DATA STOOD IN FRONT of the ready-room wall monitor. Outside the room’s narrow windows, he saw the Amargosa behind the Enterprise. The two ships were still in orbit of Tezwa, coordinating the extraction of the thousands of Starfleet personnel who had survived Kinchawn’s coup attempt.

Captain Picard sat at his desk. Across from him sat Ambassador Lagan.

“The five shipments delivered to Tezwa by the Caedera comprise twenty cargo containers,” Data said. He continuously updated the images and reports on the screen to match his statements. “Each container has a unique serial number for tracking purposes.

“The Caedera took the containers aboard at Deneva. Their shipment to Tezwa was paid for by an Antedean, seen in this image from the Caedera’s external security sensors.

“Notice in this freeze-frame that a member of the Caedera crew places a knife to the Antedean’s throat. That weapon was found aboard the Caedera by Amargosa first officer Carlos Carranza. The Antedean’s blood was still on the knife. According to the ship’s internal sensors, no other Antedeans had come aboard the Caedera since the meeting on Deneva. That blood sample was analyzed.”

A large, crisp-focus image of an Antedean appeared on the monitor. “The blood came from Federation Secretary of Military Intelligence Nelino Quafina.”

Dismayed looks passed between Picard and Lagan. Data noted their responses, waited an appropriate interval of a few seconds, then continued.

“Though there is no record of the containers being shipped to Deneva, a more detailed search of the Federation’s commercial shipping registry indicates that their last registered use took them to Earth.

“A review of all bills of lading for private, commercial, and military shipments leaving Sector 001 revealed seven that were bound for Deneva bearing classified cargo. Five of those shipments continued on to other destinations. One was received by the planetary governor’s office.

“One never officially arrived. That shipment has the distinction of being the only one of the seven whose contents were classified by an executive order of President Min Zife.”

Lagan leaned forward. “Are you really suggesting that the president conspired with Quafina to ship contraband to Tezwa?”

Data cocked his head as he formulated an answer.

“I do not think it is likely the two met directly,” he said. “There is no record of any contact between Zife and Quafina other than two brief meetings at diplomatic functions.”

“A middleman,” Picard said.

“The most likely candidate for such a role would be Koll Azernal, Zife’s senior advisor and chief of staff,” Data said. “Our analysis of Bilok’s transmissions to Earth indicate that the majority of his encrypted signal traffic was directed to Azernal. It is highly probable that Mr. Azernal personally directed any past or present Federation initiatives on Tezwa.”

Lagan sounded confused. “Past or present? I’m not sure I follow your meaning, Commander.”

“Zife and Azernal’s efforts to conceal the origins of the nadion-pulse cannons on Tezwa make sense only if they were aware that the systems were of Federation origin. The most likely explanation for such knowledge would be that they armed Tezwa.”

Lagan shook her head. “I just can’t believe we’re accusing the administration that won the war against the Dominion of engineering a catastrophe of this magnitude,” she said. “If not for Azernal, the Alpha Quadrant might belong to the Founders right now.”

“With all due respect, Madam Ambassador,” Data said, “I do not believe that any of the parties involved sought to create a ‘catastrophe.’ Nor do I think that is the issue at hand.”

“Agreed,” Picard said. “Zife, Azernal, and Quafina engaged in a conspiracy to hide their culpability for causing the Tezwa debacle—and tried to shift the blame onto an innocent party. Now they’ve cast us as their unwitting accomplices.” Picard became darkly introspective for a moment. “Thousands of lives were sacrificed here in the service of a lie.” Quiet rage infused the captain’s voice. “All that we stand for has been betrayed.”

Lagan said sadly, “What are we going to do about it?”

“I don’t know what I would have done,” Troi said. “For a moment, when he stared at me so smugly, all I could think about was how I wanted to break him.”

Marlyn Del Cid nodded. “In the heat of the moment, those kinds of feelings are understandable,” she said.

The Amargosa counselor had insisted upon following up with Troi even though Riker had been brought back safely to the Enterprise. The two women sat in Del Cid’s office aboard the Amargosa. They faced each other from either side of a narrow coffee table, on which rested two untouched cups of chai tea. Troi leaned on the arm of the couch, her legs crossed at the ankles. Del Cid perched on the edge of a plush armchair and leaned forward, palms together and fingers steepled beneath her chin as she listened attentively.

Troi got up from the couch and ambled around the room. Outside the slim window, she saw the Enterprise in the distance, slipping past the curving horizon of Tezwa. “It’s more than that,” she said. “I still think about it: Which drugs would have broken down Minza’s resistance? How much pain would it have taken to make him talk? When the Tezwans extradited him, I envied the free hand they’d have with him.”

“I see,” Del Cid replied. “Were their methods more successful?”

“No,” Troi said, ashamed of her disappointment with the truth. “He never broke. They executed him this morning.”

Del Cid folded her hands across her lap. “So even if you had resorted to such amoral means, it would have made no difference.”

“I would have been able to see him suffer,” Troi said. Almost immediately she regretted having said it.

“But you just said that he didn’t break,” Del Cid replied. “You’d have observed a prolonged torture that yielded nothing but pain. Would that have brought you any comfort?”

Again, the truth taunted Troi. “Probably not,” she said. “It’s a primal reaction. Irrational…. After Will was beamed up from Tezwa, after I saw what they’d done to him….” She let herself trail off while she struggled to suppress her burning desire to exact vengeance upon someone—anyone—for what had been done to Will, and to her. The cruel fantasies she had harbored didn’t deserve to see the light of day. Admitting them aloud felt like a failure. “I can’t just extinguish my anger.”

“It’s going to be a lot of work, Deanna,” Del Cid said. “For a month you lived with the possibility that he might be dead, or that he was suffering. Bringing him home offers some catharsis, but this kind of emotional trauma can’t be treated overnight. It takes time to confront all your feelings and work through them. Give yourself that time.”

Troi shook her head sadly.

“I don’t think it’s as simple as that,” she said. “I feel poisoned. Tainted…. I spent so much time grappling with Minza’s way of thinking that it began to infect my own thoughts. When he was extradited, I thought of Nietzsche’s warning about the abyss. It had always seemed too melodramatic to be taken seriously. But I see now that it was no exaggeration.”

Del Cid cast a sorrowful glance out the window at the planet below. “ ‘Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster,’ ” she said, quoting from the same passage as the abyss reference. “That seems like an apt analogy for a lot of things these days.”

“Yes,” Troi said. “It does.”

It was cold enough in the Enterprise’s aft auxiliary cargo bay for Jim Peart to see his breath. It jetted out in front of him like a short-lived, wispy white spectre. The chill in the room was deep enough that after standing in here for less than half an hour, he found that his hands and the front of his thighs were almost numb.

Long rows of tall metal shelves, six layers high, filled the enormous compartment. Every shelf was packed head-to-toe with blue polymer bodybags—overflow from the Enterprise morgue. Each bag was labeled in block English characters, a scannable ID tag, and additional information in other languages as necessary. Since the ship had long ago run out of stasis chambers, refrigeration was only other viable storage method.

Peart walked slowly between the rows, eyeing the names on the tags, counting the dead. More than two thousand Starfleet security personnel had been slain on Tezwa before he could use the Enterprise’s arsenal to subdue their attackers. In a matter of minutes, a single well-orchestrated assault had killed nearly half of Starfleet’s defensive force on the planet. Had the Enterprise been incapacitated by the ship in its shuttlebay or even delayed a few minutes longer by the kamikaze attackers, Kinchawn’s coup attempt might have been successful.

Pacing among the dead, however, Peart wasn’t convinced that the battle’s outcome mattered anymore—or that it had ever mattered at all.

Even more disheartening were all the noncombatants who lay beside them: doctors, nurses, engineers, civilians. For the next few weeks, until a convoy of special medical transports arrived to ferry the casualties home to their final resting places, the dead would outnumber the living aboard the Enterprise.

His heart sank with every name he recognized on the blue bags stacked around him: Gracin, Thomas A.; Duncan, Richard; Grigsby, Elaine M. Two very small bodybags caught Peart’s attention. The names stenciled onto them were Fillion, Scott J., and McEwan, Fiona. Apparently, very little of the two young security officers’ bodies had been recoverable. Peart didn’t want to imagine what their final moments must have been like.

Grief tightened its choke hold. The names, the service numbers, the KIA dates and locations—they all blurred as hot tears of anger filled his eyes. Fury swelled within him.

All these lives, he raged. His hands closed into fists until his fingernails bit into his palm. The Klingons, the Tezwans, us…all sacrificed to cover up a politician’s lies. He thought of the millions of Tezwans whose lives had been snuffed out by a brutal Klingon counterattack, and the millions more who were left starving or homeless or without medical care.

All because the Federation used this world as a pawn.

Now Starfleet—and the Enterprise, in particular—had been used, as well. Used and discarded.

The double doors to the corridor slid apart. A nimbus of vapor formed immediately as warm air rushed into the cargo bay. The doors closed as a female form stepped through the quickly dissipating cloud. It was Perim. She looked around until she saw Peart, then walked slowly toward him. Joining him in the middle aisle between the rows of the dead, she gently took his hand, which was still clenched into a fist. Gradually, patiently, she pried at his hand. After a few seconds he relented, opened his grip, and wove his fingers among hers.

“The computer told me where to find you,” she said. “You didn’t answer your com.”

“I turned it off,” he said. “I needed to be alone for a while.”

She squeezed his hand gently. He looked at her and was grateful for her company. He had seen and heard things on Tezwa over the past several hours that he could never share with her, or with anyone else. As much as he wanted to explain to her the dark truth about the litany of errors and lies that had led the Federation into the ultimately disastrous occupation of Tezwa, his orders from Captain Picard had been clear: No one could ever know. Peart had become privy to a secret that held the potential to shatter the Federation-Klingon alliance and plunge the two powers into a war of mutual annihilation.

Those were his orders. He had made his vow of silence.

But if he and others like him were willing to lie and kill today to hide the sins of the Federation, how many others before him had done the same? What dark bargains had been made in the name of the “greater good”? How many times had the Federation engaged in atrocities that no one would ever know of?

Perhaps this was the first such crisis of its kind. Perhaps it was standard operating procedure. Peart simply had no way of knowing. All he could know for certain was that the idea that Perim—lovely, gentle Perim—might one day wind up in one of these blue bags, to help mask a conspiracy, sickened him.

“If we left here,” he said, “where would you want to go?”

“You mean the Enterprise?”

“No,” he said. “You and me. Just the two of us.”

She seemed to be caught off-guard by the question. Then a look of recognition crossed her face. “Jim…are you talking about…” Her sentence trailed off. He felt her staring at him. Her confusion turned to shock as she noticed his collar.

“Jim…where are your pips?”

His voice dropped to a low whisper. “They’re on Captain Picard’s desk,” he said. “Where I left them.”

She let go of his hand. Moving in front of him, she reached up and placed her hands on his chest. “Are you serious?” Her eyes looked up at him with uncharted depths of concern and compassion. “Are you certain it’s what you want?”

“I can’t do this job anymore,” he said. “Don’t ask me to explain why, because I can’t…. Just believe me when I say that if you’re still ready to walk away from all this, I’m ready to come with you.”

He didn’t try to mask the sorrow or the bitterness that filled his heart. He waited for her to say something. Anything.

She kissed him. Softly at first. Then passionately.

Their lips parted. She pulled away from him.

Then she reached up and removed her own rank insignia from her uniform collar. “I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s go.”

He took her hand. She led him out of the cargo bay.

Guilt gnawed at him as he passed by the dead, stacked six high by ten deep on either side of a dozen rows around him. For years, since his Academy days, he had followed a plan for his career and for his life. He had mapped out a path to his own command. In a moment, that dream had vanished, consumed like parchment in flames, scattered like ashes in a winter gale.

Despair had offered its easy embrace, its inertia. But with Perim’s hand in his, life beckoned him to explore new mysteries. He didn’t know where their path would lead, but he no longer concerned himself with destination; all that mattered now was the journey, and the hope that it would carry him far from here.

Captain Picard sat next to Lagan, in his ready room aboard the Enterprise. Pictured on the display screen were Admirals Ross, Nechayev, Jellico, Paris, and Nakamura. The five flag officers had gathered in one secure location for this conference, at Lagan’s request.

“Going public would mean starting a war with the Klingons,” Admiral Ross said. “It’d be a bloodbath unlike anything in history.”

Lagan said, “I understand that exposing Zife, Azernal, and Quafina to the general public will do more harm than good. But we can’t ignore the crimes they’ve committed, or the lives that have been lost as a result.”

“Exposing them isn’t an option,” Nakamura said. “No matter what action we take, their conspiracy must remain a secret.”

“There’s no question in my mind that Zife needs to step down,” Nechayev said, “or that Azernal and Quafina have to be removed with him.”

Paris sighed heavily. “Getting them out without causing a political meltdown will be tricky. If Zife’s going to call for a special election, we’ll need to prepare a cover story.”

“Hold on,” Jellico said. “Let’s stand down for a moment. Starfleet’s charter makes it very clear that we’re subordinate to the Federation government. We don’t have any authority to give orders to Zife.”

“No one disputes that, Admiral,” Picard said. “But absent such authority, how are we to respond to what Zife and his co-conspirators have done?”

The lean, gruff-voiced admiral furrowed his gray eyebrows as he pondered that question. “I’m not sure that we can.”

“That’s not an answer I’m willing to accept,” Ross said. “Starfleet personnel died for his lie. We led our allies into an ambush because of it…. I’m sorry, Edward, but Zife and his people went too far. We have to act.”

“Which brings us back to the question of how to keep Zife’s resignation from touching off a panic,” Paris said.

Nakamura, who had been leaning back with his index finger pressed thoughtfully against his lips, leaned forward. “Zife has been meeting a lot of resistance on economic issues,” he said. “Councillors zh’Faila and Gleer have been his most vocal opponents. We could ask Zife to cite a need for more experienced economic stewardship as his reason for bowing out and calling for a special election.”

“No one will believe it,” Jellico said.

“Yes, they will,” Paris said. “Repeat it often enough and it’ll become the truth. The real trick will be getting Zife to say it.”

“He’ll need an incentive,” Ross said.

“Secrecy,” Nakamura answered. “Zife and his two cronies step down, vow to stay out of politics—here or anywhere else. In exchange, their reputations as war heroes stay untarnished.”

Ross nodded. “All right. We put them in protective custody. Somewhere nice, luxurious. Give them new identities. Then we finish cleaning up their mess on Tezwa—and dump every last shred of evidence down a black hole.”

“Are you serious?” Nechayev said. “Clean up their mess? We’re actually going to help their plan succeed?”

“We’re not going to frame the Tholians,” Ross said. “Or anyone else, for that matter. But we’ll make sure no one finds out where Tezwa’s weapons came from.”

Nechayev looked disgusted. “Abetting their conspiracy? I can’t believe we’re even considering this.”

Ross shot back at her, “This isn’t about moral purity, Alynna. This is about the survival of the Federation. Unless we want to see everything we’ve worked for get squandered on a pointless war with the Klingons, we need to contain the damage on all fronts. In this case, that means erasing Zife’s mistakes.”

“If we’re prepared to do that,” Jellico said, “then why ask Zife to step down at all? If we’re going to do his dirty work, why compound our sins by acting against our own president?”

Picard interjected, “Because our president acted against us.” The table full of admirals stopped talking and turned their attention to the captain. “Zife betrayed his oath of office when he secretly and deliberately violated the Khitomer Accords…. Sending the Enterprise and a Klingon fleet to face an enemy that he knew could overpower us—and not warning us of the danger we faced—was an act of depraved indifference tantamount to murder. Committing us to a prolonged occupation of a sovereign planet, then engaging in a conspiracy to plant false evidence…these are the acts of a criminal, not a president. But to impeach him would require a public airing of his crimes—and that would lead to scandal as well as to the war we’re struggling to avoid.”

Paris seemed burdened by the gravity of the discussion. “Edward,” he said to Jellico, “even you have to realize that Zife and Azernal set this in motion. Millions of lives were taken on Tezwa—”

“By the Klingons,” Jellico protested. “In response to provocation by the Tezwans!”

“Who would never have dared to challenge the Klingons had the Federation not armed them with its most advanced weapons system,” Lagan retorted.

“Ed,” Nakamura said. “Do you honestly believe that Zife, Azernal, and Quafina deserve to walk away from this?”

Jellico glared back at the other admirals, who had fixed their accusatory stares on him. Finally, he seemed to diminish slightly. With an air of grim resignation, he said, “No.”

“Then we’re agreed,” Ross said. “Zife, Azernal, and Quafina have to be removed as soon as possible. We’ll make it clear that they’ll be kept safe and comfortable, but also incommunicado.”

Jellico spoke up. “What if they refuse?” The conversation halted. After a moment, he continued, “What if we present our demands and make our offer, and Zife won’t step down? Do we even have a contingency plan? Or are we just bluffing?”

The mood in the admirals’ conference room darkened. Everyone seemed to sense that this question was Ross’s to answer. “We can’t bluff,” he said. “Zife and Azernal will know we want the truth kept secret as much as they do. If we aren’t prepared to force them out, they’ll have no reason to comply.”

Ross’s words raised the hackles on the back of Picard’s neck. “Is this to be a military coup, Admiral?”

Nechayev jumped to intercept the question. “It’s not a coup, Jean-Luc,” she said. “Starfleet isn’t taking control, we’re simply removing corrupt elements for the good of the government as a whole.”

Jellico folded his arms across his chest and frowned. “Leaving a power vacuum. Do you think the Federation will fracture before or after the Romulans cross the Neutral Zone?”

If Nechayev’s temper rose to Jellico’s challenge, she didn’t show it. “You know full well there won’t be a power vacuum,” she said. “When Zife resigns, the council will appoint a pro tem president. Until the election is held, the current cabinet will remain in place—except for Quafina, of course.”

“Still,” Jellico said, “we’ll be looking at a protracted period of instability as we change administrations.”

Nakamura retorted, “Don’t be ridiculous, Ed. There are several good people waiting to run. Once the council approves the candidates, we’ll have a new president within a month.”

Nechayev said, “From a political standpoint, the transfer of power will appear seamless. Once we remove Zife and his accomplices, Starfleet won’t have any further involvement in the process. The government will remain under civilian control at all times. We’re not going to repeat Leyton’s mistake.”

As desperately as Picard wished to, he wasn’t certain he believed her. “Those are all very fine distinctions, Admiral,” he said. “But let’s not lose sight of the fact that this might well be the darkest day in the history of the Federation. Let’s not give ourselves the comfort of euphemisms; let us at least be honest with ourselves about what we’re doing.”

“For the good of the Federation, we’re going to forcibly remove our president and two of his top advisors from power,” Ross said. “Is that honest enough for you, Captain?”

Picard frowned. There was no good answer to that.

Nechayev said, “This matter must be treated as one of utmost secrecy. We’re never to speak of this again, either amongst ourselves or with others…. For the record, Captain, this discussion never happened. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly,” Picard said.

“Ambassador Lagan,” Nechayev said. “I can’t compel you to secrecy as I can the captain. But I must ask you to abide by this pact of silence. Do you agree?”

Lagan nodded slowly. “Yes. I swear before the Prophets.”

Ross sighed heavily. “I’ll make the necessary arrangements,” he said.