Chapter 13: Numbers
2409
It all came down to numbers.
3.14 Billion. Artaleirh is not some small farming settlement or refugee camp. It’s been an established Romulan colony for centuries. Nearly a quarter of the entire Romulan fleet was produced by the shipyards at Artaleirh. Since the destruction of the homeworld and Remus, the planet also found itself being one of the major remaining suppliers of dilithium in the Empire. By all rights, it was one of the most valuable colonies to the Romulan people; Then they declared independence.
Now, they were a threat. The Star Empire allied with the strange aliens, and attacked independent settlements. Those settlements formed The Republic, and if Artaleirh joined, it would be a major setback. The Tal Shiar’s price for preventing this? Those 3.14 billion Romulan lives. This could not be allowed to happen.
The aliens had joined us again. Ten ships, ready to join us in the attack. Even if we’d managed to stop Irix, we had no way to stop the Elachi. We needed allies…
Kirina walks down the long hallway. This is wrong. She passes a number of doors, opening each as she passes. They’re innocent. She reaches the end of the line and taps the comm panel. There is no other way.
“Bring them in.”
Kirina watches as a heavily armed security detail escorts a group of terrified Romulans into each of the holding areas that she’d just opened. People of all sorts. Adults, children, elderly; some look ready to fight, others are barely capable of standing. Trails of blood remain on the deck as each successive group shuffles into it’s respective cage. This is all that remains of Ecurai Colony.
“Bring me one from each.”
Nearly an hour passes, before all of the cells are filled, one hundred colonists each. The soldiers bring twenty-six of the healthiest-looking survivors over to Kirina. At gunpoint, of course, they each receive a hypospray injection that seems to have no immediate effects. When they’ve all received their treatments, they are escorted back to the cells, one into each.
As the screams begin, Kirina leads the soldiers into the main lab. “Wait here just a moment,” she says, “I have one more task for you.” With that, she strolls into the control room, and promptly flushes the security team out into the vacuum of space.
Kirina watches through the camera monitors in silent horror as each of those rooms, full of Ecurai survivors, transforms into an army of drones.
19:00 Hours.
Twenty-six hundred survivors from Jouret IV, give or take a few dozen.
Everything comes down to numbers, and the arithmetic was simple. Twenty-six hundred, to save over 3 billion.
I would do it again.