“One would think the cold would be sufficient,” Tuvok remarked, his own tricorder alert for signs of movement in the narrow, high-walled streets, where the wind howled around corners, adding to the chill.

Selar silenced her tricorder. “A charnel house. An attempt to at least contain all the dead in one place. Doubtless waiting until everyone has succumbed before any effort is made toward disposal.”

“Apparently stored here in the earlier stages of the disease,” Tuvok observed, indicating the frozen corpses littering the narrow street before them. “These others were not so fortunate. Can specimens be gathered from the recently dead?”

“Perhaps,” Selar said, kneeling in the snow to examine the two nearest them, an elderly woman and a child wrapped in a final frozen embrace against the perimeter wall. “Ideally, however, those still living would be preferable.”

“But to trouble them when they know that they are dying…” Tuvok suggested. Was it only the cold that made his voice husky?

“Indeed. But if the evidence they provide can prevent further deaths…”

Tuvok frowned. “I would be most interested in ascertaining the identity of the stranger whose arrival coincided with that of the illness. Lieutenant Sisko has us both on locator. I suggest we split up and communicate on discrete.”

“Agreed.”

Once again, Sisko was monitoring life-sign readings and talking to one of the holos. This time it was Uhura.

“Not good news on Jarquin’s sons,” she reported. “Or any Quirinian who emigrates to Romulus, for that matter.”

“From what I understand of the situation, Admiral, why am I not surprised?”

“Most of them are recruited by the military. The Empire essentially uses them for cannon fodder for the most dangerous missions. The ruling families have always preferred to use colonials on the frontiers. Looks like they’ve refined it to a science.”

“Glad it’s Tuvok and not me who has to give Jarquin that information,” Sisko mused.

“Status report?” Uhura asked, bringing them back to the present.

“Tuvok and Selar have both infiltrated the enclosure and, judging from the readings, except for the occasional patrol, they’re the only thing moving down there. They’ve split up. I’m assuming Selar’s gathering specimens. Tuvok said something about wanting to find out anything he could about the stranger the citizens claim brought the disease.”

“And Zetha?”

“Aft, puttering in the lab, last time I checked.”

“Do you check often, Lieutenant?”

Tuvok moved like a shadow. The lock on the storehouse door proved too strong for him to break, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t pick it. But the mechanism was sluggish with the cold, and it took him longer than he expected. He had timed the patrols outside the walls earlier in the day, and now could only hope to be inside the storehouse and out of range of their scanners before they happened by again. His life-signs would read normal, not feverish, and the guards might consider that worthy of investigation.

At last the lock yielded to his skills, the massive door opened inward and, mercifully, did not either scrape the floor or squeak, and he slipped inside. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, it took all of his Vulcan discipline not to react to what he saw.

He had expected the corpses, but not the rats. They swarmed everywhere, feeding on the dead, hissing and squealing but refusing to give ground at his approach, swarming with the mad purposefulness of a single entity. Wondering if a rat bite would breach the fabric of a hazmat suit, Tuvok moved stealthily so as not to rouse them further. He also wondered if there was some way to warn Subhar and those outside the wall to exterminate the rats.

An enclosure in one corner of the vast, high-raftered room—doubtless at one time an office of some sort—drew his attention. Perhaps there were records, lists of the dead, even information about the interloper who had purportedly brought the illness among them.

This door was not locked. While there were indeed some cursory lists of the dead, apparently abandoned when the numbers became overwhelming and, perhaps, the one compiling the list also fell ill, what Tuvok found most significant was the corpse thrown carelessly onto a table in a corner, doubtless the interloper himself, set apart from the others as if not to defile them by his presence. Ironically, his being exiled in death had spared him the defilement of the rats.

Judging from the wounds inflicted on the body, he had not died easily. His clothing was Quirinian and so, on superficial examination in this dim light, were his features. But Tuvok’s tricorder told a different tale.

“Evidence of cosmetic surgery to remove pronounced brow ridges,” he reported to Selar on discrete. “On empirical evidence, I believe this individual was Romulan.”

“Interesting,” was Selar’s muffled response. Tuvok assumed she was preoccupied with gathering evidence of her own, and ended the transmission. Then, using the techniques Selar had taught him, he took blood and skin samples from the late and unlamented stranger and, making his way gingerly among the rats, returned the way he had come.

Zetha was tidying and prepping the lab in preparation for Selar’s return. She could hear Sisko and Uhura discussing her, even at this distance. Sisko might dictate where she could go, but not what she could hear. Knowing when and how to listen had gotten her this far.

“You are wallpaper,” the Lord told her. “A potted plant, a desk ornament. They will speak freely in your presence, because they will not notice you are there.”

I am wallpaper,Zetha thought. And it was true. Neither of the two men noticed her; they talked with their heads together as if she was not there.

Military, her instinct told her as soon as they had appeared in the anteroom of the shop, the younger of the two announcing that he had an appointment with the jeweler to look at some naming day gifts. Neither man identified himself, but there was no doubt they were military, though both were in mufti. It was in the way they carried themselves. All Romulans walked guarded in public, but these two were even more so; their very ears had ears. Erect spines, square shoulders even without the overpadded uniforms, voices correct even in whispers, that upper-caste accent they could never escape.

“But what else?”she could hear the Lord’s voice in her mind. He had arranged for her to apprentice to this particular jeweler expressly because his shop was frequented by officers. For all she knew, the jeweler himself was Tal Shiar. He certainly had the nastiness. “Observe, report. What else?”

Student and mentor? Father and son? Superior officer and subordinate? She did the exercise for her own purposes; she would tell the lord as little as possible. Even as she pretended not to look at them, concentrating on untangling a mess of fine neck chains the jeweler had dropped, she swore, on purpose just to give her something to do, and they made themselves comfortable on the couches in the anteroom while the jeweler went to fetch his trays of rings and pendants for their consideration, her peripheral vision took them in, her senses registering every nuance.

Report: They were a generation apart in age, and the younger man—not young, but younger than the other, middle-aged, the kind of man who might easily have children her age, who might even… Stop it, fool! Stop seeing every Romulan of a certain age as a potential father—all right then, the one in his prime, square-faced, ridge-browed, graying at the temples, deferred to the elder who was the handsomer of the two—silver-haired, smooth-browed, fox-faced, patrician.

Yes, military by caste and birth, when either might have chosen differently had there been a choice permitted. Aemetha’s speech about a people always at war rang in her head, and she found herself wondering if the elites as a caste would be quite as arrogant if they didn’t live under the knowledge that they would forever have to send their best and brightest out to the stars and to death.