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

by Diane Duane

  “He’s done exactly what some of us thought he might,” said Fleet Admiral Mehkan, the Starfleet Chief of Staff. “He’s gone native.”

  “You have no proof of that,” the President said.

  “We don’t need proof at this point,” said Mehkan. “He hasn’t been heard from for two days. That whole part of space is full of jamming. Romulan SIGINT and Klingon SIGINT are both up ninety percent. The war is about to break out in earnest. And Enterprise is still on the wrong side of the Zone. You heard Danilov’s last conversation with him! You heard what happened.”

  “I heard what seemed to have happened,” the President said. “As did you. That Danilov got no reply doesn’t necessarily mean that Enterprise has gone over to the other side.”

  “Sir, with all due respect, you always knew this was going to happen,” said the Fleet Admiral. “Up to a point, that served our purpose. And now the war between the Klingons and the Romulans is breaking out, as we had hoped, while the Romulans themselves are in the throes of a revolution even as they declare war on us.”

  “Dai, you can leave me out of the ‘we’ regarding that particular hope,” the President said. “And I’m not yet certain that hostilities have broken out in exactly the manner that Starfleet, or the Strat-Tac department, would have planned.” He looked at Fleet Admiral Mehkan rather acerbically. “If it had, they would’ve completely annihilated one another by now, and Kirk would have been home. But as I told you, it was never going to be that simple, and as you say, Kirk’s not back. And it would seem that neither of the two other combatant sides is entirely as eager for war as you would’ve credited. As I read it, the Klingons and the Romulans are both still jockeying for position, trying to avoid fighting with each other, while the Romulans hope to be allowed to concentrate on us, and the Klingons are looking to see which way it will best benefit them to strike. Though, as far as I can tell from the intelligence I see, the Klingons are suddenly having some second thoughts not only about us, but about the Romulans.”

  Mehkan was silent for a moment. He’s wondering, the President thought, for the hundredth time: Do I have access to intel that doesn’t come from Fleet? But the President of the Federation stood there looking innocuous, and after a few moments the Fleet Admiral turned away, frowning. The President held his face quite still and said nothing further for some moments. A gift for looking innocuous had gotten him elected in the first place; since then it had turned out to be more useful than he could possibly have believed.

  “I’m still afraid we’re going to have to hunt him down and bring him home,” Mehkan said at last.

  “Regrettable,” the President said. What he was regretting most emphatically was the image of Enterprise being resolved to her component atoms, which was—he firmly believed—what the Chiefs of Staff had in mind rather than a court-martial. “Shot while trying to escape,” was one of the things the intervention in question had often been called, once upon a time, whether escape had actually been involved or not.

  “I need your sanction,” Fleet Admiral Mehkan said.

  The President gave the Tower a glance, and then faced the Starfleet Chief of Staff full on. “You do not,” he said. “Under the uniform code, you already have the sanction you need for what you contemplate. I can quote you chapter and verse, if I must. What you want is the tacit approval of the office of the Commander in Chief.”

  Mehkan watched him. The President absorbed his gaze stolidly, not changing expression, not moving a muscle. Finally, the Chief of Staff looked away again.

  “In a perfect world…” the President said then, turning to look back at the Tower. “But never mind. The world’s not perfect, is it? What we seek, theoretically, is that there should be peace. And what we get, usually, is war. Isn’t that strange? Sometimes I think that maybe we’re just a little too willing to let our old natures assert themselves over the new one we’re trying to build. That man out there—he said, once, ‘We’re not going to fight today.’ And he was right, to the annoyance of a lot of people in Starfleet. Now he thinks he has to fight, and goes about doing it the best way he can—and you’re still annoyed at him.” The President shook his head.

  “Oh, he’s a thoughtful man in his way,” said Mehkan, “and one who doesn’t obey orders blindly. Once or twice this has served our purpose, I’ll admit that. But when forces on this scale are involved, the lack of discipline ceases to be an advantage. If one portion of a team doesn’t interact predictably with the others, doesn’t react as it should in a crisis, it endangers the others as well.”

  Not that I can tell you what orders besides yours he is obeying, the President thought. Or how much trouble it’s going to make for you when he really gets going.

  The dim lighting in the room let the President see, reflected darkly in his window, the face of the Chief of Staff behind him—the man’s already dour Centauri expression now impassive under the shadow of a distasteful task he now felt he had to do, one for which he now realized he was to be given no backing. “You know my preferences,” the President said. “And you know the realities of this situation. Come war or come peace, any scenario that ends in the destruction of the Enterprise, any scenario whatever, will cause this administration in particular and the Federation in general a great deal of trouble. That ship has become a symbol for something very basic, something at the root of what we do, which is why, I would guess, some people in Fleet are so uncomfortable with it, and its command.” He allowed himself one small smile. “It’s always troublesome to try to deal with archetype when it rears its head in the middle of what passes for reality. But if we deal with it in the wrong way, the results echo for years. Be very careful what you do. And under all circumstances, break your backs to bring her back safely, because if she doesn’t come back safely, you’re the ones who’re going to have to answer for it first. And not to me. To them.”

  He looked out into the night. A last splash and spatter of light ran up the Eiffel Tower and seemed to leap into the sky along with the pure white laser that burst up and out of the Tower’s peak to mark the end of the evening’s last display. That line of fire burned upward, like an upheld lance, and then slowly faded. By the time it was dark, and the Tower with it, the President glanced up to see that Mehkan was gone.

  He let out a long breath and sat down at his desk, leaning back in the chair. He squirmed a little in the chair, but the chair was not comfortable. This was no surprise: long ago, he had insisted on it.

  The President put his hand down on the surface of the sapphire-glass desk, gazed down into it. The desk read his handprint, and the red line of the laser flickered up into his eye, making him blink as it read his retina. It always made him blink. I can never believe the damn thing isn’t going to make me blind eventually, he thought.

  The surface of the desk went bright, then, with windowed readouts and piled-up “documents.” He searched in vain for one that he had been waiting for, one which should have been blinking for his attention.

  Come on, he thought. Show me a sign. I can’t save you now if you don’t help me do it.

  But the message he looked for wasn’t there, and was most unlikely to appear while he sat there waiting for it. Finally the President of the Federation got up and stretched, shut the desk computer down, and left his office. The office lights dimmed themselves down to darkness as he left; and behind him, through the window, the City of Light’s illumination burned steady, starlike, unmoved by the deepening night.

  SEVEN

  The dream was a strange one. There was a great deal of noise in it, a commotion of people running in all directions, alarms, the sound of disruptor fire. Through it all, Arrhae walked with unnatural calm, gazing around her bemused as the lights flickered and the ship’s engines roared. Crewmen with guns ran past her; she brushed by them as if they hardly mattered. Screams came from ahead and behind. Arrhae floated straight on through it, making her way toward the place where they would finally have some answers for her.

  She stopped at a c
losed door and lifted her hand to the door signal. She pressed it, though she couldn’t hear whether it was working; the noise of gunfire down the hall was too loud. She waited while more people ran past her.

  The door slid open. And there was Gurrhim, standing there and looking at her with a kindly expression. Unfortunately, there was a great hole in his chest where his heart should have been. He bled green, not in great gouts, but in a slow, sad seepage that ran down the front of his tunic.

  Arrhae was briefly shocked, but then she realized that, bar the blood, there was nothing really that terrible about the way Gurrhim looked; and more, he was waiting for her to speak, a courtesy that a Praetor hardly had to extend to so junior a Senator as she. Finally, all Arrhae could find to say was, “I don’t have it. I gave it away. Please forgive me!”

  Then she clapped both hands over her mouth as she realized, in absolute terror, that she had spoken in English.

  Gurrhim merely smiled. “Nothing is revealed. Nothing I didn’t know. I will keep your secret as you have kept mine.”

  For some reason, Arrhae found herself completely relieved by that, utterly reassured. She nodded, and gave Gurrhim a little bow. Then she turned and walked away again through the corridors full of shouting people, singing softly to herself in relief as she went. “Take me out to the ball game,” she sang, “take me out to the crowd; buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack; I don’t care if I ever get back…”

  In the fabric of the ship around her, she heard the groaning begin. We’re going very fast, she thought. We’ll be going into warp soon. The low, insistent shout of the battle-stations’ alert, a dismal basso hoot, was throbbing right through everything now. And without warning, the corridor before her was empty. She turned to look behind, but no one was there either, and Gurrhim had closed his door. Only Arrhae remained, and at last she turned again and headed down toward her quarters. “And it’s root, root, root for the home team,” she sang softly, “if they don’t win it’s a shame, ’cause it’s one, two, three strikes you’re out at the ol—”

  Bang! went something in the room, and Arrhae’s eyes flew open. She sat up on her couch, her sleeping silks sliding off her in all directions. The source of the bang, she now saw, was merely old Mahan, the door-opener of House Khellian, who had dropped the empty handbasin that he had apparently tiptoed into her room to fetch.

  “Hru’hfe,” he said, “I’m so sorry. Did I wake you?”

  Arrhae sat there among the silks, rubbing her eyes for a moment, and then looked around her. Visible through her bedroom window was a gray, early morning; mist lay over the gardens to the side of the house. “Mahan,” she said after a moment, as she woke up enough to realize what was going on, “that’s no work for you! Go get one of the house servants to do that.”

  “I don’t care to have them in here when you’re sleeping, hru’hfe,” Mahan said, picking up the dropped basin. “Sometimes—” He turned the basin over in his hands, looking at it thoughtfully. “Sometimes,” Mahan said, more softly, “you say things in your sleep. Gibberish, mostly, but—”

  Arrhae went cold. “Mahan,” she said, grasping after the fading tatters of her dream, “was I singing?”

  “Might have been,” Mahan said. “Hru’hfe, I need to go fill this.” And off he went.

  Arrhae i-Khellian sat there for a while in distress, being careful not to show it. Since when do I talk in my sleep? she thought. Much less sing.

  She let out a long breath, getting a last fading glimpse of the dream—the people running around, the noise. And poor Gurrhim. Since Gorget…, she thought.

  Arrhae reached to the footstool beside her bed for an over-robe. Hastily she shrugged into it, got up, and stepped over to the window. It was hard to believe that the mad events in which the conference had ended had occurred only three days ago. Gorget had fled home to ch’Rihan at speed, as if a whole battle fleet were behind her. No one truly feared that; though everyone knew that the Federation would now declare itself at war with the Empire, no one thought they would begin the war’s first battle right at the moment. With the negotiations for which Gorget had left ch’Rihan now collapsed in complete disorder, and indeed any real need for them submerged in the realities of imminent hostilities, the higher-level military and diplomatic staff on board had ceased to have any need to speak to the lesser personnel such as Arrhae and the other observers aboard Gorget with them. All such folk had been left strictly to themselves for the few days it took to get home to the Hearthworlds while (Arrhae supposed) the military staff busied themselves with what preparations they could make for war at such a distance from ch’Rihan.

  Arrhae had been left with plenty of time to catch up on her reading, if indeed she’d had the composure to do any such thing. For the first day or two, she had found it difficult to do anything but sit in the chair by the door of her suite on Gorget, waiting for someone to knock—that someone expected to be the horrible Intelligence officer t’Radaik, or someone sent by her. Every one of those nights, Arrhae had awakened sweating and trembling, remembering the sudden improvisation in which she had put Gurrhim’s tiny personal cloaking device into the hands of those who would use it to free him from Gorget’s infirmary and flee with him to the Enterprise. At any moment, Arrhae had expected the security people to come back and start asking her the questions that she had been dreading. But no one came near her at all. She had sat in her quarters all that while quite unmolested, with nothing to fear but her suite-steward Ffairrl, who at that point seemed to feel he had license to feed her until she was three times the size she’d been when she first boarded Gorget.

  Arrhae gained a pound or two, but nothing else happened at all. Gorget finally set down at the great military landing field outside Ra’tleihfi, and from every direction a flock of little flitters came to settle around her and take away the delegates to the negotiations. Arrhae had stepped out to find a flitter waiting for her as well, and within a matter of minutes she and her luggage were in it, and on their way home. Perhaps ten minutes after that, Mahan had opened the door of House Khellian to her, and shut it behind her again when the flitter crew had brought in her bags and once more departed. There Arrhae had stood with her back to the massive door, looking around her small Great Hall. It was all over; it might all have been a dream. She was still a Senator; she was still alive; and she had come away from the middle of an armed engagement at RV Trianguli, physically not a whit the worse for wear.

  Her nerves, though—those were in tatters, and even then, barely over her own threshold, she had thought they’d remain so for some time. And now this, she thought, talking in my sleep. I was more right than I knew. Arrhae shook her head. She would have been glad enough to seek professional help, but there was no one on the planet to whom she could safely go. The one professional who might possibly have done her any good was back there at RV Trianguli.

  Or probably not, Arrhae thought. Enterprise would hardly have lingered there, not with a battle breaking out all around her, and more fighting yet to come. But still, oh, Dr. McCoy, could I ever use you now!

  Arrhae leaned on her forearms on the wide windowsill and looked out at the gardens, breathing deeply and trying to maintain her composure. The gardens weren’t big—any more than most things about House Khellian were—but they were beautiful this time of year, especially now that the long, drooping crimson branches of the sserayl trees around the walls had come into leaf, so that they looked like long tongues of flame where they swept the short, trim turquoise lawn. And the turf—it was not grass, but something more like creeping chamomile—was just beginning to come into bloom. Like chamomile, wevet turf had a strong aroma, and in the morning mist the spicy scent of it was quite pronounced. Arrhae breathed it deep, several times, and waited for her old steadiness of mind to settle in again.

  Slowly it started to reassert itself. The memory of the last week’s unsettling events, of the security people searching her room, of t’Radaik trying to trick her into saying something self-incriminating, of tr
’AAnikh’s hands on her as he kissed her violently, of the last chilly session between Federation and Rihannsu personnel before all Areinnye broke loose—all these did not fade, but they started to assume more proper proportions in her mind.

  One image, though, still took the forefront. Tr’AAnikh. Arrhae put her head down on her forearms, gazing out into the garden, but mostly seeing his confused face as he came to Arrhae’s quarters and received from her something that would have been her death had she been found with it, and for all she knew had been his.

  The thought of the kind of death he would eventually have been dealt had tr’AAnikh been found with Gurrhim’s toy made Arrhae’s flesh creep. Yet there was no news aboard ship of any such thing happening, she thought. Gurrhim’s escape, yes, but nothing more. Of course I was not going to ask anyone directly. But Ffairrl was forthcoming enough about the gossip he got from the other nobles’ servants—the flight home from that part of space, the rumors and news of the war to come. Try as the Intelligence people might to keep things hushed up, intraship gossip still often defeated them. So there was a chance, at least, that tr’AAnikh had gotten away with his life. Arrhae suspected that more definite news would likely be a long time coming, so for now, all she could do was put the matter out of her mind.

  There are more important things to think about. It would most likely be today that her political patron, Praetor tr’Anierh, would send for her. The only message Arrhae had had from him since her homecoming was that he wished her to prepare a report for him; he would analyze it and send for her to answer any questions when his schedule permitted.

  Arrhae had spent the previous afternoon and evening on this piece of work as a way of settling herself back into the house and starting to regain her calm; she had finished it and transmitted it last night just before taking to her couch. The report began as a fairly dry recitation of events, followed by a more detailed and perhaps juicier discussion of personalities, conflicts among members of various parties, factions, and Intelligence services who had gathered around the negotiating table. Arrhae might not have access to supersecret bugging devices, or be a touch telepathic, but she had eyes, and a good ear for nuance in what might otherwise seem casual conversation. It was—she smiled to herself—part of a good hru’hfe’s art to be able to intuit a master’s or guest’s wants or feelings without a word spoken, sometimes before they knew what they wanted themselves. It was an art she had brought with some skill to the negotiating table, and as far as she could tell none of those on whom she’d practiced it were much the wiser. Most of the upper-echelon people had hardly noticed her anyway—a Senator almost entirely by courtesy rather than by birth, and as far as the talks themselves went, merely an observer with no power of her own.