Wending her way through the corridors to find sickbay on her own without asking for directions, she found Selar conferring with Okinawa’s chief medical officer. Seeing Zetha, the Vulcan raised an inquiring eyebrow in her direction.

“When you have time,” Zetha said, a little shyly, “may I have my freckles back?”

Epilogue

It was mop-up time.

The planet Renaga was placed under joint Federation/ Romulan jurisdiction. A Romulan warbird and a Federation starship would become permanent fixtures in orbit for the next little while. In addition to a raft of diplomats, teams of observers from both sides, including a joint medical team, would be stationed down-planet. Their final report would indicate that hiloponwas in fact not the panacea Thamnos had described in his paper. It worked only under specialized conditions—the missing “ingredient” turned out to be exposure to a particular rare element in Renaga’s sun—which meant that the stuff was useless once it was taken offworld. And if the Renagans didn’t want visitors on their world—the Council of Elders was still ignoring them, but some of the ordinary citizens from the villages nearest the observer site had made friendly overtures, though it was too soon to tell whether the Elders or the villagers would win—the curative effects of its only valuable resource would remain limited at best. Those in the know were of the opinion that Renaga would eventually prove of little interest to either side and, given the costs of maintaining a presence there, abandoned to its own devices.

Upon condition of his donating a half-liter of blood to be transformed into a vaccine to inoculate the citizens of Sliwon against the Catalyst virus, the noisy Rigelian huckster whom Tuvok had confronted in the Sliwoni marketplace was eventually released after a very thorough questioning. He steadfastly denied any involvement with Romulan authorities or any member of the Thamnos family. He left Sliwon immediately after his release.

Unbeknownst to him, a subcutaneous transceiver, legal under Sliwoni law, was injected at the site where the blood was drawn, making it possible for the authorities to track his movements throughout the Neutral Zone for a period of half a year. If he kept his nose clean for that amount of time, the transceiver would go dormant, and he’d be free to disappear once again into the hordes of itinerant peddlers the galaxy over.

Citizen Jarquin of Quirinus received a carefully worded document from one Citizen Leval of Romulus, which informed him, with regret, of his sons’ deaths. Soon other Quirinians began requesting information about their lost kin, but received no answer, and Citizen Leval’s sources for the information were never revealed. While some Quirinians steadfastly refused to believe that everyone who had ever emigrated from their world to Romulus was dead, conscription and further emigration trickled to a standstill, and most Quirinians began to rethink their relationship with the Empire.

The mysterious illness that had caused pockets of death in several Quirinian provinces burned itself out and did not reappear. The walled up districts were razed, and memorials to the dead were soon buried under a new fall of snow.

Tuvok’s preliminary research on the identities of the seeds on Tenjin was confirmed by a thorough census of all persons arriving in the domes over the past three years. It was decided that the two Romulans, both posing as Vulcans, who had died in the tram accident at about the time the first cancer patients began appearing were most likely the only seeds sent to Tenjin, but the entire indigenous population was inoculated against the Catalyst virus all the same.

The earliest casualties on the Federation side, the seventeen Rigelians from a single extended family, were discovered to be members of a clan that had been engaged in a land dispute since the time of Papaver Thamnos’s great-grandfather. Uhura thought that sufficient to at least begin an investigation into the Thamnos family’s recent activities, but she was warned off by the Federation Council. The Rigel worlds were deemed too valuable, and the Thamnos family too deeply embedded in the governments of those worlds, to risk offending them. Despite her objections, Uhura was told, “Hands off,” and was obliged to comply.

She had been pondering secure ways to tell Cretak everything her team had discovered, when she received even more infuriating news.

It arrived in the form of a bland-looking young man from the C-in-C’s office, who handed her a padd whose contents were retina-scan classified, and waited silently and at attention while the padd scanned the admiral and she read the cover page.

“Did Commander Starfleet tell you why he was sending you with this instead of simply messaging me?” Uhura asked the young man, wondering if he had any idea what was in the document.

“Security, sir. All he told me. And I’m to await your reply.”

“I see,” Uhura said carefully. “It may take me a while to read this. Would you care to sit down? What’s your name?”

“Thank you, sir, no. Luther Sloan.”

He sounds like he thinks I’m interrogating him even when I’m just trying to be friendly,Uhura noted. Very well, let him stand.What she read in the C-in-C’s memo made her all but forget the young man was there.

No!she thought. He can’t do this to me! Hands off the Thamnos cartel—well, fine. Local politics, nothing I can do about it, except maybe plant a few extra Listeners on Rigel and see what if anything they came up with. But if I comply with this, thousands more Romulans may die! And the source or sources behind Catalyst may never be stopped.

She was too seasoned and too well trained to let her thoughts show on her face. She could feel Sloan’s eyes on her, though she knew if she glanced up at him she would find him contemplating the view out the window. He was one of those people who knew when he was being watched, and could glance away a millisecond before the person he was watching attempted to make eye contact.

A natural spy.

So why was he working for the C-in-C and not for her? Uhura wondered, determined to do a background check on him soonest. For now, she deactivated the padd and glanced up at Sloan, who was in fact looking out the window, though he did make eye contact with the admiral once he heard the beep of the padd recoding itself.

“Message, Admiral?” he asked, his voice absolutely devoid of inflection.

Uhura put her not inconsiderable acting talent into a show of reluctant compliance when she said. “Inform Commander Starfleet: Message received and acknowledged. No further action contemplated.”

It was apparently the only message Sloan was prepared to take back to his boss. He accepted the padd from Uhura’s hands, and all but clicked his heels before turning on them sharply and going back the way he came.

The door had not entirely slid closed behind him before Uhura had pulled his file.

Name, rank, serial number. Sloan, Luther, born on Earth, near Pretoria, South Africa. Academy graduate, though from one of the satellite campuses. Now why, Uhura wondered, did someone born on Earth choose to attend the Academy on another planet? It was the only quirk in a record that was too perfect, but impossible to challenge.