Death in Winter - Michael Jan Friedman [42]
And that was why he was so determined now to discredit Sela, his chief rival at Tal’aura’s court. Because as long as Sela appeared useful, Eborion would never become the praetor’s sole, unchallenged source of counsel.
The aristocrat couldn’t confront Sela on his own. She was too forceful, too crafty, too well connected. However, his spy on Kevratas was in a position to undermine Sela’s effectiveness, to find the hairline weaknesses in her regime and expand them into gaping crevices. And he would, if he was even half as good as he was reputed to be.
He would drag Sela down into the mire of her failure, centimeter by helpless centimeter. And in the process, he would help Eborion raise himself up.
“Shall I take the mountain route or the coastal route?” asked his pilot.
The coastal route was the less direct of the two, but Eborion was developing more of a taste for the indirect with every passing day. “The coastal route,” he replied, and sat back in his seat to enjoy the view.
Of the seventeen worlds in the mammoth Arbitra Tsichita system, the one called Kevratas was by far the closest to its tired red beacon of a star and therefore the only one even remotely capable of supporting life.
However, Kevratas’s surface was so cold it challenged that life on a daily basis. Even in its equatorial belt, the region that had given birth to the planet’s only sentient species, temperatures only occasionally crept over the freezing mark.
At certain times of year-this being one of them-it was even worse. A nearly unbroken mantle of clouds stretched from pole to pole, making sunlight as rare as hail on Vulcan’s Forge.
“Hope you all like a good winter storm,” said Pug as they came within orbital range of the planet. He leaned back in his captain’s chair. “Looks like a humdinger brewing right where we’ll be beaming down.”
From his seat at the helm station, Picard considered the cloud-swaddled sphere on the modest, rectangular viewscreen before him. “I trust the weather will not exacerbate the difficulty of our transport?”
He had already heard about the planet’s myriad magnetic fields, which made transporting anywhere a tricky operation. That was why he and his comrades would carry concealed, miniaturized pattern enhancers for the return trip, which promised to be a hasty business indeed, and would almost definitely not be carried out in cooperation with the authorities.
“It shouldn’t be an additional impediment,” said Decalon, who was sitting at the bridge’s operations station, “unless our transporter system is hopelessly antiquated.”
“Which,” Pug said with just a hint of resentment, “it’s not. I made a point of overhauling it just a couple of years ago.”
Greyhorse, who was standing behind Picard, refrained from contributing to the exchange. But then, transporter mechanics were hardly his specialty. And in any case, he had been a man of few words since he came aboard the Annabel Lee-no doubt the effect of having lived in confinement for so long.
“They’re hailing us,” said Pug. He punched a response into the black control panel at the end of his armrest. “And we’re answering, like any trader with nothing to hide.”
A moment later, the image of Kevratas was replaced on the viewscreen with that of a hawk-faced Romulan officer. He regarded Picard and the others on the cargo vessel’s bridge with unconcealed suspicion.
Fortunately, all four of them were disguised. They had loose gray skin, startling blue eyes set deep into their skulls, and noses that spread almost from ear to corkscrewed ear. If not for the significant differences in their statures-Pug being stocky and of medium height, Decalon being somewhat taller and narrower, and Greyhorse towering over all of them-Picard would have had a dickens of a time telling them apart.
Then again, he wasn’t a Barolian, despite the appearance his subdermal holoprojector