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“Tell me what you think, honestly,” she said, once she had finished sweeping the small conference room for listening devices.

Although she had taken a seat, Valdore remained rigidly at attention. His nation’s supreme leader, after all, had just ordered him to commit the imperial military to an entirely new invasion and occupation, a war on a second front.

“The praetor is insane, First Consul,” he said simply.

T’Leikha nodded gravely. “I am inclined to agree. So I must ask you something, Admiral, in strictest confidence.”

He nodded.

“Do you intend to follow the orders of an insane praetor?” she said.

Valdore allowed an enigmatic smile to cross his lips. He knew he had to take the utmost care in answering such a loaded question. At length, he said, “The praetor is also... prone to forgetfulness. He has issued unorthodox orders before, and subsequently forgotten them.”

“Has he ever before ordered the military to do anything quite this unorthodox?” T’Leikha countered, her gaze like sharpened nhaih- stone spear points.

“No, First Consul,” he said quietly.

“What is the situation at Haakona, really?” the first consul wanted to know.

“It is a quiet backwater, as it has been for more than a generation.”

She nodded. “Ever since the fleet pulled out of the system.”

Valdore nodded. He had only been in the military for a short time, following his abortive Senate stint, when D’deridex’s father had, as part of his perceived mandate as praetor, begun the initial occupation of Haakona. That disastrous military misadventure had cost countless Romulan lives, and had finally ended after nineteen bloody years of ceaseless insurgent attacks upon the occupation forces.

Some of the dead had been his closest friends.

“Why do you suppose the praetor has suddenly placed such importance on Haakona?”

Valdore spread his hands helplessly. “When a man nears the end of his life, he begins considering his legacy with more intensity than ever before. And D’deridex’s legacy has always been bound up with that of his father.”

“Perhaps he fears that a Coalition race—probably the Andorsu— will outflank us at Haakona to gain control of the dilithium supply there,” T’Leikha said. “The Empire still indirectly imports significant amounts of dilithium from Haakona, and the destruction of Coridan has made dilithium a much dearer commodity in Coalition space than it once was.”

Valdore tried to avoid wincing at the mention of Coridan. Although the carnage there had been terrible, the immolation of Coridan Prime’s subterranean dilithium stocks had turned out to be far less complete than he had hoped it would be. He had asked himself more than once since the Coridan attack whether the results he had achieved on that world had been worth the level of indiscriminate death that he had dealt to the Coridans.

Dismissing his self-recriminations, Valdore shook his head and said, “I find that doubtful, First Consul. Outflanking us at Haakona would require a ruinous deployment of high-warp ships that are needed far more urgently elsewhere, for defense against our fleet. Besides, of all the members of the Coalition, the Thhaesu are best positioned to take Haakona’s dilithium, but they do not yet appear to have seen the logic in making any large-scale grabs for the mineral, Coridan Prime notwithstanding.”

Committing so much of the Empire’s vast yet not unlimited military resources to reoccupying Haakona struck Valdore as utterly wasteful on two levels, irrespective of the planet’s dilithium wealth. First, there was the far more urgent war in which the Romulan fleet was already embroiled, fighting back against an aggressively expansionist Coalition. Second, the presently—and with luck, only temporarily—stalled avaihh lli vastam warp-seven-stardrive project that Chief Technologist Nijil had inherited from the late Doctor Ehrehin still held the promise of rendering dilithium effectively obsolete. At any moment, Nijil might achieve