“Chancellor,” Vinok said, standing himself and bowing his head in her direction. “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.”

Azetbur nodded, but thought, As if I could have done otherwise.The praetor had sent word of the Starfleet treachery to the senior members of the Klingon High Council, and not simply to Azetbur herself—not technically a violation of the diplomatic protocols between the two governments, but a move clearly designed to undermine Klingon relations with the Federation. Had the Romulan intelligence been delivered to her exclusively, she would have quietly sought to confirm or deny it, with the hope of being able to preserve the relationship between Qo’noS and Earth. But now…

Consul Vinok withdrew from Azetbur’s office, his footsteps echoing on the stone floor, the tall, ornamented doors swinging open at his approach. Beyond the threshold, four members of Klingon Internal Security stood guard. Two of those, Azetbur knew, would escort the Romulan from the fortress of the Great Hall.

“Chancellor,” Brigadier Kuron blustered. “We must—”

“Silence,” Azetbur said firmly, waiting for the doors to shut behind Vinok. She could see the ire on Kuron’s long, angular face—ire for the Federation and for her, she was sure—but he quieted, just as he had done when she’d quashed his vociferous reactions during the Romulan’s presentation. The doors, climbing halfway up the stone walls to the vaulted ceilings and arcing to a peak, swung closed with a loud thump, resounding in the great room. “Your opinion is of value to us, Kuron,” Azetbur said with tact, a weapon her father had taught her to use in her youth. “But it is not of value to the Romulans, nor is it their place to hear it.” She sat back down at the head of the table, her right hand automatically coming up to take hold of the walking stick leaning against her chair. In front of her, to her left, a number of isolinear data spikes sat heaped on the tabletop.

“The Romulans already know what I have to say,” Kuron protested. “What allof us should have to say.” He raised a leather-gloved fist, triangular silver teeth marching up the fingers, and pointed around the table at the three other High Council members present, though he refrained from gesturing toward Azetbur. “I say that the Federation is our enemy and seeks to crush us.”

Azetbur waited, her hand tightening about the top of the walking stick, hoping that she would not have to be the first one to defend the Empire’s relationship with the Federation. In the wake of her father’s death eighteen years ago, she had stepped forward and assumed the mantle of Klingon leadership. She had signed the Khitomer Accords, enacting the peace with the Federation for which her father had so desperately worked, and she had strived since then to maintain that peace. But because of her years of service to that cause, her voice now carried less weight than it once had; her positions were so well known and so well established that the actual content of what she said now was often overlooked.

“Do you really think that the Federation is our enemy?” Councillor Kest asked across the table from Kuron. The only one of the senior Council members not in the Klingon Defense Force—he worked for Imperial Intelligence—he still cut an imposing figure. Bald, with a thin mustache falling past the sides of his mouth to his chin, he appeared almost sinister. “Do you really think the Federation has given us food and energy and other aid for all these years, helped us rebuild our infrastructure and keep our military intact, so that they could then face a reinvigorated opponent in battle?”

“Klingons would,” Kuron declared. “Klingons would seek the glory of battle against a worthy adversary.”

“Klingons, yes,” Kest allowed. “But humans? Vulcans? Betazoids?”Azetbur saw that she had been right to convene the four senior Council members for this meeting, rather than the entire Council, more than two dozen strong. While Kest no longer openly allied himself with Azetbur—few did these days, amid the public grumbling about the ignominy of continuing to accept Federation charity—he at least provided a thoughtful, stabilizing voice, a voice that could easily have been lost in a larger gathering.

“The Federation does not seek honorable battle,” Kuron persisted. “They seek to wipe us out with a single weapon.”

“If that were true,” Azetbur said, “then they had that weapon in their grasp years ago. After Praxis was destroyed, all the Federation had to use to defeat us was apathy. If they’d ignored us, if they hadn’t responded to our sudden and significant needs, then we would not now be able to feed our people, much less be able to go into battle.”

“We are not now able to go into battle,” General Kaarg said. “Not full-scale battle against a fully committed adversary. Yes, the Federation provides us aid, but not enough for us to make ourselves as strong as possible.” The general, one of the highest-ranking officers in the Klingon Defense Force, had sat through the Romulan envoy’s presentation saying very little, as had his peer in the military, General Gorak. Both commanded large segments of the KDF, but the similarities between the two men ended there, Azetbur knew.

“General,” Brigadier Kuron said, “do you doubt the might of the Empire?”

“I do not doubt the Empire, Kuron,” Kaarg said. “But as Kahless the Unforgettable told us, ‘Destroying an empire to win a war is no victory.’ ” Kaarg, beefy and physically sluggish, had earned a name for himself as a battlefield tactician, defeating enemies not on the basis of force, but through careful planning and clever strategy. Two years ago, he had managed to forestall a Tholian incursion into space claimed by the Empire, utilizing a squadron of vessels dwarfed by his foe’s. Azetbur had heard some classify him derogatorily as a backroom planner, a thinker who lacked the ability to genuinely lead. Yet he had still stormed up the ranks of the Klingon military to his present position, and to an upper seat on the High Council.

“In whatever battles we fight,” General Gorak offered, “we will be victorious, or we will die honorable deaths. That is the Klingon way.” A stark contrast to Kaarg, Gorak was lean and muscular, and had developed a reputation as a warrior’s warrior, leading his men on the front ranks. Within the last year, he had crushed a major uprising on Ganalda IV, charging the battlements himself and slaying the rebel leader with a d’k tahgthrough the heart. From every report Azetbur had received, Gorak’s men worshipped him, and would follow him all the way to Sto-Vo-Kor.“But we need a reason to go to battle,” Gorak finished. He said nothing about how one of his men, Ditagh, worked even now to provide him with that reason by undermining the trilateral peace negotiations.

“There is the fact of Federation treachery,” Kuron fumed.

“It is a fact in name only,” Azetbur insisted, but she understood at once that the veracity of the Romulan assertion was irrelevant. The praetor would not have sent an envoy with sensor logs demonstrating the Starfleet testing of a metaweapon if those logs could have been easily dismissed. In one way or another, she would have to address the Romulan allegation, as well as its implications.

“Do you doubt what we just saw, Chancellor?” Kuron said, leaping to his feet and pointing at the clutch of data spikes. Azetbur and the councillors, along with the Romulan envoy, had viewed the contents of some of the spikes on a large monitor set into the wall to the left of the table, opposite the great chair that sat raised on a dais to the right. “Do you doubt—”

Azetbur swung the walking stick—the long, tapered incisor of some long-extinct saber-toothed beast—in a wide arc and brought it down on the tabletop, filling the chamber of her office with a loud report. The data spikes jumped. “Do not question me, Kuron,” Azetbur said. “I doubt everybody and everything. That is my duty as chancellor.” She paused, fixing the brigadier’s gaze with her own. “Now sit down,” she commanded him.