STAR TREK - TOS - 95 - Swordhunt - Rihannsu 3

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Star Trek - TOS 095 - Swordhunt, Rihannsu 3
Prologue
The shadows of Eilhaunn's little yellow sun Ahadi were slanting low, now, over the pale green fields all
around the flitter port, as the work crews ran the har-vesting machinery up and down the newly cut rows
to bind the reeds into the big circular bales that Hwiamna's family favored. Hwiamna i-Del t'Ehweia stood
there off at the margin of the field, watching the two machines that her son and daughter were driving: and
she sighed. They were racing again. They loved to race, each challenging the other every morning to do
the work better, faster; and whichever one was the victor, on a given day, chaffed the other mercilessly
about it until the next daymeal, when there might be another victor, or the same one. Hwiamna routinely
prayed the Elements that the vie- tones should alternate; otherwise home life became rather strained.
Hwiamna smiled, took off her sun hat, and wiped her brow, while taking a moment to beat some
accu-mulated windblown reed-seed off the hat's thin felt, against her long breeches. Since the twins were
born, Kul clutching at Niysa's heel, this kind of thing had been going on; and it would doubtless go on
well past the end of the year, when their accep-tances came through. Naturally as soon as they were
both old enough, they had both applied to the Col-leges of the Great Art on ch'Rihan; there being no
higher possible goal, to their way of thinking, for anyone born on a colony world so far from the heart of
the Empire, with so little else to recommend it. Hwiamna was not sure about their assessment-her
foremothers on one side of the family had willingly come here three generations ago from the crowded
city life of Theijhoi on ch'Havran-and once they had paid off their relocation loan, won their land grant,
and tamed the earth to the bearing of regular crops of stolreed, they had found life good here. But farm
life, and even the prospect of managing the family flitter port, was not good enough for the new
generation. Their eyes were on the stars-which should possibly have been expected, for Hwiamna's
father was of Ship-Clan blood, native to Eilhaunn for two generations-where Hwiamna's eyes were on
the ground. She had no doubt whatever that both of the twins would be accepted. Then this rivalry would
go on as always, but within the structure of the Colleges, and later on, with appointments to Grand Reel.
Perhaps they would go further, into diplomatic service or the uppermost reaches of Fleet. Knowing her
children, Hwiamna had little doubt of that, either. But right now all she could wish was that they would fail
to destroy the farm machinery, which had to last for at least a couple of seasons more before it went
back to the cooperative for recycling or replacement.
She put her hat back on and walked back over to what she had been inspecting-the piles of firewood
carefully stacked up in hand-built racks twenty mi from the edges of the flitter port's landing aprons.
Hwiamna knew, for she had seen pictures of them, that on the Hearthworlds the ports did not have such:
but the images always looked bare to her, and some-how underutilized, as if an opportunity was being
missed Here, out among the Edgeworlds, resources could be scarce enough that no possible energy
source could afford to be ignored. The resinous dense wood of ealy, a tree native to Eilhaunn, burnt hot
and long; it was excellent for controlled combus-tion in power stations, and also for the small hearth-fires
of the householders in the area. They all helped to cut it-thus keeping the surrounds of the landing aprons
clear-and they all helped to stack it in the racks; and each winter season, when the first snows began, all
the householders gathered to take away bundles of the dried, cured wood, carefully divided according to
how much time they had spent in the work of coppicing and stacking. The trouble is, Hwiamna thought,
looking with some resignation at the racks, that time alone should not be the only cri-terion by which we
judge the division....
The comm button clipped to her pocket squeaked. "Mother?"
She reached in and touched it. "Kul dear," Hwiamna said, "pray, don't pass so close to your brother in
the middle of the rows. You're going to make life harder for whoever has to pick up the bales."
"That will be him," Kul said, cheerful, "and it's right that life should be harder for him, if I have any-thing
to do with it. But, Mother, we're almost done now; is there anything else needs doing out here be-fore
lastmeal?"
"I don't think so, daughter," Hwiamna said. "Though I may have some words for the two of you about the
way this wood's been stacked. Your super-vision last cutting-day leaves a little to be desired, I think."
She turned away from the rack she had been regarding critically.
"Mother," Niysa said, "that wasn't her fault; it was the Droalls. Those people couldn't be troubled to cut
their own wood straight, leave alone anyone else's. And they can't be made to do it, either, stand over
them how you like. I think you should cut them out of the coppicing rotations in future; they're more
trouble than they're worth."
Hwiamna sighed, amused. As usual, there was no upbraiding one of the twins for anything whatsoever
without the other coming straight in to his or her de-fense. "We'll talk about it later," she said; though
privately Hwiamna was inclined to agree with her son. "Get yourselves finished, get yourselves in..."
"Should I come fetch you, Mother?"
"No, bhun, you go on ahead; the walk will do me good..."
She watched one of the machines half an irai away finish its row; then both machines made for the
implanted strip at the edge of the field and began racing down it over the slight rise in the ground there
and back toward the apron, where their house was built a little ways back from the old road lead-ing to
the two low prefabricated cast-stone buildings which the government had installed as the flitter port's
administrative center.
Hwiamna gave the wood racks one last look and then began walking back around the edge of the apron
toward the house. It had been a good year for the reed, for once; a welcome change from last year,
when the growing season had been blighted by end-less wet weather and what seemed equally endless
uncertainty over what was going on in their region of space. They were a long way out in the Empire.
That was one of the reasons it had been so easy for the family to move out all this way, in her
grandfa-ther's time. New uncrowded worlds had been as plentiful as birds in the sky, it had seemed then,
and the government had been easygoing about relocation finance and support for new colonists. Now,
though, people were beginning to realize what the real price for such worlds might be. The government
was not so forthcoming with aid anymore, a stance which was starting to cause complaints as the
inhabitants of worlds like Eilhaunn began to realize that interplane-tary trade and defense were matters
they were in-creasingly expected to manage themselves-though there was notably no talk whatever of
excusing them from taxes. It all made for nerve-racking times, as last year, when there had been talk of
the govern-ment beginning a program of granting the farther-flung outworlds "autonomy": code, Hwiamna
strongly suspected, for leaving them completely to their own devices.
But that kind of talk seemed to have quieted down since, much to Hwiamna's relief. And the weather had
settled itself, too. This last season had been nothing but the dry fair weather that was normal for
north-continent Eilhaunn-uwe this time of year, and there would be no lack of grain-a relief, for reed was
Eil-haunn's great staple, of all the plant foodstuffs the one that grew most readily here. But as usual, the
growing was not the end of the business: nothing was guaran-teed until the grain was out of the pod and
into dry storage.
Hwiamna glanced up one more time as she ambled across the landing apron-the habitual gesture this time
of year. No one wanted to see cloud moving in when the reed was being cut, since it needed at least a
day on the ground in the sun before it could be threshed-otherwise the enzymes in the seed pods would
not activate to let the grain loose. Hwiamna scanned the turquoise sky, and breathed out. No cloud.
Yet she squinted into the brightness for a little longer, her curiosity aroused. High up there, very high up,
were some thin pale lines of white...
Getting less pale, more white.
Not cloud. Contrails.
Hwiamna looked at them and swallowed. The con-trails were growing steadily broader toward their
ar-rowy approaching ends. Dropping into atmosphere...
Her heart went cold in her side. The children, she thought, where are the children? For everyone knew
what contrails like those meant. The news services had been full of the pictures of them, in the last few
months.
Hwiamna started running across the apron. As she ran she missed her footing once, and under her the
ground shuddered, faintly at first, then harder. O El-ements, Hwiamna thought as she ran, no: not here:
why here?!
And then there was no more time for questions, for over the hills at the edge of the valley came a ter-rible
rumbling, and Hwiamna saw the cruisers come up low and fast over the hills, five of them, firing as they
came. She knew the shapes all too well, those long bodies and down-thrust wings and nacelles, like
oiswuh diving, their long necks thrust forward, the terrible claws out. They too had been in the news
services... but far away, at what had seemed at the time like a safe distance-
The ships came screaming down and over, and the ground all around the port shuddered as the phaser
bolts and photon torpedoes slammed into the fields. Great blooming black-shot clouds of orange fire
came boiling up from the impact sites as dirt and rocks shot out from them in all directions, and the
biggest one of all from the torpedo that the foremost ship fired into the airport buildings.
Charred and burning wreckage flew, and Hwiam-na flung herself down on the shaking ground, the air
knocked out of her lungs by the force of the explo-sion. When she struggled up to her knees again, she
peered desperately through the smoke and fire to try to make out what was happening. Wind whipped
up by the passage of the second and third Klingon cruisers blasted across the apron, pushing the smoke
aside for long enough that Hwiamna could see someone moving out on the edge of the flitter port, well
away from the buildings-Kul, running for one of the flitters.
"Kul!" Hwiamna screamed. Then she slapped at the comm button. "Kul! Daughter, no-!"
But her daughter would not listen to her in this, as hi most else. She had already slapped the side of the
flitter, and the canopy was levering itself up, and Kul was climbing in-
That was when the phaser blast from the next cruiser hit it. Hwiamna knelt there frozen as shreds of
glittering and burning metal and flesh blasted out from the site. Billowing smoke then veiled the spot
where the flitter had stood, but not before Hwiamna had seen too much of what preceded the smoke.
Her hands clenched together. There was nothing she could do. "Kul..." she whispered.
Motion from elsewhere on the apron distracted Hwiamna. The other flitter, rising, its engines screaming.
"Niysa," she whispered. She would not call him now. If she did, he might be distracted. "Fly, my son, fly
for it, get away-!"
It was the last thing on his mind: for he had seen them kill his sister. The flitter was in the air now, and
came wrenching around in a high-grav turn that should have pushed the blood right out of his brains; but
Niysa was a pilot born, with neirrh in his blood, as his instructor had said, and he flew like one of those
deadly little birds, racing after the closest of the Klingon cruisers. He's mad, Hwiamna thought in anguish,
it hasn't enough weaponry to do anything at ail-But her Niysa did not care, and flung his craft at the
cruiser, firing its pitiful little phasers. "No," Hwiamna whimpered, for he was actually gaining on the
cruiser as it plunged over. Niysa fired, fired again, poured on thrust-
Almost absently the phaser bolt lanced out from the back of the Klingon vessel and touched his ship. It
bloomed into fire, vanished in smoke. Lazily the cruiser arced around; and the cloud behind it began to
rain splinters and fragments of metal, and lumps of scorched burnt stuff.
Hwiamna screamed then, wordlessly, a cry of total horror and grief. The world, all her world, was over,
finished, destroyed. Her face streaked with tears of rage and loss, Hwiamna stared up into the turquoise
sky, now hazed and blackened by the smoke of burning reed, and raised her clenched fists to the
heavens, and screamed to the pitiless Ele-ments, "Why?!"
Her only answer was the disruptor bolt that killed her.
Chapter One
deep in the longest night, in a ship passing through the empty space thirteen light-years from 33 Trian-guli,
a Rihannsu woman sat in a hard-cushioned chair behind a desk and looked out through a small viewport
at the stars, waiting.
Her surroundings were blessedly familiar; her own small cabin, in her own ship. It was everything outside,
now, which was strange to her-the spaces in which she was a barely tolerated guest, the stars that filled
them, either unheeding of her presence or subtly inimical to it....
She raised her eyebrows briefly at her own fancy. / grow whimsical, she thought, and her gaze slid
sideways from the surface of her tidy desk to the chair which now sat by itself against the far wall. But
perhaps, having you around, there is reason.
In the present dim nighttime lighting of the cabin, what lay across the arms of the chair seemed barely
more than a sliver of shadow; pure unrevealing dark-ness, absorbing whatever light fell upon it. Not quite
straight, but very faintly curved, the sheath and the hilt seeming to fade seamlessly into one another by the
skill of fee ancient swordsmith, the Sword occu-pied another empty chair much different from its former
one, and the thoughts of the woman whose cabin it now shared.
Occupation... She smiled faintly. It was as good a word as any for the hold which this object had had
over her since she put her hand out in the Senate chamber, two months and a lifetime ago, to take it. In
her people's traditions there had always been tales of creatures or objects which expressed the Elements
unusually perfectly. These tended to bend the Uni-verse out of shape around them, as intense gravity
fields bend light, and equally they bent awry the in-tentions of those mortals who had close dealings with
them.
She had little thought to find herself, ever, so used. It had simply come to her, in that moment's impulse in
the Senate chambers, mat she would will-ingly take possible disaster on herself in order to save the most
sacred part of her people's heritage from further dishonor. Now she wondered, some-times, exactly
whose impulse that had been; exactly who was the Sword, and whose were the hand and will wielding it.
In the days following that day, when she and her crew had returned to these spaces where the
Federa-tion had allowed them to take refuge, she had spent a number of hours in what was little better
than shock-amazement at her own temerity, worry over what would follow it, fear for her crew. Then
prag-matism set in, as always, which was as well; for within only a few days more, the messages began
to arrive. Her act had swiftly begun to bear fruit in the form of consequences, and the fruit was ripening
fast, faster than even she could have imagined.
And soon, now, if she was any judge of events, the first fruit would fall-
The comm signal sounded, and the suddenness of it made her start. She had to laugh at herself, then,
though there was no one here to hear except that dark and silent listener lying across the arms of the
chair, it wearing its eternal slight uncommunicative smile.
She reached out and touched the control on her desk. "Ie?"
'T'Hrienteh says a message has arrived for you in the last comm packet, llhei...."
Aidoann's voice had a slight tinge of eagerness to it, and Ael knew whence that eagerness came. All her
crew had been infected by it since she came back to Bloodwing carrying what now lay on the chair
across from her.
"Send it along to my computer," Ael said. "I will read it here. And Aidoann, for the Elements' sake there
is little point in you 'madam'ing me. The crew will think we have fallen out."
A pause, then a chuckle. "Very well, II-Ael."
"Not in private, anyway," Ael said, hearing her an-tecenturion's old slight discomfort with amusement,
and wondering idly how many years yet it would take her to lose it. "We can afford a little ease among
ourselves these days, as long as our performance in action is not unpaired. Which I think unlikely to
happen. In any case, it is not as if some superior offi-cer is going to come along and reprimand us for a
breakdown in discipline."
That image made Aidoann laugh outright. "So," Ael said. "What has tr'Keirianh had to say about the
engine tests this morning?"
"He said little, madam, but smiled a great deal."
Ael's mouth quirked up a little at that. Her chief engineer might be sparse of speech, but he had no skill at
concealing his feelings. "Dangerous to make assumptions," she said, "but that would seem to bode well.
Ta'khoi..."
As she cut the voice connection, her terminal showed her the herald for an incoming message,
en-crypted. "Decrypt," she said, and sat back, watching the terminal go black, then fill with amber
charac-ters that shimmered into meaning from meaning-lessness.
About half the screenful was comm routing infor-mation, interesting only insofar as one chose to be
endlessly fascinated by the means her correspon-dents found to evade the ever-increasing interest of the
security services on ch'Rihan and ch'Havran. Some of the messages were relayed numerous times among
the subject worlds of the Empire and right out to the fringes of Rihannsu-dominated space be-fore
making their way out into the spaces beyond. This one, she saw, had gone clear out into the Kling-on
communications networks-which in itself was amusing, considering what one of these messages might
eventually mean to the Klingon Empire if things went the way she thought they might-and from there had
passed to one of the commercial sub-space relay networks in the "nonaligned" worlds buffering between
the Klingons and the Federation, before making its way to her ship. The long way around... she thought,
and touched the screen, stroking the routing information away and bringing up the message.
Under the origin and destination fields, both forged, the message itself was brief. The body of it said only:
THE PART YOU HAVE REQUESTED (NTCS 55726935-7745-9267-93677) IS PRESENTLY
UNAVAILABLE. NEAREST ESTIMATE OF AVAILABILITY IS BETWEEN THREE TO FIVE
MONTHS. FT IS SUGGESTED YOU SUBSTITUTE PART NTCS 55726935-7456-8344-86009
AS AN INTERIM SOLUTION. CONTACT US AGAIN IN THREE STANDARD MONTHS
REGARDING ORIGINAL PART.
There was, of course, no signature. She sat back and looked thoughtfully at the two long "parts
num-bers," carefully rearranging their digits in her mind according to the usual method... then held very
still for a few moments, digesting what those two sets of numbers together meant. So quickly...
She folded her hands again, leaned her chin on them once more, calculating. They are furious, indeed, for
their innate inertia to be so quickly overcome. Yet I cannot believe their consensus is genuine. I have
merely given them cause for a show of unity. Beneath that, no question but that their divisions remain.
Yet will those still run deep enough to serve my turn?
She shifted her eyes back toward the dark, slight curve of the Sword, and felt it looking at her.
Impos-sible, of course... But the feeling persisted, and others had reported it as well. How something so
inanimate could yet seem to have awareness of its surroundings, and an intent that looked out at the
world through that awareness, Ael could not tell. Yet for many long years this potent artifact had lain in
that chair in the Senate, untouched, unmolested by even the most violent and powerful of the
personali-ties who passed through-and that fact argued some indwelling power of the Sword's more
dangerous, in its way, than Ael much liked to think of.
She got up, then; came around her desk, and stood before that chair, looking down at the slice of
dark-ness that lay there defeating the dim light of her cabin. "Well," she said softly. "Now is the time, if
ever. Shall we serve each other's turn? I am willing..."
She reached out slowly, hesitant; her fingers dropped to the hilt, brushed it.... Nothing hap-pened; no jolt
of power, no arcane or silent voice shouting agreement down her bones. She expected none, well
knowing the difference between a symbol and the powers it stood for. Nonetheless, the answer to her
question was plain.
She turned away and waved the cabin lights up, then went back to the desk, reached down for the comm
control again. "Bridge."
It was young antecenturion Khiy's voice. "Yes, khre'Riov- ?"
She had to smile that so many of her people still called her that, though none of them belonged to the
Service any longer, and the Service indeed would be the instrument of all their deaths were they ever
caught. "The message which has just come in tells me what I thought it would," she said. "They are finally
coming for us..." She could not hold back a some-what feral smile. "We have much to do to prepare."
"Khre'Riov-" Khiy's voice held a most unaccus-tomed nervousness. "Are we going back with them?"
Ael laughed softly. "Did you truly think it?" she said. "Aye, going back... but never in the way they think,
or the company. Is Aidoann still there?"
"Here, llhei."
"Shortly I will have some more messages to send, and we must take care with the routing of some of
them, lest they come too soon where they are wanted. T'Hrienteh and I will confer about this at length.
But first you should call the crew together. There are things to be discussed in detail before we go
forward."
"Yes, khre'Riov!" Aidoann said, and the comm went dead.
Ael t'Rllaillieu gave the Sword in the Empty Chair one last glance, and smiled briefly; then waved her
cabin door open, and went out to battle.
There would be those who said she had started this war. Ael was not so sure about that. But beyond
doubt, she thought, / shall be the one to finish it....
In the heart of Paris, just off to one side of the Palais de Chaillot, between the great reflecting pool and
the Avenue Albert de Mun, stands the tall and handsome spire of the "troisieme Empire" edi-fice built late
in the twenty-second century to house the offices on Earth of the president of the United Federation of
Planets. It was November now, though, and half the spire was hidden in the chilly fog which had come
down on the city the night before and shrouded all its lights. The mist had risen a hundred feet or so, but
no more. Now the view from the terrace outside the room where the president was meeting privately
with the chief of staff of Starfleet Command was mostly indis-tinct, with only a glimpse or two of distant
build-ings showing here and there as flitters and little ion-driven shuttles passed, and the mist swirled with
their passing.
The room was very still even though the door to the terrace was open, the mist muting the sounds of the
city outside; and the thin pale light fell cheer-lessly on the dark-paneled walls and the Shaashin,
Kandinsky, and T'Kelan oils hanging there. In the middle of the room hovered a large oval sapphire-glass
desk on paired pressors, and behind it next to a matching cobalt-blue chair the president stood, his tall
dark bearlike bulk slightly stooped as he looked down at the desk, reading from the display embed-ded
in it. He had been up all night, and looked it.
"When did you receive the message, sir?" Fleet Admiral Mehkan said. He was a smaller man,
con-siderably slenderer than the president, and very fair, as a lot of people from Centaurus are.
"It must have been about midnight," said the pres-ident, touching the display to bring the report up again.
"The Strat-Tac people," he said, "are very thorough in their briefings. I'd thought this would have arrived
a little sooner-but apparently her ene-mies back home have been making sure they have everything they
need in place before they move."
"And now," said the chief of staff, "we have to start working out what to do..."
"Sit down, Dai, please," the president said. Mehkan sat down on a chair like the president's on the other
side of the desk.
The president lowered himself into his own chair, leaning on the desk while he finished rereading the
report. "She'll have received the same message, I as-sume," he said.
"At about the same time, yes, sir. Her sources sup-ply us as well, rather more directly."
"And you're sure that the source of the informa-tion is completely reliable."
"It's not just a source, Mr. President. It's our source."
The president nodded slowly. "I had wondered.... Well, the interesting part of all this," he said, "is going
to be anticipating what she does."
"She has to have known they would come right after her," said the chief of staff.
The president nodded. "Unquestionably. If I under-stand the relative importance of the artifact she took
with her, to produce the same result on Earth she would have had to have stolen the Articles of
Federa-tion, or the old Constitution, or the Magna Carta...."
"Combined with the Crown Jewels, the Black Stone, and the Holy Grail," said Mehkan. "The Rom-ulan
government will do anything they have to, to get that thing back... or to make sure it doesn't fall into
unfriendly hands."
"Such as ours," said the president.
Mehkan nodded.
"But it's still just an excuse," the president said. "They've been waiting for a chance like this for a long
time. There are elements in the Senate which have been looking for a cause celebre, something to push
their relationship with the Federation out of the rut it's been stuck in for all these years. The Neutral Zone
chafes them, limits their trading oppor-tunities, annoys their expansionist and nationalist lobbies..."
"An excuse for them to push outward," said Fleet Admiral Mehkan, "would certainly be welcomed."
"Well, it's not as if there aren't also elements in Fleet which would welcome the resolution of a per-sistent
tactical problem on one of our borders," the president said. "Massive resources are spent policing and
patrolling the Neutral Zone every year. Every-one would find it an improvement if suddenly that necessity
went away... wouldn't they?"
The Fleet Admiral twitched a little. The president noticed, and said nothing. "Yet at the same time," the
president said, "no one has wanted the situation to resolve itself in an uncontrolled manner. Some-times,
unfortunately, you just don't have a choice. We've known for a while that there would be a war involving
the Romulan Empire within the next five to ten years. Political tensions, economic pressures, even
personal issues at high levels in the Empire have been bringing it closer and closer. Now here it comes: a
little sooner than expected, maybe. But hardly unexpected."
He got up and came out from behind the desk, pausing in front of his terrace door and gazing out for a
moment. Across the Seine, the lower half of the Eiffel Tower was now visible: the rest was lost in fog,
producing an effect suggesting that someone had come along and sliced its top off with a knife. "That
being the case... what matters is to protect our own people, naturally; but also to try to steer events so
that they do the most people the most good over time, both on their side of the Neutral Zone and on
ours."
"The altruistic approach..." said Fleet Admiral Mehkan.
"I know that tone of voice, Dai," said the presi-dent, beginning to pace slowly in front of that win-dow. "I
did Strat-Tac only a year after you did at the Academy, and I remember old Dickinson's lectures as well
as you do. My job simply requires that I ap-proach the problem from a slightly different angle. A wider
one, maybe. War..." The president paused. "Any war is undesirable, Dai. A war that benefits one of your
opponents at the expense of the other, and weakens both... that's also undesirable, but less so. However,
a war that leaves you with, in-stead of two opponents who keep each other busy, only one opponent,
now much stronger due to the defeat of the other... that is very undesirable in-deed."
Mehkan said, "And things have been trending that way for some time, Mr. President."
"Yes. Well, events seem to be giving the forces in the Romulan Empire a different focus to 'crystallize out'
around. We have two main concerns. Tactics, and readiness." He looked up at the chief of staff of
Starfleet. "And two questions. If we go to war with the Romulan Empire: can we defeat them?"
Fleet Admiral Mehkan was very slow to answer. "Strat-Tac says yes," he said. "But it would be a long,
bloody exercise. There would be hundreds of millions of casualties, maybe billions, on both sides. And it
would take both sides decades, if not a cen-tury or more, to completely recover."
"And if the Klingons come in on their side at the beginning?"
This time there was no pause in Mehkan's answer. He shook his head immediately. "A shorter exercise.
A. much higher death toll. The modern version of what they once called 'mutual assured destruction'... the
possible loss of starflight capability to all three cul-tures, if things went on long enough."
"An unacceptable outcome, obviously. But I suspect Strat-Tac thinks the Klingons would wait to see
how things went... then come in and attack the weaker of the two combatant parties at an opportune
moment."
Mehkan nodded. "Their own Empire is slightly overstretched at the moment in terms of supply lines," he
said, "and I think they're sensitive to the possibility that the Romulans, once hostilities were well enough
under way, might attack the further-flung Klingon worlds with an eye to cutting off the trade routes to the
inner planets."
The president leaned against the terrace door, gaz-ing out. "Well," he said, "it's going to start. So our job
is to keep this war from killing any more of us, and any more of them, than is absolutely necessary; and to
manage it in such a way that the powers left standing at the end of it are unlikely to go to war again for a
long time."
"And if we can't?"
"We have to," said the president. "By whatever means. And one fairly straightforward means to the end is
lying ready to our hand... if we use it intelli-gently."
Fleet Admiral Mehkan looked profoundly un-happy. "I wish we knew for sure that we could trust her,"
he said.
"We can trust her to be Romulan," said the presi-dent.
"That's what I'm afraid of."
"And we don't so much have to trust her," said the president, "as to anticipate her. In that regard... we
have at least one resource who does that fairly well."
"I was afraid you were going to say that," said Mehkan. He got up and went to stand by the terrace door
as well. "Mr. President... there are people high in Command who are going to resist this sug-gestion
strenuously."
"You among them," said the president.
"Kirk is increasingly difficult to predict as time goes by. If he-"
"If we selected Starship captains just for pre-dictability," said the president, "most of them would be dead
within the first year of their first five-year mission. Lateral thinking, creativity, the ability to outflank the
dangers that face them... that, I would think, is the set of characteristics Fleet sorts for. Or have the
criteria changed since we last did a re-view?"
"No, but-"
"You know what the problem is as well as I do," the president said. "It is not a question of predictabil-ity,
in the case of the captain of the Enterprise; it is a question of loyalty... in this particular case."
"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. / 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, unfortu-nately," he said, "we're right. We're just going to have
to pray we're not as right as we're afraid we are."
摘要：

StarTrek-TOS095-Swordhunt,Rihannsu3PrologueTheshadowsofEilhaunn'slittleyellowsunAhadiwereslantinglow,now,overthepalegreenfieldsallaroundtheflitterport,astheworkcrewsranthehar-vestingmachineryupanddownthenewlycutrowstobindthereedsintothebigcircularbalesthatHwiamna'sfamilyfavored.Hwiamnai-Delt'Ehweias...

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