Crossover - Michael Jan Friedman [18]
Moments later, free of the base, he went to warp. The Yorktown leaped forward, as if remembering what it was like to be free.
The deed done, Scotty drew a deep breath and surveyed the bridge carefully. He knew that if he went back to the engineering station—his station—he would be able to touch the underside of the control panel and feel a gouge in the metal that predated even his service on the ship.
This place was the closest thing to home he would likely ever find in the twenty-fourth century. Looking at the bridge stations, he could imagine his friends at them— just the way it used to be.
The notion should have comforted him, but it left him cold somehow. Curious, he thought.
Shaking off the feeling as he would a highland winter, Scotty got up and headed for the turbolift. He didn’t have time for such foolish musings. He had work to do.
Somewhere in Romulan space, there was someone who needed him. As he entered the lift, he vowed to keep that in mind. For now, Scotty’s work would be his world.
And he’d leave the ghosts on the bridge to theirs.
CHAPTER 4
Governor Tharrus of Constanthus leaned back in his chair and eyed his chief of security.
“Yes, Phabaris?”
“The prisoners have been secured, Governor.” The security chief said the words with obvious pride, having taken part in the arrest. “They are in the detention facility at the city limits.”
Tharrus nodded. “Good.”
The large, craggy-featured governor allowed himself a smile. He rarely displayed his emotions in front of a subordinate, but he felt the occasion was worth it this time.
This was a pleasure. A rich, well-deserved, eminently profitable pleasure. And it was his Vigilance arid careful planning that had made it all possible.
In the end, he’d achieved something that had eluded even the vaunted Tal Shiar—who for all their fearsome power had been helpless before the unificationist movement.
The unificationists represented the first real challenge to the Romulan political system in a hundred years or more. The fact that the Tal Shiar had yet to make a significant dent in the movement had been a huge embarrassment for both the elite intelligence organization and the Empire.
And the rebels’ philosophical grounding in pacifistic Vulcan ideals only compounded the humiliation.
Though the unificationist effort had been growing on the homeworlds for some time, their arrival on Constanthus had been an unforeseen development—one that Tharrus and his operatives had been more than ready to act upon.
With a gaggle of them now in hand, the governor would be able to carry out their disposition entirely on his own—from their arrests to their trial, to their ultimate disposal. And once he had finished with them, he would announce that he had crushed the movement once and for all.
That, of course, wouldn’t be true in the least. However, the central government wouldn’t be able to refute his claims without conceding that the movement was larger in scope than they’d admitted.
He would grow in prestige. And prestige translated into power.
And when the unificationists reared their heads again on Romulus, as Tharrus had no doubt they would, those in the central government would be shown for the fools they were. After all, the movement had been crushed— how could they have let it rise up again?
Then an even greater opportunity might present itself. He might, by popular demand, obtain for himself a voice in the homeworld bureaucracy—a voice no governor before him had ever enjoyed.
It was a dream, to be sure. But not so distant or intangible a dream that his mouth didn’t water as he contemplated it.
Tharrus said none of this to Phabaris. He had learned long ago to keep his own counsel. He was not so arrogant to believe that the Tal Shiar could not place someone close to him, or convert an apparently loyal officer into a traitor.
So the governor simply smiled and lifted his powerful body out of his chair. With a gesture, he indicated the door.
“Take me to them,” he ordered.
The security chief nodded and headed out the