Everything, Thamnos had thought, balefully eyeing the stranger blocking the light at the entrance to his cave. I am about to lose everything!

“How did you find me?” he asked, pretending to be calmer than he felt.

“Your father sent me,” the stranger said.

“But—” Thamnos began, and only then, after how many years, did it occur to him that of course his tiny ship, only one of many in the family hangar, would have had a homing device.

But the stranger was not interested in Thamnos family matters. He came straight to the point. “He owes us certain…considerations. Control of the hiloponis ours from here on.”

Chapter 12

As a matter of cosmic history, one man’s terrorist can be another man’s freedom fighter, and if a Rigelian by any other name can pass for a Romulan to the cursory scan of a tricorder, the reverse can also true.

The path to the office of chairman of the Tal Shiar was a steep and necessarily twisted one. In the course of his climb, Koval had had to do a lot of traveling early in his career.

Everyone knows what spies do. They infiltrate a society, eavesdrop on its conversations, study its fleet movements and weapons technology, report on unrest and sedition in its streets, send encrypted messages back to headquarters on often-compromised frequencies and, with luck as much as spycraft, live to spy another day.

But that sort of legwork is largely for the young spy, and the goal is always to come in from the streets and out of the cold to a room of one’s own. The secret world, like any organization, has its middle management. Those spies who survive the years of ground-level sneakery without capture, torture, execution, or, perhaps worst of all, reprogramming, eventually plateau here, unless they have the sheer temerity to step on as many necks as possible on their climb to the upper echelons.

In the world of spies, much of a middle manager’s daily work lies in trying to “turn” spies from the other side, convincing them to join his cause; the rest of his time is spent in recruiting civilians to be spies. How and why the Thamnos family ended up in Koval’s pocket was a tale too long in the telling. But the sins of the fathers often pass to the sons, even if the sons are not sophisticated enough to understand the agenda their fathers have created.

All this weighed on Koval’s mind as he stood in the entrance to the makeshift underground laboratory, the dust of Renaga sullying his otherwise meticulously shined boots. The Tal Shiar had had sleeper cells on Renaga for decades. They knew someone had come to ground in a small private ship over a decade ago and had reported their finding to their superiors, who filed the information for future reference.

When Koval needed a front man for his latest freelance project, he had thought of a Rigelian. There was a saying about Rigelians on both sides of the Zone—“looks like a human, scans like a Vulcan”—and they had been of use to both sides often in the past. Koval recalled that Thamnos the Elder owed him a favor. If he believed in gods, Koval might have thought they were smiling on him when the senior Thamnos told him of his son’s disappearance and provided him with the call signal for the missing ship.

Marvelous!was Koval’s first thought. Everything I need in one place. Pity it’s such a backward, out-of-the-way place and I shall have to travel there personally, but even so…

Mindful of the bewilderment in Thamnos the Younger’s squinty eyes—the fool had no idea what this was all about—Koval considered the mediocrity of the material he sometimes had to work with. But the stupid ones were often the most easy to manipulate, and it was all for the glory of the Empire, was it not? Koval looked down his aristocratic nose at the man who on this world called himself Cinchona and asked:

“How would you like to be immortal?”

The poor dupe’s answer was exactly what Koval expected.

“What does that mean?” he said and, on that tenuous basis, Koval worked his alchemy.

Utilizing a lifelong fascination with biological warfare, he had become a specialist within the Tal Shiar, responsible for not a few covert experiments on colonials and subject populations. Now it was time to take his skills to the next level. Since Jekri Kaleh’s ouster, he was one step away from the chairmanship, and the Continuing Committee was rumored to be seeking a replacement for the current chairman, who was well past his prime. This action, Koval hoped, would prompt the Committee’s hearts and minds to turn toward him.

In his research he had of course searched the archives for the Gnawing, and found its potential encouraging. In fact, he wondered why no one had thought to use it before. He now had a place to begin. One never knew when the ability to depopulate a planet without damaging its infrastructure might come in handy. And there were so many other things one could do with a manageable disease along the way.

But there were problems. For one thing, fear of the Gnawing was so entrenched in the Romulan psyche that, even after a thousand years free of it, it would be among the first things any reputable physician would test for. Further, its incubation period was too short to be effective. Within a day or two of exposure, those afflicted died. Civil authorities, faced with an outbreak of something so virulent, would quarantine affected populations, terminating the spread. One could hope at best to kill a few hundred per world. Not what Koval had in mind.

Then, of course, there was the question of checks and balances. One wanted an antidote, a way of stopping the disease from spreading to one’s own troops, being inadvertently carried onto a warbird, and turning it into a ghost ship or, worse, a carrion bird bringing the disease back to the homeworld.

Problem: Create a disease with a long incubation period for which there is a cure that only you control.

Solution: the Gnawing, grafted onto R-fever (which had the added advantage of crossing species to affect humanoids as well) and other chimeric entities, to confuse anyone trying to deconstruct it, potentially curable by a substance called hilopon,which your sleeper cells report is only found on Renaga.

He could have done all of this himself, although obtaining the R-fever might have been problematic, but for safety’s sake Koval wanted a dupe to take the fall in case anything went wrong. Who better than a former Federation citizen, who just happened to be a research physician of sorts, living in exile on the very world inside the Zone that held the cure? It was almost too easy.

Using the simplest words possible, Koval told Thamnos what was expected of him. Not that he told him everything. He offered Thamnos virtual immortality and Thamnos, being who and what he was, didn’t bother with the details. The disease he would create, with the help of Romulan scientists, would simply evidence itself on selected worlds, Koval explained, with no possible way of being traced back to him. His role would be that of the great savior who offered the cure. Fame, fortune, the Nobel Prize, the Zee-Magnees Prize, all would be within his reach.

“But what if the hilopondoesn’t work?” Thamnos asked.

“Oh, but it will,” Koval assured him. “We’ve already tested it on the Gnawing. We assume you’ve tested it on the R-fever. If it kills both, it will kill the two in combination. We’re certain of it.”