Текст книги "Catalyst of Sorrows "

Автор книги: Margaret Bonanno

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

Some commanders, it was said, could feel the weapons even before they fired, the way a cat senses a thunderclap or a bird an earthquake long before a human does. After more than a century in space, Tal could feel the weapons in his bones. Even as Koval said, “Weapons, target and fire” he was out of his chair shouting “Belay that!”

But if Helm was nervous, Weapons was more so, and he’d triggered one phaser blast, however badly aimed, before he could stop himself. But Tal’s wrath was not for him. He fixed his glare on Koval.

“Weapons, stand down!” Tal addressed his crew, though his eyes had locked with Koval’s and he did not break his gaze. “You obey no order but mine. If Colonel Koval has a problem with that, he will have to speak to me. Now, you,” he said to Koval. “What, by the Elements, do you think you’re doing?”

“What am Idoing?” Koval asked quietly. “Destroying a ship that should not be here in the first place.”

“Admiral?” Comm said, opening the channel so he could hear the voice from the merchanter demanding to know why they were being fired on. Tal listened, still glaring at Koval.

“That’s one of our own aboard. If you kill him without knowing who or why—”

“A Romulan? On that rattletrap?” Koval waved the idea away. “Weapons, overtake and fire.”

The weapons officer placed his hands on his knees, turning to look at Tal as if to say I can be killed for less.

Tal stalked over to stand all but nose to nose with Koval; they were about the same height, but Koval’s very posture spoke of inbreeding, decadence, where Tal was disciplined to the bone.

Technically Tal Shiar of Koval’s rank could commandeer the vessel and remove even an admiral from the bridge, but he’d find precious little assistance from Tal’s handpicked crew if he did. Concomitantly, Tal could see to it that Koval fell down a turboshaft or did something else equally stupid that might be expected of someone not used to a warbird’s hidden dangers, but he who had thus far had more lives than a h’vartmight this time not survive. Stalemate.

“This is my ship,” Tal told Koval quietly, biting each word off distinctly. “We don’t fire unless I know why.”

Koval held Tal’s gaze, though the blue eyes were fierce, but his words were for the weapons officer. “Weapons, I told you to fire,” he said, his words as distinct as Tal’s.

“Admiral?” Helm sounded almost apologetic. “Unidentified vessel approaching at 107 mark 4. Configuration…Federation starship.”

Chapter 18

Now this was a target Admiral Tal would have no problem firing on if need be. Shrugging Koval off, he locked into the command chair.

“Engage cloak and come about. Bring us in line with her and maintain.” He looked at Koval “Did you know about this?”

“No,” Koval said. “But it makes matters more interesting, doesn’t it?”

It seems self-evident to describe space as three-dimensional, but it’s something to keep in mind when talking about tactics. During the Romulan War, analogies to submarine warfare were often drawn, but they could help only so much. Yes, two submarines can confront each other up-to-down as well as sideways-to-sideways, but both would still be dependent upon the planet’s gravity for maneuverability, and could never have approached each other upside down.

But there is no “up” in space.

Cultural historians often found it interesting to study old twenty-first-century space operas and note that two ships or even two fleets facing off for battle inevitably arrived at the point of confrontation right side up. No one ever dropped out of warp upside down or perpendicular relative to the observer.

In this particular instance, those on the warbird saw Okinawaemerge from the void at a 45-degree angle. If the warbird hadn’t been cloaked, she would have seemed from the point of view of Okinawato be listing acutely to starboard. From Sisko’s perspective on Albatross,they were both askew, but his mind adjusted for it even as the ships themselves corrected for the discrepancy. What worried Sisko more was that Albatrosshad ended up smack in the path of both of them.

“An interesting tactical dilemma,” Tuvok observed. “On the one hand, the warbird could simultaneously incinerate us and give Okinawaa glancing blow. But in doing so, she would have to decloak, and leave herself open to return fire from Okinawa.If we attempt to escape the line of fire, we risk giving the Romulans a clear shot at Okinawa;however—”

“Save it for the debriefing,” Sisko said tightly, racking his brain for a tactical maneuver that would solve this. “I’m getting us out of here, and then I’m going aft to see where that alarm is coming from.”

He threw the ship into a dive that structurally she shouldn’t have been able to manage, and the clumsy bird juddered and groaned and squawked in protest, but she somehow managed it.

“What do they think they’re doing?” Captain Leyton wondered. He’d been just about to hail Albatrosswhen she suddenly began to plummet like her namesake after a fish. A glance at the energy distortion just behind where Albatrosshad been gave him his answer. “Oh, I see.”

He began issuing orders calmly. “Yellow alert. Send standard challenge on all frequencies. Raise shields. Weapons at ready; stand by. And let me know if Albatrossslows down long enough to engage a tractor beam.”

“I can give you something for space sickness,” Selar suggested, seeing all the color drain from Zetha’s face as Sisko pulled the ship out of the dive, under Okinawa’s belly and, in a roller coaster ride of evasive maneuvers, out of the line of fire.

Zetha shook her head. “I’m fine. Tell me again about the test results. Is it really true?”

“Affirmative,” Selar said. Battened down or not, she had completed an analysis of hilopon,and was now downloading all the data she had gathered on this mission into her tricorder, in the event they needed to abandon ship. “We have a potential cure, and perhaps the rudiments of a vaccine as well.”

Despite her terror, Zetha managed a weak smile. “But if we die here, without letting the admiral and Dr. Crusher know…”

Selar had no answer. They had the Romulan datachips, and she would continue to copy her research in hopes of transferring both to Okinawa.Worry was illogical.

Too many Romulan commanders are trained only to fight, not to negotiate. Admiral Tal was not one of them. Looking daggers at Koval, he instructed his comm officer to answer Okinawa’s challenge at once.

“I can’t help thinking that that starship is here because of you,” he remarked to Koval as Comm fiddled with codes and frequencies, “I don’t know what you did on Renaga, but I do know where you went. It seems to me that ever since we crossed into the Outmarches, my crew and I have risked our lives for the privilege of becoming an interplanetary incident at the behest of the Tal Shiar. And I find that most irritating.”

“Admiral…” from Comm; he raised a hand that indicated: Wait!

“You may have power enough to commandeer my ship, but once on my ship, you are answerable to me,” Tal continued, his eyes boring into Koval. “I have survived far greater threats than you. If you speak, if you so much as inhale deeply while I am speaking to their captain, I will give them the coordinates you beamed to. I wonder what they’d find there?”

Koval said nothing. He simply met Tal’s gaze squarely. It was so seldom anyone challenged him that he found it refreshing. For a moment a pair of defiant green eyes flashed across his memory and he frowned slightly. Who might that have been? He had touched so many lives, watched so many die, so many beg for mercy, so many realize at the last moment how completely he had invaded and controlled their lives without their ever realizing it, that sometimes it was hard to remember them all. Ah, well. If the admiral wanted to run this part of the show, let him. He had other means at his disposal.

Tal nodded to Comm to open the channel.

“Commander Federation vessel,” he said to the bearded human materializing on the forward screen, “challenge acknowledged. But you are as much in the wrong place as we. I await your explanation.”

Ultimately the standoff took on the aspect of a chess game. Admiral Tal dropped the warbird’s cloak (necessary after this much time, if he intended to have full power for weapons) but not her shields; Captain Leyton stood fast. For the next several minutes the two commanders traded accusations of trespass into the Zone, treaty violation, and whether there were Romulans with transmitters on Renaga. Tal made note of the frail-looking humanoid standing behind the bearded captain’s shoulder occasionally whispering something into his ear. Each time he did so, the human would frown and go on speaking.

And where was Albatrossduring all of this? She had come to station-keeping just within transporter range of Okinawa,her situation precarious in all senses. She couldn’t outrun a warbird, and even if she tried, it would only set the warbird in pursuit and Okinawaafter her, and what a mess that would be. She couldn’t hail out and Okinawacouldn’t hail her without the Romulans hearing and knowing for a certainty that she was allied with Okinawa.

But Tuvok could monitor whatever conversations went on between the two larger ships, and he was doing that now.

Sisko, meanwhile, was getting itchy. Albatrosscouldn’t budge until the two larger ships had finished their business, and whatever had set off the alarm was not reading on his instrument panel; he’d have to check it out onsite.

“I’ll be in the engine room,” he announced, never more glad to get out of the center seat, and headed aft.

“I thought so!” he said ruefully, seeing the readout from the port nacelle. The phaser blast had winged her, and all those subsequent fancy maneuvers had only made the damage worse. Hairline fractures spidered out from a ruptured conduit that leaked coolant ominously. Left alone, it would eventually go critical. Sisko was confident he could patch her up well enough to get her home, but first he’d have to let her cool down.

“Steady as she goes, old girl!” Sisko comforted her, shutting down the portside matter/antimatter pod and watching the temperature monitor begin to drop back within normal parameters. An hour or so from now, he could begin to make repairs. If they were still here an hour from now.

He took his time walking back to the controls, stopped to look at the magnificent ruse of the storage containers lined up monolithically along the narrow passageway. The holo transmitter was hidden away in one of them. Only the main lab module was open and active, and Selar and Zetha were at work there, their heads together, deep in concentration on…something.

Sisko almost approached them; he wanted to ask Selar about the results of the blood tests. But he wasn’t sure he could face Zetha right now. Besides, he’d felt a lot better since they’d returned to the ship; the mysterious cough was gone. If he did have Catalyst, he didn’t want to know until he absolutely had to.

“Tell me that freighter isn’t yours, Captain Leyton, and you wouldn’t mind my destroying it,” Tal challenged. Dax took it as a hopeful sign that the Romulan was opting to talk.

“I could never sanction the destruction of a civilian vessel….” Leyton began, but Dax decided it was time to intervene.

“May I?” Dax interjected and, without waiting for an answer, somehow deftly diverted attention to himself. “Admiral Tal, I am Ambassador Curzon Dax. The freighter isours,” he said, eyes on the forward screen, grateful he couldn’t see the look on Leyton’s face. “Sent as a scout to investigate reports of Romulan transmitters on Renaga, just as your government sent a similar vessel to Imago IX some months ago to see if we had established a footprint there. Your scout found nothing, ours has found something.”

He let that sink in for a fraction of a second.

“Now, then, we both know there’s something on Renaga we are both interested in, the very reason you sent infiltrators, and that something is hilopon…”

Tal seemed to hesitate. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, of course.”

“Let’s not waste time then, Admiral. The Empire wants hilopon;the Federation wants hilopon.There are currently no official communications between our governments, but you and I can initiate contact with the Renagans and work out a solution that will enable us both to obtain what we want without involving our respective bureaucracies.”

Tal’s eyes narrowed. Finally, he said, “Agreed.”

“Excellent!” Dax smiled benevolently. “Then we can beam down together. But first, a tradeoff. If we say we never detected your transmitters, you overlook our little freighter.”

“I need to consult with one of my…aides…” Tal said, his eyes sliding to something or someone off screen.

“Of course,” Dax said, and both sides muted comm while they consulted.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Sisko said, returning to the conn in time to hear some of this exchange. “The Old Man comes through again. We may get out of this alive after all.”

“Hilopon?”Tal demanded of Koval.

“An absolutely essential medicinal,” Koval assured him. “You’ve heard rumors of a resurgence of the Gnawing on some of the colony worlds?”

Tal wondered how much Koval knew he knew. “Perhaps.”

“Our scientists have reason to believe hiloponcould be the cure,” Koval said evenly. He watched a momentary doubt cross Tal’s hawklike face. “Or did you really think we came all this way because of a couple of transmitters? Be careful what you do here, Admiral. Diplomacy is not for amateurs.”

A lesser man would have lost his temper. Tal almost did. But unless he could make the Tal Shiar operative’s death look like an accident, his crew would be forfeit. The thought stayed him. It was the only thing that could.

On Okinawa,Captain Leyton was scowling at Curzon.

“What in blazes is hiloponand why do we want it?”

“Bacteria. Occurs naturally in the soil here. May have some use as a topical medication,” Curzon said, his back to the screen so he couldn’t be lip-read. “We want it because the Romulans want it. It’s called diplomacy.”

Admiral Tal had made up his mind.

“There will be no mention of an alien freighter in my logs, Curzon Dax. And if I make no mention of a freighter, neither will any member of my crew,” he said for Koval’s benefit. “I’m sure you’ll agree that what you thought were Romulan transmissions were really only artifacts. Natural occurrences prevalent in this region of space.”

“Agreed!” Curzon smiled. “Isn’t it fortuitous that we both arrived here on the wings of rumor? Shall we discuss when and how we shall make contact with the Renagans?”

Albatrosswas too bulky to fit through the shuttlebay doors, so Okinawatook her in tow.

“Tell your crew to gather their personal belongings and prepare to beam aboard, Ben,” Leyton told him. “That damaged engine isn’t going to hold for long.”

“But, sir, she’s not—” Sisko started to say, before he realized that of course the Romulans would be listening in. “I mean, yessir, we’re on our way.”

It only now occurred to him that there was no way they could bring the ship home with them. Okinawacould hardly tow her all the way home, and even under full power, it would take her far too long to limp out of the Zone in her present condition, unarmed, and with the Romulans now alerted to her presence. The contingency plans they’d had in place to protect Heisenberg’s little modifications from prying eyes would have to be enacted, and Sisko would have to be the one to enact them.

“Dr. Heisenberg’s going to be heartbroken,” Sisko said disconsolately, closing the channel.

“Are you in need of assistance?” Tuvok asked. His carry-bag slung over one shoulder, the orchid balanced precariously atop the case of datachips, he was prepared to leave without so much as a glance backward.

“Negative,” Sisko said as Selar and Zetha also arrived, ready for transport. “You all go on ahead. I need to initiate an antimatter breach. And I’d like a minute alone to tell the old girl goodbye.”

He watched first Selar and Zetha, then Tuvok shimmer away in the transporter beam, then went aft to work his magic. When the ship blew, it had to look from the Romulan point of view as if it were an accident. He had no doubt they realized they’d damaged the port nacelle. All he had to do was make them think the damage was enough to cause the antimatter pods to lose their magnetic containment, causing the antimatter to release, interact with the normal matter, and annihilate the vessel structure.

Sisko implemented the sequence just as he’d learned it in reverse at the Academy. He estimated he had about three minutes to get clear before she blew, and hurried to the sleeping quarters for his kit.

Tuvok had left the Romulan transmitter behind.

They had the datachips as evidence, not to mention Zetha. Sisko had overheard Curzon’s agreement with the Romulans to ignore the two transmitters if she ignored Albatross.There probably wasn’t any reason to bring this transmitter along, but for some reason Sisko couldn’t get his mind off it.

Just then he felt the tractor beam release. Okinawawas about to put some distance between herself and the doomed Albatross,he had less than a minute left, and he’d better get moving.

“Okinawato Albatross,”he heard Leyton saying tightly. “Let’s go, Ben, let’s go!”

Koval watched the starship moving away from the disabled freighter, then watched the freighter implode. Minutes before tactical had informed him that the starship had lowered her shields and made use of her transporter, not once but three times, the third time several minutes after the first two. Koval would study the data later and decide whether he believed the intercepted comm signals, or whether the ship had been destroyed deliberately. Why did he care? he asked himself. Doubtless whoever had beamed onto the starship had taken their evidence with them. Still Koval was not overly concerned. He had enough fallback positions to erase all trace of his involvement in this venture once he returned home. Didn’t he? For possibly the first time in his career, Koval was visited with a little trickle of doubt.

Just his luck that the only ship available to bring him here had been commanded by one of the few officers in the Imperial Fleet who had the intestinal fortitude to defy his order to destroy the freighter and damn the consequences.

What bothered Koval most was how the ungainly little freighter, followed by the starship, had known to come to Renaga. They must have had far more to go on than Cinchona/Thamnos’s sloppy academic paper touting hilopon.Had the idiot’s father blabbed?

That thought led Koval to another uneasy thought: He would have to notify the old man personally that his son was dead and, if necessary, instruct him to remain silent. An unpleasant duty, but one he must perform.

And as he knew his Rigelians, he doubted the lockjawed Papaver had talked. There was something here he wasn’t seeing. What was it?

Leaving the warbird’s bridge, where Tal’s relief, a sardonic old veteran who had lost family to the Tal Shiar, was more than happy to see the back of him, Koval repaired to the safe room hidden in the bowels of every warbird, equipped with everything a Tal Shiar officer might need, whether one was assigned or not, and sealed himself off for the duration. He had much work to do.

“What took you so long, Ben?” Leyton had come down to sickbay personally. “For a minute there, we thought we were going to lose you. No one said you had to go down with the ship.”

“Just saying goodbye,” Sisko said. He nodded toward the transmitter. “And wanted to make sure we brought all the evidence.”

“Not worth risking your life for,” was Leyton’s opinion. “You’re an innocent, Ben. Don’t you know if there isn’t enough evidence, you can always invent some?”

“Sir?” Sisko asked, but Leyton had moved on.

Under orders from Starfleet Command, the away team had been beamed directly into quarantine in sickbay. Selar assured them it would not be for long.

Curzon Dax and Admiral Tal had a less than productive encounter with the Renagan Council of Elders.

“Isn’t this a violation of your Federation’s touted Prime Directive?” Tal remarked once they’d finally beamed down to Renaga and met face to face.

Curzon smiled as they strode together up the broad steps of the Council building. “Not in this instance. The Renagans have had outworld visitors before. Some have actually beamed down in their presence and been ignored. The Renagans simply refuse to believe that anyone lives on the lights in their sky. You’ll see.”

The meeting, if such it could be called, was exactly as Curzon said it would be. The nine doddering old men studied the two visitors, then conferred among themselves before their leader spoke.

“You say you are not of this world. That is not possible. Therefore we know you are lying, and we do not acknowledge you.”

As one, the Elders turned their backs on them.

Tal took a step forward, as if to argue, but a gesture from Curzon stayed him.

“They did actually speak to us,” he whispered. “It’s more than they’ve done for anyone else. It’s a beginning; let it be enough for now. If we try to push it, they’ll interpret it as weakness. There will be other times.”

Tal clenched his teeth in frustration. “Fools!” he growled as he and Curzon walked together down the broad steps of the Council building, completely ignored by the passersby, and returned to where they had beamed down. “To stand there and speak to us, yet tell us we do not exist—! The urge to knock their rotten old heads together…”

“Try negotiating with Klingons sometime,” Curzon muttered. “We shall report back to our respective governments and let them decide what to do.”

He and Tal eyed each other with mutual respect. “Jolan tru,my newfound friend,” Curzon said. “Perhaps someday we’ll meet again.”

“After half a century of silence?” Tal snorted, but then thought about it. He shrugged. “Who knows?”

There is an art to leaving the battleground when no battle has taken place. In a graceful maneuver worthy of a Strauss waltz, warbird and starship pirouetted away from each other under impulse and, their navigators having plotted the quickest route out of the Zone, turned their backs on each other, and catapulted into warp and away.

No way of knowing what happened aboard the warbird. Aboard Okinawa,a medical conference was under way.

“This is the result of introducing a serum derived from the blood of the dead Romulan on Quirinus into a sample of active Catalyst virus,” Selar was saying, her data safe in Okinawa’s databanks and being relayed to Starfleet Medical on Earth. “This, the result of a similar serum derived from blood samples Dr. Crusher took from Zetha before we left Earth, also interacting with live Catalyst virus.”

There was no need to give a play-by-play. Everyone watching, from McCoy to Crusher to Uhura to the away team to Okinawa’s medical staff, who had cleared the team to leave quarantine once they’d seen the test results, could see what was happening. Dr. Selar’s two experimental sera were gobbling up the Catalyst virus faster than it could replicate.

“There’s your vaccine,” Crusher said with a nod toward Zetha. “It’s you. For whatever reason, probably something at the mitochondrial level, the disease didn’t have time to activate in your bloodstream before it mutated. We’ve had the solution right under our noses all along.”

“Not entirely, Dr. Crusher,” Selar said as Zetha wondered where to put herself. “We still have to ascertain why the same gene sequence that renders some individuals immune to Catalyst also mutates from a deadly form to a killed form suitable for vaccine, given enough time.”

“Not something its creators anticipated, I’m sure!” McCoy growled, then reconsidered. “Or maybe they did. Be convenient for some Romulan bioterrorist to have the cure handy once the disease had killed enough people to create panic. I knew Thamnos hadn’t done this on his own!”

“It’s convenient for us, too,” was Uhura’s opinion. “With the help of those datachips, we can track down any additional ‘seeds’ in Federation territory. I’m sure at least some of them would be happy to serve as in situproviders of vaccine.”

Tuvok had in fact already begun tracking. “An interesting addendum to the mystery on Tenjin,” he reported. “Two seeds were in fact deployed to two separate environmental domes. Both eventually met up in a third dome and were killed in a transport accident before they could spread the disease further.”

“And Sliwon—?” Uhura wanted to know.

“It seems our snake-oil salesman was the vector there. A Rigelian by birth, who had traveled extensively in Romulan territory, and claims he has no idea how he became infected.”

“Oh, I’ll just bet!” Uhura said, making a note to have the man extracted from Sliwon. She was going to enjoy interrogating him.

With her away team safe and Okinawaon its way home, the source of the pestilence identified and a cure being implemented, Uhura found herself breathing normally for the first time in days. Had they actually solved this? There were a thousand loose ends to tie up, not least of which was somehow getting word back to Cretak so that she could take steps toward tracking down the seeds inside the Empire and stop the spread of the disease before both governments officially got involved.

And then what? What was she going to tell the C-in-C and what would he do with the information he gave her? Whoever had initiated this on the Romulan side was still at large and could easily do something like this again. But was it worth hurling accusations back and forth and perhaps making the already uneasy detente with the Romulans that much more uneasy? Uhura had no answers.

That’s why you’re a spy and not a diplomat!she told herself, halfway tempted to contact Curzon and ask him what he thought she should do. Should she risk that while Okinawawas still in transit? Perhaps best to wait until her team had returned home. As if she needed an excuse to see Curzon again.

“It’s ironic,” Zetha told Tuvok.

“I beg your pardon?”

Finally tired of roaming the corridors of the starship, marveling at everything, the young Romulan had come to rest in Okinawa’s crew lounge, where a helpful ensign who had a weakness for girls with green eyes had initiated her into the marvels of something called a hot fudge sundae. She was scooping the last of the sticky confection out of the bottom of the dish and licking her fingers while she spoke.

“This whole situation,” she explained. “My being programmed to be some sort of killing machine, and ending up providing the cure instead. Aemetha would call that irony. Would have called that irony.” The green eyes suddenly welled with tears. “I don’t even know if Aemetha is still alive….”

She let the spoon drop into the bowl, suddenly nauseated by what she had been eating. Tuvok watched and took note.

“You did this, all of this, in hope of protecting Aemetha?” he began.

“And the little ones. So many little ones. She helped everyone who came to her. I hoped I could live long enough to be like her….”

“You have already helped more people than you know,” Tuvok suggested, alluding to the vaccine that Selar was even now replicating in Okinawa’s sickbay. “And will serve to protect countless more for the foreseeable future. Ironic, indeed.”

Neither spoke for the next few moments. Behind Tuvok’s shoulder, Zetha could see the phenomenon of stars slipping by at maximum warp. On the table in front of her, the unfinished sundae seemed as much a miracle. She pushed the dish away.

Tuvok rose to go.

“Doubtless Admiral Uhura will question you in greater depth when we arrive on Earth, about your training, about those who trained you.”

Zetha shook her head. “We ghilikwere housed separately from ‘true’ Romulans. There was only one man. We were instructed to call him ‘Lord.’ I never knew his name.”

“Another irony,” Tuvok decided.

The lecture Zetha had been dreading never came. Instead, Tuvok let his hand rest for a moment on her head, the gesture of a loving father. Zetha did not look up until he was gone.

From his safe room deep within the warbird, Koval had been busy. Reports from Imperial worlds where the seeds had been planted were uneven at best. In some places, thousands had died before the entity infecting their bodies had been identified and they were quarantined. Once quarantined, all those infected died, but no new cases were reported. In still other places, the numbers of dead ranged from a few hundred to a score or less. In some places, the infection never “took” at all. The same was true for the worlds within the Outmarches so affected. And there had been no new cases reported in nearly a week.

Ah, well, the experiment in and of itself had been interesting. Koval wondered what the final numbers on Federation worlds would be. He would know soon enough, even as he would know how the revelation of the datachips would affect interplanetary relations.

There was no way the datachips could be traced to him. He had liquidated the remaining ghilikbefore he’d left the homeworld. Their barracks had been converted to a storage facility, all trace of habitation removed. The datachips would reveal the identities of beings with Romulan-sounding names who had never existed. Should the Federation be foolish enough to reveal those names, the Praetor, the Imperial Senate, and even the Continuing Committee would enjoy a good laugh at their expense.

Still, Koval was disappointed. He had hoped the experiment might continue until the number of dead had reached critical mass. There was a point in the bureaucratic mind, Koval had discovered, where the body count was deemed unacceptable. A few thousand dead was dismissed as a misfortune, but a few hundred thousand was judged an obvious conspiracy. It was from that point that he had hoped to operate, until that idiot Thamnos had ruined everything.

If only the fool had focused on the goal a little longer! The Federation would have rattled its sabers and accused the Empire of bioterrorism, and then, while they were still recovering from the embarrassment of being told those datachips were meaningless fakes, perhaps created by the Federation itself, since there were no such Romulans as those catalogued on the chips, Koval would have produced his trump card.