Star Trek: The Empty Chair (16 page)

She snatched the silks up out of the chest and was halfway to the ’fresher when the knock came at her door.
Damn!
“Mahan,” Arrhae said, sounding crosser than she meant to, “tell the pilot he must wait for me ten minutes, and that’s all there is to it. I am not a—”

The door opened just enough for Mahan to put his head in.
“Hru’hfe,
what pilot? That was just a delivery car, bringing a package. It looks like a welcome-gift.”

“Oh!” Arrhae laughed then, and draped her clothes over the top of her sleeping silks for the moment. “Well, I wonder who would send me such a thing?”

“Doubtless there’ll be a chip in it to say. I will put it on the hall table for you,
hru’hfe.”

“Thank you, Mahan. And would you get me some draft?”

“Of course,
hru’hfe.”

He went off to get it, and Arrhae padded out to the hall. On the side table, where the commset and a scribing pad and various other business supplies were kept, there now sat a square package perhaps a cubit on a side, done up in a golden wrapping all spattered with ornamental sparks of brighter and darker gold. She went over to it, picked it up to test the weight: somewhat heavy. Arrhae shook the box, then smiled at herself. Nothing rattled.

She wandered back into her chamber with it, pushed her clothes aside, and sat down on the couch. Carefully Arrhae unwrapped the paper without tearing it—the old habit of a household manager, not to waste anything that might be useful later—and set it aside, revealing a plain golden paperboard box inside. A seal held the closing-flap down. She slit the seal with one thumbnail, opened the box, and found inside it some white tissue spangled with more golden spots, all wrapped around something roughly spherical.

Arrhae pushed the padding-tissue aside to reveal a smooth clear substance, a glassy dome. Reaching into the box, she brought out what revealed itself as a dish garden of clear glass: the bottom of it full of stripes of colored sand, and rooted in the sand, various small dry-climate plants,
spiny or thick-leaved, one or two of them producing tiny, delicate, golden flowers. Attached to the upper dome, instead of a chip or tag, was a small, white, gold-edged printed card that said, FROM AN ADMIRER—WELCOME HOME.

Arrhae laughed softly to herself, got up, and went back into the Great Hall, holding the old-fashioned card in her hand.
It’s not as if he can fool me,
she thought. This present bore the hallmark of her former master, the Old Lord of House Khellian. Hdaen tr’Khellian was up in the little patch of land that still belonged to House Khellian, a “shieling,” or remote summer pasture for the house’s herdbeasts, amusing himself with the renovation of the old shieling-house there, and also cleverly avoiding the oppressive summer heat down in the city. Previously he would have been unreachable up there, but when Arrhae’s assignment to the negotiation team aboard
Gorget
had come through, she had prevailed upon him, for the sake of the household staff, to keep a mobile commlink with him. He had muttered and sworn about it, but finally he’d given in. And now Arrhae had to smile at the thought that he was doing what he’d sworn he wouldn’t do: use it on his own initiative.
How like him to think of me,
Arrhae thought, and touched the control that would connect her to the old man’s private commset.

“What?”
was the first thing that cranky voice said.

She laughed. “Hdaen, do you always answer the link that way?”

“Mostly I don’t answer it at all,” he growled. But the gruffness was feigned; Arrhae knew the tone. “So you’re home at last, are you?”

“I am indeed. Are you well?”

“Better and better, now that I won’t have to answer this thing anymore when it rings. It screeches just like the one in the front hall, but louder, since the staff insist that I keep it in my pouch all day. You’ve got to crack your whip over that lot, girl. They don’t know what to do when you’re
gone. Every little decision that’s to be made, they call me. At least I can have some peace now you’re home!”

“I should think so,” Arrhae said. “How is work coming on the house?”

“The workmen try to overcharge us every day,” Hdaen said. “The world is full of cheats and chancers, young Senator. You should go get some laws passed to make them behave.”

“The first chance I get,” Arrhae said. “But that wasn’t why I called. I wanted to thank you for the present.”

“Present? I didn’t send you anything, silly girl. It must be from one of the ten thousand suitors angling after the most eligible woman in the Tricameron.”

Arrhae laughed—and in the middle of the laugh, it came to her in a rush of terrible realization exactly what this was all about. She suddenly saw that the last thing she could do now would be to agree, on a line that was almost certainly monitored, that she had received a mysterious package from she knew not where. Nor could she give him a chance to say anything further about how this
hadn’t
come from him. “You are such a tease,” Arrhae said, chuckling, “that I don’t know how I put up with you. And—oh, now, here comes another car, doubtless with more of the same. You are a scandal, noble sir! I’m sorry to have disturbed you. I’ll speak to you shortly.” And she cut off the communication without letting Hdaen say another word.

Arrhae stood there by the commset for a few moments, thinking in the empty quiet of the hall. That package, whatever else it might be, would not be merely a present.
It’s more trouble,
Arrhae thought.
Why must all this be happening to
me?
And why now? Can’t I have a moment’s peace?
But this was why she had been emplaced here, all that while ago. So what if no one could have predicted the position she now occupied? She was in it, and peace was for other people. It was
her
job to cope, now, come what may.

Arrhae let out one last long breath, then went back into her sleeping room. There she stopped in the doorway, hearing a sound. For a moment Arrhae couldn’t think what it was.

Peep.

A tiny sound like an insect, or a bird. Arrhae stood there—

Peep.

Against the far wall stood her second travel case, the one that the household staff hadn’t unpacked, and which contained her “business” tools: her chipreader, her notepad.

Did I leave the chipreader on all this time?
Arrhae thought with annoyance.
No, of course I didn’t. I remember turning it off.

And inside the case, the chipreader said
Peep.

She swallowed, then, as the sound gave independent confirmation of what she had been thinking about while on the commlink. Arrhae’s chipreader was not quite the standard model. Under some very specific circumstances, it could activate itself.

Arrhae closed the door behind her, shot the bolt, and then went over to the case. She opened it and took the chipreader out. It appeared to be off, but in her hands it said
Peep
again. Slowly she nodded, and “woke it up” fully with the single extra keypress that let the reader know its clandestine features were authorized.

The little screen lit. Arrhae let the reader draw itself an image of her room, and then superimpose on that image a diagram showing where any as yet unfiled data might be located. Instantly the diagram showed her the location that matched where the neatly folded wrapping paper lay on the bed. Arrhae went over to the bed and looked closely at the paper, smoothing it out until she found the place where the microdot lay, in a folded-under spot where the bright and dark gold sparkles buried in the paper made it seem like just one more dark one.

She got up and went into the ’fresher for a pair of tweezers, came back, sat down by the paper, and carefully pulled the dot off. With care Arrhae dropped it on the chipreader’s scan pad. The screen filled with words. Arrhae started to read—

—and what she read made the blood thump in her veins. She could feel herself going pale, almost faint.

No,
she thought.
No!

Arrhae sat there frozen on the bed for long moments, then slowly turned to look out the bedroom window, where Eisn’s light was beginning to break through the mist.
How one takes that light for granted,
she thought.
Here, or in any other star system, whoever looks at it and ever seriously thinks of losing it, someday? Oh, tens of millions of years from now, yes, when civilization’s gone and the world’s a dry scorched skeleton, all the life long gone from it. But not
now.
Not in months, or weeks.

Or
days!

She had been able only to send home the most general warning, last time. But there was nothing general about
this.
Here were times, dates, courses, frequencies, intents—the kind of detail that would make the difference between billions of lives saved, or the same billions lost.

The sudden knock on the door brought her bolt upright, and the sweat burst out all over Arrhae a second later.

“Hru’hfe?”
Mahan said.

She breathed out, then put the chipreader aside, with its screen blanked, and got up to unlock the door. “I beg your pardon,” she said to Mahan, taking the beaker of herbdraft from him. “I was in the ’fresher.”

Mahan nodded and closed the door again.

Arrhae took a big drink of the draft and held still, forcing herself into quietness, forcing herself to think.
Do normal things when you’ve had a shock,
one of her crisis counselors had told her long ago, when she was first training for this job.
Let reflex do its job until you recover a little. Then don’t linger over your choice of intervention. Often the first thing you decide to do will be the right one. Trust your own judgment, once it’s been proven trustworthy.

So Arrhae drank her draft, and then started to do normal things. She went into the ’fresher and washed, at the usual speed. She saw to her teeth and her hair, and her basic skin care. She got dressed, and did a couple of more things with the chipreader in private. Finally she opened her chamber door again and strolled out into the Great Hall. Mahan was there, gazing out the door into the summer morning.

“The paperwork,” she said wearily to Mahan as, hearing her, he came into the Hall again. “It never seems to be done. Here’s a message I forgot to send yesterday.” She dropped it on the hall table—a plain little roll of paperboard with her reply to the received message inside, and the anonymous preprinted Imperial franking seal for that weight of container capping one end. “It’s for a city address.”

“Shall I call a courier,
hru’hfe?”

“Elements, no, the day-post is more than sufficient. Just dump it in the post-tube down in the market when you go to do the morning errands. You
are
marketing this morning?”

“Third-day is the best day for vegetables,” Mahan said, in a tone of slight reproach, as if Arrhae had no business forgetting such things just because she wasn’t acting as household manager anymore.

“Of course it is. I didn’t know if you were going yourself, though, or sending someone.”

“I’m going,
hru’hfe.
Teivet can’t tell if a fruit’s ripe or sour, no matter how she squeezes.”

Arrhae smiled slightly and went back to her room, ostensibly to relax. But there would be no relaxation for her until Mahan came back from market and reported that message sent. So she waited, and an hour passed, and two. Again and again Arrhae resisted the urge to reread the horrible message
she had passed on to the contact given her, in a time that now seemed a lifetime ago, as a use-once-and-never-again option. She went about the house, greeting the staff, checking on how things had been going during her absence, keeping herself by force from reacting to the terrible thing she had learned. It was hard.

Mahan came back from his marketing, but it would be a while yet before Arrhae could relax. Morning had shaded into noon before, without warning, the commlink in the Great Hall shrieked.

It shrieked just once. Mahan was starting toward it to answer it, but when it didn’t ring again, he turned away muttering. Arrhae, at the door of her chamber, turned away and let out the breath she felt as if she had been holding all morning. The city’s tube-post was quick; the ancient pneumatic system had been augmented with local transporter service so that even out-of-the-way branch offices received many deliveries a day. Someone had stopped in to one of those branch offices and collected her message—and the commlink’s single shriek, followed by the breaking of the connection initiated at some public link terminal, was Arrhae’s confirmation that the message had been received and read, and would be passed to where it would do the most good.

But quickly,
Arrhae thought.
Quickly!

Then she sighed, for there simply was nothing more she could do. Earth’s safety was out of her hands now, had passed to others.
And if I’m eventually to be of use for anything further, I should get something to eat.
Arrhae headed for the kitchen.

The door signal sounded again. Mahan opened the door, and there outside it, on the near flat, stood what Arrhae had been expecting earlier: the dark flitter with the arms of the Praetorate on its side. Earlier it would have been an innocent thing. But in the past few hours, everything had changed. Now the sight of it terrified her.

Standing outside the open door in the hot brilliance of midday, the pilot saw Arrhae and bowed to her; Arrhae much hoped that, through the cool dimness of the Great Hall, he couldn’t see how pale she was. “Noble
deihu,
if you will accompany me.”

Recent habit rose up and overcame fear for the moment. “I am not quite ready,” Arrhae said. “Ten minutes, if you please.”

The pilot bowed again. Arrhae let Mahan close the door on him; then he turned to her and gave her an approving and complicit look. “Do him no harm to prop up the wall for a little while,” Mahan said, “whether he needs to or not.”

“You’re quite right,” Arrhae said, and went back to her room. Into the ’fresher she went, and shut the door, and sat there on the convenience for some moments, with her eyes closed, just breathing.
Betrayal,
her fears shouted at her,
despair, death! The timing’s too coincidental! What if they’ve already caught your one-time contact? What if—