Lost Era 06_ Catalyst of Sorrows - Margaret Wander Bonanno [80]
“I have preserved their exact pattern in your medical chart,” Selar told her, sensing her concern. “Once we leave Quirinus, I can restore them. Or you can remain without them until we complete our mission and then have them back just as they were.”
Zetha said nothing. Why did such a minor change disturb her when so many major changes hadn’t? What if she died without her true face?
“They are, after all, a part of you,” Selar said mildly. Zetha suppressed a sudden wave of what a human might call hero worship. She found herself wondering how old Selar was, whether she, like most Vulcans, had been betrothed as a child, whether she had children.
In Ki Baratan, she had often searched the crowds on the streets for males and females of a certain age, imagining any one of them might have engendered her. The little monster with the booted feet was not even part of her consideration.
She thought she had gotten out of the habit by now, but she’d been wrong. The face that looked back at her in the mirror was not only naked without its characteristic sprinkling of extra pigmentation (“As if when the gods were making you they got distracted and forgot to stir the batter properly before putting you in the oven to bake!” Aemetha used to say), but the look in the green eyes was vulnerable. She had never had a mother; why crave one now? She had Selar’s trust, and she had found ways to make herself useful. What more did she want?
Everything, Thamnos had thought, balefully eyeing the stranger blocking the light at the entrance to his cave. I am about to lose everything!
“How did you find me?” he asked, pretending to be calmer than he felt.
“Your father sent me,” the stranger said.
“But-” Thamnos began, and only then, after how many years, did it occur to him that of course his tiny ship, only one of many in the family hangar, would have had a homing device.
But the stranger was not interested in Thamnos family matters. He came straight to the point. “He owes us certain… considerations. Control of the hilopon is ours from here on.”
Chapter 12
As a matter of cosmic history, one man’s terrorist can be another man’s freedom fighter, and if a Rigelian by any other name can pass for a Romulan to the cursory scan of a tricorder, the reverse can also true.
The path to the office of chairman of the Tal Shiar was a steep and necessarily twisted one. In the course of his climb, Koval had had to do a lot of traveling early in his career.
Everyone knows what spies do. They infiltrate a society, eavesdrop on its conversations, study its fleet movements and weapons technology, report on unrest and sedition in its streets, send encrypted messages back to headquarters on often-compromised frequencies and, with luck as much as spycraft, live to spy another day.
But that sort of legwork is largely for the young spy, and the goal is always to come in from the streets and out of the cold to a room of one’s own. The secret world, like any organization, has its middle management. Those spies who survive the years of ground-level sneakery without capture, torture, execution, or, perhaps worst of all, reprogramming, eventually plateau here, unless they have the sheer temerity to step on as many necks as possible on their climb to the upper echelons.
In the world of spies, much of a middle manager’s daily work lies in trying to “turn” spies from the other side, convincing them to join his cause; the rest of his time is spent in recruiting civilians to be spies. How and why the Thamnos family ended up in Koval’s pocket was a tale too long in the telling. But the sins of the fathers often pass to the sons, even if the sons are not sophisticated enough to understand the agenda their fathers have created.
All this weighed on Koval’s mind as he stood in the entrance to the makeshift underground laboratory, the dust of Renaga sullying his otherwise meticulously shined boots. The Tal Shiar had had sleeper cells on Renaga for decades. They knew someone had come to ground in a small private ship over a decade ago and had reported