“And Sliwon—?” Uhura wanted to know.

“It seems our snake-oil salesman was the vector there. A Rigelian by birth, who had traveled extensively in Romulan territory, and claims he has no idea how he became infected.”

“Oh, I’ll just bet!” Uhura said, making a note to have the man extracted from Sliwon. She was going to enjoy interrogating him.

With her away team safe and Okinawaon its way home, the source of the pestilence identified and a cure being implemented, Uhura found herself breathing normally for the first time in days. Had they actually solved this? There were a thousand loose ends to tie up, not least of which was somehow getting word back to Cretak so that she could take steps toward tracking down the seeds inside the Empire and stop the spread of the disease before both governments officially got involved.

And then what? What was she going to tell the C-in-C and what would he do with the information he gave her? Whoever had initiated this on the Romulan side was still at large and could easily do something like this again. But was it worth hurling accusations back and forth and perhaps making the already uneasy detente with the Romulans that much more uneasy? Uhura had no answers.

That’s why you’re a spy and not a diplomat!she told herself, halfway tempted to contact Curzon and ask him what he thought she should do. Should she risk that while Okinawawas still in transit? Perhaps best to wait until her team had returned home. As if she needed an excuse to see Curzon again.

“It’s ironic,” Zetha told Tuvok.

“I beg your pardon?”

Finally tired of roaming the corridors of the starship, marveling at everything, the young Romulan had come to rest in Okinawa’s crew lounge, where a helpful ensign who had a weakness for girls with green eyes had initiated her into the marvels of something called a hot fudge sundae. She was scooping the last of the sticky confection out of the bottom of the dish and licking her fingers while she spoke.

“This whole situation,” she explained. “My being programmed to be some sort of killing machine, and ending up providing the cure instead. Aemetha would call that irony. Would have called that irony.” The green eyes suddenly welled with tears. “I don’t even know if Aemetha is still alive….”

She let the spoon drop into the bowl, suddenly nauseated by what she had been eating. Tuvok watched and took note.

“You did this, all of this, in hope of protecting Aemetha?” he began.

“And the little ones. So many little ones. She helped everyone who came to her. I hoped I could live long enough to be like her….”

“You have already helped more people than you know,” Tuvok suggested, alluding to the vaccine that Selar was even now replicating in Okinawa’s sickbay. “And will serve to protect countless more for the foreseeable future. Ironic, indeed.”

Neither spoke for the next few moments. Behind Tuvok’s shoulder, Zetha could see the phenomenon of stars slipping by at maximum warp. On the table in front of her, the unfinished sundae seemed as much a miracle. She pushed the dish away.

Tuvok rose to go.

“Doubtless Admiral Uhura will question you in greater depth when we arrive on Earth, about your training, about those who trained you.”

Zetha shook her head. “We ghilikwere housed separately from ‘true’ Romulans. There was only one man. We were instructed to call him ‘Lord.’ I never knew his name.”

“Another irony,” Tuvok decided.

The lecture Zetha had been dreading never came. Instead, Tuvok let his hand rest for a moment on her head, the gesture of a loving father. Zetha did not look up until he was gone.

From his safe room deep within the warbird, Koval had been busy. Reports from Imperial worlds where the seeds had been planted were uneven at best. In some places, thousands had died before the entity infecting their bodies had been identified and they were quarantined. Once quarantined, all those infected died, but no new cases were reported. In still other places, the numbers of dead ranged from a few hundred to a score or less. In some places, the infection never “took” at all. The same was true for the worlds within the Outmarches so affected. And there had been no new cases reported in nearly a week.

Ah, well, the experiment in and of itself had been interesting. Koval wondered what the final numbers on Federation worlds would be. He would know soon enough, even as he would know how the revelation of the datachips would affect interplanetary relations.

There was no way the datachips could be traced to him. He had liquidated the remaining ghilikbefore he’d left the homeworld. Their barracks had been converted to a storage facility, all trace of habitation removed. The datachips would reveal the identities of beings with Romulan-sounding names who had never existed. Should the Federation be foolish enough to reveal those names, the Praetor, the Imperial Senate, and even the Continuing Committee would enjoy a good laugh at their expense.

Still, Koval was disappointed. He had hoped the experiment might continue until the number of dead had reached critical mass. There was a point in the bureaucratic mind, Koval had discovered, where the body count was deemed unacceptable. A few thousand dead was dismissed as a misfortune, but a few hundred thousand was judged an obvious conspiracy. It was from that point that he had hoped to operate, until that idiot Thamnos had ruined everything.

If only the fool had focused on the goal a little longer! The Federation would have rattled its sabers and accused the Empire of bioterrorism, and then, while they were still recovering from the embarrassment of being told those datachips were meaningless fakes, perhaps created by the Federation itself, since there were no such Romulans as those catalogued on the chips, Koval would have produced his trump card.

The source of the datachips? An overly ambitious Federation citizen trying to grab at a little glory, falsifying documents—as witness his earlier debacle with a paper on Bendii Syndrome! Koval had kept copies of all Thamnos’s “research,” and if the Federation operatives denied they’d found the datachips in Thamnos’s possession, he could produce the knife, no doubt containing traces of the murderer’s DNA. The accusations and counteraccusations could go on for years.

It would also have served as a test case for creating a larger pandemic at some point in the future. Ah, well. The only thing for Koval to do now was to make sure all traces of involvement were removed.

Which reminded him. Best get the call to Papaver Thamnos over with before they reached home.

“Go to bed?” Benjamin Sisko echoed Jennifer’s words as she grabbed the front of his tunic and began to tug him along with her. “It’s the middle of the afternoon! I’m not even tired.”

“Who said anything about sleeping?” Jennifer wondered whimsically, still tugging. Laughing, Sisko found himself being pulled toward the bedroom. “Jake’s on a class trip to the arboretum this afternoon; I don’t have to pick him up for another hour and a half.”

“A man can get into an awful lot of mischief in an hour and a half….” Sisko mused as the bedroom door slid softly shut behind them.

“Don’t owe you anything anymore!” Papaver Thamnos said stonily once he fully understood Koval’s message about his son. “Don’t know what your involvement was, but he wasn’t dead before you went looking for him. Got nothing to say to you. Had nothing to say to that other fellow, got nothing to say to you. We’re finished. Go away.”

“What ‘other fellow’?” Koval said, more sharply than he intended. But Papaver Thamnos was playing with his hounds. A moment later he terminated the transmission.

The ensign who had brought Zetha the sundae approached her table after Tuvok left, but his smile reminded her too much of Tahir’s, and she excused herself and left the lounge. There was something she had to do.