Chapter 58 - Teaser!

Happy Holidays to all my patrons! I should have the gift of a new chapter ready in the next day or so. In the meantime, enjoy this teaser from chapter 58! :-)

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‘When had this all gone so wrong?’ she thought in question as she walked back to her ‘apartment’ with the groceries she had replicated at a nearby public food replicator, playing the part of random human woman returning home to make dinner, hyper vigilant to spot any surveillance on her.

She cursed her beauty yet again as random human men and women cast her appreciative smiles, gestures she was forced to return, if only slightly, to avoid drawing suspicion. Humans, she had learned, considered such behavior normal. She had no desire to return these smiles, yet she had to be careful. Not smiling back was abnormal, memorable, suspicious even. Yet she also had to be careful to not smile so warmly as to invite conversation or, worse, flirtation, as had already happened far too many times since her arrival on this wretched planet. She had been forced to have sex with one persistent human man and another human woman in order to keep her cover intact. Refusing their persistent advances would have been too memorable, too abnormal, best to just get it over with, she had decided. Thankfully the Tal Shiar gave all their female operatives training on that unfortunately common aspect of field work.

The delicate balance she was forced to strike was maddening. She was meant to be invisible—noticed briefly and then quickly forgotten. Damn it! Romulans didn’t smile. And on the rare occasions they chose to—they weren’t Vulcans, after all—they certainly didn’t waste such sincere and vulnerable expressions on random strangers they passed in the street like these soft, overly friendly humans seemed so fond of doing.

No, Sub-Commander V’Ren had not been having a good few days, in fact, it was probably the worst in her career with the Tal Shiar. Her partner on the ground, impersonating the Halkan representative they’d killed, was dead, she’d learned. He had killed himself to prevent capture as all operatives had been trained to do when they were in danger of being captured, this only after the cloaked scout ship in orbit had been detected. The ship’s crew had self-destructed to prevent capture and interrogation, like good agents were supposed to. Nowhere in their mission briefing had it even hinted at the possibility that this new orbital defense net had that capability. Someone had failed and unfortunately she and her team were paying the price.