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When Koval needed a front man for his latest freelance project, he had thought of a Rigelian. There was a saying about Rigelians on both sides of the Zone-“looks like a human, scans like a Vulcan”- and they had been of use to both sides often in the past. Koval recalled that Thamnos the Elder owed him a favor. If he believed in gods, Koval might have thought they were smiling on him when the senior Thamnos told him of his son’s disappearance and provided him with the call signal for the missing ship.

Marvelous! was Koval’s first thought. Everything I need in one place. Pity it’s such a backward, out-of-the-way place and I shall have to travel there personally, but even so…

Mindful of the bewilderment in Thamnos the Younger’s squinty eyes-the fool had no idea what this was all about-Koval considered the mediocrity of the material he sometimes had to work with. But the stupid ones were often the most easy to manipulate, and it was all for the glory of the Empire, was it not? Koval looked down his aristocratic nose at the man who on this world called himself Cinchona and asked:

“How would you like to be immortal?”

The poor dupe’s answer was exactly what Koval expected.

“What does that mean?” he said and, on that tenuous basis, Koval worked his alchemy.

Utilizing a lifelong fascination with biological warfare, he had become a specialist within the Tal Shiar, responsible for not a few covert experiments on colonials and subject populations. Now it was time to take his skills to the next level. Since Jekri Kaleh’s ouster, he was one step away from the chairmanship, and the Continuing Committee was rumored to be seeking a replacement for the current chairman, who was well past his prime. This action, Koval hoped, would prompt the Committee’s hearts and minds to turn toward him.

In his research he had of course searched the archives for the Gnawing, and found its potential encouraging. In fact, he wondered why no one had thought to use it before. He now had a place to begin. One never knew when the ability to depopulate a planet without damaging its infrastructure might come in handy. And there were so many other things one could do with a manageable disease along the way.

But there were problems. For one thing, fear of the Gnawing was so entrenched in the Romulan psyche that, even after a thousand years free of it, it would be among the first things any reputable physician would test for. Further, its incubation period was too short to be effective. Within a day or two of exposure, those afflicted died. Civil authorities, faced with an outbreak of something so virulent, would quarantine affected populations, terminating the spread. One could hope at best to kill a few hundred per world. Not what Koval had in mind.

Then, of course, there was the question of checks and balances. One wanted an antidote, a way of stopping the disease from spreading to one’s own troops, being inadvertently carried onto a warbird, and turning it into a ghost ship or, worse, a carrion bird bringing the disease back to the homeworld.

Problem: Create a disease with a long incubation period for which there is a cure that only you control.

Solution: the Gnawing, grafted onto R-fever (which had the added advantage of crossing species to affect humanoids as well) and other chimeric entities, to confuse anyone trying to deconstruct it, potentially curable by a substance called hilopon, which your sleeper cells report is only found on Renaga.

He could have done all of this himself, although obtaining the R-fever might have been problematic, but for safety’s sake Koval wanted a dupe to take the fall in case anything went wrong. Who better than a former Federation citizen, who just happened to be a research physician of sorts, living in exile on the very world inside the Zone that held the cure? It was almost too easy.

Using the simplest words possible, Koval told Thamnos what was expected of him. Not that he told him everything. He offered Thamnos virtual immortality