“There do seem to be a lot of them lately.”
The praetor walked to the end of the room and back behind her desk. Not overly large, more functional than ornamental, she enjoyed working at the modest space, which she kept well organized. “Anlikar, we have such a historic opportunity here,” she said. “For so long, the Empire has been beset by powerful people advocating for war: selfish, egotistical people bent on utilizing force to elevate themselves; avaricious people who would gladly risk the lives of others to pursue their own self-interests; jingoists who fight for the sake of fighting and call it patriotism. But so many of those people are gone now.”
“Many of them are,” Ventel said. “Most of them, but there are still those who would choose war over peace.”
“There always will be, I suppose,” Kamemor said. “But for now, for right now, where there’s a Senator Durjik spouting bellicose rhetoric on the chamber floor, there’s also a Senator Eleret, calling for calm and measured responses to interstellar problems. Where there are still old allies of Pardek like Mathon Tenv, there are also those like T’Jen, who rose to power alongside Tal’Aura, but then broke from her policies. The numbers are turning in our favor. We just have to endure long enough to let everybody see that there is a better way.”
Ventel walked over to stand opposite Kamemor across the desk. “Inspiring words, Praetor,” he said. “Truthful words. But somebody in the Empire orchestrated the events in the Gamma Quadrant and the Bajoran system, and before that, at Utopia Planitia. Maybe it was Tomalak.”
“Maybe,” Kamemor said. “In which case, with him now in the hands of the Federation, maybe our problems have been solved. But I don’t honestly see Tomalak masterminding such operations. I know he commanded a starship for a long time, but he always struck me as somebody more inclined to take orders than to give them.”
“Who, then?” Ventel asked. “Admiral Devix?”
Kamemor had already thought about such a possibility. As she sat down in the chair behind her desk, she said, “I don’t think so. For one thing, if Devix was involved, wouldn’t he simply have given Tomalak command of a ship for the joint mission when he requested it?”
Ventel turned his head quickly to one side, as though straining to identify a strange noise he’d heard in a far corner. He stood that way for a moment, then peered back at the praetor. “Somebody did support Tomalak’s being given that command, even though Admiral Devix ultimately denied the request.” Ventel looked at his empty hands, and then around the office. Then he bolted to the sofa and picked up his tablet, where he’d apparently set it down. He worked its controls as he hurried back to the desk. “Tomalak’s support came from . . .” He gazed up at Kamemor, his expression grim. “It came from Admiral Vellon.”
“Vellon?” The praetor slowly stood up. “Enellis Vellon?” For more than two decades, Enellis Vellon had unabashedly championed the need for, and the patriotism of, the Tal Shiar. Nobody within the government doubted his deep connections to the secretive agency. Kamemor herself supported a strong intelligence community on Romulus, one with the capacity to extend its reach effectively throughout the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. But she also opposed terrorizing the Romulan citizenry, the invasion of privacy, and the use of intimidation and torture, all sins of which the Tal Shiar had so often been guilty.
“Which points us to the chairwoman,” Ventel said quietly.
Kamemor glanced at the empty corner of her desk, where her flower-filled vase had sat just moments earlier. She thought that if it had still been there, she would at that moment have snatched it up and sent it flying again. “I am a fool, Anlikar,” she said. “I trusted Sela. I read all of the files on her . . . spoke with people who knew her . . . who worked with her. It seemed as though she’d escaped her petty hatreds and elected to redirect her efforts toward the common good.”
“The chairwoman probably believes that she is doing that,” Ventel said. “And you can’t possibly know everything about everybody. You were thrust unexpectedly into the praetorship. You had to form your government from the ground up, and that meant you had to trust some people who were already in place.” He clearly tried to mitigate what Kamemor considered her own poor judgment.
“Irrespective of my mistakes, it doesn’t change where we are now,” she said. “This calls into question every piece of information Sela ever provided me.” The reality of that induced Kamemor to think about what the chairwoman had told her about the attack on the Federation space station and starships. “She blamed the battle in the Bajoran system on Commander T’Jul . . . and the bombing at the Utopia Planitia Shipyards as well.”
“But it was Sela behind those operations,” Ventel said. “And she probably directed Tomalak.”
“Why, though?” Kamemor asked. “What were her goals?”
“At Utopia Planitia, it was the acquisition of the quantum slipstream drive.”
“Right,” Kamemor said. “Fears still exist about Starfleet’s advanced engines providing the Federation with a first-strike capability.” In her memory, the praetor heard echoes of the past. “We used to say that about transwarp drive and the supposed Universe metaweapon.”
“That’s true,” Ventel said. “But neither of those technologies ever proved out. Slipstream is a reality.”
“Are you saying that we should be concerned?”
“I don’t know,” Ventel said. “Should we be?”
The conclusion seemed clear to Kamemor. She shook her head. “Contrary to what some senators might claim, I’m not an apologist for the United Federation of Planets. They have imperialistic tendencies, and a propensity for thinking there can be no way better than theirs.” She circled around her desk to face Ventel at close range. “But I’ve worked with them, I’ve negotiated with them, I’ve even befriended a few of them. From all of those experiences, I’m sure of one thing: the Federation will never launch a first strike against the Romulan Empire or any other power. They didn’t do so against the Dominion, and they didn’t do it against the Borg. There is no chance that they would ever attack Romulus unprovoked. I can’t say the same thing about the Klingons or the Kinshaya or the Graymel.”
For an instant, a rush of memory overwhelmed Kamemor. She remembered vividly hearing, as a young woman, of the battle between a Romulan bird-of-prey and a Graymel scourge vessel. She recalled the news that while fighting a losing battle, the crew of the scourge ship had unleashed an isolytic subspace weapon. The resulting fracture in the structure of space-time shredded the nearby world of Algeron III, visiting a horrible death on its millions of inhabitants.
“Praetor?”
Shaking off her sudden melancholy, Kamemor completed her thought. “I can’t even say that the Romulan Empire would never strike first against a perceived enemy,” she said, “because we both know that the Empire has done that many times.”
“But whether or not the Federation would actually do the same,” Ventel pointed out, “Sela is apparently working to avoid even the possibility that they could.”
Kamemor nodded. “She’s trying to tip the balance of power in favor of Romulus . . . or in favor of the Typhon Pact.”
“But there’s no slipstream drive in the Gamma Quadrant.”
“Not that we know of,” Kamemor said, but then a terrible thought occurred to her. “But there is the Dominion.”
Ventel’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, no.”
Kamemor walked the length of her office, attempting to puzzle out not just Sela’s aims, but what had actually transpired aboard Eletrix. Pacing back toward Ventel, she said, “They failed. Their ships were destroyed, everybody but Tomalak killed. Even if they reached some sort of agreement with the Founders, they don’t have the backing of their own governments. I don’t support war, and neither do most of the other Pact leaders.”
“Not right now,” Ventel said. “For some of them, it’s because they’re afraid of the advantage that slipstream provides the Federation.”
“Right,” Kamemor said, reaching the desk
again. “But that advantage is real. Maybe . . . maybe Sela sent Tomalak to secure some piece of technology that would negate it.” She reached a decision. She circled her desk and sat down behind it again. “It’s all speculation at this point,” she told Ventel. “It may be important to determine what Sela and her followers were trying to accomplish in the Gamma Quadrant and at Bajor, but it’s more important to figure out what comes next. Because I can promise you that this failure won’t stop them. They are zealots.”
“Are you going to have Sela arrested?”
“Not yet,” Kamemor said. “We need her to lead us to her next action, and to her compatriots.”
“That’s a risk where the Tal Shiar is involved,” Ventel warned.
“I know,” Kamemor said. “But we do have people there we can trust. We’ll use them if we have to, but even if we don’t, we need to start preparing for somebody to take over the chairmanship. I want you to work on that.”
“Yes, Praetor,” Ventel said. “And what about Tomalak?”
“I’m inclined to let the Federation keep him for now,” Kamemor said. “Even if I wasn’t, I’m not sure they’d agree to surrender him anyway.”
“No, probably not.”
“What about the Senate?” Kamemor asked, thinking ahead, past the time when they could bring down Sela. “I thought that our most significant opposition came from there, but if it’s strictly Sela and Tomalak . . .”
“We do have growing numbers of senators disinclined to go to war, though there are many who still distrust the Federation,” Ventel said. “The bigger problem is the number who distrust you and the people you’ve surrounded yourself with. As praetor, though, you have shown strength through decisiveness, and that helps, even when you support ideas unpopular among the senators, such as removing restrictions on the public debate of policy.”
“Those ideas might be unpopular in the Imperial Senate,” Kamemor said, “but there’s a great deal of support for them outside of Ki Baratan.”
“So what’s next?”
“You concentrate on the Tal Shiar,” Kamemor said. “I need to figure out how we can determine what Sela and her followers intend to do next.” Once more, the praetor rose from her chair. Her fingertips brushing the top of her desk, she set herself on a necessary path. “Then I need to stop them.”
11
“So are we clear?” Ro asked.
“Yes, sir,” said Blackmer. “But I have to ask: are you sure?”
Ro sighed, then stood up from her chair. When she did, her workspace—it measured far too small to call it an office—seemed to shrink by half its size. She faced her security chief across a short distance, and she thought if he’d had a chair to sit in, the entire room would be completely filled. “Honestly, Jeff, no, I’m not sure,” she said. “We considered three people possible threats to commit sabotage on the station even before sabotage was committed, but we cleared those people.”
“Thank goodness for that,” Blackmer said with a wry smile, obviously acknowledging that Ro had suspected him, along with Lieutenant Commander Sarina Douglas and Ensign Rahendervakell th’Shant.
“Sorry about that,” Ro said. Happy to have been wrong about Blackmer, she still felt justified in having questioned his loyalties, though she should have addressed her concerns far sooner than she had. “The point I’m making is that we don’t know who placed the bombs on the station, and whatever physical evidence might have existed was destroyed along with Deep Space Nine. The only things we really know are the relatively small window of time when the bombs could have been placed and—because of the tight security we had with all the civilian Typhon Pact vessels traveling to and from the Gamma Quadrant—that there’s a good chance a member of the crew was involved.”
“But for all we know, the perpetrator might have died in the explosion.”
Ro sighed again. “It’s possible,” she said. “You were of the opinion that the bombs hadn’t been set to destroy the station, but to cause an evacuation. It could be that whoever planted them thought that they didn’t have to worry about their safety.”
Blackmer nodded. “I guess there’s only one other thing we know with certainty,” he said, “and that’s who your original three suspects were.”
“Exactly,” Ro said.
“So I’ll wait for your word,” Blackmer said. “Is there anything else, Captain?”
Ro looked around her workspace. In addition to the small desk that occupied perhaps a third of the area, a replicator had been crowded into one corner, and a companel took up most of one wall. “Not unless you can find me nine or ten extra square meters somewhere.”
“You should see the space Colonel Cenn assigned me,” Blackmer said, throwing a thumb back over his shoulder toward the room’s only door. “I’d have more room working in a holding cell.”
Ro smiled. “So much for rank having its privileges,” she said.
“At least when we get back to the Defiant,” Blackmer said with a shrug, “the ship will feel like a palace.” The security chief turned and waited for the door, then obviously realized it wouldn’t open on its own. He reached forward and turned the knob. “Newfangled technology,” he muttered.
Ro followed Blackmer out, and the chief headed to the tiny area Cenn had doled out to him. Buffeted by the confused noise of construction and renovation, the captain stopped and surveyed what until recently had been the abandoned Wyntara Mas Control Center. She had taken one of the rooms tucked into the front corners of the building for herself, a space that had previously been utilized for simple storage. The other front room contained control panels for the building’s infrastructure, all of which had been overhauled by her engineers. She saw that the gate between the two rooms stood open, allowing bright sunlight to shine inside.
The transformation of the old transportation control facility had progressed well, but Kifal Illior’s estimate that Ro’s crew could begin working there within ten days had proven overly optimistic. In part, that had been because Ro still lacked a chief engineer to oversee the modifications, but the scope of the changes required had also grown beyond the specifications initially supplied to the Bajoran transportation minister.
Ro regarded what would eventually be her crew’s temporary new workplace. The sounds of activity came from every direction, and she saw many of her engineering crew busily upgrading the center. Abutting the right-hand wall, directly in front of her, stretched a six-person transporter pad. Though it hardly projected an air of permanence, it certainly improved upon the emergency two-person unit to which she’d beamed on her first visit there. An even larger cargo transporter sat against the left wall.
Straight ahead, beyond the transporters, where rows of outmoded equipment had once lined the floor, new companels, computer interfaces, and other gear gleamed, most of it still awaiting installation. Halfway up the walls, which rose ten meters to the building’s ceiling, a second floor neared completion, as did two basic, unenclosed turbolifts, one on either side. In order to have enough room for her crew, Ro had insisted on the additional story. It would be difficult enough to have several dozen personnel continuously away on Defiant; she didn’t need to have the rest of her people in two different locations on Bajor.
Ro walked to the nearer wall, to where a built-in ladder reached up to the ceiling. She climbed high enough so that she could survey the entirety of the new floor. It remained empty of equipment, but she could see in the lighted crawlspace below it a menagerie of optronic cabling, power distribution nodes, router circuits, and numerous other items she hadn’t taken enough engineering courses at Starfleet Academy to recognize.
“Captain?”
Ro looked down and saw a man wearing a Starfleet uniform with the gold collar of the operations division. Ro recognized him at once, though she’d seen him only a few times since they’d served together aboard Enterprise. She hoped that he brought with him the salvation of her engineering team.
Ro descended the ladder, her boots ringing against each r
ung. When she reached the floor, she turned to see her old crewmate approaching. He had light brown hair, thinning and curly; a pale, doughy face; and a physique that, while not exactly overweight, suggested that he hadn’t missed too many meals recently.
“Captain Ro,” he said. “Chief Engineer Miles O’Brien reporting for duty.” His Irish accent softened his vowels, hardened his consonants, and lent an almost lyrical quality to his voice.
“Chief,” Ro said, “it’s good to see you.” She held out her hand in the human tradition, and O’Brien accepted it with a firm grip. Ro then waved toward the bustle of the renovations just as a sound like a phaser beam slicing through metal filled the area. “Not a moment too soon,” she said, raising her voice to be heard.
O’Brien regarded the scene with a look of mild confusion. “What is this place?” he asked, raising his own voice.
The phaser-on-metal noise faded. “You mean Starfleet didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?” O’Brien asked. “Starfleet Command issued me new orders last week assigning me to Bajor, and I just assumed that meant the Defiant. They said that you needed a new chief engineer—” O’Brien abruptly stopped speaking as he seemed to realize something. “I heard about what happened on Deep Space Nine,” he said. “I’m sorry. I know you lost a lot of people.”
“Thank you,” Ro said, as always deeply saddened when she thought about the members of her crew and the civilians who hadn’t made it safely off the station. “One of our losses was our chief engineer.”
“Jeannette Chao,” O’Brien said.
“That’s right. Did you know her?”
“Met her a couple of times over the years,” O’Brien said. “Same circles, you know. I’ve been detached to the Starfleet Corps of Engineers for a while, so I tend to meet a lot of engineering types. Chao seemed very capable.”
“She was,” Ro said. “Not everybody could keep our hulking Cardassian ore-processing station functional.”
Star Trek: Typhon Pact: Raise the Dawn (Star Trek, the Next Generation) Page 20
