Section 31_ Rogue - Andy Mangels [72]
Chapter Nine
Koval strode into the control center of the warbird Thrai Kaleh, his thoughts dark. Speculations about the Empire’s future had weighed heavily upon his mind of late. Despite the best efforts of the Tal Shiar’s vice-chairman, Senator Vreenak, to negotiate a nonaggression pact with the sprawling Dominion, Koval found it difficult to believe that those shape-shifting Gamma Quadrant devils-and their unctuous Vorta middlemen-would honor any such agreement for long. For months now, a sense of urgency had been steadily growing within the Tal Shiar leader’s gut, an almost desperate need to prove that the best days of the Praetor’s venerable congeries of worlds had not already passed.
Of course, there were things to be thankful for, to be sure. Nine years previously, Tarod IX, a world just on the Federation’s side of the stelai ler’lloann-the Outmarches, which the Federation called the Romulan Neutral Zone-had suffered a devastating attack by the rapacious Borg collective. Koval often wondered what would have happened had the conquest-driven cyborgs continued across the Neutral Zone toward the core of the Empire. Could Romulus itself have survived such an onslaught? Would he have been forced to seek a long-term alliance with the Federation, whose continual, omnidirectional expansion many in the Empire regarded as a threat in and of itself?
If the Dominion behaves as treacherously as seems likely, Koval thought glumly, then I may yet be forced to take just such an action.
Fortunately, some of the reassurance Koval sought was now displayed upon the Thrai Kaleh’s central viewscreen. He looked upon a vast assemblage of spaceborne constructs, a colossal loop of machinery, energy-collectors, and habitat modules that dwarfed even the largest warbirds of the Praetor’s armadas. And in the ring’s center lay a concentration of unimaginably potent forces, a discovery that promised to revivify the Empire-and perhaps, one day, even to extend its reach to every quadrant of the galaxy.
Taking a seat in the command chair, Koval silently watched the coruscating energies in the screen’s center for the better part of an hour, while junior officers busied themselves monitoring the banks of equipment. It was their responsibility to assist the energy station’s technical crews in locating and dampening out all local subspace instabilities before irreparable harm could befall either the energy-extraction equipment or the power source’s delicately balanced containment apparatus.
Koval was unpleasantly aware that the crew had failed to mask all evidence of the phenomenon’s presence; the recent unwelcome intrusion of the first Federation starship into the cloaked zone had amply demonstrated those failures. In the aftermath, an overzealous warbird captain had overstepped his authority by destroying that Federation vessel, forcing Koval to have him summarily executed. Now that the incident had attracted the attention of the Federation’s flagship, Koval would countenance no further errors or unforeseen complications.
A hatchway opened and a distraught young decurion entered the control center, practically at a run. “Chairman Koval,” he said breathlessly. “We’ve just received a stealth signal from the Chiarosan orbital comm tether. There has been an… incident on the planet.”
Koval sighed. Why were so many junior officers averse to speaking plainly these days? “Specificity and brevity are among the cardinal virtues, Takal. Let me have both.”
The younger man paused for a moment, composing his thoughts before continuing. “Somehow, the Starfleet detainees have escaped from the base on Chiaros IV. They’ve taken one of our small scout vessels off-planet.”
Koval suppressed any outward show of surprise or anger, but he felt them both nonetheless. He quickly reassured himself: Even though the Federation now surely knows of the covert Romulan presence on Chiaros IV, they still have virtually no chance of correctly assessing the Empire’s larger agenda.
By the time they do that, it will be far, far too late.
“What