Every one of these vessels had already been officially written off as seized or destroyed during the brief Reman uprisings that had flared up immediately after Shinzon’s assassination of the Senate. If the commanders and crews of these vessels took care to maintain their distance from the spatially-riven event horizon that lay close to the center of the Great Bloom’s expanse, those ships would find a safe and discreet port here, remaining undetectable from any appreciable distance. The space-time distortions caused by the Great Bloom’s intense gravitational lensing effects would see to that. Now our “ghost fleet” but awaits either my or Suran’s command to pounce upon whoever prevails in the struggle for civilian power, be it Tal’Aura, Pardek, political moderates, or even those vile, cave-dwelling uaefv’digae from Remus.
The aft turbolift door hissed open. Out of the corner of her eye, Donatra saw Commander Suran enter at a breathless near-run. “We need to speak, Commander. Privately.”
Donatra suppressed a harried sigh. She wondered how many more times she would have to soothe Suran’s misgivings about hiding so many ships within the Bloom’s energetic shadow. He had objected from the beginning that the Bloom, as good a hiding place as it was, lay too far away from Romulus to allow for a sufficiently fast deployment should the need to do so arise unexpectedly. But he had never presented a better alternative. Although Suran was ostensibly on her side in the Empire’s ongoing power struggles, there were times when she wished she could simply pull rank on him rather than having to explain and persuade. But even if I could just order him about, what assurance do I have that he would do as I command?
Then she saw the look of real concern in his eyes, which blazed with a sincerity she hadn’t seen since Tal’Aura had engineered Admiral Braeg’s death. Though she respected Suran’s tactical prowess, she didn’t credit him with enough artifice to counterfeit such passion. Whatever was on Suran’s mind now, it was clearly nothing trivial.
“Of course,” Donatra said, keeping her voice even as she gestured toward the bridge’s starboard side.
“It’s about former Senator Pardek,” Suran said as soon as the plain gray duranium door had slid shut behind them, ensuring their privacy. “He’s just been found dead.”
She dropped heavily into the chair behind her desk, and gestured toward the empty seat in front of it. “I assume he didn’t die peacefully in his sleep.”
“Not unless he enjoyed taking his rest with something very sharp on his pillow,” Suran said as he took the offered seat. “His own people found him in his office with his throat slashed. My sources indicate that the deed was apparently done within the last half verak or so.”
The news of Pardek’s murder brought Donatra up short, though it didn’t truly surprise her. Deaths by misadventure hadn’t exactly been uncommon in and around the Empire’s centers of power, even before Shinzon’s elimination of the Senate. Discreet assassinations of political adversaries had become almost routine under Praetor Dralath many years earlier. She had read accounts of Dralath himself slashing the throat of a dissenting senator—a murder committed in the Council Chamber, right before the startled eyes of the victim’s legislative colleagues.
But a slashed throat hardly seems like Tal’Aura’s style, she thought. And Romulan praetors, aside from the bloodthirsty Dralath, usually demurred from such naked violence. They tended to favor instead convenient happenstances such as hovercar crashes, sudden acute “illnesses,” and other similarly improbable—though plausibly deniable—mishaps.
Still, she knew that Tal’Aura’s culpability in Braeg’s death was undeniable. The late admiral had not only been Donatra’s beloved, he had also been Tal’Aura’s chief rival for the praetorship of the Romulan Empire. Thoughts of Tal’Aura’s foul act of treachery revived the dull pain that had never entirely departed from her right leg and the entire right side of her torso. Though the superficial plasma burns she had suffered on the day of Braeg’s death were within Dr. Venora’s capacity to heal completely, Donatra had decided to leave the scars intact; they remained as tangible reminders both of her enduring love for Braeg and of her abiding hatred for Tal’Aura.
Donatra hoped that the nagging aches of her wounds would ensure that she never again risked showing her back to the Empire’s newest self-appointed praetor. Her side tingled uncomfortably as she wondered if Tal’Aura had seen Pardek as yet another dangerous rival for power. Like Braeg, who might well have ascended to the praetorship himself but for Tal’Aura’s perfidy.
“Do you see the praetor’s hand in Pardek’s murder, Suran?” Donatra asked.
“It is certainly possible. Tal’Aura may see genuine danger behind the rhetoric of Pardek’s faction. His confederates Durjik and Tebok have made no secret of their desire to make war on the Federation.”
A desire that you, my ally of convenience, once shared not only with Pardek, but also with Shinzon. Did Suran now truly see his erstwhile association with Shinzon as a blunder, as she did? Not for the first time, Donatra wondered whether Suran’s current alliance with her was motivated by his decades of loyalty to the slain Admiral Braeg—and therefore at least partly from their shared hatred of Tal’Aura, Braeg’s killer—or if it was merely a marriage of expediency. Could she really afford to trust Suran any more than she could Tal’Aura?
But can I really afford not to?
“Pardek’s group has been rattling its tarnished Honor Blades for another war against the Federation for some time now,” Suran continued. “I’m sure that even Tal’Aura would agree that the Empire can ill afford such a conflict, especially now. But I seriously doubt that even she would have resorted to such a crude means of assassination.”
“It cannot be the Remans,” Donatra said, stroking her chin. “Their involvement would imply knowledge of the impending power-sharing meeting—the one from which we have all agreed to exclude them. Were they aware of the initial secret conference, they surely would have made a great deal more trouble than slaying a single retired Romulan senator.”
“Thank Erebus for small mercies.” He sighed, obviously resigned to the identity of the only other likely culprit. “The Tal Shiar, then.”
Donatra nodded. “I suspect the bureau’s young new director might be arrogant enough not to care overmuch about subtlety. He probably even saw to it personally that you became aware of the murder as quickly as you did.”
Suran nodded. “If that’s so, then Rehaek would appear to be a rank amateur. Under his leadership, the Tal Shiar may give us significantly less trouble than it did under Koval.”
Or Rehaek may merely be maneuvering us into underestimating him. “Perhaps. But the main question now is, will the other members of Pardek’s faction overreact to the former senator’s murder?”
“There is little they can do to advance their plans. Not without the support of the military.” With a predatory smile Donatra rarely saw outside of all-out combat situations, Suran added, “Fortunately, we have a good deal to say about that, thanks to our hidden fleet.”
“He who rules the military rules the Empire,” she thought, silently quoting Amarcan’s Axioms, a text she had all but memorized during her Imperial War College studies.
Answering Suran’s battlefield grin with one of her own, she said, “I take it you no longer question the wisdom of using the Great Bloom to conceal the bulk of our forces.”
His head dipped in an abbreviated parody of a courtly bow. “I withdraw most of my earlier objections. Though we still may need to move the fleet quickly, I will concede that the necessity of keeping our strength secret has grown ever more urgent. I only wish we could afford to position our fleet closer to Romulus. We may have to mobilize it very soon, and I remain certain we will receive very little prior warning when that occurs.”
She considered trying to reassure Suran yet again that their “ghost fleet” could indeed be deployed in time to do whatever might be required of it, and that Romulus itself wasn’t completely undefended, even without the extra forces. Instead, she merely regard
ed him in silence. Though she felt relieved that they finally seemed to be in fairly close accord—a rare thing, despite their mutual loyalty to the late Braeg, and their shared hatred of the pretender Tal’Aura—Donatra also found herself wishing she could derive more satisfaction from it. Perhaps, she thought, that requires more trust than either of us is capable of giving.
Centurion Liravek’s voice suddenly issued from the comm terminal on Donatra’s desk. “Bridge to Commander Donatra.”
Donatra touched a control on her comm panel. “Go ahead, Centurion.”
“You instructed me to alert you shortly before the time of our scheduled departure for Romulus,” the centurion said, his manner crisp and professional. “If we go to maximum warp during the next five siure, we will just arrive at Ki Baratan by the designated time.”
“Very good, Centurion. Leave the fleet here, in concealment. But take the Valdore to Romulus now. Best speed.”
“At once, Commander.”
Donatra rose from her chair, signaling that it was time to get back to work. Suran did likewise.
“Don’t worry, Suran. The Valdore—and the entire fleet—stands ready to take back the Romulan Empire. Together they will restore all the honor that Shinzon and Tal’Aura have squandered.”
Suran approached the door, which obligingly hissed open. “Provided the Senate factions, Tal’Aura, and the ravening hordes of Remus do not tear the Empire to pieces in the meantime—thus rendering all honor irrelevant.”
With that, he departed from the ready room. The door closed again, leaving her alone with apprehensions that were growing increasingly difficult to tame.
Though the Remans remained relatively calm for the moment, an all-out clash between them and what remained of the Romulan Empire’s traditional power structure might well prove inevitable. Perhaps the die had already been cast by the dead hand of Shinzon. And could she truly rely on her recently acquired Federation allies not to take advantage of the coming chaos? Surely the Klingons, wartime alliance or no, would move to seize the Empire’s resource-rich border worlds should Romulus descend into civil war.
Whatever comes, we must be ready. Or the Empire will surely be lost.
Another of Amarcan’s Axioms sprang from her memory then, providing at least some small measure of comfort: “Fear only fear.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
* * *
U.S.S. TITAN
“Thank you, Commander Ledrah.”
“All part of the service, Captain,” said the chief engineer, her voice filtered through the combadge. “But be careful, sir. This admiral is a sneaky bastard, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I don’t mind a bit, Nidani. But you’re lucky he hasn’t got here yet. Now, try to stay out of trouble, all right?”
“Always, sir. Ledrah out.”
The ready room fell silent. Riker stared out the observation window at the distant stars. But he felt none of the joy and exhilaration he had experienced barely two weeks ago when he had immersed himself in the holographic projections of the stellar cartography lab. Instead of reveling in the unrestrained freedom of deep space, its dark beauty illuminated by countless distant fires, he found himself searching for naked-eye stellar distortions.
It was a poor trade-off.
His sharp gaze sought out disturbances that were as likely to be the products of drifting debris as cloaked vessels. As he watched, one of the trio of Miranda-class Starfleet aid ships, Der Sonnenaufgang, moved gracefully past the outer port-side edge of Titan’s hull, headed toward the brilliant azure limb of Romulus, about which the convoy had entered orbit less than thirty minutes previously. According to Vale, the other two vessels, the Phoebus and the T’rin’saz, were already well into the process of beaming down food, medical supplies, and heavy-duty industrial replicator equipment, along with a cadre of Starfleet medical, engineering, and security personnel to render aid and oversee distribution of the convoy’s provisions to Romulan civilians dispossessed by the recent social unrest. Der Sonnenaufgang was concentrating on using her cargo transporters to send particularly heavy matériel, such as construction equipment, down to the planet’s surface.
Despite apprehensions to the contrary from their respective crews, the Federation-Klingon convoy had crossed Romulan space completely unmolested. Even so, there were a large number of small Romulan cruisers and scout ships in the immediate vicinity of Romulus and its four moons, though not nearly as many warbirds as Riker would have expected. Either the Romulans were playing host to their visitors with utmost sincerity, or they were keeping the bulk of their fleet carefully concealed, at least for the moment. He wondered idly if they were lying in the weeds, watching and waiting for the right moment to pounce either on Titan, General Khegh’s vessels, or the Starfleet aid ships.
But that possibility seemed far-fetched given the reception the aid convoy had received so far—and what Romulus stood to lose if the Romulan military were to attack, considering the obvious evidence of the unreliability of the Empire’s internal lines of supply. Senator Pardek and his followers may want to move against the Federation, he thought, but Praetor Tal’Aura seems to be keeping things calm, no matter how unstable her power base might be.
The door chimed, and Riker turned from the window. “Come,” he answered.
Stooping his head slightly, Admiral Akaar stepped through the doorway and into the ready room. Like Riker, he had not yet changed into his dress whites; the secret meeting with the Romulan leaders was still nearly two hours away.
“You asked to see me, Captain?” Akaar said, straightening to his imposing full height once he was inside the ready room.
Riker felt himself tense up, and hoped it didn’t show outwardly. He gestured toward one of the chairs. “Yes, thank you, Admiral.” He sat down behind his desk, and leaned forward as the large Capellan wedged his wide frame into the chair.
Riker paused to take a deep breath, preparing to launch into the speech he had been practicing over and over in his mind; he had debated for hours whether it would accomplish the goal he intended, or if it would instead cost him the admiral’s respect.
“Admiral, normally I wouldn’t speak quite so frankly to someone who outranks me, but this is my ship, my command, and my ready room,” he said finally. “Even though it’s lousy poker strategy, I’ve decided not to wait until the end of the game to put all my cards on the table.”
Akaar betrayed not the slightest hint of emotion as he stared impassively back at Riker. “Your point, Captain?”
“My point is this: since you first came aboard Titan, you have been openly critical of my command style and command decisions,” Riker said, holding the admiral’s intense, dark-eyed gaze. “You have also, in my considered opinion, been less than forthcoming with information vital to the success of this mission and crucial to the safety of my crew. These actions jeopardize my staff’s confidence in me, and, quite frankly, in you. If we are to succeed here, I need you to be honest and forthright about all of the intelligence you have regarding the Romulan political situation. I ask only that you confide in me and let me decide what facts need to be distributed to the crew and when.”
Seeing that Akaar was making no move to reply, Riker took another deep breath. In for a slip, in for a brick. “Admiral, I turned down three commands before accepting this one. I have been a decorated Starfleet officer for better than twenty years now. I know that hardly compares to the eighty-some years you’ve served, but it’s not inconsequential. And neither is the fact that Starfleet continued to offer me command positions until I finally accepted. Whatever doubts you may have about my authority or my methods, you should take them up with me instead of my staff.”
Riker settled back into his chair, and looked across the uncluttered desktop at Akaar. The older man’s expression remained inscrutable, and the quiet seconds that followed seemed to drag into minutes. Have I gone too far? Riker wondered. Was that a spectacular case of career suicide?
Finally, Akaar leaned forward
. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Captain. I shall try to be more circumspect in acknowledging your authority in the future.” His lips formed a grim smile. “When Titan left Utopia Planitia, I was still receiving many conflicting intelligence reports regarding the Romulans. I made the decision then, rightly or wrongly, to keep intelligence matters purely on a need-to-know basis. I was not trying to keep either you or your staff out of the loop. Rather, I was attempting to determine precisely what you needed to know and when. Trust me when I say that you would likely have been infinitely more frustrated had you been forced to sit in on many of the interminably long conferences I held with Sorok, T’Sevek, and T’Rel.” He rubbed a knuckle across one of his thick gray eyebrows, as though wearied by the memories.
“I see, Admiral,” Riker said, nodding. Still not content to let go of his anger entirely, he continued in a low, almost perilous tone. “Commander Ledrah has just informed me that Dr. Ra-Havreii has installed an illegal cloaking device aboard one of Titan’s shuttlecraft. I assume this was done on your order.”
Akaar seemed to take Riker’s charge completely in stride. “It was.”
Riker felt his face redden, suddenly awash in memories of similar treaty violations that he had been a party to more than two decades ago under Captain Erik Pressman. “And exactly when did you intend to bring me into that particular loop, Admiral?”
To his credit, Akaar didn’t appear flustered in the least. “Whatever you may believe about me, Captain, I did intend to inform you about the cloaking device as soon as it became necessary.”
“That’s very reassuring, sir. It’s good for a captain to know when he’s been made responsible for breaking one of the Federation’s oldest treaties with the Romulan Empire.”
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