Star Trek: The Empty Chair (54 page)

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 what 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.”

Jim nodded.

“It will not last forever,” Ael said. “Nothing does. But after such a withdrawal, or absence, when we appear again, possibly you should not be surprised if we do not look, or act, as we do now. There is always the possibility—”

“That something will go wrong?”

“That something will go as the Elements please,” Ael said, “and not as we plan. They will have Their way. Perhaps our plans will coincide with Theirs. If not—” She shrugged, and turned again, heading for the door, and the Imperial escort waiting outside.

“But who knows?” Ael said, as the door opened, and she stepped through it. “In the name of peace, just to reassure other species, you understand, who can say? We might even start calling ourselves ‘Romulans.’”

The sequelae of the Romulan Civil War (as it eventually became known in the Federation) naturally lasted for many months. The war’s repercussions traveled as if on slow-moving wavefronts all across and through that part of the galaxy; political and trade alliances among worlds shifted to accommodate it, and here and there, in the spaces on either side of the Neutral Zone, planetary governments fell or were radically changed. Inevitably, on both sides of the Zone, historians started their work, sifting through all the available data to support their own theories of what had been going on, and why, and how. A few of them actually got close to the truth.

As is so often the case, those closest to it had least to say in public on the subject. In some cases this was because they were bound by the exigencies of circumstance, or service-based oaths of confidentiality. In others because the events they had striven to bring about were best served by their silence. In a few cases, it was a combination of the first two, as well as just being too damn busy.

James Kirk would have fallen into the last category. What with one thing and another, it was almost two months before he and
Enterprise
made their way back into Earth orbit for a long-scheduled, much-needed dry-dock period. Jim’s time off, as was so often the case, was much delayed by the business of getting his ship and people settled in. He had two appointments that were the first things he’d wanted to handle
on returning, which turned out—after a most exhaustive debriefing at Starfleet Command—to be the last.

The first of these was in an office in Paris, as evening fell, and outside the office window the lights began to race up and down the Eiffel Tower. Jim stood there in his dress uniform, chafing in it somewhat as always, and received from the President the Federation “Medal of Peace” decorations for Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and himself—the decorations that none of them would ever be able to wear in public, because no part of the reason they’d been awarded could ever be revealed.

And having done so, Jim was able to sit down with the President and give him a piece of his mind. It took quite a while, and the President sat there and took it like the seasoned campaigner he was, watching Jim thoughtfully over one of the pair of glasses of brandy he’d poured. At the end of it, when Jim had run down—it took him nearly an hour—the President refilled Jim’s glass.

“Every word you’ve said is true,” the President said. “No one should ever have to be in the kind of position in which I put you. But I won’t say I’m sorry, because I saw what needed to be done, and you were the only man to make it happen. I have only one question to ask you. Will it have been worth it?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Jim said. “But in the long run, I think so.”

The President nodded. “Thank you,” he said, and raised his glass.

Jim hesitated, then lifted his glass and touched it to the President’s.

They stayed there talking until quite late—one of those long discussions that reminded Jim, as he left, that the loneliness of command comes in many different forms and qualities. But the late night led in turn to a late morning, so that he was delayed in checking out of his Paris hotel, missed his originally scheduled beam-up time, and had to call
Enterprise
for another. As a result, it was half-past predawn twilight before he materialized on a stony hillside in the middle of what had once been the Sespe Condor Preserve in the wilds of central California.

The gully wound down and away through the hilly ground as it had when he was last here—a lifetime ago, it seemed. Everything was utterly still except for the thin trickling sound of the little creek that ran down through the gully, off to his right. A thick mist lay in the gully, hiding the water from sight; the top layer of the mist shifted slightly in the light of a setting moon just barely past its full.

Carefully—for the footing was uncertain in this twilit mist—Jim started to walk up the length of the gully, paralleling the creek as he headed for its source. Sometimes the mist hid the smaller watercourses that fed into this one, little stony runoffs that were live only in the rainy season, so that he stepped down onto the tumbled stones about twice as far as he thought he was going to have to; once he almost twisted his ankle in one of these. But he just smiled to himself in the predawn light, and kept on going.