Sisko implemented the sequence just as he’d learned it in reverse at the Academy. He estimated he had about three minutes to get clear before she blew, and hurried to the sleeping quarters for his kit.

Tuvok had left the Romulan transmitter behind.

They had the datachips as evidence, not to mention Zetha. Sisko had overheard Curzon’s agreement with the Romulans to ignore the two transmitters if she ignored Albatross.There probably wasn’t any reason to bring this transmitter along, but for some reason Sisko couldn’t get his mind off it.

Just then he felt the tractor beam release. Okinawawas about to put some distance between herself and the doomed Albatross,he had less than a minute left, and he’d better get moving.

“Okinawato Albatross,”he heard Leyton saying tightly. “Let’s go, Ben, let’s go!”

Koval watched the starship moving away from the disabled freighter, then watched the freighter implode. Minutes before tactical had informed him that the starship had lowered her shields and made use of her transporter, not once but three times, the third time several minutes after the first two. Koval would study the data later and decide whether he believed the intercepted comm signals, or whether the ship had been destroyed deliberately. Why did he care? he asked himself. Doubtless whoever had beamed onto the starship had taken their evidence with them. Still Koval was not overly concerned. He had enough fallback positions to erase all trace of his involvement in this venture once he returned home. Didn’t he? For possibly the first time in his career, Koval was visited with a little trickle of doubt.

Just his luck that the only ship available to bring him here had been commanded by one of the few officers in the Imperial Fleet who had the intestinal fortitude to defy his order to destroy the freighter and damn the consequences.

What bothered Koval most was how the ungainly little freighter, followed by the starship, had known to come to Renaga. They must have had far more to go on than Cinchona/Thamnos’s sloppy academic paper touting hilopon.Had the idiot’s father blabbed?

That thought led Koval to another uneasy thought: He would have to notify the old man personally that his son was dead and, if necessary, instruct him to remain silent. An unpleasant duty, but one he must perform.

And as he knew his Rigelians, he doubted the lockjawed Papaver had talked. There was something here he wasn’t seeing. What was it?

Leaving the warbird’s bridge, where Tal’s relief, a sardonic old veteran who had lost family to the Tal Shiar, was more than happy to see the back of him, Koval repaired to the safe room hidden in the bowels of every warbird, equipped with everything a Tal Shiar officer might need, whether one was assigned or not, and sealed himself off for the duration. He had much work to do.

“What took you so long, Ben?” Leyton had come down to sickbay personally. “For a minute there, we thought we were going to lose you. No one said you had to go down with the ship.”

“Just saying goodbye,” Sisko said. He nodded toward the transmitter. “And wanted to make sure we brought all the evidence.”

“Not worth risking your life for,” was Leyton’s opinion. “You’re an innocent, Ben. Don’t you know if there isn’t enough evidence, you can always invent some?”

“Sir?” Sisko asked, but Leyton had moved on.

Under orders from Starfleet Command, the away team had been beamed directly into quarantine in sickbay. Selar assured them it would not be for long.

Curzon Dax and Admiral Tal had a less than productive encounter with the Renagan Council of Elders.

“Isn’t this a violation of your Federation’s touted Prime Directive?” Tal remarked once they’d finally beamed down to Renaga and met face to face.

Curzon smiled as they strode together up the broad steps of the Council building. “Not in this instance. The Renagans have had outworld visitors before. Some have actually beamed down in their presence and been ignored. The Renagans simply refuse to believe that anyone lives on the lights in their sky. You’ll see.”

The meeting, if such it could be called, was exactly as Curzon said it would be. The nine doddering old men studied the two visitors, then conferred among themselves before their leader spoke.

“You say you are not of this world. That is not possible. Therefore we know you are lying, and we do not acknowledge you.”

As one, the Elders turned their backs on them.

Tal took a step forward, as if to argue, but a gesture from Curzon stayed him.

“They did actually speak to us,” he whispered. “It’s more than they’ve done for anyone else. It’s a beginning; let it be enough for now. If we try to push it, they’ll interpret it as weakness. There will be other times.”

Tal clenched his teeth in frustration. “Fools!” he growled as he and Curzon walked together down the broad steps of the Council building, completely ignored by the passersby, and returned to where they had beamed down. “To stand there and speak to us, yet tell us we do not exist—! The urge to knock their rotten old heads together…”

“Try negotiating with Klingons sometime,” Curzon muttered. “We shall report back to our respective governments and let them decide what to do.”

He and Tal eyed each other with mutual respect. “Jolan tru,my newfound friend,” Curzon said. “Perhaps someday we’ll meet again.”

“After half a century of silence?” Tal snorted, but then thought about it. He shrugged. “Who knows?”

There is an art to leaving the battleground when no battle has taken place. In a graceful maneuver worthy of a Strauss waltz, warbird and starship pirouetted away from each other under impulse and, their navigators having plotted the quickest route out of the Zone, turned their backs on each other, and catapulted into warp and away.

No way of knowing what happened aboard the warbird. Aboard Okinawa,a medical conference was under way.

“This is the result of introducing a serum derived from the blood of the dead Romulan on Quirinus into a sample of active Catalyst virus,” Selar was saying, her data safe in Okinawa’s databanks and being relayed to Starfleet Medical on Earth. “This, the result of a similar serum derived from blood samples Dr. Crusher took from Zetha before we left Earth, also interacting with live Catalyst virus.”

There was no need to give a play-by-play. Everyone watching, from McCoy to Crusher to Uhura to the away team to Okinawa’s medical staff, who had cleared the team to leave quarantine once they’d seen the test results, could see what was happening. Dr. Selar’s two experimental sera were gobbling up the Catalyst virus faster than it could replicate.

“There’s your vaccine,” Crusher said with a nod toward Zetha. “It’s you. For whatever reason, probably something at the mitochondrial level, the disease didn’t have time to activate in your bloodstream before it mutated. We’ve had the solution right under our noses all along.”

“Not entirely, Dr. Crusher,” Selar said as Zetha wondered where to put herself. “We still have to ascertain why the same gene sequence that renders some individuals immune to Catalyst also mutates from a deadly form to a killed form suitable for vaccine, given enough time.”

“Not something its creators anticipated, I’m sure!” McCoy growled, then reconsidered. “Or maybe they did. Be convenient for some Romulan bioterrorist to have the cure handy once the disease had killed enough people to create panic. I knew Thamnos hadn’t done this on his own!”

“It’s convenient for us, too,” was Uhura’s opinion. “With the help of those datachips, we can track down any additional ‘seeds’ in Federation territory. I’m sure at least some of them would be happy to serve as in situproviders of vaccine.”

Tuvok had in fact already begun tracking. “An interesting addendum to the mystery on Tenjin,” he reported. “Two seeds were in fact deployed to two separate environmental domes. Both eventually met up in a third dome and were killed in a transport accident before they could spread the disease further.”