Which was not to say that the silence was absolute. Starfleet Intelligence had Listeners inside the Empire, just as Uhura knew the Romulans had operatives in Federation space. Occasionally one side or the other was able to turn one of their counterparts into a double agent. There was always some question about what could or could not be believed.

But sometimes the source was so well established it predated Tomed and the silence, and in that respect it could perhaps be trusted more.

Would the messenger have been sent at all if someone other than Uhura had been head of Starfleet Intelligence? What if she had stepped down this time last year, or even last week? Retirement was always on her mind, and yet—

No more!she told herself. Just this one more mission, then I’m stepping down.

She said the same thing every year. And every year, when the winter rains began to sweep across San Francisco Bay and her birthday came around, she pulled up the resignation letter she’d kept on file since the day she took this job, updated it, and thought: I’ll submit it on New Year’s Eve. Secure all my agents-in-place, give the C-in-C my recommendations for who should replace me, help groom that person for the job, and, before the year is out, quietly step aside.

And then what?she wondered every time. When do I decide it’s enough, that someone else can take my place, and it’s time for me to do what, exactly?

She supposed she could always retire to the country house near the ruins of Gedi, and sit under the jacarandas watching the blue flash of agamalizards flitting through the leaves and the giraffes making their stately parade through the clearing, or sling a Vulcan lute over her shoulder and hitch a ride on the first freighter headed toward a star beyond Antares, or write her memoirs….

Ah, now, there was the rub. There was so much she couldn’t tell, and so many biographies and autobiographies and historical overviews and intimate portraits had already been written by and about the crew of Enterprise,but what the historians and biographers knew about Nyota Uhura was the tip of the proverbial iceberg. And because she couldn’t talk about so much of what she knew, they would more likely than not sum up her career as being nothing more than “Hailing frequencies open, Captain.” No, that wouldn’t do. There was still good work that she could do here.

Besides, she’d miss the parties. The Klingon flagship K’tarrawould be in town next week, and Starfleet was holding a reception for her senior officers. Sarek of Vulcan would be there trying to maintain his dignity while Thought Admiral Klaad and Curzon Dax drank bloodwine and swapped tall stories all night, and she wouldn’t want to miss that for the world. Retirement from Starfleet Intelligence meant a special kind of retirement. It meant either you submitted to having your memory selectively erased, in which case you ended up smiling vacuously when people mentioned missions you were on because you truly didn’t remember them, or else you stepped out of the limelight altogether and lived somewhere quietly, probably under a new identity and no doubt under observation, because there were things you knew that could be extracted from your mind and used with terrible consequences. They never told you that when you entered intelligence work, only when you tried to leave.

I’d miss the parties,Uhura thought. And the sense that once in a while what I do makes a difference to the cosmos at large. I don’t want to give that up just yet. But all the rest of it…

Oh, hell!Uhura thought. I’m a long way from being able to retire. But this will be my last hands-on case, I swear. From now on, I delegate. This will be a fitting swan song, the final sentence in a conversation that began in an unlikely spot on Khitomer almost seventy years ago…

“Admiral Uhura,” a stringer for the Altair Information Syndicate wanted to know, “is there any truth to the rumor that you’re planning to retire at the end of this year?”

“I’ll tell you this much,” she said seriously. “I do not intend to die at my desk.”

By now she could play the reporters like a string quartet. She wondered why they came back year after year, just as the academic year was starting, to ask her the same questions again and again, plead for a chance to sit in on the most popular class ever taught at the Academy, pester her for insights into the workings of SI that were retina-scan classified and that she couldn’t possibly give them.

But Command said interaction with the media was necessary. Keep the public informed, Academy personnel were told; let them see that Starfleet is their friend. So Uhura played along, poised and in control at the speaker’s podium, her rich contralto voice with its three-octave range caressing their auditory receptors regardless of their species.

What did they see when they looked at her? A petite human woman of African ancestry, well past the century mark, with a single wing of jet-black hair sweeping back from her brow into the aura of white hair that framed her face like a cloud, accentuating her upswept amber eyes and what at least one old admirer had once called “cheekbones to die for.”

Her heritage was Bantu, from among those tribes whose tradition was matrilineal, where sons inherited from their mothers and every woman was a queen. She held herself like a queen and moved like a dancer, and it was not unknown for her male students to fall all over themselves with schoolboy crushes trying to impress her. Nor were they alone. Part of her skill at moving among the influential of many worlds was her ability to attract the appreciation of males from a multitude of species.

She was at peace with herself, comfortable in her own skin, and it showed.

“So how did you get involved in intelligence, Admiral?” a Benzite asked, his aerator huffing between phrases.

Uhura smiled her careful official smile, no less dazzling than the range of others she possessed. Her voice went low and conspiratorial, and her eyes went hooded with mystery.

“I could tell you but, as the saying goes, I’d have to kill you.” She waited for the translators to render it, for the requisite laughter that followed, then added: “If you’d asked my grandfather, he’d have said I was born to it…”

The old man sat watching the sunlit pattern of the leaves at his feet. The morning was quiet enough for him to hear the chirring of insects, the squawk of the go-away birds, the sough of the breeze through the feathery leaves of the jacaranda whose powerful branches arched above him. He shifted his bony frame on the bench, his long-fingered hands clasped contentedly on the knob of the cane he used more as a symbol of his dignity than as an aid in walking for, even at 120 years, he was still straight and limber and strong.

The silence and his contemplation were broken by the sound of something wild running breakneck through the bush.

A blur of skinny arms and legs shot out of the trees, zigging left and right, but headed toward him. He could hear her labored breathing, see the terror in her eyes, and could only imagine what was pursuing her. When she was almost past him, the old man snaked out one remarkably quick hand and snagged her by the shirttail.

Nyota jerked to a halt, her bare feet kicking up dust, and ducked behind the old man, making herself as small as possible.

“Polepole,my girl!” the old man chided her in kiSwahili, trying not to laugh at the sight of her. Her little ribs were heaving; there were twigs stuck every which way in her halo of small braids. “Slowly, child. Where do you think you’re going so fast?”

“They’re after me, Babu!”she wheezed. “They’re going to get me!”

“Who is?”

“Juma and Malaika.” Her ten-years-older cousin and his girl.

“And why would they be doing that?”