Chapter 7: Delenda Est III
2408
She finds a place for the guilt.
She must find a place for it, file it away, smother it. There is no room in the unfolding plan for any suspicion to be placed on either of them. They have to do the work. They have to look invested. They have to believe. They have to trust each other – as much as two rihannsu can, in any case.
So the guilt gets locked away where the truth used to be.
The truth. She has to face it, now. She has to confront the memories that were long sublimated by Imperial discipline. Her mother’s smile, pushed away by the lies of her teachers. Her father, silhouetted by a yellow-blue Ralatak sunset. The warm welcome of the village where they lived, filled with faces she barely remembers.
The night of the warbirds, the soldiers, the screaming.
It is like she is awakening from a dream, every single day she spends on Irix. The more she picks at the loose threads, the more the tapestry falls apart. The story she was told – that she told herself – no longer makes sense. For years and years, she could imagine that the Empire saved her from being raised by traitors, when the reality was this: she had done to hundreds what they had done to her family. She was the blade in the night, the evil that created a world built on blood. She was the traitor to the Romulan people.
She now knows it to be a lie: the belief that the Empire was built on the faith and the sweat and the passion of the people, and that she was one of the brave and the chosen. Maybe it would have been this way, once upon a time. It certainly wasn’t that way now.
Her first solution to the Problem – as she’s started to refer to the Project in her own mind – is to code a solution, like she’d done for her work before being assigned to Irix. The problem is there’s never enough time to do it quite right, and the Tal Shiar programmers are simply better than her; there’s no way she could slip a bit of malicious code into the servers running the Project without setting off a thousand alarm bells. There’s kinetic damage, of course; she could place charges, but she wouldn’t be able to avoid the Tal Shiar surveillance, and execution would be swift. And there were all of the things she didn’t know about – things Kirina wasn’t even familiar with, terrible things the researchers had locked in bins and closets and lockers, and she hated going into a battle with no knowledge of the enemy.
The guilt nags at her. It makes her stay up all night, running scenario after scenario on her head, over and over. She’s missing something.
One day, her target defends himself with his family’s old dathe’anofv-sen. She takes him down easily, and the weapon gives her an idea.
When she gets back to the barracks, she opens up the bottom drawer of her storage area, paws through the meticulously-folded shirts and tablets and the rest of her meager belongings to find the only weapon she was allowed to keep on her person, and only for ceremonial purposes – her family’s own honor blade. She’d always been ashamed of wearing it, but without it she looked like just another lower-class wannabe.
The Veras family had never been very important; they had always skated on the lower end of the social spectrum, even though they fought to keep the honorific in their name. Even before her parents fled to Ralatak, the family fortunes had long since faltered. Selling the house in the older part of Mhiessan was a formality, an acknowledgement of the truth that they were done with ch’Rihan and all it had to offer, and netted just enough for Anra and Chavek t’Veras to pay off a few dock officials and smuggle themselves and their children onto the colonial transport.
She had nothing of theirs. Just their name, the blade, and the lies.
She turned over the blade, thinking of her brother and how badly their last conversation had gone. It had been years. She’d begged him to join the service, told him about the good they could do to rebuild the colonies. She’d been so angry when he’d turned his back, walked away, and got on that transport to Artaleirh.
She thought about how easy it would be to get a message to Artaleirh, next time she was on a planet. Maybe he had a shuttle.
She thought about how her brother would probably forgive her. They were blood, after all.
She turned over the blade, examining it. She thought about the old Klingon story about the warrior that slew an army of four thousand in one night. She thought about how much easier it would be to set charges if certain people were out of the picture. She thought about how much she wanted to see Major K’haeth beg for the mercy he hadn’t shown the innocent Romulans he killed. She sat there, running the scenario in her head, over and over again, and smiled, because this time, it worked.
I’ve been going about this the wrong way, she thought. Maybe I should be a little more… traditional.