“What makes you say that?”

“Because it would be suicide to do otherwise. The odds on something this deadly spreading throughout the entire Empire—I can’t believe they’d do that.”

Uhura sighed. Every generation had to be taught anew. “Then you don’t know Romulans. Granted, there have been no official contacts since Tomed, but go through your archives and see how many instances we know of where Romulan medical personnel have used experimental drugs on subject populations…”

“That’s different,” Crusher argued. “A drug can be targeted and controlled. A contagion without a cure can’t.” She shuddered, stuck her hands in the pockets of her smock. “Every time I have to work with this thing, no matter what precautions we take, I keep thinking of what could happen if it got out of the lab somehow, if I accidentally brought it home, if a ship whose crew is infected pulled into Spacedock and somehow brought it to Earth. I want a universe in which my son will be safe!”

“Don’t you think I want that as well?” Uhura demanded. “But we ask the Romulans if they know anything about it, and then what? They deny any knowledge of it until they can produce enough evidence to say we created it. How will that make the universe safer? Answer me that. You’re young; I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a combat situation, but—”

“I lost my husband to one.”

That shocked Uhura into silence. She’d forgotten the circumstances of Jack Crusher’s death. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before she spoke again.

“I’d forgotten that. And I am sorry. But let me try to explain something to you.” She deactivated the incoming messages screen—it would be waiting for her the next time she accessed it—folded her hands, leaned forward, and gave Crusher her complete attention. “The reason I am still at this desk instead of off on my own private island somewhere where there are no comm screens, is because I want to do as much as I can to stop the screaming.”

“The screaming? I’m sorry, Admiral, I—”

“I won’t presume to burden you with my experiences, with the number of times in the course of my career that I sat at that communications console listening to the screaming. Because that’s what a comm officer always has to contend with, is the screaming. You have to keep the channels open, keep listening in case the enemy wants to surrender, but mostly what you hear and keep on hearing is the screaming. Until the moment comes when you don’t hear it anymore, you merely watch the debris field scatter across your forward screen. And then you listen to the silence, but it still sounds like screaming.”

She paused for breath, more exercised than Crusher had ever seen her.

“I would like, very much,” she said slowly, “to live the rest of my life without ever again having to listen to the screaming.

“Now, then,” she said, changing gears suddenly, all business again. “This is what we’re going to do. The away team is on its way to Renaga to collect samples of this hiloponand see if it works. If it does, Q.E.D., we bring in the diplomats and the away team comes home. If it doesn’t, I recall the away team anyway, and I get word to Cretak about what we’ve found so far. Then she and I decide what happens next.”

“You’d send Zetha back to her?” Crusher asked for want of anything better to say. “And what about this Thamnos character?”

“Let’s wait and see what the away team finds,” was all Uhura would say.

“And Catalyst?”

“Catalyst!” Uhura repeated bitterly. Why had Command dreamed up such a beautiful name for such a deadly thing? “We keep on looking for a cure. I don’t have a better answer than that, do you?”

“Shooting fish in a barrel,” Sisko muttered as he and Tuvok scanned through several hundred meters of rock to find Cinchona’s laboratory deep inside the mountain and read one solitary life-form within.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s too easy,” Sisko said, suppressing the cough that still plagued him despite Selar’s having given him a complete physical and finding no physiological cause. “Nothing else about this mission has been spelled out in big block letters for us. Something in my bones tells me we’re being set up, and I don’t like it.”

They had scanned Renaga from space, registering a predominantly agrarian society on a temperate but thin-soiled Class-M planet. There seemed to be no large cities, only narrow-laned villages clustered atop steep-sloped mountains, most of them walled and fortified.

“It appears to be a preindustrial society,” Tuvok observed. “I note the equivalent of oxcarts, and some faster indigenous steeds vaguely resembling horses. Unpaved roads, no motorized vehicles or machinery of any kind. Agriculture is conducted by manual labor or with the use of draft animals.”

“Wonder why most of the settlements are clumped on top of the hills like that?” Sisko wondered. “Even if they use most of the land for agriculture, you’d think they’d build a farmhouse in the fields now and then. Floods, maybe?”

“Perhaps they were originally fortresses,” Tuvok suggested. “Possibly suggesting a long history of fighting among local warlords.”

“Of course!” Sisko said. “You think there’s any centralized government at all?”

“Not our concern,” Tuvok said, homing in on a particular sector where something had caught his interest. “We are here to gather hiloponand, if possible, find the individual who submitted the paper to the Journal.The less attention we attract, the better.”

“Agreed. But I meant to ask you about that. How can we be so sure he’s here, if—” Sisko began, but then he noticed what Tuvok had picked up on his scanner. “That can’t be right. You said this was a preindustrial society.”

“I did,” Tuvok acknowledged.

“Then what are they doing with a subspace transmitter? And am I imagining things, or is that a Romulan signature?”

“You are not imagining things,” Tuvok assured him.

A scan of the entire planet in fact revealed three Romulan transmitters, two of which were being intermittently used by a handful of Romulans to send strings of code, probably to a warbird lurking somewhere on the fringes of the Zone. Tuvok would send samples back to Starfleet Command for decoding. The third transmitter, sending from a cave beneath one of the hilltop cities, might have been a Romulan transmitter, but it was not being used by a Romulan.

“The difference is subtle,” Tuvok reported. “But unless I am mistaken, this individual is a Rigelian.”

That was when Sisko began wondering why it was all suddenly so easy. The sight of Cinchona’s life-form reading, alone within his unguarded mountain fastness, was making him twitchy. Not for the first time, he suppressed the urge to cough.

“You’d think someone sitting on what could be one of the greatest medical discoveries of the century would at least have a security system in place,” he suggested.

Traditionally, the Romulan military loathed the Tal Shiar, and the feeling was mutual. Officers of the Imperial fleet were, at least by training, straightforward and direct; they preferred action to talk, the shortest distance between two points. Military strategy had purpose, they argued; the Tal Shiar’s sneakery, they maintained, was more often than not spying for spying’s sake.

The Tal Shiar in general, and Koval in particular, considered the military to be weapons-happy dunderheads, the product of too much upper-caste inbreeding, incapable of original thought.

Nevertheless, when he needed to commandeer a warbird, even to enter the Outmarches, Koval had sufficient clout to hold his nose and do so.

“Cloak engaged,” Admiral Tal announced. He gave Koval a look that would have frightened most men. It bounced off Koval’s mental shields like a badly aimed phaser blast. “I wish I knew where in the hells we’re going and why.”