Taking Wing Page 2

  Thanks to nearly a century of at least intermittent association with humans, the operative was conversant with the idiom Spock had used. “Yes, Mr. Ambassador. And the council will almost certainly place Federation resources at your disposal, at least covertly.”

  Spock paused again before responding. “Indeed. That would be a significant change in Federation policy.”

  “We live in changing times, Mr. Ambassador.”

  “Unquestionably. President Zife’s sudden resignation is but one sign.” Spock clasped his hands before him, steepling his index fingers. “I cannot help but wonder whether the council’s offer is related to Zife’s abrupt departure.”

  The operative was impressed by Spock’s knowledge of the political landscape beyond the Romulan Neutral Zone, though he knew it shouldn’t have surprised him; he reminded himself that the ambassador had made more than one brief return to Earth since beginning his work on Romulus.

  “I’m afraid all I know about that is what’s been on the newsnets,” the operative said truthfully.

  Spock nodded, his expression grave. The operative had no doubt that the ambassador was well acquainted with those same reports.

  Sensing that the ambassador still required some additional persuasion, the operative said, “I will need to rendezvous with my transport this evening. If you will agree to accompany me, we can have you back in Federation space within days.”

  Something resembling a half-smile crossed Spock’s face. “I trust, Rukath, that you aren’t prepared to use force to return me to Earth.”

  The operative gestured toward D’Tan, whom he knew still stood—disruptor in hand—only a short distance behind him. “I am obviously in no position to force you to do anything, Mr. Ambassador. I had hoped you would agree to come to Earth voluntarily.”

  Spock very slowly shook his head. “I am pleased that the council has finally come to understand the necessity of the cause of reunification. But I cannot afford to abandon my work on Romulus, even temporarily. Especially now, while tensions between the Romulan Senate and one of the key Reman military factions continue to escalate.”

  The operative recalled yesterday’s update about this very subject in his daily intelligence briefing. The mysterious Shinzon, the Reman faction’s young leader, had led a number of successful military engagements against Dominion forces during the war. His sudden prominence in Romulan politics could cause unpredictable swings in the delicate balance of power within a senate now evenly divided on issues of war and peace.

  “You wouldn’t be away from Romulus for very long, sir,” the operative said quietly.

  “The local political landscape is far too volatile for me to leave now. In addition to the unpredictability of the Reman faction, there are rumors of unrest on Kevatras and other Romulan vassal worlds. I dare not leave Romulus now, even for a short time.”

  The operative decided that the time had come to risk goading the ambassador into cooperating. “Has your unification movement progressed so little over the past decade that you remain completely indispensable to it even now?”

  But clearly Spock wasn’t taking the bait. Sidestepping the question, he said, “I must also consider two other possibilities. One is that you actually are a Tal Shiar agent. The other is that the Federation Council’s agenda is not truly as you have described it.”

  Despite this disappointing response, the operative still wasn’t ready to accept failure. Taking a single step closer to Spock, he said, “Then I offer you access to my mind. I invite you to know what I know.”

  Spock’s right eyebrow climbed skyward yet again. Then, after casting a reproving glance in D’Tan’s general direction, the ambassador approached the operative. The operative closed his eyes, felt the steady, relentless pressure of the ambassador’s fingers against his temples. Vibrant colors and orderly shapes began placing themselves in elegant arrangements across his mind’s eye. It was a tantalizing glimpse into an extraordinarily powerful and well-organized mind.

  And then it came: a frisson of recognition. After all these years, he does remember me.

  “I believe you,” Spock said, a moment after withdrawing his hand and breaking the mind-touch.

  The operative’s eyes opened, and he blinked away a momentary feeling of disorientation as the ambassador stepped away from him. “Then come with me back to the Federation.”

  Another shake of Spock’s head. “I regret that I cannot.”

  “But you said you believed me.”

  “My faith in your sincerity is not the issue.”

  “Then what is the issue, other than Romulan politics?”

  Spock’s gaze narrowed as though he were beginning to lose patience with a willfully obtuse child. “Federation politics.”

  It was the operative’s turn to raise an eyebrow in surprise. “I don’t understand, Mr. Ambassador.”

  “The Federation president has just resigned. One of the two contenders to replace him can be charitably described as a political reactionary who wishes to adopt an aggressive posture toward former Dominion War allies. I find it difficult to believe that such a president would support the Unification movement on Romulus.”

  The operative needed no further explanation: Spock was clearly talking about Special Emissary Arafel Pagro of Ktar. And given candidate Pagro’s already well-publicized anti-Klingon predilections, it was a safe assumption that he wouldn’t support any peace initiatives on Romulus.

  “The results of the special election are not yet completely tabulated,” the operative said. “Governor Bacco of Cestus III may yet emerge as the winner.”

  Spock nodded. “In that event, I will consider returning to Earth for a brief meeting with President Bacco and the council. Provided, of course, that Romulan-Reman affairs permit it.”

  At a wordless signal from the ambassador, D’Tan and the rest of Spock’s retinue surrounded their leader. “Live long and prosper,” Spock said, holding his right hand aloft in the traditional split-fingered Vulcan salute.

  “Peace and long life,” the operative replied, using his left hand to mirror Spock’s ritual gesture.

  Then the group spirited the ambassador away, vanishing with him around a darkened turning of the rough-hewn cavern walls.

  The operative stood alone in the dim, rocky chamber, listening to the distant echoes of dripping water and his own frustrated sigh. Moving silently, he retraced his steps, recovered his disruptor from where D’Tan had forced him to discard it, and began his lonely ascent back to the cobbled streets of the ira’sihaer, Ki Baratan’s ancient casbah.

  He paused to take an afternoon meal in a shabby-looking inn built of gray-and-ocher bricks that appeared as old as time itself. Although his vegetarian order caused the servers to eye him with some suspicion, he was far too preoccupied with mentally preparing his official Starfleet Intelligence report to care.

  Following the meal—Romulan cooks, the operative noted, did not seem to have the faintest notion of how to prepare vegetables—he booked himself into a private room on the inn’s relatively secluded third floor. Once he’d settled in and run a tricorder scan for surveillance devices, he discreetly recorded his report, then used the transmitter mounted in his wrist chron to send it as an encrypted “burst” transmission that lasted only a minuscule fraction of a second. The chance that even the much-feared Tal Shiar would intercept it, much less decode it, were infinitesimally small.

  Minutes later, he heard raised voices outside the window, at street level. For a moment he wondered if the Romulan authorities had indeed intercepted his transmission.

  But one look out the concrete window casement told him that the people shouting on the streets weren’t Tal Shiar, or even Romulan military personnel. A dozen people, all of them apparently civilians, were running from the direction of the Romulan Hall of State. He could hear little coherency in their cries, other than a few general references to death and murder.

  Curious, he left his room and descended to the main lobby, and from there procee
ded to the ancient cobbled street. Still more civilians were joining the steadily growing throng, adding to the noise, chaos, and general tumult. An increasing number of uniformed police and helmeted military uhlans began to appear among the frantic crowd as it surged down the street, away from the official state buildings. In the background of the low skyline of Ki Baratan’s Government Quarter, the graceful dome of the Hall of State arced skyward, dominating the horizon like the perpetually sun-scorched face of Remus. A trio of fierce-looking mogai wheeled through the thermals high above the dome, making dirgelike shrieks as they circled on nearly motionless wings. The operative briefly wondered whether the carnivorous birds had sniffed out live prey or carrion.

  A young woman ran along the sidewalk, nearly knocking him into an elderly man as she passed. Her jade-flushed face was contorted with panic and near hysteria. “They’ve murdered the Senate!” she cried, repeating the phrase incessantly.

  The operative chased her for a few steps, grabbing her by the shoulders and turning her to face him. “Who? Who has murdered the Senate?” As he repeated her words, the notion of the entire Romulan Senate suddenly being struck down simultaneously sounded absurd to him.

  The woman’s only response was a terrified scream. At the same moment, something struck him from behind, hitting him hard enough to hurl him to the stone sidewalk. The impact drove all the breath from his lungs, and all feeling vanished from his left arm and both of his legs. Nevertheless, he managed to roll onto his back, hoping to face whatever had hit him.

  A pair of uhlans in red-crested helmets and full armor raised their stun truncheons. The one closest to the hysterical woman silenced her scream with one savage blow. The other felled the old man whom the operative had nearly toppled by accident scant moments before.

  “Leave them alone!” the operative shouted, though he could barely hear himself over the escalating melee. The uhlans moved toward him, their truncheons rising and falling like scythes harvesting ripe stalks of Rarathik-grown kheh. Countless other panicked civilians, ordinary folk who didn’t even seem to know which way to run, were either scattered or felled by repeated blows from the weapons of a growing phalanx of police and military uhlans.

  He fleetingly recalled what he’d read of the bloody riots that Archpriest N’Gathan’s assassination of Shiarkiek, the Empire’s aged monarch, had touched off more than five years ago. Something really has happened in the Hall of State, he thought. Something terrible. Everyone here must think the same thing is about to happen to them as well.

  And judging from the behavior of the uhlans, they were every bit as panicked as the general populace.

  Using his right arm, the operative laboriously pushed himself up into a sitting position, facing away from the two approaching uhlans. Pulling himself forward, he tried to navigate a sea of fleeing legs. Inadvertent blows landed by scores of running feet rained onto his ribs, chest, and belly.

  Pulling his wrist chron to his lips, he shouted a prearranged command directly into the voice pickup, hoping that all the ambient noise wouldn’t drown it out.

  “Aehkhifv!” The Romulan word for “eradication.”

  He knew he was almost certain to be either captured or killed. If he was fortunate, his voice command had already set the purge program into motion, releasing a minute thermite charge intended to destroy every bit of Federation circuitry hidden within his wrist chrono.

  Including the subspace burst transmitter that represented his best chance of getting off of Romulus alive.

  Then came a bone-crunching impact against the back of his head. As he sprawled forward, tumbling over the edge of a darkened abyss, his last coherent thoughts were of the Romulan Erebus myths.

  CHAPTER TWO

  * * *

  U.S.S. TITAN, STARDATE 56941.1

  Among stars his kind had not yet traveled, Will Riker soared.

  Scarcely feeling the observation platform of Titan’s stellar cartography lab beneath his feet, Riker let go, surrendering to the illusion of gliding swiftly “upstream” along the galaxy’s Orion Arm. Buoyed on the strains of Louis Armstrong’s 1928 recording of “West End Blues,” Riker seemed to move far faster than even his ship’s great engines could propel him. The familiar stars of home had long since fallen away. What lay ahead and all around him was an unknown expanse whose mysteries he, his crew, and their young vessel were meant to discover.

  So much to explore, he thought, at once humbled and exhilarated by the realization. Who’s out here? What will we find waiting for us? And what’ll we learn along the way? These were the same questions that had led him to join Starfleet years ago. Now, as then, he could think of only one certain way to unveil the answers.

  Soon, he told himself. Soon. . .

  “Will?”

  Deanna. He was suddenly grounded again, the solidity of his starship sure and tangible once more, though the rushing star clusters and nebulae remained. Standing in the center of the spherical holotank, he’d been so immersed in the simulation that he hadn’t noticed her entering the cartography lab.

  “Computer, deactivate audio,” Riker said, abruptly silencing the music of the immortal Satchmo.

  Deanna came up alongside him, her eyes searching his as they met. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He nodded and wrapped an arm around her shoulders; she reciprocated, slipping one of her arms around his waist. “Just looking over the road ahead,” he said quietly.

  “And how does it look to you?”

  The question took him off guard, forcing him to grope blindly for an answer. “Big,” he said finally, unable to keep a slight laugh out of his voice.

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t take such a long view,” she said lightly. “Just take it a step at a time.”

  Grinning, he asked, “Is that my counselor talking, or my wife?”

  Deanna shrugged. “Does it matter? It’s good advice either way.”

  His brow furrowed; he could read her emotions as clearly as she could anyone else’s. “Is something wrong?”

  She hesitated, then said, “I know what this assignment means to you, what you think it represents. I know you take it very seriously—”

  “Well, shouldn’t I take it seriously?” he asked, interrupting her, his words coming out more sharply than he had intended.

  Deanna let it pass. “It shouldn’t be a burden, Will. That’s all I meant.”

  Riker sighed, leaning forward on the railing and looking down into the void, watching the stars as they continued to stream by below him. “I know. It’s just hard not to think that there’s a lot at stake. I look back on the last decade and I wonder how so much could have happened, how so much could have changed. Sometimes I felt like we were speeding through a dark tunnel, with no way to turn, and no idea what we’d hit next. The Borg, the Klingons, the Dominion. . . We spent most of those years preparing for the next fight, the next war.” He didn’t bother to mention this last difficult year aboard the Enterprise; he didn’t need to. She knew as well as he what they had endured.

  He turned to her again, saw that she was now watching him carefully. “Now we’ve come out the other side, and for the first time in nearly a decade, it feels like we have a chance to get back some of what we lost during those years. We can do the things we set out to do when we joined Starfleet in the first place—the things I grew up believing Starfleet was primarily about. The Federation’s finally at the point of putting ten years of near-constant strife behind it. This mission, this ship, is my chance—our chance—to help. That burden is real, Imzadi. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t exist.”

  Deanna smiled gently at him, then reached up to touch the side of his face. “You shouldn’t. But you can share it. That’s why you have a wife, and a crew. So you don’t have to shoulder it alone.”

  He took her hand, kissed the palm of it, and nodded. “You’re right. And I won’t. I promise.”

  “Bridge to Captain Riker.”

  Still holding his wife’s hand, Riker tapped his co
m-badge. “Go ahead, Mr. Jaza.”

  “Sir, the U.S.S. Seyetik has docked at Utopia Station One. They report that Dr. Ree is preparing to beam over. We have transporter room four standing by.”

  A small, puzzling smile tugged at the corner of Deanna’s mouth. “Acknowledged,” Riker said. “Tell the transporter room that Commander Troi and I are on our way. Riker out.” Turning away from the railing, Riker reached out to the platform’s interface console and deactivated the Orion Arm simulation.

  He turned back toward her. “What’s that smile for?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” Deanna said, brushing the question aside.

  Riker’s eyes narrowed with good-natured suspicion, but he decided to let the matter drop. As the captain and counselor walked together toward the exit, the walls of the lab shifted, returning to their usual standby display of the visible universe surrounding Titan. Beyond the gridwork of the ship’s drydock, the orange sunlit face of Mars dominated the space to starboard, the flat, smooth lowlands that were home to Utopia Planitia’s ground installations obliquely visible to the extreme north; at Titan’s port side, the stations and maintenance scaffolds of Utopia’s orbital complex stood out starkly against the yellow-white brilliance of Sol.

  “Has the rest of the senior staff come aboard?” Riker asked Deanna as they exited the lab and strode into the corridor. He nodded at two of the ship’s biologists as they passed, an Arkenite whose name he couldn’t recall at the moment, followed by a lumbering Chelon of the palest green Riker had ever seen on a member of that species. The scientists nodded back.

  “Almost,” Deanna answered. “Dr. Ree is the last. Well, except for the first officer, of course. But assuming nothing goes wrong there, you’ll be able to hold your staff meeting on schedule, and with everybody present.”

  Riker tried to keep his expression steady as they passed an exposed length of the corridor wall, where several techs from the Corps of Engineers were still working at replacing a faulty ODN relay in a replicator network that crossed half the corridor. The work looked considerably more complicated than it had half an hour ago, the last time Riker passed through this section.