He paused to take an afternoon meal in a shabby-looking inn built of gray-and-ocher bricks that appeared as old as time itself. Although his vegetarian order caused the servers to eye him with some suspicion, he was far too preoccupied with mentally preparing his official Starfleet Intelligence report to care.

Following the meal—Romulan cooks, the operative noted, did not seem to have the faintest notion of how to prepare vegetables—he booked himself into a private room on the inn’s relatively secluded third floor. Once he’d settled in and run a tricorder scan for surveillance devices, he discreetly recorded his report, then used the transmitter mounted in his wrist chron to send it as an encrypted “burst” transmission that lasted only a minuscule fraction of a second. The chance that even the much-feared Tal Shiar would intercept it, much less decode it, were infinitesimally small.

Minutes later, he heard raised voices outside the window, at street level. For a moment he wondered if the Romulan authorities had indeed intercepted his transmission.

But one look out the concrete window casement told him that the people shouting on the streets weren’t Tal Shiar, or even Romulan military personnel. A dozen people, all of them apparently civilians, were running from the direction of the Romulan Hall of State. He could hear little coherency in their cries, other than a few general references to death and murder.

Curious, he left his room and descended to the main lobby, and from there proceeded to the ancient cobbled street. Still more civilians were joining the steadily growing throng, adding to the noise, chaos, and general tumult. An increasing number of uniformed police and helmeted military uhlans began to appear among the frantic crowd as it surged down the street, away from the official state buildings. In the background of the low skyline of Ki Baratan’s Government Quarter, the graceful dome of the Hall of State arced skyward, dominating the horizon like the perpetually sun-scorched face of Remus. A trio of fierce-looking mogaiwheeled through the thermals high above the dome, making dirgelike shrieks as they circled on nearly motionless wings. The operative briefly wondered whether the carnivorous birds had sniffed out live prey or carrion.

A young woman ran along the sidewalk, nearly knocking him into an elderly man as she passed. Her jade-flushed face was contorted with panic and near hysteria. “They’ve murdered the Senate!” she cried, repeating the phrase incessantly.

The operative chased her for a few steps, grabbing her by the shoulders and turning her to face him. “Who? Whohas murdered the Senate?” As he repeated her words, the notion of the entire Romulan Senate suddenly being struck down simultaneously sounded absurd to him.

The woman’s only response was a terrified scream. At the same moment, something struck him from behind, hitting him hard enough to hurl him to the stone sidewalk. The impact drove all the breath from his lungs, and all feeling vanished from his left arm and both of his legs. Nevertheless, he managed to roll onto his back, hoping to face whatever had hit him.

A pair of uhlans in red-crested helmets and full armor raised their stun truncheons. The one closest to the hysterical woman silenced her scream with one savage blow. The other felled the old man whom the operative had nearly toppled by accident scant moments before.

“Leave them alone!” the operative shouted, though he could barely hear himself over the escalating melee. The uhlans moved toward him, their truncheons rising and falling like scythes harvesting ripe stalks of Rarathik-grown kheh.Countless other panicked civilians, ordinary folk who didn’t even seem to know which way to run, were either scattered or felled by repeated blows from the weapons of a growing phalanx of police and military uhlans.

He fleetingly recalled what he’d read of the bloody riots that Archpriest N’Gathan’s assassination of Shiarkiek, the Empire’s aged monarch, had touched off more than five years ago. Something reallyhas happened in the Hall of State,he thought. Somethingterrible. Everyone here must think the same thing is about to happen to them as well.

And judging from the behavior of the uhlans, they were every bit as panicked as the general populace.

Using his right arm, the operative laboriously pushed himself up into a sitting position, facing away from the two approaching uhlans. Pulling himself forward, he tried to navigate a sea of fleeing legs. Inadvertent blows landed by scores of running feet rained onto his ribs, chest, and belly.

Pulling his wrist chron to his lips, he shouted a prearranged command directly into the voice pickup, hoping that all the ambient noise wouldn’t drown it out.

“Aehkhifv!”The Romulan word for “eradication.”

He knew he was almost certain to be either captured or killed. If he was fortunate, his voice command had already set the purge program into motion, releasing a minute thermite charge intended to destroy every bit of Federation circuitry hidden within his wrist chrono.

Including the subspace burst transmitter that represented his best chance of getting off of Romulus alive.

Then came a bone-crunching impact against the back of his head. As he sprawled forward, tumbling over the edge of a darkened abyss, his last coherent thoughts were of the Romulan Erebus myths.

Chapter Two

U.S.S. TITAN,STARDATE 56941.1

Among stars his kind had not yet traveled, Will Riker soared.

Scarcely feeling the observation platform of Titan’s stellar cartography lab beneath his feet, Riker let go, surrendering to the illusion of gliding swiftly “upstream” along the galaxy’s Orion Arm. Buoyed on the strains of Louis Armstrong’s 1928 recording of “West End Blues,” Riker seemed to move far faster than even his ship’s great engines could propel him. The familiar stars of home had long since fallen away. What lay ahead and all around him was an unknown expanse whose mysteries he, his crew, and their young vessel were meant to discover.

So much to explore,he thought, at once humbled and exhilarated by the realization. Who’s out here? What will we find waiting for us? And what’ll we learn along the way?These were the same questions that had led him to join Starfleet years ago. Now, as then, he could think of only one certain way to unveil the answers.

Soon,he told himself. Soon…

“Will?”

Deanna.He was suddenly grounded again, the solidity of his starship sure and tangible once more, though the rushing star clusters and nebulae remained. Standing in the center of the spherical holotank, he’d been so immersed in the simulation that he hadn’t noticed her entering the cartography lab.

“Computer, deactivate audio,” Riker said, abruptly silencing the music of the immortal Satchmo.

Deanna came up alongside him, her eyes searching his as they met. “Are you all right?” she asked.

He nodded and wrapped an arm around her shoulders; she reciprocated, slipping one of her arms around his waist. “Just looking over the road ahead,” he said quietly.

“And how does it look to you?”

The question took him off guard, forcing him to grope blindly for an answer. “Big,” he said finally, unable to keep a slight laugh out of his voice.

“Then maybe you shouldn’t take such a long view,” she said lightly. “Just take it a step at a time.”