Star Trek: The Original Series: Rihannsu, Book 5: The Empty Chair

by Diane Duane

  After a little, Ael stood and moved on through the crowd. Jim bowed to her as she approached.

  Once again she eyed him and then laughed. “Still a little too insolent,” Ael said.

  “I’ve got some ale over here,” Jim said, “and we can work on it.”

  He led her over to where McCoy and Spock were sitting. McCoy held out a cup to Ael. She sat down beside him, had a long drink of it, and then leaned back in the chair, glancing around at the three of them. “We have caught them,” Ael said.

  “Who?” Jim said. “The Three?”

  “They were betrayed,” Ael said. “Is it not apt? But those whom they had paid for a clandestine escape actually delivered them into our hands this afternoon.” She let out a long breath. “At any rate, we may now lift jamming and transporter interdiction in the system. There is much to do, and we need everything running again.”

  “I’ll tell Scotty,” Jim said. “Or maybe you’ve already passed the word to Tyrava.”

  She waved a hand. “Someone will coordinate it,” she said. “I am told that wise empresses do not micromanage their staff.”

  Jim chuckled.

  “So what will you do with them?” McCoy said.

  “First,” Ael said, “ask them a great many questions. Who knows, perhaps I may even find out where my poor exiled niece has gone.”

  “‘First,’” Jim said. “And after that?”

  Ael sighed. “I much fear that I must have them converted to the Empire’s permanent custody.”

  “Sounds like a long time in stir,” McCoy muttered.

  “Eternity,” Ael said, “or thereabouts.”

  McCoy stiffened, looking at her.

  “Come, Doctor,” Ael said. “You see the situation as clearly as I do. Mercy is wasted on such. Letting them live would be seen as proof positive of my weakness. I can afford no such misconceptions among my enemies right now. They are in disorder, but given a whisper of reason, they would begin to draw together again. I intend to give them no such cause. If I must seem ruthless now, it will be in service of many decades, perhaps even centuries of peace later, for millions, perhaps billions of my people. I will not risk so fair a chance for the life of men who have had their chance, and squandered it.”

  “It must be nice,” McCoy murmured, “to be so certain.”

  Ael simply looked at him; then glanced away. “It would be, I am sure. But here we run aground on the rocks of cultural differences, Doctor. Those men would have murdered your homeworld. I think we would probably be well rid of them. Yet as of this morning I also have in hand a communiqué from the President of the Federation, requesting that they be extradited.” She sighed. “So that may yet sway me. Either way, they are safely disposed for the moment.”

  She held out the ale cup for a refill. “After all,” she said to Jim, “you were chaffing me with it the other day. Am I afraid to lose the peace? Of course I am. Only a madwoman would not be. So I will walk warily for a while. Besides, for the time being, we are much dependent on others for our security, and I would dislike to alienate those who have so far been such good friends.”

  Jim leaned back, nodding. “We’ll be guarding your borders for some time,” Jim said. “Until Grand Fleet is rebuilt, and your new HQ is established.”

  “It will be a joint headquarters,” Ael said, “split between the Two Worlds, and no longer sited in space. Space-based facilities we will have as before, but I will no longer allow administration to be based above the world and looking down. It needs its feet, as your people would say, firmly on the ground, in order to keep in touch with those it serves. There, Starfleet’s model will serve us well.” She looked at Jim thoughtfully. “Though some careful thought will have to be given to find ways to keep the new Grand Fleet from distrusting and ostracizing its more, shall we say, proactive commanders?”

  They both smiled. “As for the borders,” Ael said, “yes, I accept that assistance with thanks. But not for too long. Otherwise my people will start to become restive.”

  “The Klingons will soon enough be along to test your border,” Jim said. “When that happens, call. We’ll find a way, I think, to be in the neighborhood. After all—” And he didn’t care if he looked and sounded a little bitter. “—we got what we paid for.”

  “The price,” Ael said quietly. “Yes. It is on my mind as well. Not only others’ lives, but the price we have paid in our own experience, our own pain. Still, would you have it any other way? Would you willingly serve a less trying master than you do?”

  Jim thought about that. “Maybe not.”

  “And so it has been for me,” Ael said. “Even though I am in worse position now than ever I was, for now I serve the Elements Themselves. Oh, do not give me that look,” she said. “This is not…what do you call it? A religious matter. But when you rule so many people, the sense of the Elements’ continued attention becomes rather surprising. No matter. I will cope.”

  “Speaking of which,” McCoy said, “I meant to congratulate you. What a whopper you told those people yesterday.”

  She looked at him innocently. “Why, whatever do you mean?”

  “About Sol and Eisn being in permanent equivalence.”

  Ael smiled very slowly. “There are, I think,” she said, “good lies and bad lies. Would you agree?”

  McCoy raised an eyebrow.

  “That, I think,” said the Empress of the Rihannsu, “will be a good one. Let them think no threat between our peoples of that kind is possible. You, of course,” she said to Jim, “will help Scotty and K’s’t’lk finish their work in taking the Sunseed technology permanently off the gaming table.” She cast an amused eye at the poker table off behind them. “So the trouble that brought us together at the beginning will be solved at last.”

  Jim nodded.

  “Meanwhile,” Ael said, “Mr. Spock, I cannot thank you enough for the great gift you have given me in your sword. Or rather, that you have given my people. It was a gesture that is already being deeply discussed.”

  Spock bowed his head to her.

  “And I bet I know in what context,” McCoy said. “Reunification.”

  Ael’s eyes went distant and thoughtful. “There’s a dream worth dreaming,” she said, very softly, as if afraid someone might overhear her and take offense. “But I much doubt it can come in my time. Right now my people are bruised and battered enough. Such an idea must wait a time when the Rihannsu truly feel themselves strong again—strong enough that such a move could not possibly be seen as weakness. No, that’s a matter for a century hence. You may see it.” The look she threw at Spock was challenging. “But you will not have the handicaps under which I must labor, these decades coming.”

  Spock said nothing, only looked thoughtful himself. Ael shook her head. “‘Someday’ must take care of itself,” she said. “Just at this moment, the thorny ‘now’ will be more than enough trouble to keep me very busy.”

  They all glanced up as several people approached. It was Arrhae and Ffairrl, and Aidoann with them. “Here then,” Ael said, “comes the Empress’s Lamp, as the office will be called. The Senator will serve as an adviser, and an aide in, shall we say, alien matters.”

  Terise Haleakala-LoBrutto smiled. “Captain,” “Arrhae” said, “we didn’t have a lot of time for this earlier. Perhaps I may make known to you ‘Ffairrl’—by his right name, Ron Ruis. He was my steward on Gorget, and a lot more, it turns out.”

  “When I left,” Ruis said, “my rank was lieutenant commander. Elements only know what it is now.” And Jim’s eyes went wide, for the man’s accent suddenly was pure Bronx.

  “But Terise wasn’t the only Earth-originated agent on ch’Rihan,” Ruis said. “Some of us have been there a long, long time. Some of us have made strange friends along the way, or were placed with them to begin with.” He glanced across the room at Gurrhim. “And more than one of us have wound up working both sides of the street. It seems,” he said, looking at Terise with amusement, “to be an occupational ha
zard.”

  “I’ll be staying on, Captain,” Terise said, “and under cover. I think I can do my best work here, in the Senate, helping it find its feet. The local government has apparently already vouched for me with Starfleet.” She looked slyly at Ael, and grinned.

  “Indeed,” Ael said, looking up with an expression in which amusement was well mixed with annoyance, “I have no intention of letting this young woman go anywhere. She was instrumental in dooming me to my present position. I shall make sure she stays within arm’s reach to suffer as I suffer. And so may her associate,” Ael said, glancing over at Ffairrl, “to whom I wish all luck in assisting in her political career, which is likely to become lively, as the rest of the Senate try to come at me through her.” She waved a hand. “Off with you now, my children. They are eating your share of the dainties over there.”

  Arrhae and Ffairrl bowed and went off, but Aidoann stayed, and Ael reached her up a cup of ale. “Aidoann will remain with me too, for a while,” Ael said. “I will be needing a steady second-in-command. The rest of the crew—oh, they will still be with me from time to time: but they have their own homes to find, or found, now, and their own lives to pursue.”

  “In an Empire at peace,” Jim said.

  Ael drank, looked over the cup at him, and finally set it aside. “I can give you no assurances in that regard, Captain,” Ael said. “I will control my people as best I can. But the Klingon situation will remain volatile. That grudge is an old one now, and the Klingons have done nothing to try to mend it. It will take many years to teach my folk not to hate them, if indeed it can be done at all. And until that day comes, if it ever does, we will attack them when we may come at them, take back from them what they have taken from us, and defend what is ours from them when they try to take it.”

  “Surely that won’t be anytime soon,” McCoy said. “There are too many imponderables floating around, and they prefer an easy game to a hard one.”

  “True, but their memories can be short when their own Imperial policy is served. If they would leave us alone, we would be glad enough to do the same for them. What odds would you give on that happening?”

  McCoy recognized the smile. He had seen it over a hand of cards not too long ago. “Probably about the same as for a busted flush,” he said. “But then the Chancellor will be realizing, now, that the flush on the other side all of a sudden is royal.”

  Ael knew the hand of which he spoke as well as he did, and bowed her head to him. “I am assuming they will be too Klingon to admit being frightened of us for the moment. And as memories fade and the sound of boasting grows louder, even the memory of Tyrava, like death’s shadow at the battle of Artaleirh, will begin to slip. We will have to remind them. Fortunately we now have the resources to create many more like Tyrava. As I gather the Empire back together, it is possible that there will be worlds that want no more of any empire, for good or ill; worlds that want to go their own way, or peoples whose planets have suffered so in this conflict that they desire new ones. Such peoples we must see safely on their way. It means a new fleet of generation ships, though at least this time the populations who leave us will not be lifetimes about it.”

  “Khre—” Aidoann stopped, then, and laughed. “Madam.” She made a slight face at the word, and perhaps only McCoy fully understood how strange the word sounded that no one on ch’Rihan or ch’Havran had previously used of one of their own species: the address-form of Llei’hmnë, “Empress.” “Madam, there are those who will see your letting such people go as a lesser weakness of the same kind as letting the Three live would be.”

  Ael stretched her arms out before her, let them fall again. “They’ll soon enough learn I am not weak in the ways they think. Oh, I will not be cruel. When there are people who need killing, I will not hold my hand. But as for staying in the Empire-to-be, or leaving it, that decision all but the innermost coreworlds must make for themselves. Eventually, even those. Forcing the Outworlds to participate in Empire without consulting them, or hearing their voices raised in protest, was the seed of this problem. I will not compound the error. Our behavior toward them will give them the data they need to decide whether to go or stay. But I have a number of years of bad habits to train our people out of. Or to attempt to.” Ael briefly looked grim. “Even I have only so many years to me. Some day, by knife or disruptor or disease or just time’s long malady, some day I will fall; after that, the peoples of the Empire will do as they will, and those who survive me will discover, only then, how well or ill I did my job.”

  The assembled group glanced at one another. “Morbid,” McCoy said after a few seconds.

  “Ah, McCoy,” Ael said genially, “in your job you see as much death from day to day as any of us. Possibly, in the long run, more. You surely would have to agree that ignoring mortality is the best way to invite it. I am merely turning my eye toward necessary precautions. It’s good to have a plan, and to strike the last item off the list.”

  She smiled at Jim, and stood. “Aidoann,” she said, “go you and tell the escort I am ready.” Aidoann smiled at them and went.

  Jim and McCoy and Spock stood to see Ael off. “I cannot stay any longer,” Ael said. “Already they await me, downplanet. Until we all meet again, whenever it may be, I bid you go with the Elements.”

  Spock bowed his head slightly, then glanced up again, and Jim could make nothing of the look that passed between them. But McCoy’s eyes went wry, and he reached under his tunic and pulled something out. It was a card. He held it up between him and Ael for a moment, letting her see it.

  It was a woman, royally robed, big-bellied with child, sitting on a wide and splendid throne that at first glance seemed built of dark stone, but stars and the endless night of space were buried in that stone, intractably fiery and reaching back through unplumbed darkness to unlikely depths. The dark-haired woman was crowned with those stars, some of them tangled in her hair like fireflies on a summer night. The woman gazed into the distance, holding a scepter that blazed at its end with one star shining paramount beyond all the others. Water flowed behind the woman’s throne, on the card; the wind blew through the trees in the near distance, and at the feet of the great snowcapped mountain behind her, fire ran down half-seen hills. The word IMPERATRIX was written on the bottom of the card.

  Ael took the card and looked at it closely, then glanced up at McCoy. “I did not see this card in play the other night,” she said.

  McCoy smiled gently. “It was in play,” he said. “Without a doubt. Take it as a keepsake.”

  Ael took the card and tucked it away. She gave to Spock and McCoy the same small bow she had given to Jim the day before, then turned to him.

  “Perhaps you will see me to the door?”

  He nodded. They walked together through the revelers, human and alien and Rihannsu together, and Ael nodded and smiled at all who greeted her until the two of them came out past the crowd.

  “And one last thing,” she said to Jim as they came to the doors. “It must be handled now, for I fear that this is as private as we will ever have a chance to be again.”

  Uh-oh, Jim thought.

  She paused a little way from the door. “Enough dealing with superficialities. Let us finally, now that we have the leisure, to say a word about what has not as yet been said openly between us.”

  Uh-oh! Jim thought again.

  “Loyalty,” Ael said quietly, “honor, and friendship—these are the banners we have been holding up between us, we two, for quite some time now. But they are not why we are here. Not just those. Are they?”

  She moved a little toward him.

  Jim stood his ground. “No, I would say not.”

  She moved a touch closer. “I am glad to see you acknowledge it.”

  And then she reached into a pouch at her belt and handed him something. It was a little green-metal cube, about the size of a small apple, and except for its shape, rather like what Gurrhim had brought aboard Enterprise with him.

  “This is wha
t Starfleet sent you for, the President tells me,” she said. “This is what brought you all this way. Technology. You would have stolen it if you had to. Loyalty, to your orders, yes, that would have bound you to the theft. Oh, you would have asked first! And then done your best to steal better technology than what we gave you, fearing, perhaps correctly, that we would give you less effective material, and keep the best for ourselves.”

  She gave him an ironic look. “But so far you have held your hand, not just to keep from interfering with the achievement of my goals, I think. So it is my pleasure to give you freely what even the President of the Federation is not sure I will give you. The thing you need, the thing you came for—and the reason I am now Empress of the Rihannsu.”

  She smiled. “Is there anything else you need?”

  All Jim could do was shake his head. “Damn you, woman!” he said, but very quietly.

  Ael smiled.

  Then Jim reached down. “Was there anything else I needed, did you ask?”

  And he took her hand, and touched it in a specific way.

  Ael’s eyes widened.

  “Also, one last thing. I didn’t dare ask McCoy,” Jim said. “You’ll have to tell me if I pronounce it correctly.”

  Jim leaned close to her, and spoke a word.

  She did not look away.

  “Yes,” Ael said. “Yes, that would be about right.”

  And then she freed her hand, and reached up to take his face between her hands, and drew him close.

  A moment later she let him go. “Is that how it is done?” she said.

  Jim couldn’t say a word.

  “I go,” Ael said. “Call on me when you need help from this side of the Outmarches. But bear in mind that things will change here, and may do so unexpectedly. When they do, I will react as I must. It has even occurred to me that, if matters do not go as I plan, you should not be surprised if, for some while, I and all my people might close our borders, and vanish, to put our house in order. At that time, the less Federation presence there is in our systems, the better.”