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“Excuse me?”

“You heard me! You’re asking way too much of a guy who’s just trying to get home.”

“Even though what is being asked of you could assure the security of your home planet for decades to come?”

He tossed his hands into the air. “How do I know this delicate operation of yours really has anything to do with that?”

Taking a single defensive step backward, she said, “I understand the intensity of your desire to return to your former life and career, but—”

“You have no idea, so don’t go down that road,” he said, stomping firmly on her words. “Listen, I was willing to pitch in for a few weeks on my way back to Earth, if that meant I’d be helping out one of T’Pol’s old friends.”

“How very magnanimous of you,” Ych’a said.

“But I have absolutely no intention of squandering an entire year of my life—or however much time this goddamned spy business is gonna use up—to yet another deep-cover adventure behind enemy lines. Sorry, but as Sam Goldwyn once said, you can include me out.”

Trip’s rant seemed to have stopped her short—but only for a moment.

“Are Agent Harris and Captain Stillwell aware of how strongly you feel about returning to Earth?” she said very quietly.

Trip had to work hard to keep his jaw from falling open at her casual mention of his ultrasecret—and supersecretive—Section 31 superiors. Then he decided that playing games with her by pretending ignorance would probably be an exercise in futility.

“How do you know about the bureau?” he asked at length.

Ych’a now seemed to display traces of another emotion, or at least something that looked to Trip a lot like self-satisfaction. “I know that the strategic goals of your Terran intelligence services are congruent with those of the V’Shar—at least insofar as Vulcan and Earth’s mutual Romulan problem is concerned.”

It seemed very strange to Trip that Vulcan’s leaders didn’t try to take a far larger share of the ownership of this particular “mutual” problem than they had allowed Earth and Starfleet to assume. After all, humans weren’t the Romulans’ genetic and cultural cousins as the Vulcans were.

But how many Vulcans are even aware of that? he wondered.

“And because of our shared interests,” Ych’a continued, “your superiors have already agreed to... loan your services to us, at least for the duration of the new mission the V’Shar must undertake inside Romulan space.”

If she was telling the truth, her superiors were acting in a pretty damned high-handed fashion. On the other hand, his superiors had talked him into colluding with them in faking his own death—which made them equally high-handed, almost by definition.

In spite of a rising wave of despair at the prospect of yet again indefinitely postponing his return to the land of the living, Trip felt the left corner of his mouth draw itself up into something that felt a little like a wry grin.

“Are you sure my bosses agreed to this ‘loan’ out of a shared sense of purpose?” he said. “Or is it more likely that they rolled over for it because they have no more power than I do to force you to do anything else with me?”

Trip could have sworn he saw the mirror image of his own grin trying to appear on Ych’a’s face. “Does that distinction really matter?”

He paused to think about that for a moment. “I guess it really doesn’t, when you put it that way.”

As his profound feelings of disappointment began to give way to a kind of resignation, he plopped himself down into a half-recumbent position on the hard, narrow cot that spanned the length of the back wall.

“So, tell me exactly which of our common ‘strategic goals’ am I gonna be stuck dealing with?”

“The Romulans have constructed a secret shipbuilding facility near the planet Achernar II,” Ych’a said, her tone glissading gracefully back into a businesslike lack of affect.

Trip searched his memory of the star charts and stellar atlases he had studied during his sojourn in Romulan space, mentally comparing the alien place names he had encountered to their common Coalition equivalents.