, and the two major forces in the negotiations are sitting on information from the Hearthworlds that’s making them lean toward changing their minds.”
“I take it that this information has come from the inside…”
“You know our source,” Danilov said. “Or McCoy does. An uprising is getting started on another of their colony worlds, a major one, Artaleirh. The asteroid belt around the primary there is the main source for high-quality dilithium crystals in the Imperium, and the planet itself has a great deal of heavy and high-tech industry. The Romulans could lose the system and not be crippled if it came to that, but its position is strategically critical for them. Artaleirh is far enough away from the center of things that they’re concerned that the Klingons might make a move on the system from one or another of several former Rihannsu worlds they’ve recently occupied. But it’s also close enough to ch’Rihan and ch’Havran that a failure to respond to the threat would be read as a sign of weakness by both their own people and the Klingons.”
He pushed back a little in his chair, stretching, frowning. “Jim, this is distracting their attention powerfully at the moment. This whole expedition after Ael and the Sword has always been a fishing expedition for them, a way to justify what they’ve been planning to do anyway. But now dealing with Artaleirh is much more imperative. They’re already at each other’s throats about it. If we just sit right where we are, Fox says, and keep staring, and don’t blink, they’ll blink first and use Artaleirh as an excuse to pull back from the brink. But it’s imperative that nothing else distract them right now—and most definitely not Ael. Even she’ll have to admit that.”
I wonder, Jim thought. “She has her own oaths, to her crew,” he said, “which, to her, sometimes transcend even the disciplines of her own service. I’ve been in a situation like that myself, and was fortunate enough to have Fleet come down on my side, eventually.” He did not add that it had taken no less a being than T’Pau of Vulcan to get them to do so. “But I would have done what I did regardless, and Ael is capable of the same level of resolve. I can give her advice, but I can’t guarantee the results.”
“I’m not asking you to. But Jim, please do this for me.”
He stood there for a moment more, thinking about it. “All right,” Jim said.
“Thank you, Jim.”
Enterprise’s captain fixed the commodore-in-command with a cool look. “You don’t need to thank me,” Jim said. “My oaths are in place. This is a duty matter. If you want to take it as a favor for a friend, that’s your prerogative. But I may ask for that favor back sometime soon, and I just hope your duty won’t get in the way.”
Danilov simply looked at him. “We’ll have to see,” he said, “won’t we?”
Jim nodded and went out.
“They’re coming,” said the scan technician, whose name Courhig could never remember.
Courhig tr’Meihan began to shake, and just stood still for a few moments until he could control that. Finally he felt himself steady down, his breathing begin to sort itself out. The image was indeed clear enough in the display—six Grand Fleet light cruisers, in formation, cruising slowly into the system. Courhig glanced around him at the people looking over his shoulders at the jury-rigged display and coordination panel, the hundred other people crammed together there in the big, bare, empty hangar—men and women, young and old, bulky enough already in their pressure suits. It was for all the world as if there was no room for them to spread out. But they were hungry for closeness, all of them, at the moment. None of them had any idea how much longer they were likely to live.
“All right,” Courhig said to them. “You all know what you have to do?”
Nods, murmurs of agreement. “Wait till we give you the signal,” Courhig said. “Don’t hurry the moment until we’re certain the handlers have consolidated their control. If any of you have signal failures, abort immediately and get out of the way so that we can try to destroy whichever ship isn’t responding to what we do. We can’t afford to take the chance of one of these vessels escaping with news of what’s happened.”
Everyone nodded. They had heard it all a hundred times before, in simulations and in trials, but they knew he had to say it again.
“Then go,” Courhig said. “And Elements with you all.”
“You also,” some of them murmured. Then all the pilots and crews turned and headed out the pressure door, into the big airlock where their helms were racked.
That
door sealed behind them, and to Courhig’s ears the hiss of it was like someone’s last breath. “I wish I could go with them,” he said.
Behind him, Felaen stood with her arms folded, watching the displays. “We’ve had this discussion,” she said. “You started this, and so we need you to talk to the government later—assuming that any of us survive the next thirty hours. Now just sit quiet and bear it.”
He nodded. Felaen was his second-in-command mostly because she was the only one who could speak unpalatable truths to him and not be affected, or even particularly impressed, by attempts to pull rank on her afterward. There was, at the end of the day, no effective way to pull rank on one’s wife.
“Gio—” he said to the tech.
“Gielo,” said the tech, and laughed. It was about the tenth time it had happened.
“Gielo, sorry.”
“Here’s the ecliptic view, sir.” The man touched several controls, and the main display, at the center of the cluster of nine, showed the outside view—the glitter of the asteroid belt seen from inside, a wide spatter of light fining down to a hard sharp glitter of it arcing away through space, toward the sun. The sensor was attached to a tower on top of the hollowed-out asteroid in which the hangar and the ships now departing were sheltered, one of hundreds that had been adapted over the past couple of centuries for storage and temporary docking. As Courhig watched, starlight shimmered above the asteroid’s horizon, but he could see nothing else, and had been lucky to see that. The cloaked smallships were away, carrying with them the weapons that, if the simulations had not misled them, would start the process of making Artaleirh truly free.
Courhig found it entirely appropriate, as he stood there clenching his fists from tension and watching the display, that the technology on which those weapons were based was a spin-off from the automated rock-handling setup that had been originally invented on Artaleirh for use in this asteroid belt. Since the “handlers” had become affordable, relatively few miners bothered to actually go out in ships and wrestle with rocks anymore, now that they could sit in a comfortable room on a planet or inside an asteroid and do the wrestling from there with mechanical arms and eyes. Cheap subspace radio relaying solved the time-delay problem for those who had preferred to continue work after relocating to Artaleirh, though there were some few who still liked to stay out in the belt. For those, old habits and lifestyles died hard. Some of those old hands were the ones who were sitting at consoles elsewhere inside this rock, using virtual-reality controls to manage the handlers—the little machines that, themselves hidden with the new multiphasic cloaking device, were now making their way on detection-baffled impulse toward vessels that thought themselves invisible and, therefore, invulnerable.
Courhig watched the display that showed the tactical and tracking information. There, about five million stai from the asteroid belt, came the cruisers, still coasting in in formation, maintaining radio silence, looking Artaleirh over carefully from a safe distance. And meanwhile, on the other scan screens, six different readouts showed six different handlers closing in on the shimmers in space that hid the six Grand Fleet light cruisers as they braked down. One after another, as the minutes crept by, each shimmer, in its own display, suddenly gave way to views of field-attenuated, shimmery sunlight on starship hulls: the handler vehicles, precisely matching velocities with their targets, dropping slowly and gently through their cloaking fields, unseen themselves, moving closer to the vessels’ hulls.
Easy, Courhig thought, easy! It would be too awful, after all this money spent, all this planning, all this time, to have their tactics betrayed by mere sound. But the men and women controlling the handlers were expert at maneuvering on impulse, and with the most exquisite softness, the first handler touched down on its target ship’s hull and clamped tightly onto it.
Courhig and Felaen went tense, waiting for alarms, some sign of trouble. But there was none. These ships were cloaked; they thought themselves invisible, and therefore were blind to what was about to happen to them.
“They’re scanning now,” said the tech.
Courhig bit his lip, held himself still. This would be the last test.
“No result apparent,” said the tech. “No change in course. They haven’t noticed anything.”
“All right,” Courhig said, as one after another of the cloaked drones sat down on its target, and finally they were all in place. “Are the crews all ready?”
“All ready, llha.”
“Then tell the virtual warriors to turn the handlers loose.” And Earth and Fire both be with the little metal creatures.
Courhig turned his attention to the first of the handlers to come down on one of the cruisers. He could see nothing of what it was doing; its hemispherical shape was blocking his view. But underneath it he knew that the dissolution charge was being released. That would unravel the crystalline structure of a section of the ship’s hull about a cubit in diameter. A fraction of a second after that, before the hull pressure changed at all significantly, the sealing “bell” would come down over the new aperture, snugging down tight and preventing any further change in pressure. And out of the sealing bell, the “smart” cabling would come worming its way down into the ’tween-hulls space, sniffing out what it was programmed to seek: the ship’s energy and communications system.
Courhig clenched his hands hard, trying not to panic. This had always been the most uncertain part of the operation in their simulations. Yet in some ways it was the simplest, for the people who had designed it were, some of them, people who had built ships for Grand Fleet in their time—and they had chosen for exploitation one of the simplest and most sensible parts of starship design. In the years since the development of silicate-based conduction conduits, Rihannsu power networks for starships had been built with what was called multiple redundancy; any cabling could carry any signal, electrical or optical. As a result, the ship’s cabling network now functioned like the pathways in the brain. If one path was disabled or destroyed, a message, command, or impulse could route around the “dead” spot and get where it was going some other way. The same system carried computer linkages, comms, anything vital.
Now, though, that strength was about to be turned into a deadly weakness.
Courhig watched as the blank subscreen for that particular handler stayed blank. It was blank for a long time. What’s keeping it? Is the routine failing? Have they changed frequencies, or systems, or— But the screen lit, then, a sudden blast of code scrolling down it, garbage characters that confirmed that the handler cable had tapped into one of the ship’s networking trunks and only needed to get into synch.
Other subscreens in other displays began to show similar screenfuls of code. Courhig gulped, daring to think that it was actually going to work. The starships’ computers had been programmed to protect themselves, logically enough, from commands that came from outside, from other systems. But they could not defend against ones that seemed to come from inside the ship, using the vessel’s own circuitry and networking systems, seeming to belong to one of the ship’s own computer terminals. The ship did not keep secrets from itself—or not for long.
Courhig watched the first handler’s programming go looking for the first piece of information it had been instructed to find and disable. Self-destruct—“Encoded,” Felaen whispered, as a string of garbage characters appeared. Courhig nodded
Then the code flashed into a string of intelligible letters and numbers. Courhig breathed out. Encrypted the information might have been, but the computer also had to store the information on how to decrypt it. Otherwise it would be useless. “Let me talk to the virtual pilots,” Courhig said.
“You’re on.”
“Is everything going all right?” Courhig said.
The voice of Kerih, one of the oldest of them and the chief “brain” behind the handlers’ programming, came back over comms. “So far,” he said, “we’re into three of the systems. Four. Five and six should follow shortly.”
“Don�
��t wait for them,” Courhig said. “Lock down the self-destruct systems right away.”
“Doing that, llha.”
“Then lock their helms and weapons systems,” Courhig said. “Comms too. I don’t want any warnings getting out.”
There was a pause. Courhig stared nervously at the subscreens showing the handlers’ output. All but one of them was showing results; that one was still dark.
“Done,” the report came back after a moment. “All but six.”
“What’s the matter with that one?”
“Don’t know yet, llha,” said Kerih. “Got visual from three of the other five, though.”
“Good. Let me see it, and trigger the first five’s invader control systems,” he said. “Knock out their crews.”
And now all he and Felaen could do was wait, watching repetition after repetition of the same scene: narrow views of Rihannsu officers hammering on unresponsive consoles, staggering down the corridors of their ships, trying to defend themselves and their shipmates against something they couldn’t understand, then falling to the decks, overcome. Courhig should have felt triumphant, but instead he felt faintly sick. At least the crews had not needed killing, but these people had honestly—he assumed—been trying to do what they thought was their duty. When they were sent home after everything was finally settled—assuming that the Artaleirhin as a people, and Artaleirh itself, would survive long enough to send them back—all too likely the loyalty of the light cruisers’ crews would be questioned, and a lot of them might be court-martialed and shot. Killing them cleanly might have been kinder. But that would have meant destroying the ships, and that Courhig would not do. Except…there was still that sixth subscreen, still dark. “Kerih, what about six?”
“That’s Calaf,” Kerih said, sounding unnerved. “I just took down self-destruct and comms. Just in time too, though I don’t think they got any messages out. But there’s another problem—they rerouted invader control away from us somehow.”
