Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (70 page)

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 destroyed, 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.”

He stormed out, and slammed the door behind him.

Tr’Anierh stood there until he heard the outer door close again. Then he breathed out a long breath, and went back over to the bookshelf and chose another pile of bound codices to reorganize.

Honor,
tr’Anierh thought. Urellh had not said
mnhei’sahe;
he had used the lesser word,
omien.
Tr’Anierh considered that. It came to him that very few people seemed to say
mnhei’sahe
anymore. It was as if the word hurt them somehow. Even he himself avoided using it; perhaps not to be seen distinguishing himself too obviously from others, as one championing virtue—that was a sure way to cause your enemies to go tunneling like
kllhei
for proof that your virtue was a sham.

But then the word always did have edges. And held incorrectly…it cuts….

He started making, in his mind, a list of the people he would need to call in the morning. Urellh was a bad and sore-tempered enemy when he had been crossed. Sometimes these moods passed off him quickly; sometimes they did not do so at all, or took long months to abate. At the moment, that could be a problem. Tr’Anierh thought about what to do…

…and about the seven ships.

Jim sat up in one of the briefing rooms for a long while, late that night, after leaving the rec deck and seeing Ael down to the transporters and back to
Bloodwing.
He was looking at the maps of the Federation, the Klingon Empire, and the Romulan Empire, and he was thinking hard.

The room was one of those with a big holographic display in the middle of the table. There Jim had sketched out for himself in the display, in red, a five-parsec sphere around the spot where the Rihannsu were scheduled to cross the border tomorrow. The larger portion of the task force that had been sent to do escort duty would meet them there and bring them into Federation space, to the spot selected for the rendezvous. Then the extra ships would depart, leaving the numbers equal at the rendezvous point, and talks would begin.

Jim looked at that red sphere now and thought,
Why here?
The Romulans had specified where they intended to cross the Zone for these talks. The Federation had made no counteroffer.

And why not?
Jim thought. That by itself struck him as a failure.
Your opponent wants to do something—you force him to do something else. Partly to see how he reacts. Partly to make sure you stay in control of the game.
But for some reason, Starfleet had not reacted to that particular move. It was as if they had conceded something early, something they didn’t see as particularly valuable, in a larger strategy.

For his own part, Jim had played too much chess with Spock—2D, 3D, and 4D—to much like the idea of conceding moves to anyone, especially first moves. They were strategically as important to him as later ones. And any move that did not advance your game, push you into your opponent’s territory and threaten him somehow, was a wasted move. Wasting moves was criminal.

There was nothing terribly interesting about this part of space. It was largely barren.
But a lot of Triangulum space is like that,
Jim thought,
until you get in further.
There were richer spaces, better provided with planets with suns, and developed planets at that, in the Aries direction. But that whole area was also much better provided with Federation infrastructure. There were two starbases there, 18 at Hamal and 20 at gamma Arietis / Mesarthim; each was well provided with weaponry of its own and a large complement of starships, and Starbase 20 and its starship complement had the additional advantage of being staffed by the Mesarth, probably one of the most aggressive species in the Federation (“except for humans,” Spock had once commented rather ruefully).
If I were a Romulan,
Jim thought,
I wouldn’t waste my time going that way. Too much resistance….

But it still left him with the question: Why
here?

Jim looked at the map for a while more. Leaving aside the issue of the “diplomatic mission,” which he thought was as likely to be the spearhead of an invasion force as anything else, Jim was also thinking about the seven ships that
Enterprise
and
Bloodwing
had met at 15 Trianguli.
Someone was willing to take the chance of throwing away seven capital ships,
he thought,
for
something.
And not just for Ael.
Redoubtable as her reputation was, seven ships just for
Bloodwing
made no sense. They were even too much for
Bloodwing
and
Enterprise
together.

Someone wanted to test our preparedness,
he thought.
If they got her, too…fine. But something else is going on. They wanted to test
this
area, not just the area over by the rendezvous point.

Jim leaned his chin on his fist and looked at the hologram, telling it to rotate so that he could see the way the Klingon and Romulan Empires interpenetrated one another. The only “regular” boundary in the area was the Neutral Zone, which was a one-light-year-thick section of an ovoid “shell” with Federation space on one side and Romulan space on the other. Elsewhere, bumps and warts of Klingon and Romulan territory stuck into and out of the main volumes of the two Empires with great irregularity where they bounded one another. The contact surfaces suggested many years of the two players playing put-and-take in that part of space.

Jim stopped the hologram and instructed the viewing program to zoom in on the Neutral Zone. As he did, the monitoring satellites became visible, scattered fairly evenly along and across the Zone’s curvature.
Now, were those ships
detected
coming across the Zone?
Jim thought.
And if not, why not? What’s the matter with the monitoring satellites and stations?

Is it possible one or more of them have been knocked out, or sabotaged? By whom? And why wouldn’t we have heard?

He pulled his padd over and made a note on it, one of many he had made while studying the map.
And if the ships
were
detected crossing,
he thought,
why weren’t we alerted by Starfleet?

Jim tossed the stylus to the table and looked at the map again. The satellites were much on his mind.
If we have here some program of sabotage that has been in preparation for a while and is now ready to be tested…was this possibly the first test?

If it was…what will their reaction be when their seven ships don’t come home again?

He kept looking at the map.
Could it be that what we’re looking at here,
Jim thought,
is an intended breakout in two different places? One in the area where the “diplomatic mission” will be—and one over here by 15 Tri? It will, after all, have the “New Battle” cachet….
One of his Strat-Tac instructors, years ago, had mentioned to him some strategists’ tendency to overlook a possible location for conflict because there had just been one there, the idea apparently being that an enemy was as unlikely to immediately fight twice on the same battlefield as lightning was to strike twice. This was, of course, a fallacy. A smart enemy, if he had the resources to waste and the brains to pull it off, might stage an unsuccessful battle on likely ground in order to tempt an unwary adversary onto it for a second and more murderous passage at arms.
You’d have to wonder why they were bothering with this one spot, though,
Jim thought.
Either because they’ve been assembling matériel close to it, or because it’s convenient to something else.

The Klingons, maybe?
15 Tri was convenient enough to the area where the Neutral Zone, the Klingon Empire, and the un-Zoned part of the Romulan Empire drew close together.
A lot of scope for confusion there,
Jim thought.
Suppose the Romulans break out there—and instead of coming for us, swing around and attack the Klingons from our direction. Then duck back into the Zone in the confusion of the war that’s already going on elsewhere, near the rendezvous point, say, and maybe somewhere else along the Zone as well.

The hair stood up on the back of Jim’s neck.
Two-front war,
he thought.
Bad. Very bad.