“I am to tell you not to open it except within a medical steri-field,” Zetha said now, in the careful singsong she adapted when reciting the words Cretak had taught her. “It contains biomedical material from those who have died, which may still be highly contagious.”

The locket was beautiful, almost as big as the palm of Uhura’s hand, but the touch of the cold metal coupled with Zetha’s words about contagion made her hand tingle, and she had to suppress an urge to fling the object into the bushes as if it were a scorpion. She waited for common sense to overcome fear, then enfolded the locket in her fingers, her mind racing.

Operational triage: What to do first. Get this to Medical at once. Entrust it to Dr. Crusher, with instructions. Attempt to verify everything she’d just heard by contacting her Listeners on the other side. And then—

And then figure out what she was going to do with Pandora’s box now that she’d delivered her message that there are evils loose between the stars, and the head of Starfleet Intelligence must attempt to stop them. Uhura took a deep breath and steadied herself.

“Are you hungry?” she asked Zetha.

Ravenous would have been a better word. Uhura and Lieutenant Tuvok watched from behind the mirror wall as Zetha polished off a meal that would have done a longshoreman proud, then went back to the replicator for seconds.

“What do you make of her, Mr. Tuvok?” Uhura asked quietly, always interested in the Vulcan perspective. Early in his Starfleet career, Tuvok had done some undercover work for Intelligence, and Uhura was familiar with his credentials. He had also come to her with Hikaru Sulu’s highest recommendation, and that was worth its weight in latinum. Examining his record since his return to Starfleet, Uhura could see that even his long leave of absence to pursue Kolinahrhad not dulled his skills or tarnished his loyalty. He would be a strong asset for her team.

Tuvok canted his head slightly as Vulcans did when they were studying something, his usual seriousness deepening into a slight frown.

“Female vulcanoid, age approximately twenty Earth years. Height approximately 1.6 meters, weight approximately forty-eight kilos. Color of eyes, green, color of hair, dark brown, distinguishing marks, none apparent…”

Was it only Uhura’s imagination that as Tuvok spoke, the young woman stopped shoveling food in with both hands and raised her head imperceptibly, as if she sensed another, and nonhuman, presence? There was no question she had known at once that the mirror wasn’t just a mirror, and that she was being observed from the other side. But did she also sense by whom? No,Uhura thought. That much I’m imagining.

“Freckles,” she said when Tuvok was done, watching Zetha finish her second helping and, with a sleight of hand almost too quick to see, secrete an apple and two uneaten spring rolls in a pocket of her travel cloak against future contingencies, conditioning, perhaps, from not always knowing where her next meal was coming from. “Surely you noticed the freckles. And she’s built like a Balanchine dancer.”

She could see Tuvok searching his memory for the reference and coming up blank. Vulcans, she knew, hated to admit they didn’t know something.

“I am not familiar with the reference,” he said at last, grudgingly.

“Nor should you be, Lieutenant. George Balanchine was a ballet master on Earth a few centuries ago. He believed the perfect female body for the dance was one that was exactly the height and weight you described, but with legs proportionately longer than the torso. Balanchine would have adored this one.”

“Indeed.”

“But you said ‘vulcanoid,’ not Romulan.”

“Is she Romulan, Admiral?”

“I’m asking you.”

“Uncertain merely on appearance. If I could engage her in conversation, I might be able to learn more. A mind-meld, of course, would ascertain her identity definitively.”

“I doubt the latter will be necessary,” Uhura said, moving away from the mirror wall and indicating that Tuvok should do the same. “But she came to me from the other side of the Zone, and the person who sent her used the code words ‘Pandora’s box.’ ”

This was a reference Tuvok recognized. “Indeed?”

“I’m not saying she’s a security risk, but I’m asking you to debrief her with your usual thoroughness, and take her in hand for the course of this mission. Not so that it’s obvious, but—”

“Understood. Now, as to the nature of the mission—?”

Uhura motioned him out of the anteroom and let the door lock behind them. “In my office,” she said.

She offered him coffee, real brewed arabica, not synthesized, ground fresh every morning from beans grown on the slopes of Mount Kenya, not far from her grandparents’ summer house. Tuvok accepted, tasted, nodded appreciatively. Uhura put her own cup down and got to the point.

“Tell me what you know about something the Romulans call the Gnawing.”

“An ancient illness,” Tuvok said carefully. Vulcans were always careful in addressing anything to do with their distant siblings and the reasons for their separation. “Rumored to have arisen among those who chose to leave Vulcan at the time of the Sundering. I know no more than that.”

“It killed upwards of fifty percent of those who settled on Romulus,” Uhura told him quietly.

“Indeed?” Tuvok’s eyebrow went up. He seemed about to question the number, but decided against it. “Nevertheless, to my knowledge, it is an ancient illness. There have been no serious outbreaks since the Sundering.”

“There are now,” Uhura said.

Chapter 3

History, it is said, is written by the victors. But what of a war where there is no victor? Who writes the history then?

The pundits refer to the split between Vulcan and Romulan, between the followers of Surak and those who could not accept his teaching, as the Sundering. As if it were as quick and clean as an amicable divorce, the two parties deciding that, no longer having anything in common, it was time for them to part. Or, perhaps more likely from the Vulcan perspective, as if severing a diseased limb from a healthy body and casting it aside.

It is no dishonor to the memory of Surak to say that he and his philosophy were less than perfect. And it is a lesson of more than one planet’s history that even the most inspired of reformers cannot foresee all possible long-term outcomes of their reforms.

Outworlders know of Vulcan only what Vulcans wish them to know. Vulcans speak in lofty phrases of a history “shrouded in antiquity…savage, even by Earth standards,” and few who are not Vulcan presume to question them further, grateful perhaps that beings of such intellect and physical strength—and telepaths at that—have chosen to suppress all that potential for violence beneath a veneer of logic and civilization. Easier to assume that those who could not tolerate Surak’s reforms simply boarded their ships without a glance back and quietly, if bitterly, left the planet.

But did they go all at once or over decades, years, generations? Was there only a handful of ships, or did vast armadas fill the skies above the arid and unforgiving mother world? Did all who went go willingly, or were some forced into exile, and by what means? Were families, friends, lovers torn apart?

And what of those who stayed behind? Did they buy the official story, that both sides would be the better for it, that it was not an end but a beginning? Or did some, even as the ships departed, too late, have second thoughts?