Dark Matters_ Ghost Dance (Book 2) - Christie Golden [25]
"Is the honored chairman well?" It was a servant. His inquiry was polite enough.
"It was a trifle warm inside the feast hall," Jekri answered. "But I am well enough." She nodded and left. She could feel Lhiau's contempt snapping at her heels like a pack of wild fvaiin.
He had brought her here to humiliate her. He had turned the Empress against her, and wanted her to see it. Jekri's position, perhaps even her very life, hung on a slender thread, and Lhiau pulled that thread.
No one in the Romulan Empire was safe from him.
She did not return to her ship, but to her offices in the capital. Jekri chafed at the time, only a few seconds in reality, that it took for her to pass the various security measures. She had her eyes, fingerprints, DNA examined and was finally let into her own office.
Like everything about Jekri Kaleh, the office of the chairman of the Tal Shiar was in scrupulous order. No digging through awkward piles for her.
When she needed something, she was able to place her fingers on it within moments.
She found the file she needed and called it up on the computer. It was a routine report handed in by one of her field spies. A few weeks ago, swamped by the urgent need to find Telek and the Starship, she had scanned the thin file and dismissed it. There were always dissidents. One had to judge who was dangerous and who was not.
These she had filed in the latter category, but now she hungrily perused the file as if it contained her salvation.
Because, she realized, it probably did.
INTERLUDE
THE ENTITY'S FIRST ENCOUNTER with THE STRANGE, frightening matter of which the Presence had warned it went smoothly. The matter was drifting alone in space, a cluster of something that was once right and natural and had been made terribly wrong. The Entity felt sorry for it. It had had no choice. Gently, the Entity engulfed the wrong things into itself, rendering them harmless.
They did not fight; they had no sentience. But the Entity wondered if that was entirely correct. After all, the Entity was no corporeal thing, trapped in a body. And it had sentience. It thought comfort, and peace, and was content in its task.
Again and again, it sought out what the Presence
had called corrupted dark matter and pulled the tiny bits into its mammoth, limitless self. It was an easy task, a joyful task, and one that had at its end a great and wondrous purpose.
A few times the Entity found the wrong things in the hearts of stars; sometimes in the bones of planets. It moved with a timeless grace to gather up the pieces, extracting them from other matter with an ease that it did not know it possessed.
It moved at a speed that was unknowable to places unseen, harvesting the wrong things like a child plucking flowers.
It knew a faint ripple of discontent. A child plucking flowers? How did it know these things? Dimly, something that might have been memory stirred, and the Entity was confused.
Its confusion increased when it came to a planet populated by sentient beings.
Because it recognized them.
TELEK AND SEVEN STOOD TOGETHER IN ASTROMETRICS. Torres and Khala stayed behind in engineering, ready to shut everything down the minute any danger was perceived. They had consulted with the senior staff for suggestions and received the captain's approval for this first trial run. Yet they all hesitated. Telek was familiar with the grip of fear and the paralysis it often caused, and he was the first to shake it off.
"R'Mor to Torres. We are prepared. Is everything in order in engineering?"
The briefest of hesitations, then, "We're ready. Go ahead."
The simulations they had conducted on the holodeck had varied wildly. One scenario had shown
everything proceeding perfectly until the final step. Another had shown almost die exact opposite-