In a more urbane tone, Neral continued. “We are all revolted by the possibility that we might find ourselves aligned with a power that would even think of alliance with the Breen. I consider even the suspicion of a Breen treaty sufficient grounds for breaching our neutrality agreement.”

  The Praetor raised a hand before a second uproar could begin. “Yes, that would indeed mean a temporary alliance with the Klingons—temporary, I say—and yes, that too is a distasteful proposition. But I believe our duty requires us to make that sacrifice for the Empire.”

  “Ah yes.” The voice of Senator Avelik hissed like an Honor Blade drawn from its sheath. “My fellow senators, consider for one mad instant what would happen if we did allow our honored Praetor to ally with the Federation and those Klingon savages…why, we might all actually benefit! After all, the people who suffer most from Praetor Neral’s alleged principles are his friends and relatives…assuming he has any left by now.”

  The hall fell silent as senators tried not to glance behind them to see if their guards remained in place. Neral’s family had been killed by Klingons, and every senator knew it.

  “I would make any sacrifice for the Empire,” Praetor Neral told Avelik, his voice dangerously quiet in the stillness. “If that includes a temporary, a very temporary alliance with the Klingons, so be it. Savages they may be, but they can fight. Unlike some fools here, who fight only with words. So I repeat: yes, the Federation’s plan of using Klingons as shock troops to weaken the Dominion shows an almost Romulan cunning. And that cunning tells me that supporting it makes good political sense. After all, should the Federation and Klingons fall, what senator with any wit doubts that the Dominion would attack us next?”

  Avelik flushed olive with fury. “The Dominion offers trade, not treachery, should we enter the war! The Federation offers only peril!”

  “If Senator Avelik believes every secret the Changelings whisper in his ears, he is a bigger fool than I thought.”

  The woman who had just spoken was Senator Cretak, controlled and sleekly groomed. She got to her feet. “Consider how much honor we would lose if we allied fully with the Dominion and if the Changelings then joined with the Breen on equal terms. We would never recover from the disgrace. The Breen don’t even have a word for honor!

  “As for the Federation and the Klingons: If our old enemies are foolish enough to take this war upon themselves, why should we waste our own soldiers or our ships? Let them weaken the Dominion for us! In my opinion, Praetor Neral would do better to continue his efforts to help the hearthworlds recover from the economic excesses of the past two administrations.”

  A formidable speaker, this Cretak, Spock thought. Perhaps not as elegantly fierce as a lady he had once seen here, but, potentially, a powerful ally. What logic could he use to convince her to back Praetor Neral’s proposal to ally with the Federation and the Klingons against the Dominion?

  “Now I must speak.” A deep, smooth voice interrupted Cretak’s next words.

  The figure that rose was a tall, strongly built Romulan. His high coloring was muted by the black robes he wore, bound with what looked like Old High Vulcan sigils embroidered in metallic blood-green.

  Archpriest N’Gathan.

  The archpriest was head of a cult of state that centered near-fanatic devotion on the Emperor and on the Empire’s honored ancestors.

  “I come to serve,” declared N’Gathan, the phrase bringing Spock’s eyebrow up. “I have left my duties in the Hallows beside the Firefalls of Gal Gath’thong, honoring the final resting place of the Imperial family and the Noble Born of the Romulan Star Empire so I may counsel their descendants. My sons and daughters, why is it that we trouble ourselves with these Klingons, these Changelings, these Cardassians, this rabble of a Federation, or even the Breen? All are alien, all unworthy of our notice.”

  Ah yes, Spock mused. N’Gathan dominated a faction that traced their family histories back to the first Exiles from Vulcan. Isolationists, they might call themselves—xenophobes even among Romulans.

  “Remember why we left the Motherworld,” the archpriest intoned. “Because Vulcan had turned its back on pride, on loyalty, on family. We, in turn, abandoned Vulcan so that we might preserve the purity of our heritage, the glory of our race, and, of course, the honor of our rulers. Indeed—”

  The great metal doors crashed open. A frantic underpriest, his robes disheveled, rushed into the hall, closely followed by the two young uhlans who had been guarding the doors.

  “N’Lellan,” said the archpriest sternly, “is this a priest’s decorum?”

  “The Emperor!” N’Lellan cried breathlessly. “Emperor Shiarkiek is dead! Assassinated!”

  There was stunned silence in the hall, broken only by someone’s plaintive, “No! Impossible!” Shiarkiek had ruled so long that probably no one in the room could remember a time when he had not been Emperor. Even Spock felt a pang of…yes, grief. Shiarkiek had been a reluctant Emperor. A wise, shrewd scholar, he should have lived out his immensely long life in some peaceful university.

  Rising heavily, Neral turned and bowed profoundly to the throne that was now, finally, empty.

  “No one grieves more than I for my Emperor’s death. Not even when my own family was slaughtered by Klingons.” He clenched his jaw, interrupting the flow of painful memory. “But my charge is the safety of the Emperor’s people. His Majesty’s death, make no mistake, will be investigated and mourned to the utmost. But war rages on our borders, and duty requires us to complete our deliberations.” Neral drew a deep breath. “What is next on our order of business?”

  There was a concerted roar of outrage and grief.

  “No!”

  “The Emperor!”

  “We can’t just—”

  “You don’t even mourn,” N’Gathan said. He strode forward toward Neral’s seat, stopping just out of blade-reach. “Our Emperor. That sacred, good old man. May I remind the Praetor: we are Romulans. We cannot just mourn the Emperor when it seems expedient: We must mourn Shiarkiek, on whom shine eternal honor, with all our hearts and all our might.”

  Spock suspected that if N’Gathan had anything to say about it, the funeral rites would be so long, elaborate, and time-consuming that Romulus would have no time or resources to prepare for war. And they would leave the Empire even more reluctant to deal kindly with aliens, any of whom might have had a hand—or some other appendage—in the beloved old Emperor’s death.

  “But who would kill so good an old man?” Avelik cut in sharply. “Does anyone else agree with me that the Emperor’s death is just too convenient?”

  Neral turned sharply. “What is that you say, Avelik?”

  “With the Emperor dead, who decides policy? The Praetor. The Emperor was too wise to ally with Federation and Klingons.” He turned to the others. “But Neral is not. What if he is already in the pay of the Federation?”

  Koval, head of the Tal Shiar, stirred in his seat among the observers. Spock watched as Neral shook his head almost imperceptibly, restraining the man.

  Another senator shouted, “What better way to provoke a war than kill our Emperor?”

  “We have to get out of here,” Kerit whispered, pulling at Spock’s sleeve. Tears of unfeigned grief flowed down her face. “The place will be swarming with spies.”

  She raised her voice. “Please, Uncle. You know your heart is not strong. Let me get you home. Officers, in the name of a sick old man, I beg you, let us pass!”

  “Better leave now, Citizen. In an hour, the streets won’t be safe for an old man who can’t push through,” said a guard. Kindly, he unlocked the door and held it for them.

  There is goodness in this people. I must persevere.

  Nevertheless, Spock had to yield to the logic of Kerit’s position. He drew his hood down to shroud his face, allowed himself to lean heavily on her arm, and let her guide him from the gallery toward their safe house.

  He had investigations to make.

  An old building, serviceable but with nothing about it to draw envy or attention, the Underground’s new refuge had been provided by a kinsman of the defector M’ret. It was safer—and, Spock thought, warmer—than the caves beneath the city that had been the Underground’s principal retreat for decades.

  Just now, they needed a refuge. The guard had been right. Less than 0.63 hours after Emperor Shiarkiek’s death devastated the senate, Ki Baratan’s streets teemed with shouting, chanting, weeping mourners. Mourning quickly turned to violence as rumors spread through the streets and each new group claimed its rumors were the truth. Spock saw Neral’s logic in sending out security teams to quash the riots before they turned Ki Baratan into chaos. But that only united the crowd against the guards, creating a 93.24% probability that war would replace funeral games as part of the rites honoring the late Emperor.

  Spock retired to meditate in the bare, windowless chamber, with its single mat and firepot, that he had claimed for himself. He could see no logic at all in the day’s events. On the surface, a case could be made that Neral had hastened the Emperor’s death. How easy it would be for Neral to blame the Emperor’s death on Changelings! After all, they could take the form of anyone—the Emperor’s physician, an academic, even his personal chaplain, or some politically convenient scapegoat of Neral’s choosing. But something about that hypothesis felt contrived, simplified for popular consumption.

  Spock stared into the firepot. Shiarkiek’s death had genuinely shocked him. He had met the old Emperor once and seen him on several occasions: The man had been learned and, for a Romulan, relatively gentle.

  “I grieve for thee,” he murmured.

  Spock remembered Neral as a cold-eyed, amoral young uhlan who had grown powerful enough to take down his predecessor Narviat, who had been one of the shrewdest political manipulators in an Empire famed for them. In fact, had Spock been Romulan, Narviat’s fall would have been cause sufficient for blood feud. But Neral would never be so foolish nor so self-destructive as to commit a crime for which he could so easily be blamed.

  I cannot trust Neral. But if there is any chance of persuading the Romulans to aid the Federation, I must learn the truth about the Emperor’s murder—yes, and Neral’s innocence, ironic though that may seem—before it brings down yet another Praetor and plunges the Empire into civil war.

  Some of the younger men and women who followed Spock were in the next room over, indulging in what had become their obsessive focus on the news. Over and over, viewscreens tracked Neral. Now, he appeared on the Praetor’s balcony dressed in the dull blackish-green (the precise shade of dried blood, Spock thought) of Romulan mourning. Now, he made his well-guarded way to the Palace. Now, he viewed the Emperor’s body. Broadcast after broadcast displayed all the preparations for an oppressively magnificent funeral.

  Shiarkiek, Spock thought, would make his final journey to the Halls of Erebus accompanied by the souls of all the Romulans who died in the riots after his death. Hardly a guard the old scholar would have wanted.

  Ignoring the broadcasts, Spock continued to analyze the position of each major power in the Dominion War.

  “Kerit,” he murmured. Leaving his meditations, he accessed the powerful computer that the two of them had built and began to work out the movements of the leader of each faction in the senate and their most loyal aides. Alibis, he knew, were as easily dismissed as created. But until Spock had more information—and until he knew it was safe to return to the streets of Ki Baratan—it was illogical to endanger himself or any of his supporters.

  Neral will be hunting—or at least seeming to hunt—for the assassin as well, for the sake of his administration. But he will not dare divert too much power away from keeping the peace.

  Toward the end of the tenth day of their seclusion, when composure, sleep, patience, and accurate information had all become equally scarce, Kerit glanced at one of her scanners and came alert.

  “Oh…oh, yes! Yes! Amarik’s back! He made it!”

  Then Kerit flushed, looked shamefacedly at Spock, then away.

  If concern for your mate requires apology, Spock thought, I should be abject. He signaled to her to go to her husband, and she rushed to Amarik’s side. Once, Spock thought, she had been a scrawny, almost feral adolescent with a genius for invading hardened computer systems, and Amarik had been a lanky, fearless boy with shaggy, unkempt hair. She and Amarik had held jobs in Narviat’s government and lost them when Neral came to power. Now, they picked up work when they could, but remained close to Spock.

  But closer, of course, to each other.

  Still thin, dark, and in need of remedial grooming, Amarik was smudged and bruised from forcing his way through the city streets. But that didn’t stop him from catching his wife in a quick embrace.

  Then Kerit, glancing over his shoulder, pulled back from Amarik’s embrace with a yelp of most un-Romulan glee.

  “Look who’s here,” Amarik called to Spock. “I ran into him at the door. He had the right passwords, so…are you back for good now?” He clapped a grimy hand on his taller companion’s shoulder. “Kerit, do you remember Subcommander Ruanek?”

  “I believe Ruanek left the Homeworld with the rank of full commander,” Spock heard himself correct Amarik as though it were merely an academic point. “A battlefield promotion.”

  At least Spock had control enough not to shout at Ruanek in purely Romulan anger, Are you out of your mind?

  Ruanek, born and bred a Romulan, had exiled himself thirty years ago to save Spock’s life; his return didn’t just put him under pain of death, it subjected Spock’s entire Underground to further danger. And for this…this absurd flirtation with death, Ruanek had abandoned his work on the Vulcan Spock longed to see! Could the world that had adopted Ruanek mean so little to him?

  He built a life with us. Were we wrong to take him in?

  Not surprisingly, though, the rest of the Underground greeted him as a returning hero. Clustering around him, they clasped his wrist or his shoulder in greeting. At least, Spock thought, though they barraged him with questions, they had the sense to keep their voices subdued.

  Ruanek thumped Amarik on the back as if he were a brother officer, then flung his other arm around Kerit’s narrow shoulders.

  “I still have the disruptor clip earring you gave me,” she told him.

  “But now you wear Amarik’s bracelet instead,” Ruanek said. But his attempt to tease her sounded forced. This was no time for jests.

  “What about you?” Kerit asked. “Spock told us you found someone on Vulcan.”

  Ruanek pushed up his sleeve to display the marriage bracelet given him by T’Selis, who had decided that some adherence to Romulan tradition was logical for a Vulcan who took a Romulan as bondmate.

  “She’s a healer,” he told Kerit, “just about your height, very pretty, and with such a temper.” But Ruanek’s grin quickly faded.

  He detached himself from the younger Romulans, threw back the hood of his cloak, and moved to Spock’s side. The reprimand Spock had planned to deliver went unsaid. On Vulcan, Ruanek had allowed his hair to grow out of its severe Romulan military cut. Now, he had shorn it, and his eyes were haunted.

  How not? He has not seen his birth world for three decades.

  Under Ruanek’s drab cloak, his tunic was the blackened green of mourning. Although his smooth brow and regular features had always made him look more Vulcan than Romulan, there was no mistaking him now for anything but a son of the Empire, and a heartsick one at that.

  “Explain,” Spock ordered in Vulcan.

  “I used my guest friend M’ret’s old Underground contacts to get me back into Romulan space,” Ruanek replied in the same language.

  “Elaborate.” Let the Romulan explode in anger if he chose. Spock could only express his…his extreme disapprobation of Ruanek’s actions by speaking so curtly.

  “For the Emperor, of course!” Ruanek snapped. “Do you think I wanted to leave everything I’ve built? Am I the hero Azeraik to tear open my wounds and laugh as I did it? It’s logical for you to calculate how that good old man’s death affects the war and what you need from the Empire. I don’t fault you. But the Empire needs…it needs…we need to find out who killed the Emperor and avenge him. And if no one else will do it, I will!”

  Spock shut his eyes on Ruanek’s emotional outburst. Even after thirty years of life on Vulcan, of family responsibilities, a joint appointment as lecturer in the Vulcan Science Academy and legate in Vulcan’s diplomatic service, when stressed, Ruanek still reacted like a warrior.

  “What if you had been conscripted?”

  “As far as I know, the Empire remains neutral,” Ruanek said. The irony in his tone could have drawn blood. “I considered the possibility that the Empire might be recalling veterans. So I traveled in stasis.” He shuddered. “I swear, I had bad dreams the entire trip.”

  “No doubt, your subconscious remembered the responsibilities you abandoned on Vulcan.”

  A muscle twitched along Ruanek’s jaw. “Vulcan! After all these years, Vulcan remembers I was born in an Empire that signed a nonaggression pact with the Dominion. So, I did not enjoy a great deal of credibility on Vulcan when I left. In fact, my presence there was a liability to all concerned. Incidentally, Captain Saavik agreed. I wasn’t offended. And she’s doing so well, Spock,” Ruanek added in a rush. “T’Selis has already certified her fit to return to full duty.”

  “And what was your consort’s reaction to this…preposterous excursion?” Spock demanded.

  Ruanek looked down and away. “Extreme displeasure,” he admitted. “But I served the Emperor long before I met T’Selis.” He glanced up again in anguish. “How can I honor my wife, or Vulcan, or you, for that matter, if I don’t do what honor demands to repay a master who was kind to me? ‘False in one, false in all,’ ” he quoted a Romulan adage. The people around him nodded.