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Neither spoke for the next few moments. Behind Tuvok’s shoulder, Zetha could see the phenomenon of stars slipping by at maximum warp. On the table in front of her, the unfinished sundae seemed as much a miracle. She pushed the dish away.

Tuvok rose to go.

“Doubtless Admiral Uhura will question you in greater depth when we arrive on Earth, about your training, about those who trained you.”

Zetha shook her head. “We ghilik were housed separately from ‘true’ Romulans. There was only one man. We were instructed to call him ‘Lord.’ I never knew his name.”

“Another irony,” Tuvok decided.

The lecture Zetha had been dreading never came. Instead, Tuvok let his hand rest for a moment on her head, the gesture of a loving father. Zetha did not look up until he was gone.

From his safe room deep within the warbird, Koval had been busy. Reports from Imperial worlds where the seeds had been planted were uneven at best. In some places, thousands had died before the entity infecting their bodies had been identified and they were quarantined. Once quarantined, all those infected died, but no new cases were reported. In still other places, the numbers of dead ranged from a few hundred to a score or less. In some places, the infection never “took” at all. The same was true for the worlds within the Outmarches so affected. And there had been no new cases reported in nearly a week.

Ah, well, the experiment in and of itself had been interesting. Koval wondered what the final numbers on Federation worlds would be. He would know soon enough, even as he would know how the revelation of the datachips would affect interplanetary relations.

There was no way the datachips could be traced to him. He had liquidated the remaining ghilik before he’d left the homeworld. Their barracks had been converted to a storage facility, all trace of habitation removed. The datachips would reveal the identities of beings with Romulan-sounding names who had never existed. Should the Federation be foolish enough to reveal those names, the Praetor, the Imperial Senate, and even the Continuing Committee would enjoy a good laugh at their expense.

Still, Koval was disappointed. He had hoped the experiment might continue until the number of dead had reached critical mass. There was a point in the bureaucratic mind, Koval had discovered, where the body count was deemed unacceptable. A few thousand dead was dismissed as a misfortune, but a few hundred thousand was judged an obvious conspiracy. It was from that point that he had hoped to operate, until that idiot Thamnos had ruined everything.

If only the fool had focused on the goal a little longer! The Federation would have rattled its sabers and accused the Empire of bioterrorism, and then, while they were still recovering from the embarrassment of being told those datachips were meaningless fakes, perhaps created by the Federation itself, since there were no such Romulans as those catalogued on the chips, Koval would have produced his trump card.

The source of the datachips? An overly ambitious Federation citizen trying to grab at a little glory, falsifying documents-as witness his earlier debacle with a paper on Bendii Syndrome! Koval had kept copies of all Thamnos’s “research,” and if the Federation operatives denied they’d found the datachips in Thamnos’s possession, he could produce the knife, no doubt containing traces of the murderer’s DNA. The accusations and counteraccusations could go on for years.

It would also have served as a test case for creating a larger pandemic at some point in the future. Ah, well. The only thing for Koval to do now was to make sure all traces of involvement were removed.

Which reminded him. Best get the call to Papaver Thamnos over with before they reached home.

“Go to bed?” Benjamin Sisko echoed Jennifer’s words as she grabbed the front of his tunic and began to tug him along with her. “It’s the middle of the afternoon! I’m not even tired.”

“Who said anything about