Historian’s Note
Most of this story unfolds during the final days of the year 2379 (Old Calendar), shortly after the events of Star Trek Nemesisand the novel Death in Winter.
All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803–1882)
In politics, merit is rewarded by the possessor being raised, like a target, to a position to be fired at.
—CHRISTIAN NEVELL BOVEE (1820–1904)
We are going to have peace even if we have to fight for it.
—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER (1890–1969)
Chapter One
ROMULUS, STARDATE 56828.8
“This must be your first visit to Ki Baratan,” said the woman who stood behind the operative.
So much for hiding in plain sight,the operative thought, quietly abandoning his hope that she would pay him as little heed as had the throngs of civilians and military officers he’d already passed along the city’s central eyhon.He turned and regarded her, averting his gaze momentarily from the graceful, blood-green dome of the Romulan Senate building. The ancient structure gleamed behind him in the morning sun, reflecting an aquamarine glint from the placid Apnex Sea that lay just beyond it.
“As a matter of fact, this ismy first visit,” the operative said. He smiled broadly, confident that the woman wouldn’t sense how awkward this particular mannerism felt to him. “Before today, I had seen the greatness of Dartha only in my grandfather’s holos.”
As she studied him, he noted that she was old and gray. Her clothing was drab and shapeless, her lined countenance stern, evidently forged by upwards of two centuries of hard life circumstances. He watched impassively as she ran her narrowed, suspicious gaze over his somewhat threadbare traveling cassock.
“Dartha?” the woman said, still scrutinizing him. “Nobody has referred to the Empire’s capital by thatname since Neral came to power.”
The operative silently cursed himself even as he concealed his frustration beneath a carefully cultivated mask of impassivity. Though his lapse was an understandable one—roughly akin, he thought, to confusing Earth’s nineteenth-century Constantinople with twentieth-century Istanbul—he upbraided himself for it nonetheless.
“Forgive me, ’lai,”he said, using the traditional rustic form of address intended to show respect to an elder female. “I arrived just today, from Leinarrh. In the Rarathik District.”
An indulgent, understanding smile tugged at her lips. “Just what I thought. I took you for a hveinnright away. A farmer who’s never left the waithbefore.”
The operative forced his own smile to broaden, reassured that she found his rural Rarathik dialect convincing. He maintained his caution, however; like him, this apparently harmless old woman might not be at all what she appeared to be. “At your service, ’lai.You may call me Rukath.”
She nodded significantly yet discreetly toward the dome—and the disruptor-carrying guards that walked among the green, ruatinite-inlaid minarets that surrounded it. “Then allow me to give you some friendly advice, Rukath of Leinarrh. Continue gawking so about the Hall of State, and I might have to call you ‘dead.’ Or perhaps worse.”
The operative allowed his smile to collapse, which actually came as a relief. He feigned innocent fear, per his extensive intelligence and tactical training. “Do you really think those uhlans over there would actually shootme? Just for looking?”
“Just pray that the cold fingers of Erebus find you too unimportant to snatch away into the underworld,” she said with a pitying shake of the head. “Daold klhu.”
Tourists,the operative silently translated the unfamiliar Romulan term as the old woman turned and walked away. “Jolan’tru, ’lai,”he said to her retreating back.
He turned back toward the Senate Dome and watched as the guards made their rounds. He counted six at the moment, marching in pairs, their arrogant, disciplined gazes focused straight ahead. The old woman’s warning notwithstanding, he might as well have been invisible to them.
But it’s best not to become complacent,he thought, checking the chrono built into the disguised subspace pulse transmitter he wore on his wrist. Time was growing short. Since his surreptitious arrival on Romulus the previous day, he had taken in sights very few of his people had ever seen.
He’d just paid what might well turn out to be a once-in-a-lifetime visit to the Romulan capital of Ki Baratan. Now the time had come to venture beneath it.
The operative deliberately set aside unpleasant thoughts of the underworld of ancient Romulan mythology. Those old stories hadn’t sufficiently described the noisome smells that were wafting up around him from the figurative—and literal—bowels of Ki Baratan. Erebus, indeed.
Guided through the stygian gloom by his wrist light, the operative was relieved to note that the venerable maze of aekhhwi’rhoi—the stone-lined sewer tunnels that ran below Ki Baratan—corresponded precisely to the maps the defector M’ret had provided to Starfleet Intelligence. Carefully stepping over and past countless scuttling, multilegged, sewer-dwelling nhaidh,he made his way to the appointed place. Once there, he pulled hard at a rust-covered, meter-wide wheel, laboriously opening up a narrow access hatchway that looked to be older than Surak and T’Karik combined. The corroded steel aperture groaned in protest, moving only fractionally as the muscles in his back strained. After perhaps a minute of hard coaxing, the wheel gave way and the hatch opened with a clang that reverberated loudly throughout the catacombs.
Releasing the wheel, he pulled a small disruptor pistol from beneath his cassock, then squeezed through the narrow opening without making any further pretense of stealth; by now whoever else might be down here, whether friend or foe, was surely aware of his presence.
He passed into the darkened chamber beyond the hatch, where air that reeked of stagnation, moldy old bones, and damp earth assailed his nostrils. Stepping forward, he heard a quiet yet stern male voice.