Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages (73 page)

They gazed out toward the port facilities. The landing surface was all pockmarked with holes and craters and huge long gashes gouged out by phaser blasts.

“Tomorrow,” Mijne’s grandsire said, “we’ll be told to go out there and start repairing that. Or else we’ll wind up as ‘replacements’ for other automatics around the base that were damaged and cannot be repaired. We will prove our loyalty by faithfully serving those who have oppressed us.”

He grinned. The grin was feral. Mijne thought she had never seen such a ferocious look on anyone, and she was certainly at a loss to see it on her old grandsire, who had spent her childhood spoiling her and giving her treats, and whose voice she had never heard raised.

“Oppressed us?” she said. “Grandfather, you’re—” She wouldn’t quite say “mad.”

“Oh, come, Granddaughter, surely you don’t believe they rounded us all up and brought us here to
protect
us!”

“But they said—”

“Of course they did. Free, though, and in our homes, we can’t be controlled. With the planet going about its business as usual, there are too many ways we threaten this base’s security. For we’re mostly Ship-Clan folk, aren’t we?—not really to be trusted, different from other Rihannsu, as they like to think, another breed, possibly disloyal. So they distrust us from the start. But also, our world’s in a bad spot. We are a long way from the hearth of the Empire, and the Empire would hate to see Samnethe’s privately owned shipbuilding facilities falling into the Klingons’ hands, while the employees are running around free in the neighborhood, available to be simply swept up and put to work for the Empire’s enemies. So instead, the government rounds us all up, the whole workforce of this planet which really has no other industry worth speaking of, and puts us where it can keep an eye on us, while this attack is handled, and the government thinks about what it wants us to build for them…never mind what our industry cooperative thinks. Should it look as if the Klingons might somehow get the upper hand here, well…someone can make sure that this particular highly skilled workforce is never taken by them as slave labor.”

“And a good thing, too! I would die rather than be a Klingon’s slave, or any being’s!”

“Quite right,” her grandfather said. “Quite right. But wouldn’t you rather be free to make that choice for yourself, Granddaughter…rather than have it made for you?”

She stared at him.

He kept walking gently along. “Well, if we are lucky, it may not come to that. The military may be telling the truth for once, or some of it. Though I doubt it. Sooner or later, though, we’ll come to the real reason they’ve put us here. We will be forced to start work at the base. After that, they will find other work for us to do—either shipbuilding again, on their terms and pay—if any pay at all—or something less pleasant, maybe not even on this planet. And our durance will not end until this not-yet-declared war ends…and maybe not even then.” He raised his eyebrows.

He was so calm and matter-of-fact about all this that, to Mijne’s horror, she was beginning to believe him. “But—I don’t see what we can do,” she said at last. “They are the government.”

“We are Rihannsu,” her grandfather said. “We can refuse!”

She stared at him, fearful. “But our duty—”

“Is not to follow stupid orders blindly,” her grandfather said fiercely. “Or orders that blithely destroy the freedom our long-ago ancestors brought us here to enjoy at such cost to themselves, after they in turn refused to be other than they were. How should we have become so craven as to acquiesce to our own enslavement? Our government has no such rights over us, of internment, of forced labor. And yes, they will say, now and afterward, it was an emergency, we are fighting for our lives, we will make it up to you later, all your rights will be restored to you!” He gave her an ironic look. “Do you believe that?”

To her horror, Mijne found she didn’t. In the last few years she had become troubled by some of the things she saw on the news channels, reports from the outworlds of mass arrests, “security problems,” purges of local governments. Then, over the last year, she had seen few such reports, almost none. At first she had thought,
Good, things are quieting down.
But then a small voice had started to say, in the back of her mind,
Are they really? Or are the news services simply not telling these stories anymore? And if not, why not?

“This system and others like it will shortly be the front line of a war,” her grandfather said softly. “And we can only hope that those in the other colony worlds have not yet forgotten how to die for what they believe in.” He let out a long breath. “For that is what we will have to do now.”

“‘We’—”

“I am a grandson and a twice-and three-times great-grandson of engineers,” her grandfather said, stopping now, looking up at that evening star as it slid toward its setting. “Our ancestors and their families left safety, in the ancient days, to bring the rest of our people here. We risked our lives to do it. We died with the ships that died, and in some of the ships that didn’t. Now it looks like some of us will have to die again.”

His voice was curiously calm. Now it even began to sound amused. “But not in vain, I think, for the Empire’s own greed has sown the seeds of what will now begin to happen. It wasn’t enough for them to tax us for the privilege, when we desired to spread out into the new worlds discovered after ch’Rihan and ch’Havran were settled. They sited the shipbuilding facilities on the new outworlds, and made us pay for those too. They made us staff them locally, and pay the staff ourselves.” He smiled. “And then, when the exploration ships our more recent ancestors built in turn found new, livable worlds, they taxed us for landing and living on those as well, and those colonists in turn had to pay for and run the new shipbuilding facilities established on the second-and third-generation worlds. Did they never think what they were doing?”

“Grandsire—”

“Mijne, listen, just this once. Greed blinded them—or else the Elements did. The Empire forced the tools of our future independence into our hands…and then made them all the more precious to us by forcing us to pay for them, yet withholding true ownership.” That feral grin appeared again. “What people need to see at all costs is that we are not powerless…
for we are still holding the tools.
”

“To do what?”

“We will have to ask our people, and find out,” her grandfather said. “Meanwhile…”

He stood still and silent for a few moments more, while Mijne shook in the growing cold.

“One can always say no,” he said, as the evening star winked out behind the hills, and the fence went opaque again.

The next morning they were all called together for the usual morning mass meeting in which duties and details were announced. The base commander himself was there. “Considerable damage has been done by yesterday’s Klingon attack to base facilities,” the commander said. “Immediate repairs must be begun on the landing pans, repair cradles, and cranes if we are to carry the attack to them effectively, or repulse the next one.” People looked at each other dubiously.
“Next one”?
The word had gone out that this had been a victory, that the invaders had been driven off, and the rumors had gone on to add that within a few days everyone would be able to go home and pick up their lives where they had left off. “To facilitate this goal, by order of the Empire, work crews will now be formed from the camp’s population, consisting of everyone between ages sixteen and one hundred fifty. You are required to form up in groups of one hundred, by registration numbers. Officers will be detailed to each group to describe your duties and work hours. When a project is finished, your officer will inform you of the next project to be begun. Starting with these numbers—”

There was some muttering among the great crowd, but it was muted. The officer seemed not to pay any attention to it, merely kept reading his numbers. The crowd, like a live thing, hesitated, then started to drift apart, fragmenting itself.

One fragment, though, moved through it, in a straightforward direction very unlike the uncertain motion of everyone else. He made his way out of the crowd, clear of the other people, and stepped out onto the bare concrete, stepped out of it, toward the officer. The officer, looking up and seeing him, stopped, puzzled.

The old man drew himself up quite straight, quite tall. In a voice sharp and carrying as the report of a disruptor bolt, he said:

“I will not serve!”

The crowd fell deadly silent.

Mijne blanched as the officer lowered his padd and stared at her grandsire.
He’s a hundred and ninety, he doesn’t
have
to serve, Grandsire, what are you—
“Grandsire!”

The officer looked at her grandfather in apparent bemusement. “I beg your pardon?”

“I said,” her grandsire said courteously, as if anyone within a half mile could have failed to hear him,
“I will not serve!”

The officer looked at him. Then he looked at one of the security people off to one side, and muttered something.

The security man lifted his disruptor and fired.

The scream of sound hit Mijne’s grandsire, and he went down like a felled tree.

She ran to him, fell to her knees beside him. Between neck and knees he was one great welter of blood and blasted flesh. Her grandsire looked at her with eyes clear with shock. “Did he hear me?” he said.

“He heard you,” she said, weeping.

Her grandsire stopped breathing. Unbelieving, Mijne looked up, looked around. All that great crowd looked at what had happened…then slowly, slowly began to drift apart again, into groups.

Mijne got up and walked back among them, only very slowly getting control of the sobs that were tearing at her. After a while she managed it. She went to the group she was supposed to be with, and did the work they were given, filling blast craters with rubble; and that night they all went back to their common houses, and a great silence fell with the dark.

But in it, here and there, very faintly, in the depths of night, in Mijne’s mind and in many another, a whisper stirred, slowly beginning to look for ways to speak itself in action:

I will not serve…!

Arrhae’s meeting turned out to consist of three dreary hours of procedural wrangling among the negotiators, during which the observers’ and delegates’ opinions were neither solicited nor (clearly) desired. On one level, Arrhae didn’t mind; she was glad enough to have time to turn over in her mind this new turn of events and what to do about it, though it was a pain to have to appear, at the same time, as if she were paying attention to the mind-numbing arguments of the negotiators about how the parts of the demand to the Federation should be rephrased. When midmeal break came round, it came not a second too soon for Arrhae, and she was all too glad to slip back to her suite for a bite to eat by herself.

Ffairrl appeared and began to fuss over her, and Arrhae suffered it for a few minutes, letting him bring her a cup of ale and a small plate of savory biscuits, but nothing more. “Lady,” Ffairrl said, sounding rather desperate, “
deihu,
they will think I am not serving you well!”

“If you give me another midmeal like yesterday,” Arrhae said, “you will have to serve me by rolling me down the hall on a handtruck!” Though now she would be wondering who
his
“they” were. Did the intelligence people browbeat even the poor servants?
Well, and why would they not? They tried it with
me. But to what purpose? One more question to which she was not likely to get an answer any time soon….

And then the door signal went off.

Arrhae looked up at the clock on the nearby table with some indignation. It was nowhere near the end of the midmeal break yet. “
Now
what?” she said, and then thought,
Ah, the package….
Ffairrl, with a nervous look, headed for the door.

It opened…and Arrhae saw who stood there, and slowly got up.

A slim, slight young man, a handsome dark-visaged young man hardly much taller than she was, in Fleet uniform, with a cheerful and anticipatory look on his face: Nveid. Nveid tr’AAnikh. The last time Arrhae had seen him, he had been following her while she did her shopping. Initially she’d thought he might have been following her for her looks. That did happen occasionally, for she was unusually good-looking by Rihannsu standards, that having been one element of her cover—her old double-agent master having been widely assumed to have originally bought her for other purposes than household work. But that had not been the reason, and Arrhae had begun to suspect that tr’AAnikh was possibly with one of the intelligence services…until she found out how wrong she had been about that, too.

Now Nveid stepped into her suite and bowed to her…a breath’s worth, then up again, jaunty, like a suitor who thinks his suit is going to go well and doesn’t see the need to be overly formal. “Noble
deihu,
” Nveid said, “I had to see you.”

“I am not at all sure the need is reciprocal,” Arrhae said, in as hard a voice as she could manage. “Tr’AAnikh, how
dare
you come here? I thought you would have understood after our last encounter that I do not welcome your attentions.” This was true, though not for the reasons any listener might suspect.
What is he doing here?
she thought. The brief conversation they’d had in i’Ramnau some weeks ago—though it felt more like half a lifetime now—had suggested that his family might have been under suspicion because they had kin on
Bloodwing. Gorget
was the last place she would have expected to see him.