This mission had begun with a whisper.

The fog in the Bay Area was particularly heavy that morning, and Uhura walked the winding paths of the gardens on the academy grounds more by familiarity than by sight, nodding to Boothby, who was dead-heading a row of rosebushes in front of the C-in-C’s office, and silently saluted her with the trimming shears as she passed. By midday, she knew, the marine layer would burn off, leaving a brilliantly sunny day, but for now the world existed only as far as the eye could see, which was only a meter or two in any direction.

By rights she could have had a groundcar bring her from home, or even beam directly in to her office as she did during emergencies, but unless it was raining she preferred to get off the monorail one stop early and walk to work, even on a day like today. If she had to be stuck behind that desk all day, at least she could start with a morning walk. It kept her young.

In retrospect, whoever sent the messenger must have known even that much about her. And if the messenger had been anything other than a messenger—an assassin perhaps, or even someone who thought kidnaping the head of Starfleet Intelligence might affect the balance of power on any number of worlds—Uhura shuddered to think. She would never know how the messenger got through the Academy’s security cordon, which was supposed to be one of the best on the planet.

The fog played tricks with sound. Footsteps and voices might sound close but in fact belong to those few cadets and instructors who had braved the weather and were passing between buildings on the far side of the quadrangle. At the same time, nearby sounds were muffled, hard to distinguish. The messenger made no sound, but simply fell into step beside her.

“You are Admiral Uhura.” The voice was female and seemed young. The words were in carefully spoken Standard, with only a trace of some offworld inflection. The figure, swathed in a hooded Vulcan-style travel cloak, was no taller than Uhura herself, who only made people think she was tall by the way she carried herself. “I bring you a message from Romulus.”

As Uhura turned, startled, a pair of jade-green eyes beneath the characteristic dark upswept brows met her own. A delicate face with a wide, expressive mouth, a smattering of freckles across a high-bridged nose, a stray lock of chestnut hair fallen across her brow, were all that showed beneath the hood. The first impression was of a child playing dress-up. Nevertheless, Uhura felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle and found herself thinking of phasers.

A Romulan? On Earth, after all this time? And here on the grounds of the Academy without anyone stopping her?

“Who are you?” was all Uhura could think of to say, in a voice much calmer than she felt.

“Pandora’s box,” the messenger said.

It was a code spoken by another in a time long ago, and Uhura decided to trust her.

“Pandora’s box?” a very young Romulan subaltern named Cretak had repeated Uhura’s words. “What an interesting expression. What does it mean?”

She and Uhura had met under unusual circumstances at a place called Camp Khitomer, where an interstellar peace conference had almost been derailed by a handful of militarists from the three major powers plotting to kill the Federation president.

“It’s from an old story about a woman to whom the gods entrusted a beautiful box, but with instructions never to open it,” Uhura explained. “Naturally, her curiosity got the better of her and she opened the box, letting all the evils inside escape into the world. But when in her despair she glanced into what she thought was an empty box, she found that a priceless jewel still lay within. That jewel was hope.”

Cretak tilted her head like a bird, considering this. “A moral, no doubt. There are many such tales in my culture as well.”

“Which shows we’re more alike than different,” Uhura suggested.

For the first time, the young Romulan smiled. “If only it were that simple!”

In the intervening years, Khitomer itself had been left a smoking ruin following a Romulan attack, for the usual reasons Romulans and Klingons carried on their multigenerational antagonisms: honor, as well as an inflexible attitude of absolute superiority, from each toward the other. As for the Romulans and the Federation, there was Tomed, always Tomed. Yet though their governments might posture and throw stones or, more recently, ignore each other’s existence, two resourceful individuals could get messages through the static if the need were great enough.

“From across the parsecs and across the years, I send my greetings,” the message began, composed in the traditionally flowery language of the Romulan court but, once Uhura and the messenger were ensconced in her office, delivered in Earth Standard. No need to translate from any of the Romulan languages, much less to decode it. Considering the source of the message and its means of delivery, Uhura was surprised, to say the least, but only for a moment. Cretak was, above all else, resourceful. There had been other third-party messages down the decades, but none so direct as this one.

“With satisfaction I report that I am well, and hope that you are also. I have, as much as possible in this turbulent weather with its recent storms—” A reference to the Neutral Zone, and to the supposedly ironclad silence between the Federation and the Empire since Tomed. “—followed your career with much interest, and wish you continued success…”

Even if my actions sometimes work against your own people, Cretak?Uhura wondered, holding up one hand to stop the message while she digested this much of it. No, let’s be clear: What I and my operatives do is not against any people, but is a means of checking and balancing those who would presume to make decisions in their name. Decisions like Tomed and Narendra III and a hundred lesser incursions that are enacted “for the good of the Romulan people,” meaning the good of those who stay in power by feeding off the fear of the populace, creating imaginary enemies to keep the war machinery in motion. My goal is to sniff out those plots in either Empire or even among my own kind before they gather momentum, and nip them in the bud.

I warned Command about Narendra III but, alas, not in time to save theEnterprise. If Cretak, who travels the corridors of the Romulan Senate and knows things none of my operatives can get near without losing their lives, sends me a message by way of a living messenger, it’s important.

“Go on,” she told the messenger.

“I could wish that this were merely a social call, but the very form my message has taken may suggest to you that it is in fact a matter of some urgency.”

Again Uhura stopped the message and studied the messenger.

“How much of this do you understand?” she asked carefully in Romulan.

“Nothing, Lady,” the messenger replied in the same tongue, masking any surprise at hearing her own language spoken by a human. “I do not understand your language. I only repeat what I have been told.”

“Told to you by Cretak,” Uhura prompted her. She could see the young woman’s eyes flicker, as if she were searching the corners of the room for hidden meanings. No doubt she had been told only to repeat her message, and given no further instructions, not even any indication of what was to become of her once the message was delivered. Uhura remembered something else she had learned about Romulans, something which any good Federation spy ought to be mindful of as well. Romulans don’t trust walls. Nor, even in the office of the head of Starfleet Intelligence, should they.

She had made a point of bringing the girl to her office initially, to make certain she hadn’t brought company, and so that the security sensors could scan her for concealed weapons or listening devices. Now that she was determined to be “clean” and acting alone, she could safely be moved elsewhere.