As he noted the way in which everyone he passed made a point of avoiding eye contact with him or one another, however, he realized there was a certain perverse logic to this plan. The single most important element of the social contract in a brothel was discretion, making it the one place where people actively avoided remembering, or being remembered by, those around them. It was the most anonymous place in the capital, making it a far more discreet meeting place than his office within the Great Hall, or his estate, which was always under surveillance by operatives employed by his rivals.

He reached the end of the hallway and stopped in front of the drawn curtain on his right. Assured by a furtive glance back the way he’d come that he hadn’t been followed, he knocked lightly on the door frame and whispered, “The hunter stands ready.”

From within the alcove, a hand jerked the curtain aside. Valina, a striking young Romulan woman of unusual height and beauty, was clad in a sheer negligee that left precious little to Duras’s imagination. She flashed a salacious smile. “The prey awaits.” With her free hand she pulled Duras to her and met him in a ferocious kiss. Despite her lean physique, her strength never failed to impress him, and though her species resembled the stoic Vulcans, their hearts burned with passions worthy of Klingons. Pulling free of the kiss, she bit Duras’s lip, a playful nip just hard enough to break the skin and draw blood.

Duras pushed her aside. “Business first.” He turned and pulled the curtain shut behind him. As he stepped farther inside the small room, she stood with her back to the wall, twirling a lock of her long, wavy black hair around one finger and following him with her customary come-hither leer. He wondered if her brazenly sexual demeanor was all an act for his benefit. The first time he met her, she had seemed arch and aloof, just as one would expect of an attachй of the Romulan ambassador to the Klingon Empire. Or had that icy faзade been the act, the mask she wore to conceal a lustful inner life? The only way to know for certain would be to untangle Valina’s intricate web of lies, a task that Duras suspected could take most men years, and an abundance of time was a luxury he did not have. “You know what I need.”

Her leer transformed into a steely glare. “And you know what I want, Duras.”

“I have it.” He reached into an inner pocket of his jacket and took out a data card. On it was a smattering of raw intelligence gathered by the Klingon Defense Forces about the beings known as the Shedai, and the technology their extinct civilization had left strewn throughout the Gonmog Sector. Valina reached for the card, then frowned as Duras pulled it away, teasing her. “This is top-secret information, Valina. I need something of equal value in return.”

She narrowed her eyes and lifted her chin, and in the span of a breath she reverted to being the cold-eyed predator he had met months earlier, when the High Council had welcomed the Romulan ambassador and his retinue to Qo’noS. “What do you want?”

“I need to ensure my House’s rise within the Empire.”

Hostility shone in her dark eyes, betraying her waning patience. “Be specific.”

He stepped past her to the bed and ran his finger along the hard, smooth slab, which was surprisingly clean, considering its surroundings. “If an accident were to befall Chancellor Sturka, it could pave the way for my family’s advancement inside the High Council.”

Valina crossed her arms. “An accident? Or an assassination?”

“Let’s not quibble over semantics.”

His glib deflection of her query was met by a hard stare. “The Tal Shiar won’t do your dirty work for you. If you want Sturka dead, have the spine to do it yourself.”

Duras noted the undercurrent of pride in Valina’s voice as she’d said “Tal Shiar,” and he made two immediate mental connections. First, he inferred from the context that it was likely a proper name for the Romulan Star Empire’s military intelligence apparatus, or at least a part of it; second, he surmised that Valina was likely an undercover operative for the organization.

Both useful things to know.

He expunged all aggression from his voice. “In that case, what can you do for me?”

“I can give you what you really came for.” She flashed an arrogant smirk. “Did you actually think you were being crafty? By asking for something you knew I’d refuse, just to make the thing you really wanted seem reasonable by comparison? If you plan on making a career of lies and deception, you need to work on your conversational tactics.” She reached over to a stack of rough towels in the corner by the bed, plucked out the one second from the bottom, and unfolded it to reveal a concealed data card. “It contains all the technical information your House will need to figure out why your attempts to convert our cloaking devices to your ships haven’t been working—and how to fix it. With control over this vital tactical asset, the House of Duras can rise in stature through its public actions, and earn the thanks and praise of the Empire.”

Duras reached for the card on the towel, but Valina pulled it back and tsk-tsked at him. “You first, my love.”

He held up his card of stolen data in two fingers. “Both at the same time.” He waited for her to mimic his pose. “On three. One. Two. Three.” Their hands struck like serpents, each of them seizing their prize before the other decided to renege on the deal. Then they stood, facing each other, and smiled. “Well,” Duras said, “now that that’s over. . . .”

They flung the cards aside, and then Valina tackled him to the floor, where Duras found what he had really come for in the first place.

4

Master Chief Petty Officer Mike Ilucci leaned forward—his hands on his knees, sweat running in steady streams from beneath his uncombed black hair, nausea twisting in his gut—and groaned.

Even though Ilucci had been careful to moderate his drinking in recent weeks, since technically the Sagittarius crew was not on leave but rather awaiting an opportunity to ship out, he had not been so careful in his choice of cuisines, and his epicurean tendencies seemed to have finally caught up with him. He couldn’t say whether the culprit responsible for his current gastrointestinal distress was the highly acidic Pacifican ceviche on which he’d gorged himself the night before, the overly spicy eggs Benedict with chipotle hollandaise sauce over Tabasco-marinated skirt steak he’d enjoyed for breakfast, or the huge portion of obscenely rich linguine carbonara he’d devoured for lunch that afternoon. Or perhaps some combination of the three.

It didn’t matter, he decided. Hot swirling pain moved through his gut, and it hurt so badly that he imagined he must have swallowed a plasma drill set on overdrive. All he wanted at that moment was a few minutes of peace to let the agony subside.

A moving shadow intruded upon his view of the deck, and then he saw the feet that trailed behind it. From above his bowed head, he heard the familiar voice of enlisted engineer Crewman Torvin. “You all right, Master Chief?”

Grotesque discomfort put an edge on Ilucci’s reply. “Do I look all right, Tor?”

The young Tiburonian sounded nervous and concerned. “Anything I can do to help?”

“Yeah. Kill me.”

Torvin shuffled his feet, apparently at a loss for a reply. “Um . . .”

“What do you need, Tor?”

The lean, boyish engineer doubled over so he could look Ilucci in the eye. His voice cracked as if he were suffering a relapse of puberty. “Before I kill you, can I get you to sign off on the repulsor grid?”

A tired moan and a grudging nod. “Help me up.”

With one hand pushing against Ilucci’s shoulder and the other hovering behind the husky chief engineer’s back, Torvin guided Ilucci back to an upright stance. The chief cleared his throat and lumbered across the main cargo hold of the civilian superfreighter S.S. Ephialtes, with Torvin a few steps ahead of him. Above and around them, teams of engineers and starship repair crews from Vanguard worked under the direction of Ilucci’s engineers, installing a host of new systems inside the freighter’s recently emptied, titanic main cargo hold. Several decks had been torn out, along with most of the ship’s cargo-handling machinery, such as cranes and hoists. The result was a vast, oblong cavity that accounted for the center third of the ship’s interior volume.