He turned back toward the Senate Dome and watched as the guards made their rounds. He counted six at the moment, marching in pairs, their arrogant, disciplined gazes focused straight ahead. The old woman’s warning notwithstanding, he might as well have been invisible to them.

But it’s best not to become complacent,he thought, checking the chrono built into the disguised subspace pulse transmitter he wore on his wrist. Time was growing short. Since his surreptitious arrival on Romulus the previous day, he had taken in sights very few of his people had ever seen.

He’d just paid what might well turn out to be a once-in-a-lifetime visit to the Romulan capital of Ki Baratan. Now the time had come to venture beneath it.

The operative deliberately set aside unpleasant thoughts of the underworld of ancient Romulan mythology. Those old stories hadn’t sufficiently described the noisome smells that were wafting up around him from the figurative—and literal—bowels of Ki Baratan. Erebus, indeed.

Guided through the stygian gloom by his wrist light, the operative was relieved to note that the venerable maze of aekhhwi’rhoi—the stone-lined sewer tunnels that ran below Ki Baratan—corresponded precisely to the maps the defector M’ret had provided to Starfleet Intelligence. Carefully stepping over and past countless scuttling, multilegged, sewer-dwelling nhaidh,he made his way to the appointed place. Once there, he pulled hard at a rust-covered, meter-wide wheel, laboriously opening up a narrow access hatchway that looked to be older than Surak and T’Karik combined. The corroded steel aperture groaned in protest, moving only fractionally as the muscles in his back strained. After perhaps a minute of hard coaxing, the wheel gave way and the hatch opened with a clang that reverberated loudly throughout the catacombs.

Releasing the wheel, he pulled a small disruptor pistol from beneath his cassock, then squeezed through the narrow opening without making any further pretense of stealth; by now whoever else might be down here, whether friend or foe, was surely aware of his presence.

He passed into the darkened chamber beyond the hatch, where air that reeked of stagnation, moldy old bones, and damp earth assailed his nostrils. Stepping forward, he heard a quiet yet stern male voice.

“Halt! Drop your weapon.” Something cool and un-yielding pressed forcefully into the small of his back.

The operative released his grip on the weapon, allowing it to clatter to the rough stone floor. A bright light suddenly shone before him, momentarily triggering his nictitating inner eyelids. He caught a glimpse of several humanoid silhouettes standing before him, several meters farther inside the cavern’s depths.

“State your name,” said the voice behind him. It sounded young, almost adolescent. Or perhaps merely frightened?“And state your business here.”

The operative knew that this was the moment of truth, and very possibly the last moment of his life. He faced that prospect with a Vulcan’s ingrained equanimity.

“While on Romulus, I am known as Rukath.”

“Of Leinarrh, in far-off Rarathik,” someone else said, in a stern female voice. “By way of Starfleet Intelligence. Yes, we knew you were coming.”

The operative nodded. “Then you already know my business here. I expected no less.”

He felt the weapon at his back quiver slightly, and he calculated his odds of disarming the man behind him. They weren’t at all good. Nevertheless, the time had come to end the standoff, regardless of the outcome.

“I also bring greetings from Federation starship Alliance.Captain Saavik sends her best regards to the movement. And to the ambassador, of course.”

As the operative had hoped, the mention of the ambassador’s wife prompted one of the silhouettes before him to detach itself from the others and step forward. The tall, lean form spoke in a graveled yet resonant voice that he recognized instantly, even though more than eight decades had passed since he had last heard it.

“Lower your weapon, D’Tan. Rukath is among friends.”

“But how can we be certain this Rukath is a friend? If that’s even his name.”

The figure stepped forward another several paces, and waved an arm in what was obviously a prearranged signal. In response, the light levels diminished, allowing the operative to see the approaching man’s face clearly, as well as the coterie of a half-dozen armed Romulan civilians, an even mix of men and women, who stood vigilantly all around him.

Ambassador Spock.

The tall, conspicuously unarmed figure came to a stop only a meter away, his hands folded in front of his simple hooded pilgrim’s robe as he studied the operative’s face. The operative recalled his only previous meeting with the ambassador, whose saturnine visage was umistakable despite the addition of a great many new lines and wrinkles. He wondered if Spock remembered him as well, after the passage of so many years. Perhaps the minor surgical alterations that had been wrought on his facial structure obscured his identity.

“Your vigilance is an asset to us, D’Tan,” Spock said to the young man with the weapon. “But as Surak teaches us, there can be no progress without risk.”

That evidently got through to the armed man, who withdrew his weapon and backed away. The operative spared a quick glance over his shoulder, nodding toward Spock’s youthful bodyguard in a manner that he hoped would be taken as nonthreatening and reassuring. He noted the other man’s response: a hard scowl and a still-unholstered disruptor.

The operative fixed his gaze once again upon Spock, a man who had achieved great notoriety back on Vulcan—as well as throughout the Federation and beyond—more than a century earlier. How strange,he thought, that one who never even achievedKolinahr now represents all of Vulcan here in this forbidding place—and attempts to bring such radical change to both Vulcan and Romulus.He wondered if Spock would have taken on such a task had he attained the pinnacle of logic that the Kolinahrdisciplines represented.

Would I have been so foolish to have followed him here hadKolinahr not eluded me also?

“Walk with me, please, Rukath,” Spock said, then abruptly turned to stride more deeply into the rough-hewn cavern that stretched beyond the sewer hatch. The operative immediately fell into step beside the ambassador. He heard the crunch of gravel behind him, as Spock’s followers tailed the pair at a respectful distance. If I really were the Tal Shiar or military intelligence infiltrator these people fear that I am, this mission would surely be a suicide run.

“You must forgive D’Tan,” Spock said.

“There is nothing to forgive, Mr. Ambassador. His caution is understandable. The Tal Shiar’s eyes and ears are everywhere.”

“Indeed. And none of us have forgotten Senator Pardek’s betrayal.”

The operative thought he detected a touch of wistfulness in the ambassador’s tone. Though it was a surprising departure from Vulcan stoicism, he could certainly understand it. Though he had studied Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s reports about Romulus—one of which included Spock’s own observation that reuniting the long-sundered Vulcan and Romulan peoples might take decades or even centuries to come to fruition—it was disappointing to think that Spock’s efforts had yielded so little after eleven years of hard, often perilous work.

As though he had surmised the dark turn the operative’s thoughts had taken, Spock came directly to the point: “Tell me, Rukath: Why have you come to Romulus?”

The operative was not surprised to learn that Starfleet Intelligence might not have briefed Spock thoroughly on his reason for visiting Romulus. Or perhaps Spock was testing him, despite his reassurances to D’Tan.