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By Root 397 0

lobby, and from there proceeded to the ancient cobbled street. Still more civilians were joining the steadily growing throng, adding to the noise, chaos, and general tumult. An increasing number of uniformed police and helmeted military uhlans began to appear among the frantic crowd as it surged down the street, away from the official state buildings. In the background of the low skyline of Ki Baratan’s Government Quarter, the graceful dome of the Hall of State arced skyward, dominating the horizon like the perpetually sun-scorched face of Remus. A trio of fierce-looking mogai wheeled through the thermals high above the dome, making dirgelike shrieks as they circled on nearly motionless wings. The operative briefly wondered whether the carnivorous birds had sniffed out live prey or carrion.

A young woman ran along the sidewalk, nearly knocking him into an elderly man as she passed. Her jade-flushed face was contorted with panic and near hysteria. “They’ve murdered the Senate!” she cried, repeating the phrase incessantly.

The operative chased her for a few steps, grabbing her by the shoulders and turning her to face him. “Who? Who has murdered the Senate?” As he repeated her words, the notion of the entire Romulan Senate suddenly being struck down simultaneously sounded absurd to him.

The woman’s only response was a terrified scream. At the same moment, something struck him from behind, hitting him hard enough to hurl him to the stone sidewalk. The impact drove all the breath from his lungs, and all feeling vanished from his left arm and both of his legs. Nevertheless, he managed to roll onto his back, hoping to face whatever had hit him.

A pair of uhlans in red-crested helmets and full armor raised their stun truncheons. The one closest to the hysterical woman silenced her scream with one savage blow. The other felled the old man whom the operative had nearly toppled by accident scant moments before.

“Leave them alone!” the operative shouted, though he could barely hear himself over the escalating melee. The uhlans moved toward him, their truncheons rising and falling like scythes harvesting ripe stalks of Rarathik-grown kheh. Countless other panicked civilians, ordinary folk who didn’t even seem to know which way to run, were either scattered or felled by repeated blows from the weapons of a growing phalanx of police and military uhlans.

He fleetingly recalled what he’d read of the bloody riots that Archpriest N’Gathan’s assassination of Shiarkiek, the Empire’s aged monarch, had touched off more than five years ago. Something really has happened in the Hall of State, he thought. Something terrible. Everyone here must think the same thing is about to happen to them as well.

And judging from the behavior of the uhlans, they were every bit as panicked as the general populace.

Using his right arm, the operative laboriously pushed himself up into a sitting position, facing away from the two approaching uhlans. Pulling himself forward, he tried to navigate a sea of fleeing legs. Inadvertent blows landed by scores of running feet rained onto his ribs, chest, and belly.

Pulling his wrist chron to his lips, he shouted a prearranged command directly into the voice pickup, hoping that all the ambient noise wouldn’t drown it out.

“Aehkhifv!” The Romulan word for “eradication.”

He knew he was almost certain to be either captured or killed. If he was fortunate, his voice command had already set the purge program into motion, releasing a minute thermite charge intended to destroy every bit of Federation circuitry hidden within his wrist chrono.

Including the subspace burst transmitter that represented his best chance of getting off of Romulus alive.

Then came a bone-crunching impact against the back of his head. As he sprawled forward, tumbling over the edge of a darkened abyss, his last coherent thoughts were of the Romulan Erebus myths.

Chapter Two

U.S.S. TITAN, STARDATE 56941.1

Among stars his kind had not yet traveled, Will Riker soared.

Scarcely feeling the observation platform of Titan’s stellar cartography