The Hall of State, Dartha, Romulus
NIJIL HAD TURNED to leave the office once First Consul T’Leikha released him to return to his duties. But before he reached the door, her comm unit emitted a piercing electronic tone—a tone that Nijil knew heralded a high-priority incoming communication.
He paused momentarily on the threshold and glanced back at her, prepared to move on instantly should she so much as scowl at him. But the look of dismayed surprise on T’Leikha’s face made his feet throw down roots. All of her color had abruptly drained away.
“It’s from Valdore,” she said, incredulous.
Nijil stepped back into her office and sealed the door behind him. “The admiral is alive?” he whispered in disbelief, though he found the notion curiously easy to accept; after all, in all the images of the post-detonation wreckage he had seen, he had never so much as glimpsed a body.
The world suddenly began to spin wildly about him. Valdore doesn’t know about my involvement, he told himself. He’s not omniscient. He couldn’t possibly know.
But he also wasn’t supposed to have been able to survive.
The Krocton Segment, Dartha, Romulus
“T’Luadh, I believe the First Consul may actually have soiled herself when my face appeared on her terminal,” Valdore said to the woman who sat across the dining room table from him, slurping her bowl of aafvun’in’hhui mollusk soup with noisy gusto. “I’m still more than a little surprised that she found the courage to strike at me so brazenly.”
“This wasn’t about courage, Admiral,” the spy said, setting down her bowl. “If it were, T’Leikha simply would have challenged you to a duel.”
Valdore pushed his own half-eaten plate of viinerine to the side— he had developed a taste for simple military fare decades ago, and had never lost the habit—and slowly swirled his glass of kali-fal. He savored the blue liquor’s pungent aroma as much as he did the continued rock-steadiness of his nerves.
“True enough,” he said. For most of his adult life, in fact, Valdore had been keenly aware of the complex, indirect machinations of which members of the Romulan Senate were capable. This knowledge was the primary reason he had over the years established a number of safe houses such as this one, in Dartha and elsewhere, some of which he felt certain that not even the Tal Shiar knew about. He’d spent enough time in the Senate prior to his initial fall from grace—and before his subsequent military career—to gain a thorough understanding of the lethal deviousness of the Empire’s political schemers.
Which was why he had sent Darule, Vela, and Vool away to one of his most remote safe houses just yesterday, shortly after Tal Shiar operative T’Luadh had initially apprised him of the First Consul’s plot—a scheme that his own Commander Khazara had not only corroborated, using discreetly intercepted comm traffic, but which he had also successfully backtraced through Chief Technologist Nijil’s office. Thanks either to skill or blind luck, a number of communications between Nijil and known associates of the antigovernment Ejhoi Ormiin dissident faction had turned up. It appeared that Nijil had used his dissident connections to engineer last year’s assassination of Doctor Ehrehin, the original developer of the still uncompleted avaihh lli vastam stardrive project.
Using the dissidents to arrange Ehrehin’s murder may simply have been Nijil’s most expeditious means of poaching the most prestigious undertaking of Ehrehin’s long career. Or it might have been indicative of a deeper, far more dangerous ideological bent. It left Valdore wondering whether Nijil’s slow progress on the high warp project came from the difficulties of the physics or from a desire to confound the Empire’s efforts. Whatever Nijil’s agenda might ultimately prove to be, Valdore was certain of at least two things: first, Khazara was now in line for a promotion; and second, Valdore had something quite different in mind for both Nijil and T’Leikha.
“How is your family adjusting to their present... low profile?” T’Leikha said as she helped herself to another osol twist from the platter. Judging from her lean proportions, he doubted she ate such trifles very often. Valdore himself had never developed a taste for the damned things—they were far too sour—but his servants often left heaps of them out for his visitors, perhaps guided by the knowledge that the confections wouldn’t tempt him to overindulge.
“Darule says that Gal Gath’thong is lovely this time of year,” he said. “Vela and Vool haven’t seen the firefalls since they were in secondary school.”
T’Luadh answered with a knowing nod. “Gal Gath’thong. Good choice.”
Of course, Valdore had sequestered his family nowhere near Gal Gath’thong. As trusted an adviser and ally as T’Luadh had become, he never allowed himself to forget that she was attached to the Tal Shiar, which commanded her primary loyalty. And he was not about to reveal his family’s present whereabouts to the Tal Shiar. Let them unearth the truth themselves, if they really considered it worth discovering. For all he knew, T’Luadh already knew that his family was actually elsewhere in the Krocton Segment’s southeast district this very moment, and she was simply humoring him.
“Are you pleased with the progress your Haakonan-front forces are making in redeploying to Coalition space?” she said, adroitly changing the subject between bites of her osol twist. “Commander Khazara’s report on the subject indicated that the redeployment was proceeding more quickly than even some of the most optimistic logistical projections.”
Valdore wondered how T’Luadh, or her Tal Shiar puppet masters, had gotten hold of Khazara’s report, which was intended for his own eyes alone. Her personal interest in the fleet’s redeployment was probably perfunctory at best; he knew that she was really delivering a subtle reminder that he’d be hard pressed to keep anything truly secret from her.
“I think the fleet still needs some serious shoring up at our Coalition lines,” he said, deliberately sticking to safe generalities.
“Yes. The loss of D’caernu’mneani Lli was an alarming development. But our new praetor trusts it will not be repeated elsewhere.”
“Thanks to the redeployment, I will not only avoid repeating it, I will undo it.”
She raised her glass of kali-fal in a salute. “The praetor will be delighted when I report that to him. I drink to your making good on that promise, and to the Empire.”
Valdore raised his own glass in response, but remained silent. So not only must you remind me that you can read my mail with impunity, he thought, but you also must reiterate that the Tal Shiar has at least as much access to Karzan’s ear as I do.
T’Luadh drained her glass and set it down on the table. “What will you do next, Admiral?” she said. “Regarding First Consul T’Leikha and your chief technologist, I mean.”
Valdore allowed a death’s head grin to split his craggy, weather beaten face. “I am content to leave Nijil working in his present position—for now. He may become complacent, grow careless again, and expose whole nests of Ejhoi Ormiin vermin as a consequence.”
T’Luadh grinned. “Well played, Admiral. You’re beginning to think like a veteran Tal Shiar field operative. And what of the first consul?”
“I shall bide my time with her as well.”
“Wise, Admiral. Now that Senator Vrax is out of prison, I would think you’d have to get in line behind him to get revenge against T’Leikha.”
“Perhaps,” Valdore said. “Vrax is considerably more patient than I am, T’Luadh.”
“Does that mean you do plan to retaliate against the first consul before Vrax does?”
He shrugged. “Retaliate for what? The destruction of my residence has been officially recognized as purely accidental, has it not? Therefore I needn’t be in a rush to seek revenge.”
She nodded, finally seeming to take his meaning: Once a suitable time interval had passed, similar “accidents” could be relied upon to befall both T’Leikha and Nijil, no doubt at the times and in the places they were least likely to expect them.
Provided, of course, that Valdore did not wait so long as to allow T’Leikha to strike preemptively against him.