Star Trek: The Empty Chair (34 page)

The young man looked at her in a way that suggested he agreed, though it was not his position to be saying so. He opened the door to tr’Anierh’s study; she stepped inside. “If you’ll wait here for a few moments, noble
deihu,”
he said, “the Praetor will be with you shortly. He is finishing his noon meal, and I dislike interrupting him. He has little enough leisure in these days as it is.” He gestured over to a pair of easy chairs on the side of the room; a tray and jug and a pair of cups, and several small plates of dainties, sat on a table between them. “If you’ll make yourself comfortable there and await the Praetor, he’ll be with you shortly.”

Arrhae smiled and bowed to him, just a shade more deeply than she needed to. Tr’Fvennih smiled back at her, and closed the door.

She went to sit down in one of those chairs, taking the one nearer the window; she very much wanted to see the light on tr’Anierh’s face as she said what she had come to say. Arrhae reached out for the jug, poured herself a very small tot of ale, and tossed it directly off. She was not above using its paired stimulant and depressant qualities to her own advantage at the moment. Then she waited.

While in the midst of pouring a little more into the glass, the door opened again, and tr’Anierh came in. Arrhae made as if to rise and bow; he held a hand to stop her.

She smiled at him and went on pouring, this time pouring into his cup as well. Tr’Anierh settled himself in the chair opposite her, and once again empty pleasantries about the weather were spoken. But after a few moments, tr’Anierh
reached out to that cup of ale and said, “Noble
deihu,
while I recall asking you for information, I did not think it would be ready for my attention so soon. Of your courtesy, tell me what you have for me. The rest of the day is going to be fairly busy, and I have not too much time to spare right now.”

Arrhae bowed her head to him a little. “Noble patron, I have a small item of news. My sorrow is that I did not come to you with it more quickly. I was unsure how to couch it.” She shook her head. “But the brunt of it is: you’re betrayed. Those with most to gain by it have spoken a word in the ears of those in whose minds that word will eventually be the most damaging—and so I came to warn you, and to see how I might help you in this.”

Tr’Anierh’s eyes widened a little. He raised his eyebrows, and at her earnest look, just shook his head a little and slightly smiled. “Arrhae, I grant you have been through much in recent days. But for you, this turn of phrase seems somewhat…theatrical?” He said it kindly enough.

“So it might,” Arrhae said. “As you say, your day is busy. I will be brief. Indeed, for those who are doubtless watching, brevity is probably best. It will suggest that nothing in particular has gone wrong.” She looked up at him from under her brows. “Yesterday, the commlink rang in my house.”

Tr’Anierh held quite still.

“The one who rang it,” Arrhae said, “is now dead. And those who caused his death are pleased that it should be so. As it happens, his death has not served their purpose. The word that was meant to come to me has done so regardless. And now I bring it to you. If I do so somewhat hastily, it is because I am not sure how much longer they will feel they can afford to leave me alive.”

Tr’Anierh still had not moved, not a millimeter more than he needed to breathe. “The import of that call,” Arrhae said, “was that information has been planted in the most damaging possible place concerning you and your connection to a great
blow that is about to be struck against our enemies.” Arrhae got up, casually enough, and went over to that beautiful table—the one that had the long, long stanza of the “Song of the Sun” inlaid with platinum wire just under its glossy top. Idly she ran her hand along one side of the table, along the first verse of the stanza; then she glanced up, expecting him to take the meaning of the glance. “Agents on the far side of the Outmarches have been primed with ‘proof’ of your instigation of the dispatch of the ‘package’ that has been quietly making its way into Federation space. When it does its intended job,” and she smiled slightly and kept on walking around the table, trailing her hand along the long, silvery verse, “they intend for those long planted in Starfleet Command’s extrasolar branches and in the higher structures of the older planetary governments to bring
your
name forward as the one to blame. You are the one at whose doorstep this ‘great crime’ will be laid. We—” Her eyes flicked toward the chair in which another Praetor had recently sat. “—will be seen to be merely innocent pawns of your plan—victims, as uninvolved as anyone on the Earth was.”

Arrhae looked up at tr’Anierh from the far end of the table, its shining expanse stretching between them. In the light from the window, his face looked suddenly rather pale. “The rest of the Federation,” Arrhae said, “will come for you, and for the Hearthworlds. They will come to take such a vengeance on these two planets as no one can imagine. The Empire will be shattered, reduced to nothing. Eventually, of course, it will be rehabilitated. And in this your allies, or should I say your opponents, intend to climb up to their new places on
your
scourged back. They have their own plans—of a reconstituted Empire, one more amenable to their bidding—an aggregate of the most cooperative surviving colony worlds. They have been manipulating the intelligence that reaches you to make it seem a certainty that the Federation would come undone with Earth gone and Earth’s humanity
destroyed.” Arrhae shook her head. “But the more accurate intelligence has been kept from you, to serve their purpose. And when the infuriated allies of our destroyed enemy arrive, it is you who, in the sudden capitulation following a few brief battles, will be handed over to them to stand trial for the ultimate ‘crime against humanity’—the extinguishing of the Homeworld of a whole species. Those opponents of yours will take up their positions as inheritors of the new Empire, which will rise from the ashes of the old. And you—” Arrhae came around to the bottom of the table again. “Of you, alive in some prison for your life’s length, or executed for your crimes, the new masters of a new Empire will count themselves well rid.”

Arrhae stood by the end of the table and held quite still, watching the Praetor.

“Why, Arrhae,” he said at last, “your imagination does you credit.” But he could not quite hide a tremor in his voice.

“Would that it were only so fertile as you think it,” Arrhae said. “I would have been better able to conceive of a way out of the situation in which you and I find ourselves today. You, noble patron, have been kind to me. I felt it only right to warn you. Soon, now, those others who until now have commanded your trust will begin coming to you with all manner of tales about how my commlink rang, about what that call really meant. They count on it being as it has so often been among our people before: the best way to discredit the message is to discredit the messenger. The Intelligence people—” She looked at him narrowly. “They do not love you, noble patron. Far less do they love me. To them, I’m a jumped-up housekeeper.” And then she smiled. “But how does the saying go? ‘It’s a poor
hru’hfe
who doesn’t know what’s in the cupboards.’”

She came away from the table, and sat down once again in the easy chair, on the edge of it, her hands folded in her lap. She leaned toward tr’Anierh, intense. “It will be easy,
noble patron, for them to cast me to you as a traitor. I swear to you, I am none such. If they are allowed, those others will see to it, shortly, that I am dead—as dead as that poor man who rang one ring on my commlink, trying to save your life, and mine, and the lives of many hundreds of thousands of people in this world who do not deserve to have the Empire pulled down around their ears for the sake of someone else’s ambition. Yet this will happen…unless you stop them.”

“It is all very well—” tr’Anierh began, and then stopped himself. He raised his eyes to Arrhae. “How do you come by this data, noble
deihu?”

She raised her eyebrows. “You put me in the way of it yourself, noble patron. You sent me to
Gorget,
and to
Mascrar,
where many voices spoke, sometimes not being as careful as they might have about who heard them. Especially when they thought that the one who heard them was more interested in polishing the furniture.” She gave him a wicked look, finally letting a little amusement show through. “As a result, I was able to make connections of which they knew nothing. Many others there, as you intended, undervalued me, the Intelligence operatives perhaps most of all. That, too, was as you desired it, was it not? That I should be seen to be like the bright little insect that sits on the warm wall, fanning its wings in the sunshine, without enough brain in its head to carry a thought in. People were to see me as a gesture of your goodwill, a political gesture perhaps, something guaranteed to win you support among the common throng of people on ch’Rihan. And so it has, indeed. But, as you also intended, your action has provided you with information you would not otherwise have had. Such as this.”

Arrhae held her peace and watched him. Tr’Anierh’s eyes were fixed on something she could not see. Then, finally, he looked up at her again. “You’re right,” he said. “I have chosen a sharper weapon than I knew.”

“I hope that may be so,” Arrhae said. “But now they desire
to turn that weapon in your hand. Oh, doubtless that is the choice I shall be offered, at least, if they’re merciful. To turn traitor, join myself to their cause as the price of my life. If they are not merciful,” she shook her head, “I will be dead within a week. But at least I have satisfied
mnhei’sahe
by bringing you the information you need to save yourself from their plans. Possibly, even to save many more of us. What happens now, depends on you.”

He was looking at the table now. “If all this is true—”

“You will have little time to find proof,” Arrhae said. “Even to do so will start turning your tiles up on the table, when you least need them seen. But this I would say: now, noble sir, we must stand together. There is no other hope for us. If they split us apart one from the other, we’re both done. Together…together we stand some chance. And you,” Arrhae said, leaning ever so slightly closer to him, “you have a better chance than they think to turn their plans tails-up in the air.”

He looked at her.
Now,
Arrhae thought,
everything, everything rides on this. This one last throw.
“There is another stroke coming, as you know. Not that great one, but the impending action that is meant to stave off the threat from the colonies and the one who is bringing the Federation against you. The others have tried to keep you from taking any active part in what’s about to happen there.”

Tr’Anierh sat there quietly for just a moment more. “Augo.” His face changed.

“Now there lies an opening before you,” Arrhae said. “A way both to put aside the stroke they’re aiming at you, and to take matters—perhaps unexpectedly—into your own hands. By this action, and the document trail you may now begin to preserve—though carefully, away from all prying eyes who might see it too soon—you will be able to prove that you were the one who saw the wave of the future rising, and prepared for it. You saw the threat coming from the Federation,
and counseled restraint, a careful and conservative response. Negotiation, compromise. But others would not listen; others acted to destroy their enemies utterly. And when you discovered what terrible thing those others were doing in your name, you moved to stop it.” She gave him a sly look. “In the most straightforward way, since many of the agents intended to carry word of your ‘guilt’ to the Federation are part of the complement that is being sent to Augo. It is, after all, on their way.”

Tr’Anierh sat still and quiet for a while more. Arrhae could practically hear plot jostling against plot in his mind, chance against chance, gamble against gamble.
But from here on in,
she thought,
it’s all gambling anyway. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool. Too many forces are moving, in too many directions, for chance not to take its part. The least I can do is help it along.

For a long time, tr’Anierh sat there, doing the mathematics of paranoia and political calculation in his head. He was astute in that art. Arrhae did not expect him to take long about it. And when at last he looked up at her, his mind was made up, though very few other people could have seen it.

“It has been good having this chat with you, noble
deihu,”
he said. “Getting a fresh perspective on old problems. In days to come, we’ll meet again. We’ll speak more of this in good time, insofar as it’s safe to speak of it at all.” He leaned back in the chair, turning around and around the cup of ale she had poured for him, and of which he had drunk very little. He glanced up at her again. “You will know—of
course
you will know—how close you have been to death, these last few minutes.”

“Noble patron,” Arrhae said, rising and gracefully bowing to him, “that old companion rides with us everywhere we go, closer than the vein in the neck or the heart in the side—so the poet says. The whole point of this exercise is, for a short time at least, to draw a little further away from it, for both
ourselves and our people. Meanwhile, I hope I have the noble Praetor’s leave to depart. His day is almost certainly going to be busier than mine.”

Tr’Anierh rose, and then bowed to Arrhae. It was a gesture that both shocked her and heartened her; it was one she had never hoped to see. “I would say that would be true,” he said. “If either of us survive the night, I will see you perhaps tomorrow.”

He opened the study door for her. Arrhae went out, moving easily, taking the greatest care to keep any of the thoughts in her mind from showing in her body. But there were no guns waiting for her in the hallway, no armed security staff waiting on the doorstep. Only the air car in which she had come sat quietly off to one side, its pilot leaning against it in the sunshine, trying to soak up some of the good weather through his uniform.

Arrhae walked up to the car, unable quite to get rid of the feeling of how lightly she was walking on the earth. She had more or less said good-bye to it when she arrived only—she glanced at her chrono.
Only half an hour ago!
So much could happen in a short time, when the stars were in the right configurations, and one’s mind was focused.