Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [7]
“Widowed,” Uhura reported. “With a young son. I’ll send her and Dr. Selar your regrets.”
“You’ve got Selar on this, too? Now, her I know by reputation. Wouldn’t mind sharpening my wits against a Vulcan’s again. It’s been way too long.” McCoy frowned. He suddenly realized he’d just been dismissed. “Wait a minute. Do you want my help on this or not?”
“Yes, repeat: No.” Uhura said, throwing his own words back at him.
“You said I can consult on remote.”
“Correct.”
“Don’t have to leave my front porch.”
“Affirmative.”
“Get to interact with bright, attractive women and maybe save a few lives in the bargain.”
“Affirmative.”
“You’ve talked me into it.”
Uhura gifted him with one of her dazzling smiles. “Welcome aboard!”
Only after she’d closed the frequency did she let her face relax and show what she was truly feeling, which was a bone-deep exhaustion. This mission had occupied her attention 24/7 ever since Cretak’s message had reached her from inside the Empire. In that time she’d done all the things she’d just told McCoy-put the medical team to work, gotten through to her operatives inside the Empire with instructions to track down every rumor of unusual illness anywhere in Romulan space, and scanned her files to determine who she had available to send into the Neutral Zone for what could at best be an exercise in futility, and at worst mean a death sentence.
Because if this was just some unusual bug, the potential was bad enough. But if, as her source suggested, it was an artificial pathogen designed to kill everyone it affected, the potential was too horrific to contemplate.
It had been almost fifty years since the infamous Tomed Incident, fifty years in which Empire and Federation had turned their backs on each other, shunned each other, withdrawn their diplomatic embassies from each other’s soil, and metaphorically glared across parsecs of space at each other in stony silence, neither side willing to take the step across the void that separated them and start again.
Which was not to say that the silence was absolute. Starfleet Intelligence had Listeners inside the Empire, just as Uhura knew the Romulans had operatives in Federation space. Occasionally one side or the other was able to turn one of their counterparts into a double agent. There was always some question about what could or could not be believed.
But sometimes the source was so well established it predated Tomed and the silence, and in that respect it could perhaps be trusted more.
Would the messenger have been sent at all if someone other than Uhura had been head of Starfleet Intelligence? What if she had stepped down this time last year, or even last week? Retirement was always on her mind, and yet—
No more! she told herself. Just this one more mission, then I’m stepping down.
She said the same thing every year. And every year, when the winter rains began to sweep across San Francisco Bay and her birthday came around, she pulled up the resignation letter she’d kept on file since the day she took this job, updated it, and thought: I’ll submit it on New Year’s Eve. Secure all my agents-in-place, give the C-in-C my recommendations for who should replace me, help groom that person for the job, and, before the year is out, quietly step aside.
And then what? she wondered every time. When do I decide it’s enough, that someone else can take my place, and it’s time for me to do what, exactly?
She supposed she could always retire to the country house near the ruins of Gedi, and sit under the jacarandas watching the blue flash of agama lizards flitting through the leaves and the giraffes making their stately parade through the clearing, or sling a Vulcan lute over her shoulder and hitch a ride on the first freighter headed toward a star beyond Antares, or write her memoirs….
Ah, now, there was the rub. There was so much she couldn’t tell, and so many biographies and autobiographies