Chapter 12: Sub Rosa I
2409
13:00 Hours
She takes longer than usual to look at herself in the mirror.
This will be the last time she wears the uniform of the Imperial Navy, she knows, no matter if the day ends with her on a shuttle to Artaleirh or bleeding out on the floor of the Irix bridge. The silver-checked waistcoat, the severe lines running from shoulder to shoe, the carefully-shorn hair, even the thin chain of rank of which she’d been so proud. She has been so long wearing this, she thinks, that she does not know if she will even exist without it.
There is only one change today – the dathe’anofv-sen in her jacket, placed right over her breastbone.
I am going to betray them all, she thinks. I am a monster. But there is no other way.
That is answered by a voice from long ago, as soft and as far away as her conscience waking up – Aura, sweet, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
One of the unimportant Uhlans who works in the armory is addicted to eihssinhhre – a contraband substance in the Imperial Navy but relatively available on planets further from the baleful eye of Rator, if one knew where to look. She’d found just enough in the home of Subject 3938 to buy the attendant’s silence and the use of one disruptor minigun and small breacher pod, both small enough to conceal, and a sworn oath to have it back by the end of the man’s shift.
She leaves him greedily tearing open the baggie of alien crystals, stuffing them up his nose as quickly as he can. It will keep him high for the next hour or so, Aurelia knows, but the comedown will be a 'thrai – they’d find him at the end of his shift sprawled dead beside the pulsewave rifles.
He’s the lucky one, she thinks.
Her next stop is the quarters of Subcommander Khaul, the Tal Shiar squad leader who’d replaced her as lead tactician in the war room. She knows exactly what his capabilities are and what systems his codes allowed him access to – because they had once been hers. Even his quarters had once been hers.
So she has been subtly indicating her interest in him for weeks, now, ever since she and Kirina made their pact. It is nothing that would be noticed by others, of course, and nothing that would cause undue harm to either of their stellar reputations. So when she arrives at his door, and compliments him on the efficient and daring way he planned the Jouret attacks, he responds by lifting his chin and asking Aurelia to stop playing games.
“Turn off the security cameras and I’ll do whatever you want,” she whispers.
Khaul does so, then takes her by the wrist and drags her into his quarters, pushing her up against the wall. He tells her she is beautiful. He tells her she is worth his attention, even though she’s just a common soldier. She tells him to close his eyes as she reaches for the fastening at the top of her waistcoat.
The fvadt fool closes his eyes. Serving something as powerful as the Project has made him cocky. He is expecting her to shed her waistcoat like the other women do. He is not expecting her to draw an honor blade and stab him through in the way of a traditional ritual suicide. He does not even have time to ask why she is doing it.
She sets him carefully on the ground, and goes about her work.
First, to his bedside, where she finds his own family’s dathe’anofv-sen. She puts her gloves on, picks it up, bloodies it and arranges it exactly how it would look if Khaul had committed suicide.
Second, she opens Khaul’s official terminal. For a Tal Shiar agent, he is remarkably clumsy with code, but it still takes her longer than she wants to crack the root access. There, she is able to use his biometric signature and authorization to lock the ship’s internal sensors against a few very specific types of energy weapon without raising an alarm.
Third, a cursory search of his drawers nets her the thing he’d been boasting about in the lounge last week: a prototype interrogation device. It is very much like the one the Tal Shiar already used, but half the size. She slips it down her shirt, near the blade.
Fourth, she heads to the bathroom, and the loose tile at the top of the sonic shower. She holds her breath – and it’s still there, the lot of it, all five poisons she’d been keeping for a rainy day. Good – she won’t have to go to medbay. Those go in the left pouch with a sigh of relief. A moment later, she thinks about it and leaves one of them in the bedside drawer, implicating Khaul for the next thing she was about to do.
She washes the dathe’anofv-sen in the sink and returns her waistcoat to its immaculate state in the sonic shower.
She examines herself in the mirror.
The point of no return.
Although the lab workers on the second shift spend most of the time in the offices behind the Project checkpoints, they live together in a barracks room closer to the lounge alongside the general ship’s population, and would be on the schedule for rack time at this point. The room abuts a maintenance tube, which Aurelia enters between passing sublieutenants; she dials down the breacher pod to its lowest settings and uses it to punch a hole in the wall.
She hesitates, listening for the sensor alarms that do not come. It is enough to entertain the slightest bit of doubt.
They are Romulan. This is wrong, she thinks.
And then: Kirina told you what they did to those colonists. These ryakna made them Borg; they stripped them of all dignity, tortured them, and killed them when they were no longer any use.
Before she can stop herself, she installs the poison vials into the aerosolizer, turns it on and drops it through the hole.
They will not awaken again.
Crawling back out into the hallway, she straightens her uniform and heads towards the command area of the ship. She sees Major K’haeth rounding a corner towards the area of the ship the Project has devoured, a sick smile on his face. She finds herself holding her breath, thinking of Kirina, knowing what is to come.
We’re pulling this off. Ajoi, we are pulling this off.
Feeling emboldened, she pushes forward, heading closer to the bridge than she’s been in a while. If K’haeth has just come from making his shift’s-end report to Galan, as she suspects, Galan will generally head back to his quarters to calm down before he takes it out on the crew. So she hangs a right towards the commander’s quarters, drawing out her PADD from the pouch at her side, typing a message on it.
Galan is indeed in his quarters. Despite the commander’s many failings, he is a conscientious captain that cares for his crew, so when she rings the bell and tells him that she has early reports from the probe data on Artaleirh’s defenses, he rings her in, even though she’s not exactly the person tasked to report it. She stands at perfect, respectful attention as he looks away to read the PADD, and the message she’d placed on it.
When he looks back up at her, there is a disruptor in his face.
“Don’t move. Don’t call for help,” she says.
Galan’s face twists. He stands quietly, splaying his fingers open on the desk, daring her to shoot, attempting to make himself look bigger than he is. A long time ago, the tactic would have frightened her straight into submission. Today it does the opposite, dragging up the anger harvested over the past hundreds of missions. It has the dual effect of showing Aurelia he has no weapon – and instructing her that he thinks he is still in command. “I will see the Irix burn before I give you access to that.”
“Why not? Are you worried about the lives on this ship, sir? The Romulan lives?”
Galan sneered at her. “All except yours, traitor. Who has put you up to this? The Federation?”
She tightened her grip on the minigun. “Six thousand two hundred and eighty three innocent Romulan lives. That is the blood on your hands, and what comes next is only what you deserve. Give me the codes for that closet, or I will fire.”
He stares at her. “I had no choice. The Tal Shiar --”
“We all have a choice! And this is mine. I stand for the Romulan people, for the glory of what the Empire used to be, not the regime of the Tal Shiar! You will not see the Irix burn. You will not even live that long.”
She fires. Galan crumples, the command leached out of him as he becomes nothing more than a rumpled pile on the floor. She holds her breath – but her work in Khaul’s quarters stands; the sensors do not register the internal gunfire. So she moves forward, kneels, and rolls him over, checking his pulse. Just as she hoped, he is not dead. She looks at her chrono; no-one will search for Galan for hours.
She reaches into the bag and takes out the Tal Shiar device, securing it tightly on the commander’s temples. Galan feels the connective electrical impulses even as wounded as he is, and he rouses to a sleepy half-stupor, his limbs leaden from the stun, just awake enough to realize what he is doing. He tries to scream, but she covers his mouth with one hand. With the other, she activates the device.
“Tell me the codes, and I will make it stop,” she says. “I will show you the mercy you did not show the six thousand.”
He does not tell. It will be a long few hours for him.
There is only one more place to go, now.
Aurelia walks the halls of the Irix as she has always done, nodding respectfully to passing officers, making small talk, telling people how excited she is to be attacking Artaleirh, a standard gym bag dangling from her shoulder. At the fifth junction past the astrometrics lab, she turns and ducks into a very particular secondary armory that isn’t on any of the public D’Deridex schematics. Unlike the primary armory, this one is guarded not by rihannsu soldiers but by the command codes and biometric readings of an elite few – K’haeth, Galan, and the first officer, who is currently on the bridge, completely unaware.
Galan’s bio-information and codes get her through the first door, and then the second. When the third opens, she finds herself breathlessly staring at a shelf neatly stacked with small silver boxes. Forbidden boxes, full of the power of life and death, the power to turn flesh to stone, the thing she had come this far and this long to obtain – field-issue thalaron radiation generators.
She puts the bag on the floor and starts filling it carefully, one by one, reviewing her distribution plan. Halfway through, she takes a shuddering breath and hits her wrist-comm.
“t’Veras to t’Nalah,” she says, “I’m on my way to dinner.”
I am a monster. But there is no other way.