Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [137]
“A man can get into an awful lot of mischief in an hour and a half….” Sisko mused as the bedroom door slid softly shut behind them.
“Don’t owe you anything anymore!” Papaver Thamnos said stonily once he fully understood Koval’s message about his son. “Don’t know what your involvement was, but he wasn’t dead before you went looking for him. Got nothing to say to you. Had nothing to say to that other fellow, got nothing to say to you. We’re finished. Go away.”
“What ‘other fellow’?” Koval said, more sharply than he intended. But Papaver Thamnos was playing with his hounds. A moment later he terminated the transmission.
The ensign who had brought Zetha the sundae approached her table after Tuvok left, but his smile reminded her too much of Tahir’s, and she excused herself and left the lounge. There was something she had to do.
Wending her way through the corridors to find sickbay on her own without asking for directions, she found Selar conferring with Okinawa’s chief medical officer. Seeing Zetha, the Vulcan raised an inquiring eyebrow in her direction.
“When you have time,” Zetha said, a little shyly, “may I have my freckles back?”
Epilogue
It was mop-up time.
The planet Renaga was placed under joint Federation/ Romulan jurisdiction. A Romulan warbird and a Federation starship would become permanent fixtures in orbit for the next little while. In addition to a raft of diplomats, teams of observers from both sides, including a joint medical team, would be stationed down-planet. Their final report would indicate that hilopon was in fact not the panacea Thamnos had described in his paper. It worked only under specialized conditions-the missing “ingredient” turned out to be exposure to a particular rare element in Renaga’s sun-which meant that the stuff was useless once it was taken offworld. And if the Renagans didn’t want visitors on their world-the Council of Elders was still ignoring them, but some of the ordinary citizens from the villages nearest the observer site had made friendly overtures, though it was too soon to tell whether the Elders or the villagers would win-the curative effects of its only valuable resource would remain limited at best. Those in the know were of the opinion that Renaga would eventually prove of little interest to either side and, given the costs of maintaining a presence there, abandoned to its own devices.
Upon condition of his donating a half-liter of blood to be transformed into a vaccine to inoculate the citizens of Sliwon against the Catalyst virus, the noisy Rigelian huckster whom Tuvok had confronted in the Sliwoni marketplace was eventually released after a very thorough questioning. He steadfastly denied any involvement with Romulan authorities or any member of the Thamnos family. He left Sliwon immediately after his release.
Unbeknownst to him, a subcutaneous transceiver, legal under Sliwoni law, was injected at the site where the blood was drawn, making it possible for the authorities to track his movements throughout the Neutral Zone for a period of half a year. If he kept his nose clean for that amount of time, the transceiver would go dormant, and he’d be free to disappear once again into the hordes of itinerant peddlers the galaxy over.
Citizen Jarquin of Quirinus received a carefully worded document from one Citizen Leval of Romulus, which informed him, with regret, of his sons’ deaths. Soon other Quirinians began requesting information about their lost kin, but received no answer, and Citizen Leval’s sources for the information were never revealed. While some Quirinians steadfastly refused to believe that everyone who had ever emigrated from their world to Romulus was dead, conscription and further emigration trickled to a standstill, and most Quirinians began to rethink their relationship with the Empire.
The mysterious