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  “You’re called Quintilian,” she said. “As in the number?”

  “As in the Roman.” He turned toward the helm station and spoke over his shoulder. “An Earther, before your time. Rhetorician. Teacher of Pliny.”

  “The Elder or the Younger?”

  He smiled to hear her say it. “You know, sometimes I forget.” He sat behind the helm and started working the panel.

  Georgiou read the logo on the shoulder of his spacesuit—and seeing the spelling, understood. “Veneti. The people who handled trade for England before Caesar’s time.”

  He laughed. “See there, Zee? Somebody finally got it!” Quintilian looked back to Georgiou, clearly impressed. “My group does the same thing for the Troika. Trade between them—plus a little trade of my own with the outside. They consider it dirty work, fit only for the few aliens like us who already live in the neighborhood. I started with a single freighter ten years ago.”

  “Clearly you’ve expanded,” Georgiou said, looking warily at the vessels holding position outside. “You’ve armed.”

  “Let’s just say the place has personality. I can’t tell sometimes if the locals closed the borders to protect themselves from you—or you from them.” Quintilian returned his attention to the console. “Either way, this is their territory, and what happened to this ship is their business. They’re going to want it. And they’re going to want you gone.”

  The words alarmed Georgiou for a moment, until she felt the soft push of the thrusters. “You’re taking me to Archimedes?”

  “That sounds funny to hear out loud.” He looked back to her, eyes alive. “Say, do you have a Greek history museum or something over there?”

  “I…” she started. Another off-putting question in a room full of dead people. “Yes,” she answered. “There’s a display in our observation lounge devoted to his works—and of course, they’re all in the library files. It’s a science ship.”

  “Not really my line, but I like the history—and Earth’s is always a good read. There’s so much of it. I should make like a good human and go there someday.” He faced the console. “But for now, I’m getting you to transporter range. The Casmarran sentry satellites at Tagantha have likely called all of this in already.”

  Georgiou noted the name. “The Troika species won’t accept our help at all? What do they have against Starfleet?”

  “It’s not you,” Quintilian said. “Well, it is you, but it’s not just you. It’s the whole neighborhood. Federation, Klingons, Gorn—when you folks come into conflict, it doesn’t pay to pick a side. Or to be in the way.”

  “We would not infringe on a neutral’s space.”

  “Yet here you are,” Zee said, helmet-modulated voice flinty.

  Quintilian gestured for his companion to simmer down. “Sorry—I guess you can see the opinion isn’t limited to the natives.” He stood and approached Georgiou. “I appreciate what you were trying to do, Lieutenant. It was already too late for these people.”

  Georgiou looked again at the bodies on the floor, being tagged and identified by Quintilian’s crew. One used a marker to outline the locations of the fallen on the deck. It seemed such a sad end.

  “You know, I’m not superstitious,” she said. “But I saw the strangest thing as I was approaching.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The gases and dust here play tricks on the eye. But something shimmered for a second—as if the atmosphere was escaping the ship. Or maybe—”

  “Maybe the souls?”

  She blinked. “I didn’t mean—”

  “They’d be lucky to leave, then. Coleridge would have had them stay to work the ship.”

  Georgiou just stared at him. Who was this human, so far from Earth, yet knowing so much about it?

  “It wouldn’t be the strangest space tale I’ve heard.” He offered his gloved hand, and she accepted the handshake. “Thanks for checking on these folks, Philippa. We’ll see the Troika learns what happened—and we’ll leave you out of it.”

  “Until they’re ready to talk to us.”

  “If not,” he said, gripping her hand ever so slightly harder, “you can always talk to me.”

  U.S.S. Archimedes

  DEPARTING THE TAGANTHA SYSTEM

  Quintilian’s word was good. She had been returned safely to her ship. Captain Eagan’s relief at avoiding a confrontation had been immense, overwhelming any other detectible emotion. She suspected he was happy to see her home, yet still irritated over the incident she had nearly caused.

  She regretted the Troika’s standoffishness—and that she had been unable to bring back more data about the cause of the deaths. Her tricorder readings had found no toxins, but she had not been able to run full medical scans on the bodies. Quintilian’s explanation, though, rang true with Archimedes’ security chief, who had worked antipiracy missions elsewhere and knew the gamut of Orion activities.

  She had been entering her thoughts about the day’s events into her log when a personal subspace message arrived from Quintilian:

  Thanks again for answering the distress call, Lieutenant. Not many would take a chance for strangers. I have some pull with the Troika; their space may be closed, but you’re always welcome to visit me and the Veneti. You’re the sort of Starfleet person they should meet.

  You seem to know your classics, so I am sending along something unlikely to be in your library—a facsimile of The Songs of Uthalla, a manuscript written by one of the last Orion emperors to his wife. Theirs was a high culture, once—I think you’ll find it engaging. There’s a ghost ship in there and everything.

  Benediximus, Philippa—good fortune in your travels. You’ll lead people one day, and they’ll be better off for it.

  Georgiou read the last line twice and sat back.

  Notes from infatuated suitors were something she’d seen, including from those who were either erudite or pretended to be. But Quintilian seemed genuinely interested in her—and he had done what few others did, complimenting her job performance. Too many people she’d known in the Academy and Starfleet were obsessed with their own careers, unable to notice the growth of others.

  And yet after the briefest of meetings, he seemed to understand what she needed to hear. A merchant, living in a place few humans were allowed to visit.

  “You’ll lead people one day, and they’ll be better off for it.” She didn’t know whether to believe it or not—but who didn’t like to see something like that?

  I hope he’s right.

  3

  2255

  I.S.S. Hephaestus

  NEAR THE TAGANTHA SYSTEM

  MIRROR UNIVERSE

  “All hail her imperial majesty, Emperor Philippa Georgiou Augustus Iaponius Centarus!”

  Georgiou twirled, delivering a chop to the face of the gray-haired bridge officer outside the turbolift. His head slammed against the bulkhead—and she caught him on the rebound, throwing him to the deck. Another second found her boot planted firmly on his neck. “That’s Centarius,” she said.

  His eyes bulged. “Yes, Majesty!”

  She ground her heel in a twisting motion. “The Terran Empire honored Alpha Centauri by making it an early conquest. You dishonor my subjects by mangling their title.”

  “No! I—”

  “Are you disagreeing with me?”

  “No…”

  He choked out her entire name a wrenching syllable at a time, bloody spittle flying from his mouth. Nearby, several members of her royal entourage—her imperial honor guard and select others—exited the adjacent turbolifts and headed for the darkened alcoves where they would wait until she needed them.

  Like the bridge crew, they avoided looking directly at the altercation—but they definitely saw.

  Good, she thought as she lifted her foot. She didn’t care a whit for the Centaurans and their honor, but she did need to remind her people now and again that she was ready to defend her position at any moment, over any slight.

  “If you want a picture of
the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” The wise Terran author who’d written those words had intended them as advice for emperors seeking the perfect government. As a matter of day-to-day motivation, however, Georgiou had found the neck a much better target, less likely to rupture and ruin one’s clothing. Yes, as emperor, she could look any way she wanted without fear of judgment; she dressed to please only herself. But being outfitted by her servants took time—and time, criminally, was the one commodity she had no more of than any other person in the Empire. She had conquered many worlds, but there were so many yet to go.

  If she could not give herself more years, she had to speed things along.

  Fortunately, there were ways of doing that. Weapons of immense power existed everywhere; the Terrans had no monopoly on diabolical geniuses and infernal machines. Georgiou had to reach each and every weapon first and take them for herself, before they were wielded against the Empire or claimed by one of her rivals for use against her rule. Emperor Sato had seized power in exactly that manner with U.S.S. Defiant, a ship from an alternate future where the people were weak but their weapons were strong.

  Now, someone had found a weapon in a forsaken corner of the Beta Quadrant. Georgiou wouldn’t simply wait for it to be delivered to her, not with so many jackals about. She had to get it—and that required someone who knew the area.

  “Where’s our guide?” she asked Captain Maddox as she walked to the center of the bridge. “The new navigator?”

  “Behind you,” Maddox said, “trying to get his windpipe working.”

  “Oh,” Georgiou said, looking back at the old officer she’d accosted. He was still on his hands and knees. Realizing that her eyes were on him again, he rose and quickly staggered to his station.

  “He was sent over from Buran by Lorca,” Maddox said, distaste evident in his voice as he spoke his rival captain’s name. “His record says he served aboard a ship of yours, long ago. I don’t know if you even remember it: Archimedes’ Flame.”

  Georgiou knew it well. The starship’s name honored the parabolic mirror weapon created by a famed ancient Greek general who understood that war was science’s only use. Her posting aboard it had been one more stepping-stone in her rise to power. The man before her rose and saluted. “I know you,” she said. “You’re Rudolfo Eagan.”

  “Ro—” The navigator quickly stopped, midcorrection. He cleared his throat. “Pleased you remember, Imperial Majesty.”

  “I remember I chose not to kill you when I took command from you.” She coolly regarded what was left of him. “Did I make the right decision?”

  He gulped, with apparent difficulty. “You saw I was better suited for another station, Imperial Majesty. I’ve served as a navigator and tactical officer faithfully on ships patrolling this region since.”

  “This region? What a disappointing way to serve the Empire.”

  The area was a backwater amid backwaters—territory no one had gone to the trouble to claim. The place had its privateers, but none of them had become rich; that spoke to a lack of anything worth stealing. And neither the Klingons nor the Gorn had seen much point in forming a defensive alliance with its residents, who seldom scurried out of their holes.

  And it certainly looked like a hole. Such an ugly sky, she thought, surveying the mess on the main viewscreen. Multiple stars in close proximity had produced streams of ejecta, occasionally overlapping. A tangle of tangential matter: a Bok globule here, an emission nebula there. It was no wonder the Empire had skipped the area—

  —until now. She glared at Eagan. “We’re on the course I provided?”

  “Yes, Majesty. We’ll be in orbit around Tagantha in six minutes. It’s the outermost Empire-facing system—the doorway to Troika space.”

  “Troika?” She’d heard the word before, but not in this context. “Explain.”

  “It’s the local spacers’ name for the three species who live here,” Eagan said. “I’ve also heard them called the Three Hermits. They don’t like visitors.”

  “I’m not interested in their likes.”

  “I can call up the invasion forces,” Maddox said, looking back to her. “But I still don’t know what you’d want with the place.”

  “You’ll know when I tell you,” she said. “If I tell you. Scan the coded frequencies—all of them.”

  “Very well. You heard the Emperor,” he told his underlings. “Do it!”

  Maddox worked well with her, she thought; he coveted her position as much as anyone, but he wasn’t going to take his chance until he saw weakness. Before then, he was fully invested in her enlarging the Empire. She was seriously considering naming him captain of Charon, her new flagship, when it was completed.

  “We’re receiving a transmission on a coded channel,” announced Hephaestus’s comm chief. “A repeating signal from a moving vessel, with your imperial signifier.”

  There it is, she thought. “Locate the source of the transmission and approach, full impulse.”

  “As you command.” Eagan looked to her. “Note that it will require entering Troika space—”

  “You’re still talking.” Feeling the impulse engines underway, Georgiou approached the comm station and addressed the officer there. “Shoo.”

  The emperor accessed the comm terminal and took a careful look. The transmission was immense, terabytes of nonsensical data, inscrutable to anyone without the emperor’s personal decryption system. Georgiou entered her codes and watched the screen as the stream of data resolved itself into seven simple alphabetical characters:

  W H I P S A W

  “Whipsaw.” That’s it. The name her contact in the region had given for—what? An invention? A discovery?—that reportedly had the potential to change the political map of the galaxy. It was a word in Terran Standard, the name of an ancient logging tool later used as a torture device by the Canadian warlords once there were no trees left to cut.

  This Whipsaw could cut down whole peoples, she’d been told. And it was aboard the ship that had sent the message. That was what the signal meant. Aboard and on its way to her, providing no one else learned of its—

  “Proximity alert!” Eagan shouted.

  She cleared the terminal display and stepped toward the main viewscreen. More than a dozen freighters outfitted with disruptor emplacements materialized in the space before Hephaestus, dropping out of warp. “What do we have here?”

  Eagan spoke. “I’ve seen such vessels before on previous trips, Your Majesty. Merchant rabble. They generally warn us away.”

  “And you obeyed them?” Georgiou rolled her eyes. Useless. I should have killed you when I had the chance.

  “We’re being hailed,” Maddox said. He looked to Georgiou. “Do we care?”

  She did not—and didn’t want to delay reaching the ship carrying Whipsaw, whatever it was. But neither did she want to reveal to her rivals on the bridge the importance of the thing she was after by breathlessly racing for it.

  “Amuse me,” she said, approaching a dais. A throne rose from the deck, and she took a seat. “On screen.”

  “Attention, Terran vessel. Be advised that you have entered—”

  The human on screen stopped talking. The “merchant rabble” Georgiou had been told to expect were present behind him, hunched behind their leader’s chair like the drooling gibbons they were—but their master was something else. He didn’t wear the bangles and furs of a common trader; he looked almost respectable. Tanned and gray-bearded, he was a few years her senior—but he’d worn those years, and any difficulties of his life, well. He had the eyes of a much younger man—eyes that were currently wide with shock. “You’re the emperor!”

  “And you’re scrumptious,” Georgiou said, uncrossing her legs and leaning forward. “I like an older vintage now and again.”

  “I’m sorry. I expected someone important in a ship this size, but—” Recovered from his surprise, the merchant captain rose, only to take a knee. He clasped his hands and bowed his head. “
Hail to you, Philippa Georgiou Augustus Iaponius Centarius, Dominus of Qo’noS, Regina Andor, Overlord of Vulcan.”

  “You see?” She looked all about Hephaestus’s bridge. “At least someone can get it right.”

  “Of course,” the merchant continued, looking up. “Your might is known far and wide.”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere. I might even ask your name.”

  “I am Quintilian, of the Veneti.”

  Eagan spoke as Quintilian stood. “I’ve pulled up my notes on them, Your Majesty. A trading collective based in Hermit space.”

  “Troika space,” Quintilian corrected. “And that’s the extent of our range. The Veneti handle trade between the three native species here, nothing more.”

  “Ah, the Veneti,” Georgiou said, smirking. “A classic. Caesar annihilated them when he took Britain.”

  Quintilian raised an eyebrow. “I shouldn’t be surprised that you know your emperors. But I’m here to avoid conflict—on behalf of myself and the Troika species.”

  She leaned back, disappointed. Peacemakers bored her. “These are not your people. What do you care what happens to them?”

  “Their way of life makes mine possible.” Quintilian gestured broadly. “The races here are exotic, Your Majesty—peculiar, and stubborn. You’re not likely to get them to produce more than they do through… with your usual methods. But I work with people on the ground, who are used to dealing directly with me.”

  Her tone grew icy. “Are you trying to sell me, merchant? I’m not in the habit of taking on motley bands as partners.”

  “I’m just trying to suggest another way,” he said, letting the richness of his voice work on her. “There were two Veneti, you know. The merchants I named my group for—but also a tribe in Italy.”

  “Where Venice was. I’m not a fool.”

  “Rome absorbed them, without destroying them. You can do that too, Emperor. Work with us, and you can add to your power without laying waste to others—as you will most certainly have to do if you try to handle the species here directly. They will not cooperate.”

  “How refreshing. You seek to lecture me on governance as well as history.” She sneered. “Tell me, Quintilian—or whatever your real name is—are there people on whom this act of yours actually works?”