Chapter One
Deep in the longest night, in a ship passing through the empty space thirteen light-years from 33 Trianguli, 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. I 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 darkness, 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 the ancient swordsmith, the Sword occupied 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 Universe out of shape around them, as intense gravity fields bend light, and equally they bent awry the intentions 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, that she would willingly take possible disaster on herself in order to save the most sacred part of her people's heritage from further dishonor. Now she wondered, sometimes, 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 Federation 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 pragmatism 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, ll -- Ael."
"Not in private, anyway," Ael said, hearing her antecenturion'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 impaired. Which I think unlikely to happen. In any case, it is not as if some superior officer 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, encrypted. "Decrypt," she said, and sat back, watching the terminal go black, then fill with amber characters that shimmered into meaning from meaninglessness.
About half the screenful was comm routing information, interesting only insofar as one chose to be endlessly fascinated by the means her correspondents 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 before making their way out into the spaces beyond. This one, she saw, had gone clear out into the Klingon 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 subspace 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. IT 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 numbers," 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. Impossible, 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 personalities 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 darkness that lay there defeating the dim light of her cabin. "Well," she said softly. "Now is the time, if ever. Shall
