Chapter Thirteen
SOMEWHERE DEEP IN ROMULAN SPACE
Space itself twisted into gigantic shimmering whorls and glowing iridescent loops before Commander Donatra’s fascinated eyes. What she saw was a thing of both beauty and power. A monument to the heroism of many.
And to the overweening ambition of one.
The Great Bloom. Here is where the thalaron explosion finally rid us of Shinzon,she thought , along with his plans to spread still more death and destruction across the galaxy.
Surveying the bridge of the warbird Valdore,she watched her crew as they busied themselves scanning and monitoring the phenomenon displayed on the viewer. Turning back toward the Great Bloom’s spectacular image, she reflected that this region of space had nearly become a cemetery for her own ship and crew, as well as for Shinzon. How many noble Romulan soldiers, as well as subordinates of Captain Picard, had died in the battle to stop the upstart praetor’s dishonorable rampage?
Now, many weeks after a truly dreadful weapon had been turned back upon its wielder, the site of Shinzon’s denouement still blazed furiously. Commander Suran had recently confided to her that he regarded the Great Bloom as a cosmic warning about the deadly consequences of wielding power unwisely—and of choosing allies poorly. It was obvious now to Donatra that she and Suran had chosen poorly indeed when they’d made their initial alliance with Shinzon and his Reman faction.
Just as Tal’Aura chose poorly,she thought, when she threw in with Shinzon.She remained convinced that Tal’Aura could never have assumed the praetorship without first conspiring to enable Shinzon to eliminate Praetor Hiren and every important member of the Romulan Senate save herself.
Donatra continued staring into the ever-shifting recesses of the great tear in the spatial fabric known as the Great Bloom. She couldn’t bring herself to disagree with Suran’s assessment of the thing’s significance. But she preferred to see another dimension to it as welclass="underline" it was also a testament to the sacrifices that both Romulan and Federation nationals even now stood ready to make for the ever-elusive cause of peace.
Perhaps it is also a monument to redemption.Donatra wondered if she would ever expiate the guilt she still felt for having once supported the man who had slain every member of the Romulan Senate except for the one who now called herself the Empire’s praetor.
It is indeed a hopeful sign that we have found a constructive use for this remnant of Shinzon’s folly,Donatra thought, watching in silence as orderly patterns of dots carefully arranged themselves at strategic positions between the glowing loops of thalaron-tortured space-time. She sincerely hoped that taking advantage of the phenomenon’s newfound utility would give additional meaning to the lives of all the soldiers and senators whom Shinzon’s horrible weapon had slain.
Each of the more than two dozen tiny shapes on the viewer’s tactical display represented a D’deridex-class or Mogai-class warbird, every one of them equipped with armaments, shields, and engines comparable to those of their flagship, the battle-scarred Valdore.Those potent armaments included not only scores of disruptor banks and hundreds of photon torpedoes, but also large complements of small but lethal attack fliers.
Every one of these vessels had already been officially written off as seized or destroyed during the brief Reman uprisings that had flared up immediately after Shinzon’s assassination of the Senate. If the commanders and crews of these vessels took care to maintain their distance from the spatially-riven event horizon that lay close to the center of the Great Bloom’s expanse, those ships would find a safe and discreet port here, remaining undetectable from any appreciable distance. The space-time distortions caused by the Great Bloom’s intense gravitational lensing effects would see to that. Now our “ghost fleet” but awaits either my or Suran’s command to pounce upon whoever prevails in the struggle for civilian power, be it Tal’Aura, Pardek, political moderates, or even those vile, cave-dwellinguaefv’digae from Remus.
The aft turbolift door hissed open. Out of the corner of her eye, Donatra saw Commander Suran enter at a breathless near-run. “We need to speak, Commander. Privately.”
Donatra suppressed a harried sigh. She wondered how many more times she would have to soothe Suran’s misgivings about hiding so many ships within the Bloom’s energetic shadow. He had objected from the beginning that the Bloom, as good a hiding place as it was, lay too far away from Romulus to allow for a sufficiently fast deployment should the need to do so arise unexpectedly. But he had never presented a better alternative. Although Suran was ostensibly on her side in the Empire’s ongoing power struggles, there were times when she wished she could simply pull rank on him rather than having to explain and persuade. But even if Icould just order him about, what assurance do I have that he would do as I command?
Then she saw the look of real concern in his eyes, which blazed with a sincerity she hadn’t seen since Tal’Aura had engineered Admiral Braeg’s death. Though she respected Suran’s tactical prowess, she didn’t credit him with enough artifice to counterfeit such passion. Whatever was on Suran’s mind now, it was clearly nothing trivial.
“Of course,” Donatra said, keeping her voice even as she gestured toward the bridge’s starboard side.
“It’s about former Senator Pardek,” Suran said as soon as the plain gray duranium door had slid shut behind them, ensuring their privacy. “He’s just been found dead.”
She dropped heavily into the chair behind her desk, and gestured toward the empty seat in front of it. “I assume he didn’t die peacefully in his sleep.”
“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 verakor 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.