Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [127]
Zetha remembered how her gums used to bleed in the final weeks in the barracks. She understood about stress. For a moment she almost pitied Sisko. Then she remembered about Catalyst.
“So I didn’t infect him? Does that mean-?”
“Will you assist me in continuing my experiment?” Selar asked again.
Puzzled, emotionally spent, Zetha could think of nothing else to do. She followed Selar to the lab.
Many in the village on the hilltop were awakened by the rushing sound of Albatross’s thrusters, and some ventured to their windows in time to see the fiery orange trail soaring upward, but none dared venture outside to investigate. Some prayed, others simply went back to bed. In the morning, some would venture into the woods from which the demonic sight had originated, see the scorch marks in the grass, and pray again. The only one who might have offered some explanation, however incredible, was Boralesh, who slept through it all.
Speculation might have entertained the villagers for days if they had not soon had newer marvels to concern themselves with. For that morning Boralesh informed her neighbors that she had dreamed her husband had been murdered by a demon, and this was of far more interest than some unexplained fireball in the sky. Perhaps the two were somehow connected?
When Thamnos failed to reappear that same evening-the villagers were accustomed to his seemingly aimless peregrinations, but he always returned for supper-some would whisper behind their hands that perhaps he had deserted the woman who had forced him into marriage. Others would speculate that it was not a demon that had killed him. The buzz would last for several weeks, then dissipate. It was all in the stars and the gods’ hands, anyway, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
“Well?” Admiral Tal demanded yet again, wishing Koval would get out of the habit of standing just between his peripheral vision and the forward screen every time he was on the bridge. “We’re here. Now what?”
Koval did not look at him so much as address him over his shoulder. “I beam down. You wait.”
“Alone?” Tal demanded, though not with any great passion. If a Tal Shiar operative chose to beam into a possibly hostile environment without a security team, who was he to stop him?
“Yes, alone,” Koval said. “Where I’m going, no one will even see me. I will instruct your transporter crew. You will stay in constant contact with me and await my orders.”
The sight of the knife in Thamnos’s throat almost made Koval wish he’d brought guards. But there was nothing living in the cave, and Koval was confident he could beam out before anyone might come shuffling in from outside.
He had already silenced the other two transmitters and their operators, ordering the warbird’s transport officer to beam him from site to site. He’d planned to silence Thamnos next, but someone had beaten him to it.
The fact that the murder weapon was a native kitchen knife might almost have led him to the obvious conclusion that Thamnos had been killed by a Renagan, for whatever reasons Renagans killed each other. Jealous husband, embittered wife, cheated business partner-what did he care? But when he realized that the Rigelian’s transmitter and the datachips were gone, Koval arrived at a different conclusion entirely.
A Renagan killer might have opened the case looking for valuables and, not finding anything but datachips, meaningless to an illiterate, dumped them on the floor, smashed the transmitter as being equally useless, trashed the place, and gone away. The fact that the only things missing could directly link Thamnos, the seeds, and the Empire was disquieting. Whoever had done this knew exactly what they were looking for. Using a native knife to kill the Rigelian was just a sardonic twist.
Seething, Koval searched the cave once more to make certain he’d overlooked nothing. Knocking carelessly against a table, he