Taking Wing - Michael A. Martin [76]
“Not unless he enjoyed taking his rest with something very sharp on his pillow,” Suran said as he took the offered seat. “His own people found him in his office with his throat slashed. My sources indicate that the deed was apparently done within the last half verak or so.”
The news of Pardek’s murder brought Donatra up short, though it didn’t truly surprise her. Deaths by misadventure hadn’t exactly been uncommon in and around the Empire’s centers of power, even before Shinzon’s elimination of the Senate. Discreet assassinations of political adversaries had become almost routine under Praetor Dralath many years earlier. She had read accounts of Dralath himself slashing the throat of a dissenting senator—a murder committed in the Council Chamber, right before the startled eyes of the victim’s legislative colleagues.
But a slashed throat hardly seems like Tal’Aura’s style, she thought. And Romulan praetors, aside from the bloodthirsty Dralath, usually demurred from such naked violence. They tended to favor instead convenient happenstances such as hovercar crashes, sudden acute “illnesses,” and other similarly improbable—though plausibly deniable—mishaps.
Still, she knew that Tal’Aura’s culpability in Braeg’s death was undeniable. The late admiral had not only been Donatra’s beloved, he had also been Tal’Aura’s chief rival for the praetorship of the Romulan Empire. Thoughts of Tal’Aura’s foul act of treachery revived the dull pain that had never entirely departed from her right leg and the entire right side of her torso. Though the superficial plasma burns she had suffered on the day of Braeg’s death were within Dr. Venora’s capacity to heal completely, Donatra had decided to leave the scars intact; they remained as tangible reminders both of her enduring love for Braeg and of her abiding hatred for Tal’Aura.
Donatra hoped that the nagging aches of her wounds would ensure that she never again risked showing her back to the Empire’s newest self-appointed praetor. Her side tingled uncomfortably as she wondered if Tal’Aura had seen Pardek as yet another dangerous rival for power. Like Braeg, who might well have ascended to the praetorship himself but for Tal’Aura’s perfidy.
“Do you see the praetor’s hand in Pardek’s murder, Suran?” Donatra asked.
“It is certainly possible. Tal’Aura may see genuine danger behind the rhetoric of Pardek’s faction. His confederates Durjik and Tebok have made no secret of their desire to make war on the Federation.”
A desire that you, my ally of convenience, once shared not only with Pardek, but also with Shinzon. Did Suran now truly see his erstwhile association with Shinzon as a blunder, as she did? Not for the first time, Donatra wondered whether Suran’s current alliance with her was motivated by his decades of loyalty to the slain Admiral Braeg—and therefore at least partly from their shared hatred of Tal’Aura, Braeg’s killer—or if it was merely a marriage of expediency. Could she really afford to trust Suran any more than she could Tal’Aura?
But can I really afford not to?
“Pardek’s group has been rattling its tarnished Honor Blades for another war against the Federation for some time now,” Suran continued. “I’m sure that even Tal’Aura would agree that the Empire can ill afford such a conflict, especially now. But I seriously doubt that even she would have resorted to such a crude means of assassination.”
“It cannot be the Remans,” Donatra said, stroking her chin. “Their involvement would imply knowledge of the impending power-sharing meeting—the one from which we have all agreed to exclude them. Were they aware of the initial secret conference, they surely would have made a great deal more trouble than slaying a single retired Romulan senator.”
“Thank Erebus for small mercies.” He sighed, obviously resigned to the identity of the only other likely culprit. “The Tal Shiar, then.”
Donatra nodded. “I suspect the bureau’s young new director might be arrogant enough not to care