The fact that the murder weapon was a native kitchen knife might almost have led him to the obvious conclusion that Thamnos had been killed by a Renagan, for whatever reasons Renagans killed each other. Jealous husband, embittered wife, cheated business partner—what did he care? But when he realized that the Rigelian’s transmitter and the datachips were gone, Koval arrived at a different conclusion entirely.

A Renagan killer might have opened the case looking for valuables and, not finding anything but datachips, meaningless to an illiterate, dumped them on the floor, smashed the transmitter as being equally useless, trashed the place, and gone away. The fact that the only things missing could directly link Thamnos, the seeds, and the Empire was disquieting. Whoever had done this knew exactly what they were looking for. Using a native knife to kill the Rigelian was just a sardonic twist.

Seething, Koval searched the cave once more to make certain he’d overlooked nothing. Knocking carelessly against a table, he overturned several jars of hilopon.

“And we never even figured out how the accursed stuff works!” he muttered in disgust, rubbing the fine powder between his fingers before wiping them fastidiously on a handkerchief, which he wrapped around the haft of the knife and, not without tugging, pulled it free. He touched the dead man’s neck. Not that he expected to find a pulse, but he wanted to determine how long ago he had been killed.

The corpse was still warm, the limbs limp as a rag doll’s, not yet stiffened with rigor mortis. Thamnos had been dead for less than an hour. Whoever did this could not have gone far.

With a humorless smile, Koval wrapped the knife in the handkerchief, which he concealed in his tunic before signaling the warbird.

“Scan the planet for any sign of transport,” he ordered Tal. “A ship, a shuttle, a transporter signal. At once!”

“Acknowledged,” Admiral Tal replied, nodding to his science officer to run the scan. Tal himself was watching something else on the forward screen with the intensity of a predator watching a mouse. The schematic showed him a smallish, lumpy shape that did not match the configurations of the military vessels of any enemy he knew. A civilian ship, then, streaking away from the surface of a pre-industrial world as fast as its engines could take it, which wasn’t all that fast.

She cannot see us,Tal thought, checking the cloak anyway, yet she somehow knows we’re here. I wonder if she’s what Koval brought us all this way to find.

Admiral Tal allowed himself the luxury of a yawn. With the indolence of a predator who’s already eaten a full meal, he let the mouse go.

“Admiral?” Sciences had completed her scan. “There is no sign of any alien vessel on the planet.”

They had all seen the small awkward ship streaking away from the planet just moments before Koval gave his order for a sensor scan. But if Tal said they hadn’t, then they were prepared to swear on their mothers’ graves that they hadn’t.

“Admiral?” Helm was more nervous than usual. None of them liked it when Tal Shiar was aboard, and no one needed to tell them Koval was Tal Shiar. They knew. “Colonel Koval is signaling to beam aboard.”

“Yes, yes, by all means, beam his lordship aboard!” Tal said dryly. “And quickly now! He needs to know we found nothing on the planet.”

Whatever smiles or titters the bridge crew might have indulged in were well gone before Koval strode onto the bridge.

“We’re leaving orbit,” he announced.

“Are we now?” Tal’s expression was just this close to a sneer. How many scars did he bear in service to an Empire that had spawned… this.But Koval was oblivious to the admiral’s disdain. Whatever he’d found on Renaga had locked him into killer mode; before Tal could give the order, Koval took over.

“Helm, come about. Set scan to widest possible range and scan for any and all vessels in the area. The rest of you, to battle stations!”

“Energy distortion,” Tuvok reported evenly. “Port side aft.”

“I’m told no matter how often they redesign the cloak, there’s always some leakage,” Sisko mused, hoping he didn’t sound as anxious as he felt. “Damn! Just a few minutes more and we’d have been able to put the planet between us and hide out. She’s seen us, and she’s in pursuit.”

The icy silence between the Federation and the Empire had begun before he was born. He’d never seen a Romulan warbird before, and would have been perfectly content to live a long and fruitful life without ever having the privilege. He raised Albatross’s ancient shields and opened the intraship.

“Sisko to Selar and Zetha. Assume battle stations. We’ve got company, and we may have to do some fancy maneuvering between now and when Okinawa—uh-oh!”

Tuvok correctly interpreted that as “Romulan vessel powering weapons and decloaking.” At Sisko’s nod he opened a channel and, in the most imperious Romulan he could muster, announced: “Imperial warbird, this is a civilian vessel. Documentation is in order. We are prepared to be boarded and searched if you desire.”

The hell we are,Sisko thought, trying to push the engines to give him a little bit more, but they were already giving him everything they had.

“Imperial warbird…” Had to give Tuvok credit for trying. “…why are you powering weapons? I repeat, we are a civilian vessel. We are prepared—”

The answer was a phaser blast that, had Sisko not flung the clumsy bird into evasive, would have blown them into smithereens. Instead it swatted the ship off course, drained the shields down to forty percent, and set off an alarm somewhere that Sisko hadn’t even known the ship had.

“A little better aim and we’re finished,” he told Tuvok unnecessarily, readying to throw her into a new evasive pattern before the next blast. “C’mon, Okinawa,where are you?”

It was a peculiar artifact of Romulan ships that they were rather poorly designed acoustically. Depending upon the class of ship, they all made some sort of sound. Some hummed, some whined, some expressed themselves in a kind of low waspish buzz, but they all gave voice. One would think a species so acute of hearing would have remedied this long ago. Or perhaps the ships were designed that way deliberately, to keep the crew always on edge, always combat ready.

As if the background noise weren’t annoying enough, seasoned veterans swore they could feel the weapons fire vibrate through the soles of their boots before they heard it. New recruits usually scoffed at them, until they felt it for themselves.

Some commanders, it was said, could feel the weapons even before they fired, the way a cat senses a thunderclap or a bird an earthquake long before a human does. After more than a century in space, Tal could feel the weapons in his bones. Even as Koval said, “Weapons, target and fire” he was out of his chair shouting “Belay that!”

But if Helm was nervous, Weapons was more so, and he’d triggered one phaser blast, however badly aimed, before he could stop himself. But Tal’s wrath was not for him. He fixed his glare on Koval.

“Weapons, stand down!” Tal addressed his crew, though his eyes had locked with Koval’s and he did not break his gaze. “You obey no order but mine. If Colonel Koval has a problem with that, he will have to speak to me. Now, you,” he said to Koval. “What, by the Elements, do you think you’re doing?”

“What am Idoing?” Koval asked quietly. “Destroying a ship that should not be here in the first place.”

“Admiral?” Comm said, opening the channel so he could hear the voice from the merchanter demanding to know why they were being fired on. Tal listened, still glaring at Koval.

“That’s one of our own aboard. If you kill him without knowing who or why—”

“A Romulan? On that rattletrap?” Koval waved the idea away. “Weapons, overtake and fire.”